The Glitch
How Dr. Seuss and DARPA fought for your mind
The War Department faced a critical failure in 1943. Millions of drafted young men refused to read the field manuals necessary for their survival. Soldiers were dying because they wouldn’t learn through traditional means.
The government responded with terrifying competence.
The Factory
They hired Theodor Geisel ("Dr. Seuss) and paired him with Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones. They provided a classified budget, security clearances, and a mandate to create an instructional cartoon called Private Snafu.
The name was military slang for “Situation Normal: All F*cked Up.”
Snafu was a bumbling, lecherous idiot who leaked secrets to spies, bragged about troop movements, and refused to take nasty-tasting malaria pills.
In six of the twenty-seven episodes, his carelessness led to his death. Blown up, crushed by tanks, or eaten by diseased mosquitoes.
These cartoons were grotesque, hilarious, and brutally effective.
Surveys showed Private Snafu ranked among soldiers’ favorite films. The men who ignored written pamphlets remembered every lesson they watched Snafu die learning.
The War Department understood that art is a primary weapon of consciousness. They built a factory to manufacture behavioral change, fingerprinting workers and segmenting the animation process so few understood the full scope of the project.
The Playbook
For decades, these operations remained obscured. Then, in 1999, the government released the unredacted instructions as CJCSM 3500.08. Four years later, they released the even darker 2003 Army Field Manual on Psychological Operations.
These documents read like user’s guides for the human mind rather than military strategy. The manuals redefine military objectives as “Product Production” rather than troop movements.
They treat videos, memes, or news stories as artillery shells.
Weapons with targets, payloads, and calculated impacts.
They list the specific machinery required to edit reality, such as high-speed Risograph leaflet printers, the MSQ-85B rolling TV studio for field editing, and COMMANDO SOLO. The EC-130 aircraft that functions as a flying broadcast station designed to overpower local signals.
These platforms execute task orders designed to edit reality.
The Metrics
The manuals are clear regarding success measurement. They redefined “Battle Damage Assessment” from counting destroyed tanks to counting adopted ideas. The standard for success found on page 7-8 is simple:
“20 percent of target audience exhibits behavior in accordance with Commander’s desires.”
The manuals make clear that action is the only metric that matters.
Agreement is irrelevant because obedience is the ultimate goal. If one-fifth of the population changes their behavior to meet the Commander’s desires, such as turning against their own allies, consuming themselves with infighting, or spreading demoralizing doubt, the operation is successful.
It is behavioral engineering at scale.
The Chemistry
By 2006, DARPA shifted its focus from psychology to biology. They realized persuading humans with logic is inefficient compared to overriding survival instincts at the chemical level.
They mapped neurochemistry and created mathematical formulas to track how ideas spread through populations, monitoring dopamine responses like drug tolerance. In 2011, they named the resulting victim the “Memeoid.”
Training slides describe the Memeoid as a person whose behavior is so strongly influenced by a narrative that their own survival becomes inconsequential.
What we once called a fanatic, DARPA classifies as a successful product.
Suicide bombers, people going down rabbit holes, those destroying relationships for political tribalism, and rage-typers doomscrolling at 2 AM are all Memeoids.
They are chemically dependent on a narrative.
The Formula
In 2006, DARPA defined the mathematical spread of ideas with this formula:
M = P × I / S
Memetic Fitness equals Propagation times Impact divided by Entropy.
The denominator, S, is Entropy. Complexity and disorder. The documents explicitly state that as complexity increases, memetic fitness dies. The formula punishes intelligence.
Any attempt to add nuance, context, or depth to an idea acts as interference that hinders the weapon’s spread. The system requires simple concepts reduced to slogans.
This necessity drives the hypnotic repetition in children’s media, the looping catchphrases of streamers, and the deteriorating quality of online discourse.
The algorithm selects for low-entropy content because it is more viral.
Rage trends faster than complexity because it requires less cognitive processing. Your mind is being optimized for transmission at the expense of critical thought.
