"For the first time in the history of humanity, we are going to immerse ourselves in spaces motivated and influenced by these silicon spirits that we have created ourselves. Our environment will no longer be passive or harmless; it will have intentions, opinions, and agendas." (Wylie, 2019, p. 233).

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"Attacking the most important center of gravity of an adversary – the mind of its people – no longer requires massive bombings or bursts of propaganda. All it takes is a smartphone and a few seconds of inactivity. And anyone can do it." (Singer, Brooking, 2018, p. 18).

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L. Poenaru

 

The ontological status of the individual in the era of artificial intelligence and exponential exposure to the Internet has been radically altered. Humans no longer live solely with their peers, confronted only with the ambivalence and conflicts inherent in intersubjective encounters. There is now a third presence of another order: hyper-present, decentralized, insidious, algorithmic, hyperactive, dynamic, co-constructed, co-modified, evolving, swift, unpredictable, conveying political and economic propaganda that is not without effects on bodies and minds. Decentralized technology thus allows any individual to trigger cycles of violence, as suggested by Singer and Brooking (2018, p. 13). And since "Data is money, fantasy is money, privacy is money, mental illness is money, unconscious is money," everything must be extracted, digitized, and exploited for unlimited profitability.

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Before the health crisis brought about by the coronavirus in 2020, a growing number of researchers and philosophers demonstrated what we all experience: the harmful effects of screen and Internet exposure, both for children and adults (see In Analysis 2/2019, devoted to the Digital Subject). Because the Internet, beyond knowledge and entertainment (themselves governed by economic interests), presents itself as a virtual jungle, increasingly real and invasive, allowing for a limitless universe without faith or law that colonizes our unconscious. From this universe—controlled and deliberately chaotic (we will see below that chaos and randomness are a tremendous source of capital for the Web and primarily for social networks)—emerges and imposes a viral regime and social network wars that claim real-world victims, as Singer and Brooking (2018) highlight. These authors argue that viral disinformation alters not only the outcome of battles on the military battlefield but also the very fate of nations, with the result that war, technology, and politics have merged into a new type of combat space played out on our smartphones.

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The viral spread of information is thus the simultaneous reflection of a ferocious digital economy, the right/imperative to freedom of expression synonymous with freedom of consumption, and a weakening of individuals' mental boundaries (Poenaru, 2019). Individuals seem to have become too permeable to a virality that continues to be deliberately transmitted by the media and influencers with the goal of generating online engagement and digital labor.

With the coronavirus crisis, orchestrated by both health policies, economic interests, and human nature, which has become addicted to the digital and is constantly mutating, our immunity to pathogenic elements paradoxically induced obedience to systems previously recognized as vectors of illness: the overuse of the Internet. Are we therefore condemned to a viral world for reasons linked both to our cognitive-behavioral predispositions and to cognitive capitalism (Neidich, 2013, 2014, 2018), which exploits and constantly modifies them? Making our profiles, intimacy, consumption choices, orientations (religious, political, sexual), predispositions, messages, audiovisual exchanges, and work available to the GAFAM+ means surrendering to the perverse reasoning of artificial intelligence and an economic, informational, and attentional war that may decide what is dangerous or not for our future. It is undoubtedly a matter of public health and the future of democracies. As Singer and Brooking (2018) note:

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"These new wars are not won by missiles and bombs, but by those who can shape the narratives that frame our understanding, provoke the responses that push us to act, connect with us at the most personal level, create a sense of camaraderie, and organize to do all of this on a global scale, over and over again" (Singer, Brooking, 2018, p. 21).

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Christopher Wylie, author of Mindf*ck (Random House, 2019), in meticulously describing the process of constructing and implementing the strategies of Cambridge Analytica (CA), gives us the opportunity to better decipher the hidden mechanisms of certain contemporary logics that undoubtedly affect our unconscious, our functioning, our behavior, our emotions, and our bodies.

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Why would these logics interest psychoanalytically oriented clinical psychologists or psychiatrists? Foucault, more than psychoanalysts, continuously emphasized knowledge related to the political technology of the body directly immersed in a political field:

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“(...) power relations immediately seize [the body]; they invest it, mark it, discipline it, torture it, constrain it to work, subject it to rituals, demand signs from it. This political investment of the body is linked, according to complex and reciprocal relations, to its economic use. (...) The body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body. This subjection (...) can be calculated, organized, and technically considered” (Foucault, 1975, p. 30-31).

