Who’s Pulling the Strings?

May 17, 2022 8:07 PM

The ghost in the machine - Army PSYOPS recruitment video appears (Army Times). The Army has a PSYOPS group, and they need people, and on their YouTube channel they have posted a recruitment video that in three minutes creates a quite harrowing mood. They say that they will show who’s pulling the strings, and they do, dark silhouettes, of people here and there, maybe around the world, maybe here, but all faceless, and in dark spaces. All centered on a Fleischer Brothers cartoon of Koko the Clown, rotoscoped from a film of Cab Calloway, turning into the ghost in the machine. But you know, that might be an interesting job?
posted by njohnson23 (42 comments total)

... it’s important to note that the field is incredibly competitive. According to the Army, candidates have to score higher than 85 on the Defense Language Aptitude Battery test. Soldiers also must pass a 10-day selection course

This just calls for an action movie to be made of good-looking candidates doing things like playing volleyball, riding motorcycles, singing songs in bars, vying at the competitive school to be TOP MEME (1987)
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 8:30 PM on May 17, 2022 [26 favorites]

According to the Army, candidates have to score higher than 85 on the Defense Language Aptitude Battery test.

For scale, that test is out of 164 points, and a score of 95 is sufficient for an English speaker to be considered for training in a closely related language such as French. I don't get the impression that a score of 85 is particularly high.
posted by jedicus at 8:37 PM on May 17, 2022 [7 favorites]

What is the song in the background?
posted by glaucon at 8:38 PM on May 17, 2022

If these guys are any good at their jobs, this ad will bring in more recruits than they can handle.
posted by adamrice at 8:47 PM on May 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

gaslighting: career mode unlocked
posted by glonous keming at 8:49 PM on May 17, 2022 [12 favorites]

Look, I don't mean to brag, but I stared at a goat once.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:27 PM on May 17, 2022 [31 favorites]

Did the goat stare at you?
posted by foonly at 10:13 PM on May 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

What is the song in the background?

Shazam says Mountain with Many Rivers by Lee Rosevere.
posted by bendy at 10:20 PM on May 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

All that just to tell us the Brain Bug is afraid?
posted by gelfin at 12:10 AM on May 18, 2022 [7 favorites]

There is at least one US Army PSYOPS veteran mefite, as it happens. I know him personally, but only as an acquaintance. Maybe he'll see this post.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 12:18 AM on May 18, 2022

Shazam says Mountain with Many Rivers by Lee Rosevere.

Or maybe that's just what they want you to think.
posted by The Tensor at 12:34 AM on May 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

>Maybe he'll see this post.
Of course they'll see this post: the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, I'm told. (Maybe that is itself propaganda, can you get your in-person mefite acquiantance to clarify?)
posted by k3ninho at 1:33 AM on May 18, 2022

I got a very unnerving "Q" vibe from this, and not in a good way.
posted by chavenet at 2:12 AM on May 18, 2022 [7 favorites]

in the grim darkness of psychological warfare, there are only videos with clowns in
posted by glonous keming at 3:48 AM on May 18, 2022 [5 favorites]

maybe the real PSYOPS were the ghosts we made along the way
posted by glonous keming at 3:57 AM on May 18, 2022 [17 favorites]

I used to have a friend that was in Military Intelligence and he said all the PSYOPS guys were really weird. Ran into one of the weirdest people from my high school at a party once. He had a shaved head and was very proud of his new career: Army PSYOPS.
posted by nestor_makhno at 4:30 AM on May 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

I suspect Dr. Mindbender had a part to play in this.

(Side note: I used to work with the wife of the voice actor behind Dr. Mindbender. He did the voice for me—“Oww, these pants are too tight!” Made my day.)
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 5:21 AM on May 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

I guess unlike me, the target audience for this would be … impressed? … by the random and not particularly sensical concatenation of unattributed quoted phrases?
posted by eviemath at 5:21 AM on May 18, 2022

So, I really need someone to invent something like Army but, you know, for Good Guys?
posted by allthinky at 5:52 AM on May 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

Also, the "What, are we?" gives off really existential vibes.
posted by allthinky at 5:58 AM on May 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

Nah. It’s not deep enough to be existential. Really reminds me of some student papers I’ve read.
posted by eviemath at 6:17 AM on May 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Someone tell Nick Nocturne a government sponsored sequel to Marble Hornets just dropped.
posted by charred husk at 6:52 AM on May 18, 2022

"Yeah, I joined this group that fights against cults! Sure, I had to shave my head and take a personality test with an antique machine that measures my breathing, but I get paid BAQ."
posted by credulous at 7:05 AM on May 18, 2022 [5 favorites]

Psywar Rules!

It's not what it is; it's what it means. It means whatever "They" tell you it means. Not us. Well, anyhow, not me.

