Under Construction · Psychological Warfare
The architecture of plausible deniability.
A case-file series that starts from a real event and dissects the tactic behind it: what it is, how it was found, its history as a weapon against people, and what we can do about it. The aim is to drag the methods — and the language — of these campaigns into the light.
Case files
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01
PARANOID: Who are you working for?
The exploitation of human psyche — lessons on manufactured uncertainty in cognitive warfare.
Near final -
02
The limits of human adaptability — Sirhan Sirhan: Brainwashing vs Conditioning
What brainwashing actually does to a person, and why that means it cannot be the covert, activatable sleeper of the movies — and where the line falls between brainwashing and conditioning.
Planned -
03
The Trojan Word: the lie that poisoned the well
How a single 1946 mistranslation read homophobia backward into scripture — and why a word keeps the meaning of the room you first learned it in, long after the definition is corrected.
Planned -
04
The public body, the new colosseum, and the obfuscation of institutional accountability
What happened and how it is read are two different things. Judgment is assigned by emotion before language arrives, and the spectacle of the crowd becomes the alibi that lets institutions walk.
Planned -
05
The nature of the shadows and the dissolution of the trans-Atlantic slave trade
Abolition did not end the trade — it fragmented into the dark and re-formed as the carceral state, military labor pipelines, and trafficking networks.
Planned
The starting reading list
- · Kunda (1990) — The case for motivated reasoning, Psychological Bulletin
- · Nickerson (1998) — Confirmation bias: a ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises
- · Heuer (1999) — Psychology of Intelligence Analysis (CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence)
- · U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff — Military Information Support Operations (JP 3‑13.2)
- · Habermas — The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere