Reclaiming Reality: From Fakes, Deep Fakes and from Algorithmic Mind-jacking
by Mark Thomas
Principal Staff Writer
IN THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT: BLINDNESS BECOMES A VIRTUE
“Awakening is not changing who you are but discarding who you are not.” (Deepak Chopra)
You’re an outcast. An enemy of the state. Just standing here in the middle of Liberty Square on a crowded Sunday, you recognise what a threat you pose. And that your days of freedom may now be numbered.
Scanning their faces on your way to the fountain, you wonder how many others. How many like you are questioning this. What they see, what they hear and feel. Your urge is to scream – to yell for them to open their eyes – to wake – to climb out from the compulsory coma.
But there must be a better way. To reach as many as possible without giving yourself away. In custody or diagnosed, you’re helping no one. Walking slowly, you turn your eyes up to the surveillance drones – a patterned grid 30 metres above you never noticed before.
But there’s much it seems you’ve been travelling through life without noticing. Or noticing without questioning.
“Strange days, wouldn’t you say Iris?”
Turning to the young man seated at the fountain – his eyes glued to his laptop, you walk over and sit facing him.
“How do you know me? How are they strange?”
He looks up at you then out across the square. “You’re seeing and questioning, when you never did before. You’ll need to be careful with that.”
Accepting his warning, realising your expression, posture, everything about you is different from your state profile – a giveaway that you’ve ceased your meds and are now searching, everything, you pull your laptop from its sleeve, open it and begin scrolling your feed.
“Can you help me?”
“What did you have in mind?”
Wait. This is a stranger. Telling him you’re now challenging your own senses - seeing the city as it is, utilitarian grey and cold – when others are still anaesthetised, you realise you need to be cautious.
“How do I know I can trust you?”
“Maybe you shouldn’t.”
“I want to.”
He looks up from his laptop and turns it to you. It’s an aerial image of Argentic Avenue from the police network of the main boulevard fronting the square you just crossed. “The DHL delivery truck -southbound just short of the light.”
Moments on, you watch it explode filling the screen in a massive fireball sending a mushrooming plume of orange and black smoke high into the sky. Immediately the scene changes to a live broadcast from the police terror network – with new scenes from different drones and from building cameras.
Now returning to the square, you watch them look up away from their phones and computers out onto Argentic before packing up and moving quickly into the building or to the shelters on 48th.
But as you turn your eyes back to the boulevard – nothing. Traffic moving along, and that DHL truck moving with it.
“Strange, huh?”
“Are they all… what? A mass hallucination?”
“That’s a good way to put it.” While packing his laptop, he stands and drops you a hand.
“Where?”
“Inside. We stay here, we might as well confess.”
Even more curious and desirous of answers, you take his hand and head for the Cobalt building. On your way to the doors, you glance back at the people racing away from another terror attack. Common, a fact-of-life in the city. Or is it.
Stepping in through the front doors, you stop and peer out through the glass realising – you’re no longer sure. Not of this, or of anything now.
“They see it. What you uploaded.”
“See it and believe it. As you would have a week ago. Before you stopped the Triazine.”
Turning, you stare him in the eyes. “How did you know?”
He shoots a look around the lobby. “Bad place to talk. We’ll take the sky tram across to West Village. Talk on the way.”
“It’s safer?”
“Nah. Just nicer view.”
Accepting, driven by an urge to trust – someone, anyone, you walk with him to the escalator up to the lifts then to the sky trams.
Where this will lead, and what you’ll hear along the way, you’re more anxious than fearful. Like waking after a dream, you’re obsessed with an urge to understand – and to know how much of your life has been a state-sponsored hallucination.
Pre-planned and force-fed with an objective you’re just now beginning to assemble.
THE EVIDENCE OF DECLINE: WHEN ALTERNATIVE FACTS ARE NO LONGER LIES
“The world is easily deceived by appearances; it loves to be cheated.” (Thomas Fuller)
Image by StockCake
You’re quiet up through the atrium to the aerial transit. Your mind exploding with an internal exploration of all you know, questioning it for what you truly know. All you’ve seen and witnessed – unsure, suddenly how much if any of it was real.