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If Foucault could be categorized as mad or paranoid because of his predictions, in any case, of little interest to an apolitical psychoanalysis that aims to stay focused on transference and internal conflicts, Wylie provides contemporary evidence of Foucault’s clairvoyance as well as the perspecticides to which we are all exposed, scientists, clinicians, and patients included. This raises the question of clinical interventions in times of economic and psychological warfare, which we will return to later. First, let’s listen to Wylie, his insights, as well as the political-economic context and psychological strategies implemented before addressing this as a clinical factor requiring the development of appropriate operators.

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To facilitate our analysis of the book and remain as close as possible to our concerns, I have placed particular emphasis on data related to psychological functioning and its manipulation, setting aside a series of descriptions linked to the American political context, Brexit, Russian interventions, Wylie’s involvement in the Trump campaign, his coming out in collaboration with Carole Cadwalladr (journalist at The Guardian), etc.

 

WHO IS CHRISTOPHER WYLIE?

Born in 1989 in Victoria, Canada, Wylie describes himself as being drawn to politics from adolescence: his challenges are political, his entire existence is political, and he decides to become political. Later, he spends time in Montreal with hackers (computer specialists capable of bypassing software and hardware protections); he learns a lesson that shapes his perspective within the Cambridge Analytica project: every system has weaknesses waiting to be exploited. Does the human system as well?

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His passion for politics leads him, as a teenager, to join the Liberal Party of Canada and later to volunteer in Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. He continues as a micro-targeting strategist in the digital campaign of the UK Liberal Democrats (2010) while studying law at the London School of Economics. Enrolled in a Ph.D. program (2013) at the University of the Arts London with research focused on trend prediction in fashion, he eventually works under the supervision of Carolyn Mair, who has a background in cognitive psychology and machine learning. Following this academic encounter, he wishes to explore "fashion models" based on neural networks, computer vision, and autoencoders himself.

 

CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA (CA)

In 2013, Wylie shifted, as he says, from a political environment to one working with military and governmental strategies; he was employed as a contractor for SCL Election and its offshoot for American elections, later renamed Cambridge Analytica (CA). An international consulting firm specializing in psychographic targeting based on digital data, CA was, thanks to Wylie’s revelations, at the heart of a scandal that exposed how it influenced hundreds of elections worldwide, notably Donald Trump’s election by using personal data from approximately 87 million Facebook users. It is also credited with Bolsonaro’s victory in Brazil, aided by viral messages sent via WhatsApp (a messaging app acquired by Facebook in 2014), as well as with Brexit. According to the independent newspaper The Guardian, the company was active in 68 countries until its dissolution in 2018 (and its recreation under other names). It maintained close ties with the Conservative Party (UK), the British royal family, and the British military.

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Steve Bannon, a businessman and media executive, vice president of CA, and appointed in 2016 as executive director of D. Trump's presidential campaign, was one of the project’s investors; through his involvement, he foresaw a cultural war by staging massive manipulation of the American psyche aimed at bringing about lasting changes in the political landscape. Chaos and disruption, Wylie realized, are the central principles of Bannon’s driving ideology.

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CA was born and operated under the radar, within a labyrinthine network of companies where even the employees themselves were never certain which employer they were actually working for. At the core of the project was the idea that nonsense is a much more effective organizing tool than truth! The culture of fake news only continued to consolidate and reached its peaks during the Covid-19 crisis, which was also a peak in the use of digital means for communicational and economic purposes.

 

PERSPECTICIDE AND CULTURAL WAR

Armed with his experience in micro-targeting and predictions, Wylie is convinced that the cultural Zeitgeist is nothing more than a set of individuals acting in concert, and that trends can be discerned in the data that everyone provides to the web giants. Through observation and online profiling, he attempts to predict the life cycle of these movements, their early adopters, their rates of diffusion, and their peaks. The information that social media users freely make available becomes a political and economic weapon. However, he argues, if you build a non-kinetic weapon designed for perspecticide on a human scale—the active deconstruction and manipulation of popular perception—you must first deeply understand what motivates people.

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The strategy employed aims to mutate the concept of self: the manipulator attempts to "steal" the target's concept of self, replacing it with their own. One begins by trying to suffocate the adversary’s narratives while dominating the target’s informational environment, which involves gradually breaking down, over several months, what are called psychological resilience factors, explains Wylie. The targets are encouraged to start catastrophizing about minor or imaginary events, while the counter-narratives spread on the networks attempt to suppress meaning, thereby creating an impression of confusing or nonsensical events. The counter-narratives also seek to foster distrust in order to hinder communication with others who might disrupt the target’s evolution. It is much harder to remain loyal to an existing hierarchy or group when you begin to think you are being unfairly used or when events seem meaningless or purposeless. You become less willing to accept setbacks, take risks, or comply with orders. The ultimate goal is to trigger negative emotions and thought processes associated with impulsive, erratic, or compulsive behavior. The most sensitive targets are usually those with neurotic or narcissistic traits, as they tend to be less psychologically resilient to stressful narratives. The psychological attacks generated lead to conflicts between participants, neglect, and exploitable errors.

