Trauma programming.

[WALFTEAM]

I've noticed that there's been two distinct "tracks" of trauma programming that occur online and greatly influence the behavior of those who experience and engage in it.

The more "male/masculine-coded" type is the exposure to grotesque/violent/disturbing imagery. The more "female/feminine-coded" type is the sharing of buried or otherwise dealt-with personal trauma that the poster or someone from their peer group has actually experienced.

The "male-coded" stuff is fairly crude and appeared earlier. It has a pre-internet precursor in the bootleg "video nasties" and more mainstream productions such as Faces of Death, but back then that kind of material was rare and difficult to obtain. Genuine, explicit and detailed imagery of death/mutilation/destruction/etc were only easy to access once the internet came along. It started in places like Rotten/Ogrish, then got really widespread on the imageboards, held out for a while in places like bestgore and liveleak, then became somewhat scarce again as social media took over. Things like ISIS execution videos, industrial accidents, misc news footage, etc. There's a natural human inclination to seeking out that kind of stuff, but the way the internet works makes it a bit too easy. Of course, it's degrading, desensitizing, harmful, and exploitative, but the primary issue is the desensitization. It makes people less empathetic. It can train certain susceptible people to be psychotic. That makes it weaponizeable.

The "female-coded" stuff came into it's own a little later. I suppose there's pre-internet precursors here too, but it really got it's start in late Livejournal, exploded on early Tumblr and has never really died down. This form of trauma programming is a lot more sophisticated. It consists of lots of talk about abuse, assault, rape, family tragedy, illness, disability & so on. Basically the dark side of oversharing. The "trigger warning" is something that escaped it's original invention for use in theraputic settings and was turned completely on it's head online. Under the guise of avoiding things that gave them past trauma people would tag everything they posted with every mention of traumatic concepts. The psychology of this has yet to be fully explored, but I saw a lot of people who before were functionally over their pasts start to get more and more neurotic as they constantly dug up every aspect of a traumatic event or relationship as well as every mundane thing that happened to occur during those periods in order to avoid them.

What it really did was make these people associate more and more mundane things with those traumas, make them dig up more and more details until they were constantly rearranging their lives around avoiding the "triggers". It was the absolute opposite of therapy; it gave people social permission to start making demands of others to stop reminding them of past tragedies they had nothing to do with but it didn't improve anyone's lives in any obvious way. The original therapeutic concept of the trigger was to train PTSD sufferers not so much to not remember things but to not be hurt by those memories and this had evolved, somehow, into the opposite. People online used to catastrophize before this but not nearly as much as they do today.

When I read about how the powers that be were experimenting with trauma-based mind control in the 50s-70s, of forcing people to dissociate and other such reactions using drugs and stressful situations, I sometimes wonder if this stuff was invented or discovered + cultivated online as a way of doing trauma-based mind control from a distance, not by inflicting trauma directly but by incentivizing someone to relive past trauma enough that it could achieve the same effect, perhaps with some progressive-sounding scrambled mumbo-jumbo spread around to obscure what was really happening.

I think it would explain a lot about the internet we now post on.

 

[№56]

Things like ISIS execution videos, industrial accidents, misc news footage, etc.

Don't forget pornography, specifically the extremely depraved hentai and cartoons some guys (federal agents?) on 4chan like to brag about wanking to.

 

[quick]

Absolutely, point and laugh at anyone who brags about knowing "the reality of the world" through exposure to gore online, for they have given the system their most thorough consent to enact psychological warfare upon them. Same with the less edgy people who claim watching videos of gore made them "more careful" or have some better understanding of safety - what they have actually learned is merely a self-defeating fear of death. Fear of death fuels support for transhumanism, in that those with a fear of death wish to escape their human condition and will be more sympathetic or lean towards efforts in society to detach the consciousness from the human body. This is absolutely demonic. There's a reason ALL of the sci fi in our popular media presents transhumanism as a natural outcome of advanced human society

I'd also like to point out the "outreach" efforts of trauma programming that were crafted to reach people who otherwise followed their intuition and made efforts to avoid stuff like gore. Funnily enough I made a video about this but the video would dox me a bit. Anyways, in my opinion/my own experience the two big ones of my generation are:

- Screamers (ie Scary Maze Game and the Car/Zombie energy drink ad)
- Mothers Against Drunk Driving lectures/events in school where they would force kids to look at gruesome car crash photos on a big screen or even recreate a gory car crash

Probably by 2020s standards that shit is really crude compared to the much more advanced ways they have now. When I have a kid I will surely do my best to keep them out of public school if it can be avoided

 

[handoferis]

shock shit imo isn't as insidious as the constant trigger warning trauma party.

i've seen people get fucked up worse by seeking out other people who have gone through the same stuff and then clearly just caught the mental illness from those groups. mental illness is obviously a personal disease but imho it is also very transmissible.