We liberals will not fall for that propagandistic bullshit from those weak-minded and under-educated enemies of freedom on the radical right. Keep in mind that every time somebody gets the tip of the spear, somebody else gets the shaft.

That reminds me, I have to go down to Walmart and get another case of bottled water, so I can brew up some of that organic coffee I got from Juan Valdez.
posted by mule98J at 8:17 AM on May 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

I thought this was a trailer for "Joker."
posted by panglos at 8:17 AM on May 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

I suspect that it was deliberately crafted to evoke stuff like Joker or the "Mandarin"'s propaganda films from Iron Man 3 (themselves a form of psywar) or whatever spicy memes. Does the double duty of displaying their talents and using them for recruitment, since psyops is all about persuasion.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:35 AM on May 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

Really reminds me of some student papers I’ve read.

Student peer reviews suggest that might not mean it isn't well received.

Also, "warfare" is people riding horses in historic-recreation films and a Molotov cocktail? I guess I should not be surprised.

I like goats. I'm going to stare at geese. They're all jerks.
posted by eotvos at 8:44 AM on May 18, 2022

Did you see those guys flipping over a tank with their bare hands at 3:14? That was cool.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 8:58 AM on May 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Would you like to know more?
posted by kirkaracha at 9:08 AM on May 18, 2022 [12 favorites]

I remember back in the late-1990s/early-2000s poking around the Web 1.0 internet of Geocities & Angelfire webpages (and the occasional somehow-still-alive Gopher hole) and stumbling on someone's page detailing some of their experiences as an Army PsyOps person. I remember clearly thinking something like "oh shit, buckle up cause I bet this is gonna be wild"... but it turned out that almost all of the page was about leafletting. Like, most of it was about the logistics of where and how to drop pamphlets into places where the enemy could pick them up. I don't remember exactly what war era (e.g.: Vietnam, Korea, WWII, etc...) this person's experience came from but I do remember feeling somewhat disappointed by the mundanity. Maybe they were keeping all of the really juicy stuff to themselves.
posted by mhum at 9:17 AM on May 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

Student peer reviews suggest that might not mean it isn't well received.

Sort of true in some cases? (Though in my experience, their peers can also often tell when a paper has been thrown together without a central organizing principle or smooth transitions, and plagiarizes common sources. They don’t necessarily know how to fix it or what peer review comments would be useful, of course.) But that’s also not related to the context of my comment?
posted by eviemath at 10:04 AM on May 18, 2022

I'm guessing the people they really want would watch this, chuckle, and say "pass. I could have made a better film.". the real psy-op is finding those people.
posted by OHenryPacey at 10:10 AM on May 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

They're looking for the guys who email them and say "I could make a better film, want me to?"
posted by jacquilynne at 10:38 AM on May 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

That was beautiful, and terrifying. What if "are we the baddies," but cooler.
posted by Mchelly at 11:29 AM on May 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

We've met the enemy and he is us.
posted by zerobyproxy at 11:31 AM on May 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

The Army wants my email address to read that, so other people will buy it and send me spam. I haven't tasted spam since the 1950's, I oughta try it one more time. Spamelets with feta and tomato, might be good. The Army doesn't want old women, except to feed their goats, or target practice. My dad told me an interesting Army thing, once. There were donkeys left over from The Spanish American War, out at Dugway, they shipped them out to Afghanistan for the Taliban to use, when it was someone else's venue. I would like to read the piece, however.
posted by Oyéah at 1:13 PM on May 18, 2022

Really interesting video. For an audience of 18-year-olds who might be considering military service, I think the clichéd unattributed phrases do what they're supposed to do. I watched the Army's doctrinal evolution away from psyops to the new "strategic communication" hotness in the mid-2000s, some of which coincided with the failed shift to the new counterinsurgency model. As mired in "tradition" as the Army is, it's taken a while for them to get caught up to the kind of thinking that the video shows. The 2019 edited collection Rhet Ops: Rhetoric and Information Warfare (self-link disclaimer: I've got a chapter in it) digs into a lot of this stuff.
posted by vitia at 2:26 PM on May 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

Meanwhile the U.S.Army eSports team...
posted by charred husk at 3:50 PM on May 18, 2022

Oyéah: you might want to consider beefing up your ad blocker, i'm not getting any modal email request. after all, this is PSYWAR

the main video content is also here on youtube titled GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE because all caps is obviously way more PSYOPPY
posted by glonous keming at 7:43 PM on May 18, 2022

Yvan eht Nioj.
posted by porpoise at 8:30 PM on May 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

It's just marketing. State Department is sales. "Psyops" is just marketing.

They made a marketing video to make it seem a lot cooler than it really is.

I really enjoyed the video, too. But still.
posted by Xoebe at 8:48 PM on May 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Pamphleteers arose: From Choi Oi to Chieu Hoi, no doubt about it.

You sorta hadda been there.
posted by mule98J at 9:39 PM on May 18, 2022 [1 favorite]