Otherwise, "semiotics, structuralism, and information theory"

I couldn't resist posting the follow up now. Since it's election day in the US it is timely.

The title is intentional. Any interested reader should investigate the CECMAS group in France in the 1960s. In short, they realized that technological innovation and mass media had created circumstances where an artifical reality was manipulable to create specific emotional response.

One may note that social upheaval followed new forms of media - television, the internet, social media, and now AI.

In 1967, Guy Debord published The Society of the Spectacle. Any person in modern America, living with Fox News, the current administration, Facebook, and influencers should read this. Debord talks about how rage, spectacle, and urgency could and were being used to keep society pacified and controllable. I believe "A closed loop extraction machine" may be a more moder phrasing.

This is buried in American academics because of the rise of applied behavioral psychology, and at this point, it's essentially been industrialized and weaponized.

Another key point in US history in the mid-2010 when adveraries of America realized they could access and manipulate the control systems that were in place to geopolitical advantages. The people in charge of those systems had gotten amoral and atrophied, and were more interested in their own wealth and power interests even to the harm of the host society. So they became coopted, and various experiments showed it was possible to even convince some people that a bunch of children were being trafficked in the non-existent basement of a pizzeria by a cabal of the most powerful people in the world.

The irrationality required to believe this was the point, it was a demonstration of the capability of these systems.

From my last post, you'll see that it's a straight line from 2016 today in terms of the societal junkie dynamic. As one gets habituated to the prior stimulus, the dosage has to keep increasing to get the same effect, and this eventually becomes unsustainable.

This is less interesting, let's talk about self defense.

1. Somatic Interruption

This is breaking the cycle, or what you may think of "stepping away". To avoid the cortisol release and the deeper, longer term stress response that comes after the amygdala triggered norepinephrine release, you have to think of this very, very tactically.

You may think something is wrong you have correct, step away. Take 10 deep breath in which you exhale longer than you inhale. This activates the vagus nerve, and lets your parasympathetic nervous system take control from your sympathetic nervous system. Same with relaxing your posture.

The re-uptake and half life of a pulse of norepinephrine is 2-3 minutes. If you outlast that, you will avoid being hijacked by someone or something trying to steal your attention, and you will break the cortisol and dopamine mediated rage addiction cycle in you before it starts.

You will still have to contend with a mode shift in your locus coeruleus, or your arousal center. This is akin to an anger hangover and your physiological state will lag your norepinephrine levels. If you were angry enough or long enough, the decay rate for adrenaline is 30 or more minutes, and the decay rate for cortisol is hours. As you become aware of this, you will recognize how each neurotransmitter or hormone impacts your mental and physical state.

2. Cognitive Reframing

This is a mental discipline, beyond physiological, similar to managing a phobia. If you know a dark room won't harm you, then you can intellectualize the threat even as you are feeling the physiological manifestations of a threat response.

When you read ragebait, your amygdala responds to it as a threat to your self and your societal group. From an evolutionary perspective, where everything is biased toward the propagation of genetic material, we have evolved or this to be an extraordinarily difficult threat response to intellectualize.

The discipline you need is fourfold

a. Strip away anything important from the stimulus.

Your first reaction is "this person is a jerk, they are a threat to my way of life and values, and I need to fight with them and correct them". You should instead pause, and say "here is a misguided person, they are arguing with me, and don't realize they are caught in a rage addiction loop, and deserve my pity. That is, if they are a real person to begin with - do I know they are real? They might just be a fragment of output from an algorithm to provoke me to click on or post something, for the profit of the people running that algorithm".

Treat the stimulus like candy. You wouldn't eat a bowl full of skittles just because the bags are brightly colored and shiny. It would make you feel sick. You intellectualize the stimulus, step away from the bowl of candy, and eat something healthy. If you have one bag of candy later, you know it is an indulgence and you approach it as such.

b. Redefine your space

You may feel like the comment or post is a threat you must respond to. You are in fact an MMA fighter and the other person has been arranged to be in front of you like a promoter. They are using your conflict to sell tickets, but you are not party to the transaction or being payed for you. You are being exploited.