 

[NeverTheSameColor]

your distinction between masculine and feminine types of online trauma is not one i've read before and is well explained
it's human nature to try to push the limits of one's own psychology and the net makes it so easy to happen organically. the "masculine-coded" type as you call it is like a self-hazing ritual where the viewer becomes more and more hardened and resistant over time, whilst the "feminine-coded" is more like self-harm which is of course highly addictive. in either case the consumer will have to seek out more and more extreme material to get the same effect. i agree with you that no doubt TPTB are taking advantage of and encouraging this behaviour once they took notice of it happening.

 

[WALFTEAM]

Don't forget pornography, specifically the extremely depraved hentai and cartoons some guys (federal agents?) on 4chan like to brag about wanking to.

This is a severly underexplored phenomenon because it wasn't around long enough to be seriously explored before everyone went mad and academia started eating itself in earnest. Regular porno sites and community sites that had porn on a seperate manually walled-off section were one thing, but the trend as social media got more advanced was to eventually just throw it all in a blender and scroll it into your face. Being an absolute firehose of every imaginable kind of porn whether you sought it out or not was a baseline, super-key feature of Tumblr and 4chan.

Some anti-porno types will bring up combinations of porno and other material as a method of indoctrination, but their writings on the subject wind up too ideologically slanted to be of much use. The blending of ideology and eroticism is absolutely a thing for all sides and is a lot more complicated than just "buhh cuckoldry obsession" or "buhh sissy hypno".

 

[quick]

shock shit imo isn't as insidious as the constant trigger warning trauma party.

i've seen people get fucked up worse by seeking out other people who have gone through the same stuff and then clearly just caught the mental illness from those groups. mental illness is obviously a personal disease but imho it is also very transmissible.

Yes, by keeping negativity swimming around in your mind you continue to manifest it in your life and the lives of those around you. Trigger warning types are so blatantly manipulated into seeing a reality where danger and lurks around every corner, and therefore manifesting such a reality

If I recall my first exposures to extreme violence or porn as an innocent child I remember the effect it had on me was extremely minimal, nothing beyond a natural understanding that it is alien and evil and I'm not interested. Exposure to those very same things now (mainly extreme violence) is something I genuinely do fear and try to avoid for the effect it can have on me. I allowed myself to make space for that shit in my mind, and now I see it lurking around certain corners, and when I do see it I consciously feel a need to recover from it. Whereas when I had no concept of it, it slid off me like water. Kind of shocking to think about

 

[Taleisin]

Right now, trauma programming has taken a backseat just as trauma based mind control took a backseat to more subtle methods such as informational control and mass social programming. Nowadays, these things are used as a small aspect of the wider process, which is social contagion of mental illness and specific worldviews created to target vulnerable, suggestable (and hence dangerous) members of society to neutralize them before they can be co-opted into any hypothetical anti-establishment movement (among other more complex uses).

Average level actors who think about memetics use minimal amounts of psychology to inform the process. The reason certain memes became so effective in the recent culture "war" (see false dichotomy) was because they hijacked the emotions of the consumer, causing either subtle indoctrination or subtle aversions to the ideas presented.

More powerful emotions can cause more powerful effects on the consumer's constructs about reality and themselves. This can be used crudely to influence people, as a lever to move a more rigid construct. Or it can be used subtly. A larger construct such as a political ideology, or identity label such as mental illness or minority or sexuality etc. can all be used as memetic viruses provided you have an efficient enough vector for the contagion (social media in this case). These are in fact more suitable for use in the process i explain in the next paragraph, because of their high emotional and personal significance.

There's a two-process model at play here, which you have at least partially identified via your masculine/feminine model. To change someone's mind from a distance, from any one position to any other, you cannot just convince them of something using logic or facts (this often has the opposite effect, which can again be used intentionally). Instead you must first destabilise their construct (on any level, but the more deeply held a belief the better). Once you introduce instability, this reads psychologically as a threat to the self (as the perceived self is interchangeable with the empirical self). This opens a person up to influence, as they will act to reduce the instability unconsciously, and will prioritise this over logical analysis of new information. Once you cause uncertainty and dissonance, you add a "lifeline" of a new idea, that the person can hang onto. This then is assimilated into their reality-construct and becomes a belief (or into the self-construct and becomes identity).

The masculine programming you identified can act as a destabilising influence. Introducing paranoia, safety-anxiety, and a negative worldview all act to put the person off balance and erode faith in their emotional and mental support structures (eg: "losing my religion"). The feminine programming acts as the lifeline, providing an identity or belief to assume to reduce the instability. Do not be stupid enough to assume this only applies to leftist zoomers. A "conspiracy theory", "rules for life", or even "technological movement" (eg: crypto) is just as effective a lifeline as LGBT identity etc.

I have to assume that anything I can explain is childishly simple compared to what is really going on. I am not as smart as the smartest bad guy, and not as experienced as a psyop operative. I am not as well educated in psychological theory as the person sitting behind another screen planning how to set your google search algorithm.

All media access is controlled. All information is censored by selective representation. You are not immune to propaganda. You are not immune to mind control. Only by introspection and self-awareness can you begin to fight back.