#trancewar

In 2016, I published a dense little book book called Fixing Broken Robots. This work explored the relationship between people and technology, and began describing the epochal change into which our society

In April, it was widely reported that Shadow Brokers had captured a suite of NSA hacking tools. Less than a month later, supercharged by state-sponsored malicious software, ransomware went totally mainstream,

Did Vladimir Putin personally lead a successful effort to hack the DNC, collude with Wikileaks to release data obtained by such means, and thereby sway US elections? Probably not. In fact, according to

My last post in this series described how, due to widespread disillusionment, "the trancewar's foot soldiers already appear to be losing control of the public narrative. It may take them a while to regroup,

This is my first attempt at the @williambanks #nameinlights initiative.  I hadn't thought about doing something like this previously because I have fewer followers than many of my followers do.

Have you ever found a container of leftover stew in the back of your refrigerator, opened it, and discovered a putrid mess? From where I stand, the US political establishment is in a similar condition

According to the Washington Post, the upcoming US elections are totally stressing people out. The American Psychological Association has even issued guidelines for dealing with election-related stress.

Have you ever experienced what it is to be held hostage by an invisible barrier acting upon the thinking of another person? Of course you have. This is commonplace. It is as commonplace as an inability

At first glance, Cass Sunstein appears to be just another rabidly neoliberal policy wonk. His writing - from academic papers to books to a regular Bloomberg column - seems fairly intelligent and thoroughly

Both conscious and unconscious awareness is written into and read from our bodies in a variety of ways. Whether or not we notice it, our interaction with this information has a strong influence on thinking,

In part, the trancewar manipulates thinking to make the satisfaction of human needs contingent on rendering service to the desires of a control regime. To understand how exactly the trancewar operates,

The world is made of people; of past and present lives encoded in the rearrangements of matter intermingled with our passing. The world is made of the stories we tell ourselves and each other about ourselves

When I was in elementary school, at perhaps age eight, I had a friend who shall be called 'Bob' for the purposes of this story. Bob and I would meet up on weekends and conduct little science experiments.

Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian psychoanalyst who began work under Freud, and introduced many of the personality-related concepts employed in modern psychology. His early work was, and remains, well-respected.