Time to grow up. Stop IPSocating on social media immediately!
The Ukrainian state and public infrastructure, which is obliged to understand and resist cognitive attacks on our consciousness on the so-called " sixth battlefield " , is still assembled from "shit and sticks". However, the tragic time that we are going through will force us to grow up faster and soberly assess the processes that we have to face.
The magic word "IPSO"
The magical thinking of man, which has been the key to the survival of our species for thousands of years, requires a simple and straightforward explanation of the processes taking place before our eyes. Thunder rumbles - so the gods are angry. They hit - they hit back. Give - take. There is danger to life - run.
Moreover, it does not matter to our brain whether all of the above is happening in real life, or whether we only read about it and watch posts on social networks. Scientists are slowly developing research that shows that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can be just as likely to occur in a person who has seen the horrors of war with their own eyes as in a person who simply scrolled through a feed of Telegram channels 24/7 with relevant descriptions. photos and videos.
However, it would be naive to struggle with thousands of years of evolution. Demanding that millions of Ukrainians learn media literacy and critical thinking in a year is like insisting that their tails grow back in the same period.
Magical thinking will require them to answer simple questions. And the expert media community likes to create and give the audience such simple answers. And they can't be blamed for that either! We have to somehow feed the family...
Just to feed their families and pay their mortgage payments, Russian propagandists have been brainwashing around the clock, and they started doing it long before 2014. And the rest of the world came up with the field of "countering disinformation" somewhere around that time. Then 2022 came and began to demand new approaches. Therefore, now media experts have decided to use the term "IPSO" - "informational and psychological special operations" all the time and massively.
I can be cautious: in the next couple of years, Western funds will massively allocate money to the study of IPSO, just as zealously as seven years ago they began to allocate money to the "counteraction of disinformation".
Take the grant "for the study of IPSO", but use it for "reflective control"
When the story about the "disinformation counteraction centers" had exhausted itself, someone first said the word "IPSO", and - it took off... This word is repeated 100 times on TV channels, written in posts and comments.
About 2.5 thousand years after China formulated the basics of its military strategy in Sun Tzu's work "The Art of War", the term " psychological operations" (abbreviated, PSYOPS — psychological operations) appeared in the United States . This name, in itself, indicated that the influence is exerted directly on the psyche of the object of influence (enemy, adversary or other audience).
Almost simultaneously with the PSYOPS protocols in the USA, the same documents appeared in the military departments of Great Britain and other NATO member states. Only then did NATO form the corresponding standards.
It is obvious that over time, the main means of conducting psychological operations have become means of conveying information. That is, media of all kinds. And that is why different interpretations of this activity appeared, such as the name - special information operations (SIO), which is used in many documents of the Ukrainian special services. The military, especially the GUR of the Ministry of Defense and the SSO, use the term " informational and psychological special operations" .
To understand this variety of names, it is useful to think about the mandate of state institutions in wartime and peacetime. Or in the hybrid time, which could be considered the entire period of the Anti-Terrorist Operation and the Operation of the United Forces in the east of Ukraine.
The question is whether the relevant units have the right to use psychological weapons against their own citizens? What about the civilians of the enemy and partner countries? And to your own military? In a democratic country, such issues can occur even during martial law, not to mention relatively peaceful circumstances.
For example, the experience of the Ukrainian fight against covid shows that the government resorts to psychological influence. Thus, Viktor Lyashko admitted in May 2020 that the ban on visiting parks had the purpose of psychologically influencing its own citizens in order to form motives in them to comply with quarantine restrictions.
And this is already a matter of behavioral management, the experience of which, for example, was in the British government , until the moment when the special unit that was engaged in this was decided to be separated into a non-governmental organization, away from the sins of Cambridge Analytica.
