Blind god of digital eugenics
The language of crisis, cognitive distortions and algorithmic brainwashing
A study titled Historical language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades (edited by Susan T. Fiske, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved June 15, 2021) examines the potential relationship between societal crises and how language can be indicative of the prevalence of cognitive distortions in society. The quotes I use are from the study, unless stated otherwise.
The study seeks to answer the question "Can societies collectively become more or less depressed over time as their populations are exposed to stressors such as war, political upheaval, economic collapse, food insecurity, inequality, and disease?"
The authors are careful not to assume causation from data that clearly demonstrates correlation between a society being affected by a crisis and collective mental unwellness. In my evaluation, I suggest an additional factor which has been shown to induce adverse mental health that exacebates all other crises: the use of social media and virtual environments, especially on smartphones. I link the Facebook’s massive scale emotional contagion experiment from 2012 and Google’s 2016 Pokemon Go operation, both of which demonstrated that human cognition and behaviour can be manipulated algorithmically to maximise revenue goals. Next, I apply this experimental evidence in the context of the ongoing teenage mental health epidemic which, according to the New York University social psychologist Jonathan Heidt, took off also in 2012.
Cognitive distortions and internalising disorders
Cognitive distortions can be thought of as defective mental patterns in depressed indviduals. They have been clinically associated with internalising disorders, negative self-talk (i.e. talking oneself into unwellness), and certain styles of distorted communication, e.g. overgeneralising, fortune telling, magnification and minimisation, mindreading, labeling and mislabeling, dichotomous reasoning, etc. Given the historical record of the prevalence of such language, the study examines the possibility of extrapolating the diagnosis of depression from the individual to collective level, given the mass communication technologies which could arguably exacerbate that.
According to the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) framework, cognitive distortions are associated with internalising disorders. “In fact, recent research shows that individuals with internalizing disorders express significantly higher levels of cognitive distortions.” Cognitive distortions “are associated with marked changes in an individual's mood, behaviour and language.” That said, this correlation, according to the authors, is insufficient to infer causation.
Design and results
The authors of the study examine "textual markers of cognitive distortions in over 14 million books [in English, German and Spanish] for over 125 years and observe a surge of their prevalence since 1980s to levels exceeding those of the Great Depression and both World Wars. The results "suggest recent societal shift toward language associated with cognitive distortions and internalising disorders."
We learn from the study that the socioeconomic crises of the 20th century clearly correlate with the language associated with cognitive distortions and internalising disorders for the crises recorded historically in English-, German- and Spanish-speaking societies, respectively.
Whereas the language associated with cognitive distortions appears in these three cultures on the local level consistently with the their respective societal crises, there is a disproportionate surge in the use of such language first in 1978, next in 1999 and finally, following the events of the global recession and the launch of the first iPhone—both in 2007. The graph curve which illustrates the surge in language associated with cognitive distortions becomes more vertical as the social media + smartphone technology stack become more popular in the years following these two events in 2007.
The overall trend of CDS [cognitive distortion schemata] prevalence for most of the 20th century pointed distinctly downward toward a historic minimum in 1978, with only a few noticeable peaks, one surrounding the turn of the century in 1899 (possibly related to the Spanish-American war), a slight peak from 1940 to 1945 (around the time of World War II), and a sharp peak in 1968 (possibly related to social and political unrest). From 1978, we observe an accelerating increase in CDS prevalence.
While the study focuses on the socio-historical factors as the drivers of the CDS prevalence, I would like to consider how popularisation of communication technologies during this time—especially the combination of smartphone + social media app which radically decontextualises communication—could have exacerbated these crises and the CDS prevalence associated with them. This is because the last two of the below accelerations of CDS prevalence coincide with the explosion of new information technologies as they unfold in unstable socio-political contexts:
This acceleration seems to be separated into three periods: an accelerated increase from 1978 to 1999 (…), an even more rapid increase after 1999 to roughly 2007, followed by an acceleration after 2007, and a possible stabilization in 2010. The so-called “bursting the dot.com bubble seems to coincide with an acceleration of the increase of CDS prevalence after 1999 whereas the acceleration since 2007 seems to coincide with the widespread uptake of social media and the start of the Great Recession. Present CDS prevalence levels exceed those observed since the 1900s by almost two standard deviations (excepting the 1899 peak).
Being careful, the authors do not claim to be showing causality between the language associated with cognitive distortions and the socioeconomic-technological conditions that might have impacted it. They do however encourage other scholars that more research is done to try and empirically strengthen such a hypothesis.