The Target
The 2003 manual reveals the scoring system used to determine target viability. They weaponized Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, explaining that susceptibility scores increase when targets are scared, broke, lonely, or desperate.
Once susceptibility is scored, they use a formula to predict behavior:
Stimulus → Orientation → Behavior
By knowing a target’s beliefs and controlling the stimulus, the visible news, feared crises, or desired opportunities, they can predict and engineer behavior with algorithmic precision.
It is a calculated process of engineering the exact conditions required to make their behavioral forecasts inevitable.
The Glitch
This context clarifies what Geisel and Jones received in 1943. A blueprint for biological programming designed to override survival instincts.
In 1957, Geisel looked at the machinery designed to program soldiers and saw a way to teach children to read.
He repurposed the entire methodology—dopamine loops, simple language, and rhythmic repetition—to create The Cat in the Hat, serving a different master with the same neurochemical triggers.
He systematized this hack by founding Beginner Books, building a counter-factory based on the intuitive understanding that high-complexity ideas do not spread.
Geisel demonstrated that simple tools can serve complex liberation by smuggling freedom inside accessibility.
Everything depends on whether the tools are used to extract or to empower.
The Chaos Variable
The system’s single goal is prediction. It requires you to be computationally reducible. Simple enough to model and manage.
This is why authoritarian regimes fear Art.
Because art is High Entropy, representing maximum complexity and ambiguity. It is the antithesis of the DARPA equation. Creating something complex feeds the machine data it cannot quickly process, introducing the Chaos Variable.
While the machine can model consumers, voters, and Memeoids, it cannot predict an individual Creator. Creation is non-linear.
The same input (like a viral video) generates infinite unpredictable outputs. Laughter, tears, or spiritual realization, which breaks the Behavior Probability Forecast and collapses the prediction model.
You can feel the machine operating now.
The tightness in your chest at a crafted tweet is an engineered dopamine spike. The exhaustion after scrolling is brain shutdown from information overload. The DARPA documents make it clear that the system requires your unawareness.
Seeing the machinery makes you ungovernable.
Today's war is an information war for your mind.
History shows that these tools are neutral, that stories outlast bombs, and that complexity breaks predictive models.
The machine only works if you forget you have a choice.
<3 EKO
Quick Note
Thanks to your help, The Magi hit #13 on Amazon yesterday as a biblical thriller. It’s an experiment in high-entropy storytelling designed to be computationally irreducible.
If you have read it, leave a review. The algorithm punishes hard-to-categorize art, but reviews force its hand.
P.S.
The religious fiction category is crowded, soft, and poorly designed. I spent the weekend building a scalable system to cut through the noise.
I call it Biblical Noir.
UNSEALED: THE FIRST FOUR VOLUMES
VOL 1 & 2 (DAVID + MAGI): live now
VOL 3 (JUDAS): Launches Jan 7
VOL 4 (EVE): Launches Jan 21
Grab the first two to read over Christmas.
Much more coming in the New Year.
And I can’t wait to share it all with you.
Thank you for this fascinating, well-documented, and illuminating primer on military psychological operations, EKO.
I especially appreciate these observations in light of my own efforts to help people recover from menticide (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/letter-to-the-menticided-a-12-step) and resist tyranny through art, creativity, and love:
• “By 2006, DARPA shifted its focus from psychology to biology. They realized persuading humans with logic is inefficient compared to overriding survival instincts at the chemical level.”
• “Rage trends faster than complexity because it requires less cognitive processing. Your mind is being optimized for transmission at the expense of critical thought.”
• “This is why authoritarian regimes fear Art.”
I got a DVD with several of the Snafu shorts on it years ago. I did a propaganda unit in my government class (high school seniors). They Loved it. The best one is “rumors.” I understand that they became so popular that when they showed Hollywood films “in country” there was a near riot if they didn’t include a Snafu shirt. Very effective.