Stephen Fisher

Operant Conditioning and the Cybernetic

Hacking of the Human Mind
Society has never more literally been in your head.
JUN 21, 2021
Welcome Back to Trenchant Edges, where we take deep dives into fringe culture for fun and
prophet.

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 7 seconds. Contains 826 words

Yesterday night I left my phone in a friend’s car and so I’ve been taking this rare opportunity to
explore my relationship with my technology. Not loving how I feel.

A computer is a kind of philosopher’s stone, where one’s intention melds with the deep
mysteries of the universe to create whatever effect one wills.

Naturally, it’s highly addictive.

Western culture has operated mainly on a false assumption of the division of mind and body (and
perhaps spirit) into separate and irreconcilable spheres since Descartes. Materialist science and
neuroscience have been working on untangling this delusion from the materialism side for the
last century.

Personally, I’ve found the opposite approach more beneficial. But that kind of Occultist thinking
comes with some weird strings and maybe more complications than it’s worth. So I want to
explore today with limited metaphysics, but with the most basic organs of consciousness.

Disclaimer: I cut a bunch of stuff here so if this next section doesn’t quite make sense, roll with
me.

Shadows on the wall, amitright?

How BF Skinner Ruined the World

One of the theories on how to create stable neural connections is called conditioning. Simply
consistently pairing two unrelated things enough times you can make a person or animal link
them together. I’ll skip the usual talk on Pavlov and his, uh, maybe not super ethical experiments
with dogs and bells here.

The important guy for this is BF Skinner, America’s preeminent Behaviorist. Skinner discovered
the mechanics of how many kinds of addictions work: If you have an action with a clear
relationship between cause and effect, you get mostly responsible behavior. But if you have a
cause that has a sufficiently messy range of effects you can generate on-demand addictions. It’s
called Intermittent Reinforcement

This is something, abusive romantic partners have always known: The wider the range of the
emotions someone feels and the less they feel they can predict what they’ll get, the harder it will
be to break out of the bad relationship.

Did I just call BF Skinner and his entire intellectual tradition abusers? Yup.

And their techniques form the basis for the kinds of computers that now suffuse life in our
modern dystopia.

The skinner box is a kind of torture device where all stimulation is controlled by the
experimenter. I call this torture because I’ve read too many Army and CIA interrogation manuals
and am aware that total environmental control is often considered a prerequisite for “effective”
interrogations.

Skinner used this box to refine his ideas on Operant conditioning. But it was his successors,
particularly in the wake of the success of Google’s adwords advertising platform, that really
turned it into a horrorshow. Yup, I’m rambling about The Age of Surveillance Capitalism again.

We talk a lot about the cyborgificaton of humanity in this newsletter, how our tools remake us as
we remake them. And what we’ve seen over the last 20 years is the most intense period of
cyborgifcation so far within history.

These themes, oddly enough, are explored most effectively in a pair of video game rock operas.
Take an hour and a half and listen to them. I suggest starting with act 2 because it’s less
dependant on knowing the source material, a famous action game from the 1980s.

Incidentally, one of the videos of it is the source of maybe the greatest youtube comment ever:
Jesus loves you and died for your sins. Protoman hates you and died for your sins twice.

Trust me, it’ll make sense.

So, back to Google and friends. They quickly realized the more data they have to train their
algorithms on, the better their predictions, the more profitable their ads will be.
This created an imperative to collect as much data as possible. Soon, they realized that every
design element involved in each of their products would create different effects. You could
change people’s experience of information by changing its presentation.

Now, this is an old bit of wisdom. But when paired with surveillance IT and so on, every app and
every website is now its own Skinner boxes. Each a highly motivated structure to funnel anyone
who uses the page or app to certain ends.

A business might point you to the buy button, Facebook points you to stay on the page for
increasingly long, and Google points you to more google services.

So, every new phone sold creates a new mess of engagement with skinner boxes and technology
measures responses in increasingly granular levels.

Shoshana Zuboff described all this as an attack on The Will To Will, our ability to even directly
want an end goal enough to decide to decide about it as increasingly effective behaviorist capture
of our lives rendered into data for optimal advertising.

And it tracks well with the sense of self disorientation many people report on social media.

Now, while this is kind of inevitable with the current social forces in play we’ll explore Skinner
Box Self Defense tomorrow.