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We easily recognize, in the strategies described by Wylie concerning digital colonialism, a global psychological atmosphere created by our constant exposure to digital environments. Confusion, compulsions, distrust, dissatisfaction, negative emotions, stress—are these states making us future conquests in an economic and political war? Biases, priming, and the militarization/instrumentalization (weaponization) of information and data allow for the identification of key elements to emphasize in order to influence a person's feelings, beliefs, and behaviors, and ultimately to skew our lives and minds. In other words, a true "Mindfuck."

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By profiling every citizen of a country, Wylie continues, by capturing their personality, cognition, and unique behaviors, and placing these profiles in an in silico simulation of that society (created inside a computer), the goal was to build the first prototype of the artificial society we currently face—a society predetermined based on simulations that reveal how we would communicate with one another. We are thus in the realm of psychohistory, whose objective is to predict and also control the future of societies. If it is possible to play with an economy or culture in a simulation of artificial agents having the same characteristics as the people they actually represent, it is also possible to create the most powerful economic intelligence tool ever imagined, through simulations of different futures of entire societies. And by adding quantified cultural signals, we approach a new field akin to "cultural finance."

 

USAGE OF EXTREMELY GRANULAR PSYCHOLOGICAL DATA

CA (Cambridge Analytica) would not have come into existence without the contribution of the University of Cambridge's psychology department, says Wylie, which provided cutting-edge research tools for computer modeling of psychological traits, machine learning based on psychometric tests, psychographic criminal profiling, social media user habits (status updates, groups, follows, clicks, likes, interests, disinterests), and even genetic information from individuals (provided by the university’s Faculty of Medicine). This profiling exceeds all imaginable spectrums! All of this data is first used to identify increasingly fine and invisible patterns of individual and collective behavior, which are traditionally undetectable, but this time deduced by artificial intelligence. The University of Cambridge had already been conducting a series of studies based on data legally provided by Facebook. The outlook opens up a new science of behavioral simulation based on real-life data, provided by the natural and domestic environment of Facebook users; this data has immense, growing, and unprecedented ecological validity, as it is less biased by researchers' motivations and methods. Ultimately, many of the benefits of passive qualitative observation, traditionally used in anthropology or sociology, can be maintained. Moreover, as many social and cultural interactions are now captured through digital data, researchers gain the advantages of generalization typically obtained in quantitative research.

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For example, your parents may not know that you took MDMA at your last party with friends. But Facebook knows because it monitors your relationships, your friends, your actions, your messages, tracks you via your phone, and observes what you click on and buy online, as well as the communications of those around you at the time. Thus, the platform’s data reflects more of who you "really" are than the judgments of your close ones, or even what you tell your therapist. In some respects, a computer model may know a person’s habits and unconscious mechanisms better than they know themselves.

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The multidisciplinary team at CA developed an application launched in 2014, Wylie explains, aimed at further facilitating profiling and targeted interventions. Users had to complete a large battery of psychometric assessments; it always started with a peer-rated personality measure validated internationally, called the IPIP NEO-PI, which features hundreds of items such as "I keep others at a distance," "I like hearing new ideas," or "I act without thinking." When these responses were combined with Facebook likes, reliable deductions could then be made. For instance, extroverts seem more likely to enjoy electronic music, people with higher openness scores are more likely to enjoy fantasy films, while neurotic individuals are more numerous. 200 million profiles were targeted by the end of 2014. The data is "freely provided" by users and flies under the radar of privacy laws. The project triggered a wave of hiring at CA, including psychologists, data specialists, and researchers. Wylie was appointed director of research. CA was thus launched, and Steve Bannon's goal was to change politics by changing culture; Facebook data, algorithms, and narratives were his weapons.

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The company first used focus groups and qualitative observation to dissect the perceptions of a given population and learn what people’s concerns were—whether it was the deep state, the environment, weapons, or the concept of a wall to keep immigrants out—all explored in 2014, several years before Trump’s campaign. The researchers then formulated hypotheses about how to influence opinions. CA tested these hypotheses with targeted segments in online panels or experiments to see if they played out as the team had anticipated, based on available data. They also extracted Facebook profiles looking for patterns to develop a neural network algorithm that would allow for predictions.

