Unfortunately, the internet is not really a psyop

2025-11-13

It seems public sentiments around the internet as a technology have undergone a flip. Rather than being treated as a tool with liberatory potential, more and more, it seems the perception is extremely negative. I believe this can be traced back to a few events, the pandemic, the explosion of tik tok, and a particular book which I will discuss shortly. As it seems to me, concepts such as "brain rot" have entered widespread public usage in daily lexicons, and public perception of the internet has landed on a reading in which it exists purely to pacify, surveille, and extract profit for billionaires. This was already a constant thread of thought within internet users going back decades and only accelerating, however something about the tone has changed. It used to be "capitalists are coming and colonising the internet, forcing everyone onto the same 4 websites". But the message has changed to "the internet was always a psyop".

I've traced this back to a book called Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History Of The Internet, by Yasha Levine. I have not read this book, nor do I intend to read this book, because it's supposed revelations are simply things anyone who is tech savvy has already known for a long time. For example, one of the major bombshells in this book, or supposed bombshells, is that TOR was developed by US intelligence, and when you use TOR you are effectively acting as an agent to supply network noise to cover the activities of the US military. Uh, yeah. Everyone knows that's how TOR works. Tor's own website says plainly right there on the "history" page that it was developed by the US Naval Research Lab. This is not a secret and has never been a secret. Wow did you know Ghidra was developed by the NSA too!?!? At no point does any of this indicate that TOR doesn't work. Does TOR not work? Is there a 51% attack on exit nodes? We simply do not know, it's definitely possible. We also know of various other vulns in TOR which have gotten people caught such as time correlation attacks. Although, in certain cases, we don't really know how well this would hold up in court, since the accused have confessed before the state has had to prove their case. What I mean to say is, there is nothing new being revealed here. There are just a series of rhetorical questions predicated upon false assumptions, "if the internet was created by the US military to spy on you, why would they also fund a technology that lets you circumvent that spying?", trying to imply that TOR is compromised without having any proof. Now to be clear I do have my own problems with the way the TOR project has been managed especially more recently but that is beyond the scope of this post.

Another supposed revelation is that Signal messenger uses AWS servers as if that means anything. The book also erroneously claims Signal is a metadata harvesting operation designed to collect user's phone numbers, even though they have had an option to sign up without using a phone number for quite a while now. I'm not sure what the timelines are on that between that option being released and the book being published, but the fact is if it was ever a problem it isn't any more. It's also something privacy minded internet users have been complaining about for a very long time. I remember threads on lainchan about this from many many years ago. The book fear mongers around this metadata collection, even though you can literally see what signal has reported to law enforcement upon request and it's really not that scary. That being said of course I recommend using a messaging program such as XMPP or Matrix with a self hosted homeserver or hosted by a trusted party, just to mitigate legitimate concerns about metadata collection.

Again I have not read the book and I do not intend to read the book, however, I've seen enough people reference this book including the youtuber "we're in hell" who has two at time of writing long form video essays adapting the book. I didn't make it through those videos because they were boring and just saying things I already knew. I feel like I have a general sense of what it's about. But this is not a well researched post this is a stream of consciousness thing and you should read it as such. You should also take into account the first paragraph, read this as a response to the attitude that the internet was always a mistake rather than this book that I haven't read in particular.

But anyway, this is seemingly the book's main trick, to simply point at things and say "the us military was involved". I'm sure it is probably fine as an introduction to someone who knows nothing about online privacy and surveillance, but it is absolutely not rigorous. For one thing, the claim and the evidence are not related. The claim is, "the internet was created by US intelligence from the start to surveille people", but the evidence is "the internet was created to communicate and transport surveillance information". A task which could also be done using pen and paper, or a telephone, or smoke signals. In other words, the revelation is, "the internet is a communications network which can be used to communicate information and transport data". No shit.

As far as I am aware it contains no mention of cybersyn or OGAS, despite the problems with both experiments (especially OGAS), these are two other alternate internet-like networks developed by Chile and the Soviets respectively, for managing planned economic production, they deserve mentioning if you're going to run through the history of the internet. Perhaps there is a broader point to be made, that any advanced communications are already necessarily dystopian or oppressive, and I could even see myself agreeing to some extent with this depending on how you phrased it. But this is not the general attitude. I also believe there is a general confusion where people general confuse "social" media platforms with the internet as a whole. I make a clear distinction between the two things when I write.

I believe there is a lack of nuance here, it is easier to simply believe that either the internet is inherently good or inherently evil, when the reality is that it has the potential to enable all sorts of interactions depending on how it is used. It is just dishonest to lump all of these platforms together. I still hold the belief that the internet with it's potential for infinite effectively free re-production of digital commodities functions to meaningfully negate certain harmful property relations.