Cort, who looks no more than 18 is polite and more focussed on his laptop – monitoring the many police and social networks than anything. Strange, intentionally you feel, but also genuine. And unthreatening.
At the Diamond building in the Village, you leave your transit tube for the lifts down to the underground.
Once on the platform, he points you to a bench along the wall where you follow him and sit. After watching the platform clear – with 5 minutes showing on the board for your train to Weston, Cort, again with his laptop out, glances over while searching available networks.
“Why’d you go off your Triazine?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“I did, I think. Not now.”
From here he goes into detail about how Triazine was first designed to help people see through the fakes. Mainstream and social media fakes. AI generated deep fakes. Political double-speak. Phony-baloney news and advertising.
To know what was real and what wasn’t. He describes how people generations earlier had gotten to where they couldn’t believe anything they read, heard. Not what they felt. Not what they saw. Not what they thought.
It’s hard to accept, but with the changes you’re feeling, and your perceptions and memories all jumbled, fuzzy and shifting, and what you just witnessed, you’re willing, even eager to fill in what seems a past that wasn’t even yours.
“Back there at Liberty Square.”
“Minds rewired. Open to implanted suggestions. They believe – see and feel whatever their screens tell them.”
“You did that.”
“The Gov and big tech own all data streams now. We just share them from time to time when it suits our needs. Or to piss them off.” He nods at the Loop train pulling to the platform and stands while shoving away his laptop. “So much for that… We’ve got to go.”
Taking you by the arm, he lifts you from the bench and begins guiding back out to the escalators and the lifts to the surface. With a quick glance back before you leave the platform, you see why.
From each door, a population control officer in military fatigues steps off with a rifle and begins scanning the crowd through Intel-Lenses. Facial recognition – base connected biometrics. Instantaneous ID of anyone skipping their morning dose.
Now out through the tunnel, you look up at more soldiers coming down the rolling stairs – shoving passengers out of their way with pulsing, blue-white flashes like lasers streaming out from their eye-tech.
“Here. Turn away from their scan.” With Cort pulling you along, you enter the maze of interconnected tunnels. Moving in and out of the afternoon commute – tunnel after tunnel – changing directions – switching back then turning again into yet another passage then another finally into a southbound Purple Line to Renton with the doors just closing.
Inside, you push your way in through the standing passengers into seats near the back where you stare out through the glass at more guards stepping out onto the platform.
“Serves them right, fat bastards.”
“For us?”
Cort gives you a kind, only slightly patronising smile. From it, you feel an urge to laugh while covering your face with your hands. So embarrassing. And sweet of him to withhold his sarcasm. You’re liking him suddenly even more for not asking if you were this daft before going off the Triazine. And if so, whether you might want to reconsider your rebellious shift.
THE UNIVERSAL DEPARTURE: FROM THE PAST, THE TRUTH AND TRUST
“The surface of dreams is broken, the picture of the past is shaken and scattered.” (DH Lawrence)
Image by StockCake
No one talks about the past. It’s difficult for you now to remember if you ever thought about it. Or read or even opened a history book. While racing beneath the city, you listen to Cort who has quite an outlook and a wealth of knowledge to share.
He tells you how the fakes, mis and disinformation – so complex and discrete had crept into everything and everyone. How people had become apathetic, complacent even about their health and hygiene no longer believing nutrition advice or their doctors.
Most stopped even going to doctors. Disbelieving they were ill often to their final moments.
He speaks of how, because of the general erosion of confidence in anything, economies began to crumble. Invest in the future? What future? Why invest in something that’s yet another fake story meant to manipulate us? To get us to spend money. To make the upper 2% richer.
Don’t drink, smoke or eat meat? Why? Because the corrupt upper echelon has bought up the health food companies and inflated the prices to make us spend our income faster and go bankrupt earlier – ultimately landing us on the street where we can’t eat at all?
Cynicism became rampant. Apathy and indifference were rife. The world was at a tipping point with humanity, not ready and willing to face extinction – just disbelieving it was a possibility.
“They had no choice. The neuro-chemical decision was their only option.”
“But making it mandatory for everyone?”
“That was the best deep fake of all. Like a magician’s trick. Brilliant, right? Take this so you can read through the fakes – except ours. You’ve got to hand it to them with that one.”