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The results obtained by CA showed that a minority of people displayed traits of narcissism (extreme egocentrism), Machiavellianism (ruthless self-interest), and psychopathy (emotional detachment)—in other words, belonging to the "dark triad." Unlike the five major personality traits (Big Five) found in everyone to some degree in normal psychology—openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—the dark triad traits are maladaptive, meaning that those who exhibit them are generally more prone to antisocial behavior, including criminal acts. From the data collected by CA, the team identified people online who exhibited neurotic and dark triad traits, and those more inclined to impulsive anger or conspiratorial thinking than the average citizen. CA targeted them by introducing narratives via Facebook groups, ads, or articles that the firm knew, through prior internal testing, were likely to inflame these very narrow segments of people exhibiting such traits.

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CA's goal was to provoke people to engage. Liking an extreme group, like the Proud Boys or the Incel Liberation Army, marked the user as distinct in such a way that a recommendation engine would prioritize these subjects for personalization. This means that the site’s algorithm starts channeling the user towards similar stories and pages, increasing online engagement. For Facebook, increasing engagement is the only measure that matters because more engagement means more screen time to be exposed to ads. This is the dark side of Silicon Valley’s famous user engagement metric. By focusing so much on greater engagement, social networks tend to parasitize the coping mechanisms of our brains, Wylie argues. It turns out that the most engaging content on social media is often horrible or enraging. According to evolutionary psychologists, to survive in pre-modern times, humans developed a disproportionate focus on potential threats. The reason we instinctively pay more attention to blood and the bite of a decaying corpse on the ground than to the wonder of the beautiful sky above is that it was the former that helped us survive.

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Aleksandr Kogan, one of the University of Cambridge’s psychology professors, specializing in the computer modeling of psychological traits and who had previously conducted research on profiling in Russia, joined CA. He brought on board two other professors from the University’s Psychometrics Centre, David Stillwell and Michal Kosinski, pioneers in psychological profiling based on social media and thus on a huge dataset legally collected from Facebook. Kogan encouraged the team to replicate some of his previous research: profiling individuals who are highly neurotic and also exhibit dark triad traits; the goal was also to identify disturbed individuals and explore their potential for maximum participation (in terms of time) on social networks. These targets seemed to be more impulsive and therefore more likely to have conspiratorial thoughts, and with the right nudges, they could be drawn into extreme thoughts or behaviors. We are still operating under the logic of "more engagement."

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Social networks, according to Wylie, use designs that activate "game loops" and "variable reinforcement schedules" in our brains. These are reward models that are frequent but irregular, creating anticipation, but where the final reward is too unpredictable and fleeting to be planned for. This establishes a self-reinforcing cycle of uncertainty, anticipation, and feedback. The randomness of a slot machine prevents the player from developing a strategy or planning, so the only way to get a reward is to keep playing. The rewards are designed to be just frequent enough to reengage you after a string of losses, keeping you playing. In gambling, a casino makes money based on the number of spins a player takes. On social media, a platform makes money based on the number of clicks a user makes. That’s why information feeds scroll endlessly. There is little difference between a user spending their time searching for content and a gambler repeatedly pulling the lever of a slot machine, Wylie argues.

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When users join CA's fake groups (designed to pop up via Facebook), these groups post videos and articles that provoke and inflame them further. Conversations rage on the group’s page, with people complaining about the terrible or unjust situation. Meanwhile, the messages are tested and refined to achieve maximum engagement. CA only needs to infect (parasite) a small portion of the population and can then watch the narrative spread. People show up and find a community of anger and paranoia. This naturally leads them to feel like they are part of a giant movement, allowing them to feed further off each other’s paranoia and conspiracy fears. Sometimes, a CA staff member acts as a "confederate," a tactic commonly used by the military to stoke anxiety in target groups. But most of the time, these situations unfold organically.

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Another strategy involves identifying targets to disrupt drug trafficking organizations from within. The first thing the company does is find the most accessible individuals who, according to their psychologists, are most likely to become more erratic or paranoid. Then, the company works to suggest ideas like, "The bosses are stealing from you" or "They’re going to pin the blame on you." The goal was to turn them against an organization, and sometimes, if someone hears something often enough, they start to believe it. Once these first individuals are sufficiently exposed to these new narratives, it’s time to have them meet and form a group that can then organize. They share rumors, pushing each other deeper into paranoia. That’s when you introduce the next level: people whose initial resistance to the rumors begins to weaken. And that’s how you gradually destabilize an organization from within. Once a group based in one county begins to self-organize, you introduce it to a similar group in the next county. Then you do it again. Over time, you create a movement of neurotic and conspiratorial citizens on a statewide scale. And now on a global scale, especially since the pandemic.