Robustness and limitations
Amongst the precautionary measures the authors considered factors which could indeed distort the results in a meaningful way, such as:
Language effects—semantic shifts in language over time—how the meaning of words and phrases change as the society changes,
Sampling effects—potential issues with sampling of the books used in the study,
CDS limitation—questioning of whether CDS can be a reliable indicator of cultural and linguistic shifts, given the fact that some of the books used in the study were “published at times or locations marked by reduced freedom of expression, widespread propaganda, social stigma, and cultural as well as socioeconomic inequalities.”
Discussion
The article accounts for the way in which the quality of discourse in society affects the quality of communications and relations between individuals in it. For example, their remarks about the National Socialist propaganda in World War 2 Germany and its detrimental impact on the society as a means to normalise the political objectives of the ideology. This aligns with the important work by Hannah Arendt in this area, both in the chapter on propaganda in her 1951 The Origins of Totalitarianism, and an insightful analysis of Eichmann’s language and thinking in Eichmann and the Holocaust. What she found was that Eichmann was so thoroughly brainwashed that critical thinking was for him impossible, given the kind of langauge he had been conditioned into using. According to Arendt, Eichmann was cognitively compromised.
While authors are reluctant to assume causation in their suggestions, comparing the linguistic shifts as indicators of cognitive distortions between the three types of societies—English-, German-, and Spanish-speaking—does seem to indicate to the sociopolitical events having direct impact on the way in which language is used under local conditions of each society at the time of these events.
For instance, in Spanish and English we see a rising trend starting around 1980, whereas in German there is no such rise, only a sharp jump to a higher level in 2007. It is possible that the reunification of Germany in 1990 and the increased integration of the German-speaking countries in the European Union (and the introduction of Euro currency in 1999) provided resilience to trends recorded in Spanish and English prior to 2007.
The 2007 acceleration is indeed the only simultaneous acceleration for all of the three societies, as represented on the graph by the verticalising curve of the CDS prevalence. Authors suggest that the combination of the great recession, the global spread of the internet and social media might have caused the accelerating polarisation of our societies with the language of such polarisation, corresponding to cognitive distortions such as “us-vs.-them thinking (labeling and mislabeling), dichotomous reasoning, mindreading, overgeneralising, emotional reasoning, and catastrophizing” while maintaining caution to not draw causal links between lexical markers, cognitive distortions and internalising disorders.
The results are thus interpreted as speculations with a goal to encourage further research. I would argue further, as does Jonathan Heidt who is quoted twice in the paper, that the commercialisation of smartphone technology might be the decisive factor as it brought the frictionless seduction of mobile communication to a new level by offering access to self-publicising and real time interaction capacities via chat and social media.
My evaluation:
Additional research in support of causal interrelationship between experiencing crisis, cognitive distortions and mental health
In this final section I will present additional research to further support the view that the rise to prominence of the tech giants such as the Facebook corporation with their monopoly on social media which runs on algorithmic extraction of user attention is bound to create the conditions of collective mental illness. I support this by a number of recent sources, including NATO’s articles and booklets on cognitive warfare.
The available research includes an array of recent studies, including a book by Harvard Business School professor, Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power; the work which places Arendt’s early study of totalitarian propaganda in the context of the Information Age. This work shows how instrumental rationality which drives the deployment of new data-hungry digital infrastructures results in building a corporate surveillance state where autonomous thought and human relationship are threat to the system optimised for total predictability of human behaviour. I briefly discuss one aspect of this in my previous 3-minute article from 23 March 2023.
Importantly, as we learn from Zuboff, these commerical developments were informed by former research, including the Facebook’s controversial massive-scale emotional contagion experiment from 2012 reviewed by scholars from the Cornell University’s Departments of Communication and Information Science, and later, at Princeton University, as well as widely publicised on ever since. This behavioural engineering experiment that was specifically designed to verify algorithmic methods of altering emotional state of online users at scale. It provided evidence for two kinds of findings: (1) that emotions can be induced in Facebook users by curating the amount and emotional quality of the content they are exposed to to manipulate behaviour, and (2) that this can be done subliminally, i.e. beneath the level of user awareness. The said Cornell/Princeton review article states the significance of the original 2012 Facebook study thus:
We show, via a massive [689,003 participants] experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion issufficient), and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues.
(*square brackets added by me)
The method involved language manipualtion—A/B testing of how different words affect the emotional state of the target population:
Posts were determined to be positive or negative if they contained at least one positive or negative word, as defined by Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software (LIWC2007) (9) word counting system, which correlates with self-reported and physiological measures of well-being, and has been used in prior research on emotional expression (7, 8, 10). LIWC was adapted to run on the Hadoop Map/Reduce system (11) and in the News Feed filtering system, such that no text was seen by the researchers.
