Programming People and its Inversion
Turning Mind Control Upside Down
I’m sitting in class right now, learning about the efficacy of various “programming” strategies for inoculating youth from drug use.
Just Say Gno
In my experience of online college today in 2025, lectures and workshops are about 30% screen-shared YouTube videos.
This one, from Khan Academy, talks about the failure of the D.A.R.E. program and ends
We don't currently have the ability to sit children down in a room for a few sessions, and expect them to be able to change their long-term views. That said, there has been a lot of research looking into new drug prevention strategies, and it's very possible that we'll have more effective programming in the future. But focusing only on this type of programming doesn't give us the whole picture because family and community can have a huge influence. Having a strong and nurturing family, school, and community seems to act as an important protective factor against drug use and abuse.
I get a lot out of watching videos like this one. The very-carefully-stated caveats and qualifiers interpreting the statistics, the reminders about correlation not implying causation—all these are essential in branding this video as credible science.
I’m not saying it’s not credible science, but it leads me to imagining how many viewers of popular science videos sit in inpatient expectation of hearing these name-drops, ready to pounce in the comments to decry anyone who fails to say all the exactly-correct things in due course.
The next video we watched began with a statistic about addiction. What followed was the sentence beginning “Addiction, also known as substance use disorder…”
Here’s another signifier of reliable information: the hat-tip to the a specialist term which experts are under professional pressure to adopt.
The DSM-V came out in 2013, introducing the term “Substance Use Disorder” as an umbrella term for a grab-bag of disorders which used to be split among “Substance Abuse” and “Substance Dependence” disorders. Also included is the first behavioral addiction diagnosis, “Gambling Disorder”, which would have formerly been classified as a compulsion, similar to OCD.
Therefore, it’s essential when talking about “addiction” to a wide audience to at least once make reference to the proper term so that those who know know you know.
I find myself sending off such-signals all the time in my regular speech. Not about addictions so much, because this is a new field for me. But technical stuff, especially so.
For instance, I would never say, regarding the recent crash at Pearson International in Toronto, that “the plane” was left upside-down. The plane is in pieces, what’s left of it, belly side up, is the fuselage.
I obsess about proper terms for technical objects. People who referred to their desktop computer case as a “CPU” drove me apoplectic as a kid.
It’s largely an ego thing. When I, in casual speech, go out of my way to throw in proper terms, I’ll readily confess here to be signalling something about myself of which I am proud.
But, beyond that, I’m also executing an agenda in social programming. I wish everyone could speak about the world around them as I do. I’m on a mission of the exact same sort as the institutions which tribalize professionals and activists into their own universes of jargon, with one difference: I assert that my jargon is material and environmental, and their jargon is abstract and conceptual.
My way of speaking weaves your perception into the world around you—their way of speaking ensares you in webs of their own design.
Of course, in spite of my nefarious framing, this is usually a good thing.
Should you ever seek their services, you’ll find that you won’t meet an addictions counselor who doesn’t employ the a pocket-dictionary’s worth of jargon like “substance use,” “self-care,” and “harm reduction,” while laying-out the program of treatment. All these terms have very specific meanings for the counselor; meanings above what they might mean for you. They serve to glue all the various stages of progress and treatment models and other concepts together which are being detected or rolled out during the sessions.
The education is largely the memorization of many such conceptual models, which I employ like invisible rulers held-up to the client and their life, helping me shape the course of treatment.
If you have been sent to me by a judge because you were caught drunk driving, you may not even think that your drinking is really a problem. You’re just going through the motions to get your license back. It’d be useless for me, then, to ask you to set goals for your sobriety. This puts you in the pre-contemplation stage of the behavioural change I am being paid to help you program into yourself. Whether I, as the counselor, ever actually utter the words “pre-contemplation stage” during our session is irrelevant—my pin-pointing of your place in your “hero’s journey” to recovery shapes the nature of the treatment I can offer.
Upon graduation and employment, it will be my job to help you transform yourself. And, so, everything I’m learning about has the same structure as all the stuff which I wrote early and often-about on this very blog, in pieces like On Becoming Fictional Characters, Rituals of Change As Used on You, and Metamorphosis: The Countours of your Embedding. I wrote those pieces, and then I half-unconsciously went to college to become qualified in practicing their ethical implementation.
I swear it was a virtual coin-flip between that and cyber-security. I’m extremely happy today the coin landed as it did—rigged, somewhat, by conversations with those closest to me.
Perception over Programming
Above, I said that there is a difference between how I speak in technical terms for the specific parts of our material technical environment, vs. the way expert classes speak within abstract models using their own adopted jargon. I called the later a form of “programming,” echoing the way the video I watched talked about the efficacy of anti-drug “programming” for classrooms.
Computer programming—or “coding”—at a high-level doesn’t require knowledge of the low-level. The underlying computer can be a black-box, and code is portable across different machines. When you write a web-app, it will run on anything with a web browser.
Likewise, social programming is suited for the masses—for anyone and everyone. The audiance’s relation to the world isn’t about specific places or things. What you need are “support networks” and “communities” and “resources” to address all the “domains” of your wellness. All the jargon is in generalities—never specifics. The advice can be transplanted across people and cultures and places.
The act of translating the generalities of expert advice into the specifics of your own life is the weakspot. Engineers call it implementation. Programmers call it the instantiation of a declaration at one level, or the motions of code through compilation, linking, and runtime at another. Marxists call it the movement from theory to praxis. Whatever you call it, this “putting on” of the abstract into concreteness is where everything can go wrong—and sometimes it going wrong is what the system relies on.