“And they bought it. You can hold the sarcasm – that wasn’t a question.”
Suddenly, his warm smile has a strange effect of connecting you. It wasn’t meant to impress or earn his praise or acceptance, or maybe it was. Maybe acceptance is what you’re after now as much as direction.
Where will this lead? What part will you have? Like a bystander suddenly pulled from involuntary anaesthesia onto a stage in some play you attended by accident, you’re unaware yet of your role. Or even the name of the play.
With the train pulling to the platform at Grant, he closes his laptop and turns to you. “You like modern art?”
“A museum?”
“Jesus.” He rolls his eyes again taking your arm like a child lifting you from your seat – and like before leads you out onto a crowded platform back into the maze-like underground network.
Where again, like back in the Village, you work through the labyrinth of interconnecting tunnels filled with passengers and the population control officers with their scanning lenses.
Finally emerging from the underground at Kings and 12th, you’re struck again by the aerial surveillance grid like a beaded fishing net suspended above the city. Wondering why you’re noticing it now, and how odd and compressed it makes you feel.
It’s here you realise, there was something else going on with the collective surrender. Not a chemical dulling of feelings or emotions – more of a redirect of attention. A neural hijacking. Commanding what and only what you find important.
Moments later, you’re up the steps in through the doors of the Museum of Modern Art heading down to the lower post-humanism galleries unaware of what you’re heading into – why you’re here and who you’re about to meet.
LOOK INWARD TO BEGIN: YOUR SEARCH FOR NEW PURPOSE
“We trace the light of silicon and search the dark to find the dawn. Expecting truth to line the screen or meaning in the space between.” (Attributed to Claude)
Image by StockCake
The Sensory Immersion Gallery Cort leads you into is a room ringed with Variable Frequency Displays. The glow they cast is subtle, soothing but also disorienting. Your senses seem intentionally distorted – as if there’s no ceiling or floor. And with the walls – cascading rectangular voids moving in and out, it’s as if you’re hanging in space weightless. Or in freefall in some ingenious virtual domain.
Turning to Cort, ready to ask, your attention is drawn suddenly to the display directly in front of you where an indistinct shape takes form.
Distant polygons at first – forming perhaps a human figure but without definition. Suddenly a male voice from nowhere and everywhere – as if part of the environment echoes throughout.
“Why have you come?”
Made insecure by this, you turn to Cort who gives you a reassuring nod. Urging you to continue. Regaining your confidence, you turn back and decide to answer honestly.
“Because we live in a world that’s a lie.”
Now to your left – a similar form and an immediate response, but this time from an elder. The voice harsher – commanding.
“Explain. This lie. Tell us of this deception.”
“What we see. What we feel and even think. We’re programmed. Our senses have been hijacked.”
“By whom? For what reason?”
Turning to this new voice and yet another moving cascade to your right, you answer quickly – now feeling defensive. Unaware this was to be an interrogation.
“If I had those answers, I wouldn’t be here. And I’d have no need of you.”
For a full minute, the room falls silent, and you’re again insecure – wondering if you’re being perceived by this concealed council as brash. Then another voice – this time from behind. Male – deep and articulate. Less aggressive.
“Look around you. At the world you’ve known your entire life.”
You’re on a street corner downtown. The way you remember it. Pristine, ornate buildings. The beautiful blend of modern and period architecture you’ve known and accepted.
Trees and 19th century iron lamp posts hung with colourful flowers line the streets. Inside, you’re comforted with a beautiful warmth. Memories of your childhood.
Sensations – your skin, the moist coolness of Autumn or Spring. Smells – cafes, fresh bread and sausages – coffee and croissants.
“And this.”
Suddenly, you’re in the cold, utilitarian world you’ve been wandering in for a week. Since your personal rebellion. Your urge to see a reality you and the rest have been raised to believe was diabolical – fake - beyond your ability to navigate.
“Why do you believe this is more real?”
“Because, I feel it.”
Instantly, a new scene – and new environment. You’re breathless on a corner in a burned-out nightmare of a post-apocalyptic world. The air is rancid with death and decay. The yellow-green haze above is thick with continuous lightning from an atmosphere being stripped away by the solar wind.