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By making people angry through psychologically abusive experiments, CA follows a fairly large body of research, warns Wylie, showing that anger interferes with information-seeking. CA observed that when respondents are angry, their need for complete and rational explanations is significantly reduced as well. Anger puts people in a mindset where they are more indiscriminately punitive, especially towards outgroups. They also underestimate the risk of negative outcomes. This led CA to discover that even if a hypothetical trade war with China or Mexico meant the loss of American jobs and profits, people primed by anger would tolerate domestic economic damage if it meant they could use a trade war to punish immigrant groups and urban liberals.

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Naturally, race is highly exploitable in this type of project aimed at polarizing online and social media engagement. Race is thus one of many topics that CA began exploring. The psychologists involved in the projects initially announced that this research would be used either to passively gather information on population biases or even to help reduce their effects. They eventually, in line with CA’s culture, tested how to use cognitive biases as a means to change people’s perceptions of racial groups. "In our invasion of America," comments Wylie, "we deliberately activated the worst in people, from paranoia to racism. (…) I was now working for extremists who wanted to build their own dystopia in America and Europe. (…) Ultimately, we were creating a machine to contaminate America with hate and cult-like paranoia" (p. 144).

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With these strategies, Steve Bannon aimed to affirm the vilest prejudices of the American psyche and convince those who held them that they were victims, that they had been forced to repress their true feelings for too long. To Wylie, Bannon needed an army to trigger chaos. Because he wanted his targets to "discover themselves" and "become who they truly are." Therefore, the tools created at CA in 2014 were certainly not aimed at self-realization; they were used to accentuate people's most intimate demons in order to build what Bannon called his "movement."

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By targeting individuals with specific psychological vulnerabilities, the firm victimized them into joining what was nothing more than a cult led by false prophets, argues Wylie, where reason and facts would have little effect on its new followers, digitally isolated. Bannon seemed to blame "big government" and "big capitalism" for suppressing the randomness essential to the human experience. He therefore wanted to free people from an administrative state that controlled them, made choices for them, and thus took away their life’s purpose. He wanted to provoke chaos to end the tyranny of certainty within the administrative state. Steve Bannon does not want and will not tolerate the state dictating America’s fate.

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Quickly gaining fame for its potential to extract data, modify behaviors and emotions, and hack the personal accounts of influential figures, CA became a revolving door for politicians, security agencies, and foreign businessmen seeking influence over governments and elections, etc. According to Wylie, the Russian oil company Lukoil, a major force in the global economy, was interested in the data provided by CA as it sought a strategy to infiltrate the Russian opposition campaign with damaging information. This was a typical offer from the parent company (SCL Group), which already provided private espionage, deception, bribery, extortion, infiltration, and disinformation through fake social media accounts to clients around the world, etc. To woo potential client Lukoil, CA presented an internal slide deck created by the U.S. Air Force targeting center in Virginia, which the company had somehow gained access to. CA thus demonstrated (while flaunting its power by being affiliated with the U.S. military) to certain potential clients how the U.S. was already incorporating socio-cultural behavioral factors into operational planning to gain the ability to disarm targets and amplify non-kinetic force against U.S. adversaries.

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Thus, all forms of manipulation and propaganda now seem possible in Western countries where citizens have the right to freely express themselves (including the right to agree with the propaganda of a hostile nation or project). This right thus serves as a magical force field for online propaganda. Wylie also describes the orchestration put in place by CA to enable Brexit and D. Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential elections because having resources (in terms of money and data) now means being able to reach a disproportionate number of voters for, against, or undecided. To convince voters based on their profiles, hundreds of different ads and messages were used: videos of women being burned alive, men choking on their own blood as their throats were slit, campaign posters showing a caravan of brown-skinned migrants under the words breaking point (a poster that drew a comparison with Nazi propaganda from the 1930s, which showed lines of Jews pouring into Europe), etc. All levels of cruelty were employed to win the economic and political war. The media, Wylie notes, did not talk about what individuals and groups were actually seeing during the referendum on the UK’s membership in the European Union. Moreover, through a network of offshore companies registered under different names allowing for tax evasion and escaping legal scrutiny, CA managed to evade examination by electoral or data protection authorities, as it continued its activities under new names following the indictments and bankruptcy caused by Wylie’s revelations.