The results therefore confirm the hypothesis that emotional states can be induced with a degree of precision by manipulating language at scale:
The results show emotional contagion. As Fig. 1 illustrates, for people who had positive content reduced in their News Feed, a larger percentage of words in people’s status updates were negative and a smaller percentage were positive. When negativity was reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results suggest that the emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks (3, 7, 8), and providing support forpreviously contested claims that emotions spread via contagion through a network.
The above is the description of what we commonly refer to as limbic hijack—hacking the emotional centres of the brain to elicit a desired reaction; in terms of the social media business model limbic hijack is it compels a behavioural reaction to generate monetary profit driven by engagement. We know from neuroscience that once the brain is limbically hijacked, this disrupts higher cognitive functions, e.g. through emotional reasoning, fear, or outrage where critical faculties are suspended. Such a disturbed emotional state will therefore produce cognitive distortions which is why making people frightened or angry is so critical in controlling the perception of mind control targets, as has been previously evidenced by the classic experiments such as MK-Ultra.
This science was then scaled up and instrumentalised in service of Facebook’s business model where monetisation of user activity relies on unlimited extraction of attention by hacking their nervous systems through limbic hijacking, exploiting cognitive biases and leveraging group identity. Such undue influence effectively consititutes what in military terms is classed as cognitive warfare: war against sensemaking. As our attention becomes downgraded in the algorithmic race to the bottom of the brainstem, our higher cognitive capacities on which our critical and strategic reasoning depend, atrophy. The cliched phrase “If you don’t pay for it, you are the product.” does not apply in this context. Rather, in the algorithmic conditioning protocol, the users’ attention becomes the raw resource for extraction in service of blind commercial imperatives.
In other words, social media are algorithmically powered brainwashing machines which select for us content which we like most—not one which we need most in order to think clearly and be well. As the online echo-chambers grow, social polarisation exacerbates and uproots trans-ideological dialogue. This leads to a sense of isolation and mass narcissism induced by falling in love with one’s own digital avatar. The dissociative, dopamine-starved state of being more concerned about others’ perception of one’s online persona than one’s real-life being is bound to produce self-alienation, atrophy of social skills and, ultimatley, depression—social media are thus like digital cults: they bind their victims into an illusion of self while attacking the higher cognitive skills that are necessary to extract oneself from the web of symbiotic dependency on the digital Moloch.
There are no coincidences
Interestingly, the Facebook experiment coincides with Jonathan Heidt’s diagnosis of the onset of the mental health epidemic in teenagers, also from 2012. This could be the reason why Mark Zuckerberg had such a hard time apologising in January 2024 to the families of the young people abused by Facebook’s cognitive violence. Note that in the conversation leading up to the apology, Zuckerberg’s language, just like Eichmann’s at his trial in Jerusalem, is limited to stock phrases and formal cliches (possibly advised to him by his lawyer) which keep him from meaningfully responding to the allegations leveraged against him.
The reality of surveillance capitalism where harvesting intimate data becomes the weapon of the century is a significant example of how human cognition is deliberately targeted by algorithmic manipulation that is designed to modify and automate human behaviour. The word manipulation A/B testing shapes the perception of the target individual or population imperceptibly. The causal effects of algorithmic conditioning for behavioural modification have thus been known for at least 12 years as I’m typing this in 2024.
Another behavioural experiment reported by Zuboff in her book, testing the deployment of AI-powered digital information systems against human consciousness was the Google’s 2016 augmented reality game Pokemon Go. The real objective of the game was hidden from those who played it: to remotely control the behaviour by luring the users (who chased Pokemons around town) into business premises, including McDonalds and Starbucks, to spend their money there. These businesses had previously bought ‘lure modules’ whose commercial value was set by the degree to which the user behaviour could be predicted, and therefore more easily monetised.
“The human brain is the battlefield of the 21st century.” — James Giordano, PhD, 2018
The cognitive battlefield
Now, these two experiments alone povided empirical data showing the impact of word manipulation, emotional distortion of cognition and creating augmented reality tunnels to remotely algorithmiclly steer human perceptions and behaviour at will. This knowledge was accessible to every policymaking institution and state or corporate organisation involved in behavioural manipulation of populations ever since, including during the onset of the coronacrisis in early 2020.