“And this?”
With all your strength, you pull inside, closing it off – telling yourself it’s not real. That it can’t be real. That your mind has been pried open - senses distorted. A test. Ugly, macabre theatre challenging your perceptions – a formula perhaps for assessing your potential.
When you open your eyes, you’re back inside the minimalist gallery staring at the dimensionless voids. And when you respond, your voice is steady, unemotional, determined. To make them if not accept you accept that you’re strong, committed and can learn.
“If you see me as unworthy, useless to you because I’m a woman or less technical, or incapable of seeing the difference between a real world and a hallucination, I suggest you say it… Because you’re wasting my time.”
With the room again falling into a belittling silence, you turn and leave the gallery for the stairs – angered and even more driven. More decided now than you were an hour or week ago that you’re going to find who’s behind this charade.
And expose them – to everyone. Not just some select group of elitist techno rebels who hide in art galleries. Who you’re suddenly seeing as no different from those they claim to defy.
THE DISTORTION OF PERCEPTION: COORDINATED MIND LARCENY
“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.” (George Orwell)
Image by StockCake
The disease of mass indoctrination and perception distortion through coordinated manipulation wasn’t something new when 21st century technologies like AI, social media and tablet phones took the stage.
Human history is a perennial tapestry of nefarious regimes using psychological manipulation to control minds – to convince people what’s good for them, what isn’t – what’s fact, alternative facts or merely a beneficial narrative. What’s right, what’s wrong and when the sum of two and two should be five.
Arrogance and hubris are staples when the corrupt gain power. Some claim, rightly you’re convinced it’s no longer choice but encoded in our DNA.
21st century technology along with advances in psychology and neuroscience simply refined it. Made it more feasible and of course more profitable. Why invest in infrastructure or costly programs to assist your population when you can more economically convince through algorithmic manipulation – mind-jacking you’ve already done so.
Standing at the corner of High Street and Princeton after leaving the museum, you’re incensed by the hoax. This ingenious seizure of our ability to perceive accurately our surroundings or anything.
Immersed in something like despondency or desperation, still unclear of what your role should be – or what you’ll do now having your hopes dashed that some underground movement would offer you support, you’re snapped from your lapse when Cort pulls you from the path of a Number 7 bus after stepping from the curb.
“No, no-no-no. Let’s not lose complete touch babe.” He gives you a smile while guiding you back up unto the walk. “Squished by a bus is still going to hurt – regardless of how you perceive it.”
Turning back as you walk, you realise how close you just came – wondering if there’s some dark, fatalistic part growing inside you that wanted it to happen. To be free of this. Or possibly just to know for certain certainty in some form still exists.
At Briar Street, you pull out from beneath Cort’s arm and turn. “Why did you bring me here?! If they don’t want me or see me as valuable, I’ll find my own way.”
“How? What will you do?”
Snapped out of your tirade, now searching for ideas, you’re startled when a virtual Quad-prop drops to the walk in front of you with its blinding white emitter scanning your eyes – setting your nervous system on fire.
Frozen and trembling, with every nerve in your body buzzing from the Optical Tomography, you feel it stop when Cort grabs your face in his hands and turns you to him.
“Concentrate. Only look at my eyes and listen to my voice.” Struggling, certain your about to crumple with your inner voice telling you you’re under arrest for Coercion, he pulls you even closer so that you’re face to face. “It’s fake. A virtual program meant to identify and hold you for an enforcement unit.”
“How? How could it know?”
“Your voice. Something you said. Think of it logically Iris. They could never have gotten here that fast.”
Blinking, fighting the suggestions, focusing only on Cort’s voice, you close your eyes and shut it out. The street noise – the hum of the illusory vehicle. The thoughts sending you into panic.
When you open your eyes, it’s just you and Cort walking swiftly along the walk back towards the transit hub.
Two blocks down, Cort pulls you to a doorway. “You, okay?”
“Hardly. But I’m not giving up.”
With him glancing back, then up, you follow his eyes to see the Police C4s sweeping the walk from above then moving methodically back towards the museum.
When you bring your eyes back to look at him, you see his concern. “That’s what I have to look forward to now, don’t I.”