 

THE CRIME AGAINST SUBJECTIVITY

In silico simulation of a future society and the development of strategies to achieve it, gradual destabilization of your environment, knowledge of your intimate life and your deep self better than you or your loved ones, accentuation of internal demons, stimulation of fragile segments of your personality, parasitizing your brain’s defense mechanisms, substitution of your self, manipulation of perceptions, emotions, and behaviors, creation of communities of anger and paranoia, fueling of racism and conspiratorial thoughts through psychologically abusive experiments, activation of online engagement and information-seeking to make sense of the artificially induced societal chaos, a culture of catastrophe, imposition of frequent but irregular reward models forcing you to “play” again, militarization of information based on the PSYOP model—this dystopian and powerful science based on real-life data nevertheless resembles a global psychic violation.

These data are based on a philosophy that is both profoundly true and profoundly perverse. Regarding the program of world chaos undertaken by Steve Bannon and more broadly by the web’s regimes/logics, we can recognize that it is true that humans, like all living things, have a chaotic or entropic dimension (Dodds, 2011) that tends to be eliminated/controlled by the surveillance society, just as psychoanalytic theorizing has privileged psychic structuring over the creativity of chaos. It is true that there is a fundamental violence in all of us, well known in the psychoanalytic domain (Bergeret, 1984). It is true that, as confirmed by Wylie and CA, secret manipulations have always taken place at various levels in our societies, a fact that feeds into conspiracy theories, which in turn fuel digital labor. However, we must point out, in the current context, the existence of feedback loops mixing truth and falsehood to stimulate engagement in the voluntary algorithmic chaos—and, more seriously, the chaos of the world. It is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between true and false (see the culture of fake news, which affects all fields, from science to lifestyles). These feedback loops are constitutive and determinative of the repetitive, compulsive, and impulsive dynamics of the web. They currently shape our selves.

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The global crisis triggered by the coronavirus in 2020 has led to a worldwide conspiracy tsunami. Could this state be understood as a global experiment intertwining medical, digital, and social issues, leading to a worsening of the world’s condition? The Lancet (the prestigious scientific journal, itself compromised by the same crisis after publishing a botched study on hydroxychloroquine) suggested in September 2020 that we are not facing a pandemic, but a syndemic (Horton, 2020), meaning the concentration of several problems abnormally elevated in a given population. “A syndemic is not just comorbidity. Syndemics are characterized by biological and social interactions between situations and conditions, interactions that increase a person’s susceptibility to harm or worsen their health condition,” Horton suggests (§2). These various issues therefore interact and influence one another within this synergy understood as a bio-psycho-social process. Thus, social interactions (on social networks) and the associated attention warfare may have worsened the state of the world and that of the sick, producing chaotic and devastating political decisions and manipulations. At the time of writing (January 6, 2021), riots are taking place inside the Capitol (U.S. Congress) in Washington, spurred by President Trump’s posts, showing that a social network and malicious intentions can put democracy in danger.

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The media has continually reminded us that the crisis is also psychiatric, with the number of mental breakdowns having increased significantly. This is a very complex debate that requires space. However, let us keep one question in mind: Is there a link between the chaos/confusion of the world observed during the 2020-21 health crisis (and its management by various actors) and our abnormally high use of the web, particularly social networks, which largely rely on chaotic logics?

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Returning to our point, Wylie seems to put psychologists on the trail of the endangerment of subjectivities due to the deep manipulations and systematic psychological abuse they suffer from increasing screen exposure. Thus, individuals are, to varying degrees, trapped in a digital system from which it is becoming increasingly difficult to escape.

“Technical engineers intentionally design labyrinths of confusion on their platforms, allowing people to sink deeper and deeper into these architectures, without any clear way out. And as people continue to click within their labyrinth, these architects rejoice at the increase in engagement,” warns Wylie (2019, p. 235).

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On this point, Wylie is not a pioneer, as, as suggested earlier, a significant number of philosophers, scientists, and citizens had been concerned before the crisis about the effects of digital life on populations (Knafo, Lo Bosco, 2016; Twenge, 2017; Alter, 2017; Lanier, 2018; Stiegler, 2018; Courtwright, 2019; Johanssen, Poenaru, 2019). Among the side effects of digital life, we have highlighted the slide into ordinary addiction, the weakening of boundaries, exposure to traumatic excitation, the tendency toward regression and narcissistic withdrawal, the failure of transitional space, the blurring of psychic screens and hallucinatory doses, the increasing correlation with cases of depression and anxiety worldwide, etc. (Poenaru, 2019). Wylie nevertheless confronts us with a detailed description of manipulation strategies, as well as a confirmation of the hypotheses and testimonies of other researchers or actors in the web.