As we learn further from the open source NATO documents on cognitive warfare, the current developments in behavioural science, neuroscience, data science, and artificial intelligence have granted unprecedented possibilities of weaponising network dynamics against human targets, individually and collectively. Among the goals of the war on sensemaking is intentional induction of cognitive stress and confusion in order to subvert critical faculties and decision-making in the target population. The conclusions of this recent (2020-23) military research are consistent with Zuboff’s work and her acknowledgement of the instrumentarian logic of surveillance capitalism. In addition, probably the most comprehensive, culturally contextualised, systemic review of these otherwise covert phenomena can be found in the series of articles on computational propaganda made available by The Consilience Project.
Nudge units, neuroweapons and cognitive terror
As the ripples of the metacrisis manifest in novel ways of weaponising science and technology against human beings, the literature on intentional technologically induced behaviour modification of public consciousness keeps growing. Amongst some of the most recent titles are the Duke University’s distinguished professor Nita Farahany’s The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology (2023), Laura Dodsworth and Patrick Fagan’s Free Your Mind: The New World of Manipulation and How to Resist It (2023), and an earlier Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (2009). Couched in euphemistic cliches of the last title, the power to modify behaviour at scale has grown exponentially with more knowledge gathered about human cognition in the last decade then in the entire previous history of brain sciences—thanks to big data harvesting. These experimental insights are at the disposal of those who own the technologies and can use them to further their economic ambitions.
We are living through an immense assault on our senses and cognitive faculties by corporate and state actors who fiercely compete for cognitive dominance over our perceptions in a silent war of all against all. Nudge units deploy behavioural science to shape collective behaviour of citizenry, the upcoming neurotechnological implants, like the Elon Musk’s Neuralink, read human brainwaves, while our social media newsfeeds are oversaturated with political propaganda and neuromarketing. The cognitive cacophony of warring narratives, nudges and limbic prompts merge in a homogenous soup of perceptual vertigo as our shared reality collapses. All of this during an advent of an era in which many people choose to swap their relationships with humans for synthetic relationships with Artificial Intelligence bots. Finally, as we speak, Apple’s new Vision Pro headset brings the game to a new level of narcissistic dissociation, paving the way, some would argue, to a Matrix style dystopian nightmare.
Could all this lead to exacerbation of cognitive distortions, impoverishment of language proficiency and mass mental illness? You decide.
I’m trying to shed light on an issue, which is difficult to prove empirically by its very nature—it’s in the sphere of human consciousness and communication which are intangible domains for producing direct empirical data. There are numerous factors which might impact cognitive distortions in the world engulfed in numerous compounding crises. That said, one cannot ignore multiple coinciding indicators that crises amplified through communication technologies have direct adverse effects on the human mind and language as the several mentioned independent unrelated publications suggest.
From correlation to causation
The correlation between historical crises, and the language which indicates cognitive distortions and internalising disorders is one piece of the puzzle. The other piece is all the research which points to the weaponisation of information tools to intentionally subvert cognitive sovereignty for political and commercial ends. Jonathan Heidt’s social psychology research into the ongoing pandemic of teenage mental crisis, the evidence of algorithmic behavioural engineering gathered by Shoshana Zuboff, and the metasystemic overview of these phenomena by The Consilience Project, Center for Humane Technology and NATO point to the thesis articulated by Daniel Schmachtenberger and Zak Stein of Civilisation Research Institute; namely that exponential technology unbounded by wisdom exacerbates all the other crises and spells an existential threat to language and consciousness altogether. According to this article by The Consilience Project, the current global network dynamics is self-terminating as it constitutes mutually assured destruction (MAD)—term coined during the Cold War, denoting the existential threat to humanity that would result from a potential clash of nuclear superpowers. The difference now is that the existential crisis we are facing this time is of many orders of magnitude greater. The kind of technology at our disposal is much more threatening: as we learn from Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence, AI weapons could autonomously make better versions of themselves, nuclear warheads could not. Information weapons captured by the blind plight of AI-instrumental goals therefore seem to be the most immediate threat to humanity right now.
If we are to thrive submerged in the cognitive onslaught inherent in our broken information ecology, we ought to educate ourselves in becoming immune to the blind forces which hold humanity hostage on the exponentiating curve of self-termination. We need new institutions which foster informational and cognitive literacy in the age of cognitive warfare where the line between military and civilian agency had dissolved and no one noticed... Fostering our self-awareness of the way the language we use, and the media and content we consume shape our thoughts is fundamental. Realising our ignorance is the first step on a path of developing the wisdom we need for our self-salvation from the mortal grasp of the blind god of digital eugenics. Collective awareness is our power, collective ignorance, our doom.