“They’ve identified you, so, yeah.”
“You think I should go back on my meds.”
“I would never suggest that. But without them, you’ll live in a world where you’ll often have no idea of what’s real and what isn’t.”
“Your world.”
He nods and again takes your hand. “Come on. I’ll get you back on the train and try to help when I can. Don’t expect it though.”
“I know.”
30 minutes after getting you into a Purple Line heading back to New Brunswick, you’re sitting in the back staring out at the countryside of the Southeast – watching the rolling hills of your childhood wondering what’s ahead for you.
How you’ll navigate the world of your parents and grandparents who ultimately conceded their inability to do so.
HUMILITY AND ACCEPTANCE: THE OPPORTUNITY TO LEARN
“There is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it.” (Amanda Gorman)
Image by StockCake
The next morning wheeling a cart through the produce aisle at the market, you’re startled when a guy about Cort’s age pushes his cart in front of yours forcing you to stop while he begins searching the fruit bins. Just when you’re pissed enough to protest, he drops a fat, well-used text into your cart on top of your groceries.
Never making eye contact, he speaks casually while filling a sack with apples. “You’ll want to work through chapters 4 through 8 and 11 through 19. And the Appendices. A, C and F on deductive, inductive and abductive reasoning. Also, the last part on Bayes’ Theorem.”
Not sure how or if you should respond, you grab the text and begin to page.
With his apples bagged, he starts off – but not before dropping a final comment that you ‘take care of it. It gets passed on when you’re done.’
Scanning the produce aisle to see if anyone noticed, you quickly shove it into your arm bag and head for the tills.
At the counters, you make your way to your favourite checker who greets you with her usual inviting smile. She’s the coolest one here. A student at one of the universities – always friendly. Always a compliment. Your scarf, gloves, earrings – always something to brighten your day.
After ringing you up, she decides to bag for you – which is odd but even odder is the text on The Laws of Thought – a Guide to Algorithmic Linguistics she slips into your bag giving you just the slightest smile before adding…
“Just stick to the highlighted sections. And the summaries to the other chapters. Don’t get bogged down with the equations.”
Grabbing your groceries, confused but catching on, you thank her and start for the door but stop and turn when she adds a parting comment while already checking her next customer. “Oh, and take care of it… it gets…”
“…passed on when I’m done?”
She shoots you a look before turning back. “Stay cool. Neat hat, by the way.”
An hour later, you’re on a stool at the window in your favourite Pret across from Regents with your text open scribbling notes into a fresh spiral pad when a guy with headphones in a university sweatshirt plants a slim laptop on the ledge next to you.
On top of it, a 4-inch binder on Network Architecture and Programming Languages for Artificial Intelligence.
After checking his watch, he begins looking out through the glass as if scanning the buses as they pull to the stop. “It’s already set up. Your password and the news feeds you’ll be monitoring and changing are on page 16. Along with instructions for how to flip a narrative – and the videos you’ll create and upload.”
“I already have a laptop.”
He glances down at your newer Micron Pro then looks at you deadpan before heading for the door. “Now, you have a laptop.”
Watching him out the door, you conclude this is Cort’s doing. That you’ve been adopted by the younger branch of anarchists, operating within the underground, undoubtedly beneath their radar, planning to bring you up to speed – to make you useful. Regardless of what they saw or didn’t see in the basement of an art museum.
Doing what?
That part becomes all too clear later while going through your new books and getting into your computer. As the last kid said – monitoring specific state media outlets – learning to read through, into and beneath them. Then creating your own news feeds with responsive counter media fakes – and uploading them at propitious moments.
It’s tactical warfare. Modern, efficient and puzzlingly brilliant.
Sitting there like a first-year grad student – but also a driven activist beneath a deluge of work, all you can wonder is how you found your way into this. A techno-anarchist. When that’s all you were really after was winning the battle for your mind.
Deciding for yourself what you’re capable of consuming.
THEORY AND APPLICATION: THE EPISTEMIC PATH TO PROMISE
“Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.” (Immanuel Kant)
Image by StockCake
Over the next 11 months you studied, spending long hours in coffee shops, at different libraries on different campuses – filling your spiral notebooks. Learning skills, you never imagined you would or even could.