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In psychoanalysis, we are relatively clear about the idea that a psychic apparatus is made up of conflicts, ambivalences, contradictory drives, repressed or split-off parts, defense mechanisms that are more or less mature depending on each person’s personality, naturally narcissistic traits, etc. Digital logic seems to exploit individual characteristics with monstrous precision and a knowledge of personal traits that probably far exceeds that of psychoanalysts. For these reasons, contemporary subjectivities—and especially their fragile segments—seem exposed to increasingly unpredictable and potentially devastating confusions and co-modifications, requiring further psychoanalytic inquiry into appropriate clinical interventions. Because we are in a true epistemic void regarding the articulation between psychoanalysis and Mindfuck.

 

WHAT PSYCHOANALYSIS IN TIMES OF WAR?

The preceding descriptions, confirmed by multiple authors, suggest that we are living in a context (accentuated by the 2020-21 health crisis and the overinvestment in digital means) of psychological, economic, informational, attentional war, etc. "We are at war. Not against another nation, but against an invisible and elusive enemy," declared French President Emmanuel Macron on March 16, 2020. This statement synthesizes a context that goes far beyond the health crisis, which is only the culmination of an unprecedented environment. In LikeWar: The weaponization of social media, Singer and Brooking (2018) describe and analyze the logic of war underlying social networks:

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“Everywhere, armed groups and governments had begun generating information operations and war propaganda alongside the endless supply of memes and cat videos on the Internet. (...) The fights could now be watched live, on both sides of the front lines. You could ‘like’ the version you preferred, your clicks engaging you in the fight to determine which version received the most views (p. 9-10). Digital sociologists describe how social media creates a new reality ‘that is no longer limited to the perceptual horizon,’ in which an online argument can seem just as real as a face-to-face dispute. The difference with online life, however, is that today the whole world seems to be witnessing whether you accept the challenge or not. This phenomenon manifests at all levels, not just in murders; 80% of fights that break out in Chicago schools are now triggered online” (p. 13).

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Wylie, like Freud, reveals the existence of a manifest world and a latent world that determine our relationships with the environment and with ourselves. They reveal the existence of a black box that escapes knowledge, hence the epistemic inequality (Zouboff, 2019): on one side, there is knowledge, on the other, we live/prefer ignorance, entertainment, repression. A latency co-constructed and co-modified in interaction with our environment, which generally escapes the radar of psychoanalysis when it comes to digital aspects. However, the multiplicity of factors involved in psychiatric pathologies obliges psychoanalysts to question the usefulness of their theoretical and clinical corpus in the face of the transversal and hybrid factors associated with digital warfare and its psychological abuses. For it is no longer possible to deny the obvious: these factors alter the functioning of the people we treat. Wylie thus presents psychoanalysis with a historical challenge, immensely more important than the challenges the discipline faced with recent discoveries in cognitive science, neuroscience, etc.

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Psychoanalysis in times of war has once again the possibility to:

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1. remain in its obsolescence and supposedly apolitical silence, continuing to explore instinctual drives and Oedipal and pre-Oedipal configurations that underpin individual metapsychology, while psychological warfare rages outside;

2. recognize its obsolescence or the insufficiency of its classic tools and undertake the modification/adaptation/transformation of its own perspectives in the face of the perspecticide carried out by the active deconstruction and manipulation of individual perceptions and unconscious minds;

3. provide a critical perspective in the form of applied psychoanalysis.

 

The question of clinical method lies at the heart of these possibilities and the cognitive and theoretical dissonances they generate. How can we listen, question, and interpret in this new context that takes psychoanalysts almost by surprise, like an unexpected tsunami (while they themselves acknowledge their ordinary addiction to screens)? Should we use hybrid techniques that mix listening, multifactorial interpretations, and education? By education, I mean the communication and elaboration of scientific knowledge related to digital culture, its effects, and the potential hygienic means to be developed, modeled after therapeutic patient education applied in medicine (WHO, 1998). Is all of this contrary to psychoanalytic logic, which requires stepping back, suspending the superego to allow the patient's unconscious conflict to unfold? And if the superego is also the heir to the propaganda that runs through history and civilization, why suspend it and not question its work on perceptions and the relationships it generates? Why not interpret digital manipulations in the same way we interpret manipulations by mother and father? Is working on the patient's narcissistic vulnerabilities and drive assembly enough to foster a sober and healthy attitude towards the digital environment? How do we know that what is constructed in a session is not immediately obliterated by subsequent exposure to screens? Can an hour, two, or three of therapy per week compete with the daily screen time (which is constantly increasing) and thus the exposure to the overexploitation of our cognitive-behavioral (in)competence, addiction, regression, loneliness, and chaos? Can we still practice psychoanalysis in times of war?