The only problem is that psyops, IPSO, disinformation operations (or, in scientific terms, "deception") are all just tools and means of managerial activity, the conceptual foundations of which originated in the Soviet Union and became fashionable and widely used thanks to getting into the leadership positions in Russia of such people as the head of the administration of the President of the Russian Federation Anton Vaino, the first deputy head of the administration of the President of the Russian Federation Serhiy Kiriyenko, as well as the former advisor to the President Vladyslav Surkov.
The general name of this activity is reflexive control, or reflexive management, which the Ukrainian scientist Heorhiy Pocheptsov began to write about in the fall of 2014.
I have been describing examples of the use of reflexive control techniques for a long time using concrete examples, and a few days before the large-scale aggression, I explained how it works at a webinar organized by the NGO "Information Press Center" with the support of the Media Program in Ukraine.
Prophets and priests of reflexive management
Anton Vaino and Serhiy Kiriyenko are included in the informal galaxy of managers, who are called " generous " or methodologists. The Soviet philosopher Georgy Shchedrovytskyi together with like-minded people founded the Moscow Methodological Circle (MMK) in the 60s of the last century. It has become a kind of school of thought and a platform for organizing organizational and action games. For more than 30 years, its supporters have gathered to find ways to solve a wide variety of problems with the help of an interactive game. Some even got addicted to these games as a drug, since they sometimes had a sectarian entourage. During the game, people could not sleep or eat for a long time, due to the energy of the process itself.
To some extent, such games can be compared to the NATO standard of "red teaming" exercises, but this is the subject of another study.
One of the members of the MMK was the psychologist and mathematician Volodymyr Lefebvre , who later fled the Soviet Union to the United States. He is considered the creator of the theory of reflexive games and reflexive management . However, some sources say that there was a serious rift between Lefebvre and Shchedrovytskyi , after which Lefebvre left to pursue his own topics, and the games continued.
However, I have every reason to say that the world-famous developments of Lefebvre, which provided him with a world name, may be the result of joint work with George Shchedrovytskyi. The bottom line is that it is very difficult to draw any clear boundaries in such a layer of knowledge, practices, approaches, discussions and conflicts. After all, at that time it was pure scientific creativity. Unfortunately, decades later it was distorted and put at the service of schizo-fascists (as Timothy Snyder calls them).
Examples of the use of reflexive management
Open sources publish the legend that Volodymyr Lefebvre described the principle of reflexive control with words from a children's fairy tale: " Do whatever you want with me - just don't throw me into the thorn bush . " If the reader remembers, the cunning rabbit turned to the fox with such a call to save himself. Accordingly, the fox thought: if the rabbit asks not to throw him into the bush, then this is probably the worst suffering for him. And that is exactly what the fox did.
It is the latest media technologies of content delivery that help bring information to us, consuming which we make some unconscious actions and steps, the result of which is the goal of the manipulator and reflexive manager.
One of the latest examples of the action of such a complex of measures was shared by the author of the book " Armored Mind " Walde Khan (Kostyantin Ulyanov).
There is a rather conspiratorial, but no less real hypothesis that the video of the inhuman abuse and castration of the Ukrainian military was filmed and distributed in order to get the expected reaction of Ukrainians and the rest of the world - pain and outrage.
Confirmation of this hypothesis is certain nuances of the so-called seeding of this video through Telegram channels controlled by Russian special services (probably the GRU of the Ministry of Defense). And also, for example, the "two-part" release of this video (first one clip, and the next day the second, and in different sources) and subsequent mass distribution in marginal sources.
Experts do not rule out reflexive management in the attack on the Odesa seaport a few hours after the signing of an agreement in Turkey on the transportation of Ukrainian grain.
The fact is that certain political subjects, including, in particular, Serhiy Kiriyenko, Serhiy Shoigu, Andriy Turchak, and Ramzan Kadyrov, were and remain unconditional supporters of the continuation of the war at any cost. Separate sources indicate that the start of the war was the only way for Shoigu to avoid political blows from competitors who were extremely unhappy with his excessive rapprochement with Putin. Folders with thousands of proofs of unpunished embezzlement of army budgets were already prepared for Shoigu.