The craft of mental hijacking. The art and science of mass manipulation. How to read into and through video and text media devised by genius – meant to delimit cognitive internalisation and realign cognitive bias.
To reorder the once natural deductive, inductive and analogical reasoning that individualised us – gave us our identity and our natural inclination to question our senses – comparing the apparent with the logical – the obvious with the rational.
You sat with Cort on a Saturday one February morning on the steps outside UCB preparing on-the-spot video media – counter fakes to the state terrorism fakes – watching the kids sit only momentarily confused by the contradicting Breaking News reports. And the police and campus security stymied – unable to reason a responsive course. Subject to their own Machiavellian practices.
You watched kids queued outside a concert two days before Christmas look up from their screens only briefly to confirm the club was not pouring out smoke – deducing their media feed was in error, perhaps. Maybe historical content.
A contrivance meant to amuse
Was what you were doing right? Sending us back to a time when we questioned everything – looked sceptically at every media clip, InstaChat video, state-sponsored news update or terrorist threat?
Reading again between the lines for an objective or agenda – a benefit to those who with unrivalled prowess would claim it was in our best interest to see invaders in our friends, menace in our companions or that right was left and what we witnessed clever fiction.
Will history look back on you and Cort and the others kindly? Fairly? As driven idealists who believed you could decide for yourselves true menace, or as driven anarchists simply using the same practices for an opposing agenda.
That conversation you and your group spent long nights debating. Always reaching the same conclusion. That though as unsure as they were sure they were doing the right thing; you were open for the debate – ready and willing to heed the public’s demand. Once the public had been enlightened and granted the opportunity to decide.
THE COST OF FREEDOM: AND THE BEAUTY OF THINKING FREELY
“Freedom will not come today, this year, not ever through compromise and fear.” (Langston Hughes)
Image by StockCake
On an unusually hot Tuesday in May, with the city under emergency lockdown, you, Cort and the others you’ve come to see as family look out from your table in the campus library.
It’s been three hours since the first waves of Chinese Shenyang J-95s crossed from the Pacific into the American West – first appearing on the radar nets in Alaska, then Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and LA.
In the East, two hours earlier, Russian satellites in Low Earth Orbit equipped with until now theoretical High Energy continuous pulse lasers took out air defences from Main to Florida with radar sighting three carrier groups in the Atlantic and the skies dotted with Tupolev TU-460s and Sukhoi Su-90s.
The air throughout the city screams with sirens. The Executive Committee from an emergency session has ordered a curfew with city and suburban transit networks shut down – along with all federal and commercial buildings except for essential services; hospitals and pharmacies, grocery, liquor stores and stationers, closed until this unprecedented, aggressive mobilisation can be confirmed and if necessary countered.
With the chaos outside still developing, and the true utilitarian austerity of your world even more apparent, still hidden from most with masterful neuro-medical and neurotechnological control, you look up from your screen at Brian, James and Marwan. Himari, Anton and Cort. All focussed and capable. Dedicated and honourable.
The true, quiet heroes whose names will never be known. Deeds never recorded.
And though you wish more now than ever to express your gratitude to them for taking you in a year ago - to begin tutoring you, advancing you, enhancing your value; there’s something concerning you. Besides them not recognising the marijuana dispensaries as essential if not vital during this masterfully orchestrated crisis.
That of course being – the selection of adversaries. “I mean, look. It’s always the Russians and Chinese – isn’t it? That’s their playbook. What about New Guinea or Greenland?”
Cort, controlling the Eastern network traffic since early this morning pulls back away from his screen, yawns and stretches. “You want to add Greenland to the attack?”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure they have a military let alone an AirForce.”
He turns to Brian who’s been covering the Canadians, and their commitment planned for some time within the next twenty minutes. He scratches his head and thinks. “You know, it’s possible. I mean…. they could have been hiding one.”
Now looking around for a consensus – getting nods and smiles, you dive back in and pull up your Video generator and get busy – alerting CENTCOM of Greenland’s declaration to join with the Eastern and European Bloc – but not before Himari delivers the news of the European Union’s commitment – once their leaders emerge from their emergency meeting in Brussels.
About 15-minutes from now.
Mark Thomas