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I think we must face the evidence: our technique can only be mixed and multiaxial, in order to avoid denial of the environmental, political, economic, and cultural factors and their cognitive-behavioral consequences. For the unconscious is heterogeneous, and our work must engage with the various layers and rhizomes that constitute it. A therapist with a psychoanalytic orientation cannot rely solely on free associations and recollection. Sooner or later, they must intervene, engage with their own speech. Is there any speech other than socio-political? Isn’t the structure of language underpinned by a power structure, fundamentally political and normative (Guattari, 1979)?

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Failing to address the digital norm (individual and societal) could signify collusion or submission to the economic and political power that produces it. Certainly, the foundation of the psyche is built through early interactions with attachment figures (themselves subject to internal and external power), and this must remain a central focus of clinical work. But have you not noticed that children spend less and less time with their loved ones and more and more time on a screen?

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REFERENCES

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Courtwright, D. T. (2019). The Age of Addiction. How Bad Habits Became Big Business. Cambridge : Harvard University Press.

Dodds, J. (2011). Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos. London and New York: Routledge.

Guattari, F. (1979). L’inconscient machinique. Essais de schizo-analyse. Paris : Editions Recherches.

Foucault, M. (1975). Surveiller et punir. Paris: Gallimard.

Horton, R. (2020). Covid-19 is not a pandemic. The Lancet, 396 (10255), published online, September 26, 2020. Doi: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32000-6/fulltext

Johanssen, J., Poenaru, L. (2019, prépublié). Do Big Data and Data Mining influence our Identities? Interview with Jacob Johanssen. In Analysis, revue transdisciplinaire de psychanalyse et sciences, 3 (2), 114-118.

Knafo, D., Lo Bosco, R. (2016). The Age of perversion. Desire and Technology in Psychoanalysis and Culture. Londres : Routledge.

Lanier, J. (2018). Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now. New York : Henry Holt and Company.

Neidich, W. (dir) (2013, 2014, 2018). The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part One (2013), Part Two (2014), Part Three (2018). Berlin : Archive Books.

Poenaru, L. (2019). Inconscient digital, excitation des limites, écran bêta. In Analysis, revue transdisciplinaire de psychanalyse et sciences, 3 (2), 125-134.

Singer, P. W., Brooking, E. T. (2018). LikeWar : The Weaponization of Social Media. Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Stiegler, B. (2018). Dans la disruption : Comment ne pas devenir fou ? Paris : Actes Sud / Babel.

Twenge, J. M. (2017). iGen. New York: Atria Books.

Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. London: Profile Books.

Wylie, C. (2019). Mindf*ck. Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America. Random House Publishing Group.

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Notes

Carole Cadwalladr (2020). Fresh Cambridge Analytica leak ‘shows global manipulation is out of control’. The Guardian, 4 Jan 2020. Disponible en ligne:

 https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jan/04/cambridge-analytica-data-leak-global-election-manipulation

 

Brown, D. (2018). SCL Group’s founders were connected to royalty, the rich and powerful. The Times, March 21 2018.

 

In psychology, priming refers to a family of experimental paradigms based on the prior presentation of a stimulus (the prime) to influence the processing of another stimulus (the target).

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However, there is a lack of in-depth discussion regarding the artificial induction of social and cultural interactions by social networks, through the stimuli we are analyzing here. The observed results pertain simultaneously to a natural environment and an artificial environment, co-constructed by the interactions between computer logics determined by engineers and the natural segments of individual personalities.

 

PSYOP: Psychological operations is a program of the U.S. military. It involves strategies aimed at transmitting selected information and indicators to target audiences in order to influence their emotions, motivations, and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.

Werly, R. (2020). Emmanuel Macron : « Nous sommes en guerre face à un ennemi invisible ». Le Temps, 16 mars 2020. Disponible en ligne : https://www.letemps.ch/monde/emmanuel-macron-sommes-guerre-face-un-ennemi-invisible

 

OMS (2018). Éducation Thérapeutique du Patient. Recommandations disponibles en ligne : https://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/145296/E93849.pdf