The Weaponization of Memetics (intro)

Kent Dahlgren
2 min readMar 31, 2021

If there’s a positive outcome from the past five years, it’s this:

Most people were henceforth unaware that their own government had fine-tuned the weaponization of psychology, in a domain generally referred to as “psychological operations.”

Psychology, as a weapon. Who knew?

In the past decades, and using technology that resembles platforms such as Facebook, our government has deployed psyops to devastating effect in the destruction of grassroots opposition to foreign occupation, generally described as “insurgents.”

But one man’s terrorist is another man’s martyr.

Seasoned human intelligence and psychological operations officers can infiltrate these “cells” and rip them apart from the inside, utilizing a weaponization of psychology that resembles a hybrid of gaslighting, projection, and deflection.

Actual job posting on the US Army’s web site

You know, the old “divide and conquer” from within; they use the methodology because it works.

Most people are therefore unaware that their own government have frequently used this same psychological weapon against its own citizens (and sometimes against its own lawmakers), but that knowledge gap is rapidly closing, and as the chickens come home to roost, so to speak.

With the bizarre cult in retreat comes the understanding that it and similar efforts were likely explicitly contrived operations, orchestrated by the same precise people who had cut their teeth using psychology to devastating effect against insurgents in the Middle East and beyond.

Alarmingly, local law enforcement agencies have been buying and deploying repackaged software architectures that were originally designed for battlefield usage, and are therefore arming local law enforcement agencies to identify and destroy activists the police would be hasty to label “insurgents.”

It’s one thing to read about how “the good guys” are using bleeding edge technology to identify and destroy “terrorist cells,” but how does it feel to realize that there’s a possibility that your own activism may be similarly described by local law enforcement?

In any case, the research of Jeff Giesea and studies like it have been eagerly embraced in the government’s evolving efforts to weaponize memetic influence over civilian populations.

Unfortunately, I don’t anticipate that this activity will result in any outcome other than destruction.

--

--

Kent Dahlgren

Product management fix-it guy. World-famous people skills. Extremely small hands. (edit) marketing lady says I’m also supposed to say “CEO of software company”