Pilgrims Society
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Control of people's perception and behaviour through media began a century ago
By Rhoda Wilson | December 29, 2024 | 7 Comments
Mechanisms of controlling people through media, films and music began with Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908.
Using Edison's model, significant entities like the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations emerged, shaping knowledge about medicine through strategic grant-making, which contributed to a larger architecture of social control.
While the CIA's Operation Mockingbird was shaping public perception through the media, Britain's MI6 was developing methods to control consciousness itself. with the Tavistock Institute playing a significant role, some of which became the foundational algorithms of social media platforms such as Facebook.
In a three-part series, Joshua Stylman aimed to make visible the hidden systems of influence, enabling others to recognise manipulation and resist it. His series examines the foundational systems of control established in the early 20th century, exploring how these methods evolved through popular culture and counterculture movements, and analyses how these techniques have been automated and perfected through digital systems.
The following is paraphrased from Part One. You can read Stylman's full article HERE, and read Part Two HERE and Part Three HERE.
Engineering Control: A Century of Cultural Control
In 2012, Facebook conducted a secret experiment on 689,000 users, manipulating their news feeds to study how changes in content affected their emotions. This crude test was just a glimpse of what was coming. By 2024, algorithms would not be used to simply shape what we feel, but what we believe it is even possible to think.
Social media platforms are now able to predict and modify behaviour in real time while streaming services automatically and continuously curate our cultural consumption, and digital payment systems track every single transaction. What began as simple emotional manipulation has become comprehensive consciousness control. This power to mould human perception didn’t emerge overnight.
The cultural control mechanisms were built over a century, evolving from Thomas Edison's physical monopolies to today's invisible digital chains. Understanding these historical foundations is crucial to resisting algorithmic consciousness control.
Thomas Edison's establishment of the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908 laid the groundwork for a century of systematic influence, demonstrating five key mechanisms of control: infrastructure control, distribution control, legal framework, financial pressure and legitimacy definition.
These mechanisms have evolved and reappeared across industries and eras, becoming sophisticated tools for engineering public consciousness and controlling the boundaries of possible thought and expression.
Early 20th Century
The early 20th century witnessed an unprecedented convergence of concentrated control across multiple domains, with the breakup of the Edison Trust in 1915 leading to the consolidation of power in an oligarchy of studios that could coordinate content control and messaging.
The Motion Picture Production Code, the Hays Code, established in 1934 demonstrated how moral panic could justify systematic content control. It controlled the content depicted on screen, setting a template for narrative manipulation that persists in the digital age, similar to Edison's control of film distribution.
The early 20th century saw unprecedented bureaucratic convergence across domains, including medicine, media, education, finance, entertainment and scientific research, with major foundations like the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations playing a crucial role in shaping academic research priorities and social science methodologies.
John D. Rockefeller replicated Edison's template in medicine by controlling infrastructure, distribution, legal frameworks, financial pressure and legitimacy definition, effectively controlling what constitutes legitimate knowledge in the field.
This administrative alignment established interlocking systems for controlling both physical reality and public consciousness, with each piece contributing to a comprehensive architecture of social control, from Edison's control of visual media to Rockefeller's definition of medical knowledge to the Federal Reserve's monetary control.
Reshaping America's Global Role
The power of this converged system was first demonstrated at scale in reshaping America's global role, with the narrative of American "isolationism" emerging as a major shaper of public consciousness, reframing America's projection of power through banking networks, corporate expansion and gunboat diplomacy.
J.P. Morgan’s acquisition of major newspapers helped establish this narrative framework, while Operation Mockingbird, a US Central Intelligence Agency ("CIA") programme, formalised the influence of intelligence agencies on public perception through seemingly independent media channels.
The same principles of narrative control persist today, with automated systems operating at a global scale, replacing human intermediaries, and exemplified by the media-intelligence nexus, as seen in the transformation of the US radio and television network Columbia Broadcasting System ("CBS") into a broadcasting empire under William S. Paley.
Please go to The Expose to continue reading.
In a three-part series, Joshua Stylman aimed to make visible the hidden systems of influence, enabling others to recognise manipulation and resist it. His series examines the foundational systems of control established in the early 20th century, exploring how these methods evolved through popular culture and counterculture movements, and analyses how these techniques have been automated and perfected through digital systems.
The following is paraphrased from Part One. You can read Stylman's full article HERE, and read Part Two HERE and Part Three HERE.
Engineering Control: A Century of Cultural Control
In 2012, Facebook conducted a secret experiment on 689,000 users, manipulating their news feeds to study how changes in content affected their emotions. This crude test was just a glimpse of what was coming. By 2024, algorithms would not be used to simply shape what we feel, but what we believe it is even possible to think.
Social media platforms are now able to predict and modify behaviour in real time while streaming services automatically and continuously curate our cultural consumption, and digital payment systems track every single transaction. What began as simple emotional manipulation has become comprehensive consciousness control. This power to mould human perception didn’t emerge overnight.
The cultural control mechanisms were built over a century, evolving from Thomas Edison's physical monopolies to today's invisible digital chains. Understanding these historical foundations is crucial to resisting algorithmic consciousness control.
Thomas Edison's establishment of the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908 laid the groundwork for a century of systematic influence, demonstrating five key mechanisms of control: infrastructure control, distribution control, legal framework, financial pressure and legitimacy definition.
These mechanisms have evolved and reappeared across industries and eras, becoming sophisticated tools for engineering public consciousness and controlling the boundaries of possible thought and expression.
Early 20th Century
The early 20th century witnessed an unprecedented convergence of concentrated control across multiple domains, with the breakup of the Edison Trust in 1915 leading to the consolidation of power in an oligarchy of studios that could coordinate content control and messaging.
The Motion Picture Production Code, the Hays Code, established in 1934 demonstrated how moral panic could justify systematic content control. It controlled the content depicted on screen, setting a template for narrative manipulation that persists in the digital age, similar to Edison's control of film distribution.
The early 20th century saw unprecedented bureaucratic convergence across domains, including medicine, media, education, finance, entertainment and scientific research, with major foundations like the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations playing a crucial role in shaping academic research priorities and social science methodologies.
John D. Rockefeller replicated Edison's template in medicine by controlling infrastructure, distribution, legal frameworks, financial pressure and legitimacy definition, effectively controlling what constitutes legitimate knowledge in the field.
Further reading: The Information Factory: How Reality is Manufactured, Joshua Stylman, 12 November 2024Private foundations, through strategic grant-making and institutional support, established and maintained approved frameworks for understanding society, becoming powerful gatekeepers of acceptable knowledge and extending Rockefeller’s medical model into the broader intellectual sphere.
This administrative alignment established interlocking systems for controlling both physical reality and public consciousness, with each piece contributing to a comprehensive architecture of social control, from Edison's control of visual media to Rockefeller's definition of medical knowledge to the Federal Reserve's monetary control.
Reshaping America's Global Role
The power of this converged system was first demonstrated at scale in reshaping America's global role, with the narrative of American "isolationism" emerging as a major shaper of public consciousness, reframing America's projection of power through banking networks, corporate expansion and gunboat diplomacy.
J.P. Morgan’s acquisition of major newspapers helped establish this narrative framework, while Operation Mockingbird, a US Central Intelligence Agency ("CIA") programme, formalised the influence of intelligence agencies on public perception through seemingly independent media channels.
The same principles of narrative control persist today, with automated systems operating at a global scale, replacing human intermediaries, and exemplified by the media-intelligence nexus, as seen in the transformation of the US radio and television network Columbia Broadcasting System ("CBS") into a broadcasting empire under William S. Paley.
Please go to The Expose to continue reading.
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