As for Kirienko, the current situation is his springboard to the status of Putin's successor, since the balance of political forces in Russia has been completely reset.
At the same time, the whole world fervently wants an end to the war and a transition to negotiations. There are also supporters of such a development in Russia. However, it is the demonstration of inhuman violence that leads to the fact that Ukrainians will not allow the Ukrainian political leadership to negotiate with inhumans.
Another potential example of reflexive control can be the constant attacks on the first lady of Ukraine since the inauguration of Volodymyr Zelenskyi as president.
Such a hypothesis must be investigated to find sufficient evidence. In addition, there is no doubt that there are a large number of people, including in the camp of Zelenskyi's political opponents, who openly criticize his wife and without any external incentives.
However, as it has been repeatedly proven, the wife and family are a kind of "kryptonite" for the president of Ukraine. He himself recklessly and inexperiencedly confirmed this at his press conferences. Therefore, it would be very logical to imagine that, using the existing dynamics in Ukrainian social networks, the enemy is doing everything possible to deepen divisions.
As a result, Zelensky thinks that Poroshenko is organizing the attacks on his wife, and starts attacking him in return. There are botnets, "Podolyak positive bloggers" and opinion leaders on both sides, who are busy breaking spears and burning each other in the comments, while the enemy calmly plans and conducts the next reflexive operations. The formula "just don't throw me into a thorn bush" works without fail.
How to "counteract" and whether to "counteract"?
In my humble opinion, such a word as "counteraction" simply does not exist in the lexicon of reflexive management at all. I will never get tired of repeating that the Ukrainian media community needs to forget once and for all such words as "disinformation", "counteraction", "IPSO"... And learn new, more effective ones.
For example, " network-centric communications" or " narrative regulation system ".
Yes, the network-centric management approach also came to us from the military sphere. It consists in the fact that in modern combat, the old management and communication principles, when a command or combat order follows vertically integrated chains, are no longer possible.
By the time "upstairs" understand the situation, make a decision and send you a combat order, you will already be dead several times. Instead, each unit commander operates fully autonomously and interacts with assigned forces and assets at his discretion and in his own time, with a deep understanding of the current operational environment, the general and specific objectives of the operation, and having good horizontal communication.
A network-centric approach (even by its name) can ensure the effective operation of a huge number of vainly created "centers"... Everything as we like!
The Center for countering disinformation should be "merged" with the Main Situation Center at the NSDC Apparatus. And the Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security should become a working group under the Prime Minister of Ukraine to ensure the formulation and support of the map of narratives of the Ukrainian government. Winter is near... Do you think that Zelensky will take on the low temperature in the houses? The Cabinet of Ministers must be equipped with communication skills. While the Ministry of Culture does not need this "third leg without adequate status".
However, for this, the tasks of communications and narrative regulation must be worked out and detailed at the strategic level. In other words, every public communicator, both in the civilian and military sectors, must be clear about the future we are building. Because, for example, it is physically impossible under active Danyla Hetmantsev to talk about a newly liberal country to which we will attract investors who love economic freedom.
The toolbox of reflexive management is surprisingly effective in political communications precisely because totalitarian Russia uses it against democratic Ukraine. In this situation, we have only one way out - to become the subject of reflexive management from the object of reflexive management.
However, the problem with this decision lies in the fact that Ukrainians are building a free society in which the conditional "chief epidemiologist Lyashko" has no right and cannot base his management decisions on the basis of the desire to "exercise a psychological influence on citizens." Because it has nothing to do with democracy.
Thus, a certain protective control over the public consciousness and the Ukrainian information space can be achieved exclusively with the help of a mosaic of our own narratives, which are supported and promoted in Ukrainian society by an institutionalized network of communicators, each of whom acts proactively within their capabilities, but without additional instructions from above.
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