I’m very glad to have returned, yet again, into education for addictions counseling. The work of helping people overcome an addiction is noble. Furthermore, it provides positive opportunities for instantiating many of the ideas of change which I’ve been making declarations about here on this blog. I can work responsibly within the proper constraints of well-developed profession while simultaneously understanding the work through my more literary, occult (merely meaning obscure, or mystified) and media ecology-informed perceptions.
The 12-Step program of Alcoholics Anonymous, for instance, is readily amenable to understanding through often-mystified ideas of transformation and transcendence of the self. I was awestruck in this assigned video to hear AA sponsor Michael Marks say
My good friend Gavin back in New York always summed up the 12 steps in the following way: he always said to me, “One, two, and three got me right with God; four five six and seven got me right with me; eight and nine got me right with you; and 10, 11, and 12 keep me right with God, with me, and with you.”
Which, for my money, is the steps in a nutshell. It speaks to the idea that every human being in the world really has but three primary relationships: a relationship with yourself—a relationship with ourselves; a relationship with whatever you believe is your higher power—relationship with God; and a relationship with your fellows—a relationship with the world around you."
I wrote three massive long pieces on this blog about my recovery from psychosis premised on this very idea—with the exception that I was working diligently to avoid ascribing God-hood to the elements of my environment which exerted control over me, but which I knew to be mere human contrivance, or programming.
In the first of these pieces, titled The Human Scale Triangle, I opened by quoting one of Marshall McLuhan’s early and unpublished works of literary criticism:
Baudelaire knew that the “significance of an experience”, and this is the whole of the matter, does not reside in the poet, the thing, or the larger reality but in the ratio between the three. And there I think we should find the solution to the Case of the Missing Anecdote. —Marshall McLuhan, “The Case of the Missing Anecdote”, ~1948
As summarized in my third piece, about my wild trip into the world of science fiction writers and fans at the launch event for Amazing Stories magazine,
I patterned my journey out of psychosis as the very-gradual integration of three elements. In Part I I wrote about the relation of myself to the material world. Part II looked at how other people related to the world. Now we complete the triangle, with my relation to other people.
Do you see what’s going on here? Alcoholics Anonymous—which was founded during a time when Modern ideas about scientific study of ritual and spiritual phenomenon were widespread—presents spiritual surrender as a path of personal transformation, or death and rebirth, which I myself was inspired to develop and work through in complementary action.
The anonymous alcoholic looks at one’s relation to one’s self; I considered my relation to my environment, the extensions of myself.
The AA looks at one’s relationship to others; I strove to interpret other people’s relations to what of themselves they’ve externalized into their own environment.
The AA considers one’s relation to God; I strive to speak about the greater environmental forces which surround us all, by which we are all programmed and fooled.
I think it’s okay to say that fighting the massive system of manipulation comprising the modern technological environment is complementary to “getting right with God.” To do one is to make strides in doing the other.
Social Construction
The use of jargon in speech arrises from the gradual education in conceptual models which are built out of said-jargon.
When you learn a specialism, and become a member of a tribe of specialists, you speak their language. Doing so not only helps you apply your specialism, but also signals to others your identity as as specialist.
As someone who’s often been more of a loner, solitary type, I don’t think I was trying to signal group-belong when I spoke in my own ideosyncretic way. I was trying very, very hard to be precise in whatever it was I was talking about—and if I couldn’t be precise about a thing, I just dared not to speak about it.
Lots of smart and insecure young people furiously study-ahead in order to speak about things “scientifically” or accurately, becoming little facsimiles or apes of the experts in those domains. Eventually they’ll assemble and put-on, from a mish-mash of models, a perception of the world so tight that it strangles the circulation of their free thought.
My journey through psychosis demanded that I speak about things I couldn’t speak about. And my subsequent self-education in language and art, which I undertook in order to learn how to speak about these things, lead me to an appreciation of metaphor and poetic technique as a means to leap the gaps in my knowledge without feeling deficient. I learned how allusive and vague language can be a strength, a means to communicate in spite of all of one’s uncertainty.
Yet, for all that, I’d like to argue that technical language stands apart from the “scientific” sounding language of experts and their abstract, scientifically-informed models. Technical language of the sort I mean—calling a fuselage a fuselage, as it were—is a matter of embodied perception of our material world. This is because marketers and social engineers have been programming our common language with bad language which directly defies the material reality of our world.
Free software is not open source software. Websites and applications are not a seperate-and-distinct kind of “social media”. Neither can “video games” be considered as an art for a style of criticism seperate from the total history of computers. Information does not flow and ideas are not viruses or “contagions”.
I write and write and write these long tracts quibbling over words. Why? Because all these tiny mistakes, which we all make every day—even I slip up—amount to a massive cultural misperception about the problems technology create for us, and the effects that they have.
And the computer industry is full of people who speak about their own specialism wrong. I watched their language change over the course of the 20-plus years I’ve been reading Slashdot.org every day. Tech workers are dumber today than they were twenty years ago. They are more precise about specifics of specifics, but completely out of reality on the big picture.
If you’ve been socialized into sounding like an expert on tech, or computers, by hanging out in those circles than you are worse than lost—you are heavily invested in never recognizing it in the first place. And you’re in too large and welcoming and lucrative a company of also-lost fellows to bother venturing out to see why. You’re surrounded by people pointing at A and saying B and you’re helpless but to repeat after them. You’ve been programmed to speak contrary to what your faculty for perception ought to reveal.
I’m not.
I’m glad I dropped out of computer science in 2010. And I’m glad I didn’t take cybersecurity in 2024.
I’m much happier establishing my credibilty on firmer grounds than anything the right-speaking experts of those worlds can offer.