Again, intellectualize your response. You are not engaging with someone, you are engaging in deliberate conflict engineered by someone else. You have agency and do not have to engage. Does your time have value? Is it well spent interacting with this other addicted person, or at worse a paid human or AI generated content?

c. Reframe it as stolen focus

Do not let them manipulate your ego. You may think it is your personal or civic duty to correct the offending stimulus. This is an illusion. You have very finite, high quality capacity to pay attention in a day. This stimulus is stealing from you to take that value time and argue, and risk trapping you in an unproductive addiction cycle. Do you want to waste your value time? Do you want to take the best part of your day to increase a social media company's quarterly earnings and engagement metrics? What do you owe to the person on the other side of the exchange, if they are even a real person?

d. Break your reward loop, realize you are the sucker

You will attempt to reframe your response to the anger and stress inducing stimulus as a personal victory and make yourself the hero in the narrative. Realize you are dupe if you respond. You have fallen victim to a complex trap to make you a part of this broader cortisol and dopamine response loop, which others have created to keep you docile, compliant, and poor.

3. Structural Environmental Design

Somatic Interruption and Cognitive Reframing are difficult. They require constant vigilance and discipline and you will inevitably fail. The struggle is intentionally and structurally asymmetrical and a small group can easily control and manipulate larger groups. Trillions of dollars and the brightest minds for generations have intentionally and unintentionally created this system.

Instead of dealing with each stimulus physiologically and psychologically you have to move to a more strategic approach where you remove the stimulus from your routine. When you create structural friction in your daily routine for those who would have you constantly outraged, addicted to anger, and manipulable you make their work harder.

a. time on devices - reduce the amount you are exposed to this. "feet to grass" as they say.

b. delete apps - the stimulus requires your attention, and the mechanism is a mobile app. The app permissions you ignore and approve give access to the time of day, your activity, your location, and more. More than enough to coarsely model how pliable you are to stimulus at any time. When you are vulnerable, you will get a phone notification, which will place the anger inducing stimulus in front of you. When you notice an app doing this, remove permissions for notifications or delete it.

c. browser only - the browser is less information rich than your phone or apps, which is why all companies want you to use their apps. The line between marketing and propaganda is more of an illusion than real. Using a browser gives away less information about yourself that can be used to manipulate your mood.

d. starve the algorithms - learn not to hover, click, or reward accounts, products, or companies that try to create engagement through manipulation. Ignore, mute, block, and uninstall. Repeat.

e. create air gaps - create spaces without access to digital stimulus. Leave your laptop or phone in a different room at night. Block the facebooks, twitters, instagrams, and linkedins of the world for stretches in the day. Neurologically it is critically important to avoid bad stimulus in the first and last half hours of your day, in terms of the impact on the HPA axis, making you most vulnerable to anger based addictive behavior.

f. create substitutions - remove yourself from the computer and create intentional activities that don't involve one. Walk outside. Read a book. Build something. It should require interactions with the real world, and preferably not other media like television or radio.

At this point, you have broken the intentionally created chemical cycle creating the addictive loop for the day. It is a shame that this requires constant vigilance and discipline, but the reward are substantial.

In terms of the academics promised in the beginning:

* When you see a political meme or other ragebait, please realize you aren't reading information, but are really processing a carefully engineered semiotic sign. You probably don't recognize it after a lifetime of conditioning, but these symbols are cultural shorthand. They have been gear to be a threat signal to your amygdala well before your conscious mind can even parse the syntax (if ever). Think the word "Nazi" or the swastika symbol (as they were pioneers of this dark work) or thin-blue line decals, or wedge-issue two-word descriptions.

* Regard structuralism, your choice to reply to a ragebait is an illusion, you aren't acting as an individual having a debate. you are a cog in a machine following a script and rule. The system has structural rules, and you are just following the path of least resistance the system has made available to you.

* Memes are the end state of this. A viral piece of ragebait that may be a manipulated video, a partisan graphic, or an outrageous post shared on twitter/x/facebook but they are just a psychological payload. It is a self-replicating cultural unit optimized to hijack the SAM pathway, trigger a norepinephrine spike, and force you to reshare it before your prefrontal cortex can intervene. The entire "share" or "retweet" or "like" mechanism to alter your and others feeds makes total sense when you reframe it based on the engineered intent of the system.