All of that being said, I do also believe that a majority of people who find themselves on "the internet" (read: meta-meatspace) these days probably shouldn't be. Or rather, they would probably feel more fulfilled in life without being online in the way that they are. I am not interested in shilling and expanding things the net, the actual net, the network of small independent pages and files across numerous protocols. This is nerd shit for nerds and it's only nerds who will get anything out of it. The average tik tok doomscroller will not get anything out of semi-obscure BBSs on the reticulum network and that is fine.

This is a book that is just smart enough to scare normies. But the normies don't know enough to actually mitigate these problems. One thing that's surprising to me is that there has never to my knowledge been a mass campaign to poison the data collection of major social media platforms. An activist campaign like that wouldn't achieve much on the grand scale, but it is good practice to lie on the internet when talking about yourself.

The focus on the Vietnam war is funny because it also misses something big. The US lost that war. These mass data gathering techniques aren't actually effective strategically. The digital economy is based on lies. If "social" media companies collect enough user information they can sell it to data brokers who can sell it to advertisers who can use it to target ads, which the user never sees because they are using an ad blocker, because the web browser has to download content to the user's PC which they can modify as they see fit. The targeted ad never reaches it's target, the value of the data is entirely fictitious. So perhaps the data broker sells to an intelligence agency instead, in which case the NSA has possession of a dataset so impossibly large they cannot hope to actually parse the signal from the noise, and over-reliance on that dataset leaves them open to the most basic data poisoning by simply lying. Thus with the effort of actually processing the immense mass of data and into anything useful being so intensive, this technique ends up being less efficient than old school targeted surveillance, and so they end up resorting back to that anyway. Mass surveillance might be acceptable if it actually worked, but these high-modernist ideologies have proven themselves to fail historically over and over again. They will continue to do so. What people fail to realise is that it doesn't really matter whether your focus is the bilaberg group or the WEF or the CIA or the illuminati, conspiratorial thinking always looses out to real world incompetence. Any notion that a group of elites knows what's really going on and are pulling the strings with some vast intellect and grand plan, it's wishful thinking. That group of elites are the very ones who are most vulnerable to backwards thinking and accidental psyops, just look at Elon. General "social" media users have their filter bubbles, but the haute bourgeoisie are surrounded by a real life filter bubble of yes-men even when they log off. They psyop themselves by accident. It seems the average vaguely lefty person has started to come to the realisation that the police are as a rule incompetent, which is easily evidenced by ever interacting with them. But they still seem to be under the impression that perhaps the intelligence agencies or the military or the capitalists or someone actually knows what's going on. No one knows what's going on, those guys least of all! In other words, even if the internet was created with the intention to spy on and manipulate The People, that is no reason to believe it is actually successful at that task, or that it cannot be put to use for other purposes which weren't foreseen.

A more enlightened individual may contend that while the individuals are stupid or misinformed, the system itself has these functions. Via a sort of natural selection, capitalism as a whole maintains and reproduces itself via a series of systems which negate threats. This is a much better view, but I also find the naive version of this to be missing it's key observation. Natural selection is the process which drives evolution via random mutation in nature. Threats aren't negated without the organism first mutating to negate those threats. The environment forces a system to mutate in a certain way to deal with a threat. Well I will not expand here, I leave this an exercise for the reader.

The internet, much like meatspace, is a cyberpunk dystopia. Simply looking around and pointing at the buildings saying "the sprawl was built by and for the Tyrell Corporation" is not a novel or useful observation. These bland critiques of the internet or even anti-tech critique more broadly always leave me saying "ok, so what now?" Are you really opening your Apple iPhone and opening Meta Platforms Instagram, unaware that there might be a capitalist involved here. What, you want me to ask politely that you uninstall tik tok from your phone? But you like tik tok. You find the videos funny and you send a funny tik tok to your partner via Discord. No one is under any illusions here. I have no interest in proselytising to anyone, if you don't like those apps you're not on them, if you're on them it's because you want to be on them. And to be clear, I am not judging you for that. If you want to veg out on your bed and scroll Youtube shorts who gives a shit man, go ahead, I've done it. I would say I used to be somewhat judgey on this topic, or see myself as superior for being off "social" media, but these days I really do not care. The net would not benefit from a larger user base, not really, and Facebook doesn't miss me. Everyone is happy with the way things are, for the most part.

It doesn't even make any sense to make a claim like "the internet is a psyop" (the title of "We're in hell"'s video). Writing is a psyop guys! They're trying to get us to write down letters so the imperial guard can read our messages! Hey the history of mass literacy comes deeply entwined with state and corporate repression surveillance and so on, but I'm still glad I can read (mostly).

In conclusion, the history which proclaims the internet was a psyop from day one is deeply flawed, but even to the extent that it is correct it is largely irrelevant. Corporate and state capture of the internet is not unique or special compared to their capture of anything else. The evasion and refusal will continue.