Psychopathic Algorithms

Posted on by Flag Bearer

Recruitment in an Age of Data

I have never enjoyed the recruitment process. What I felt was not excitement; it was compulsion, perhaps even addiction. The hunt stirred something predatory in me. I crafted the perfect application bait, colouring it with strategic stripes of war paint, designed to draw the reader’s eye to specific areas. It was a psychological dance of glitter and performance, dressed in company values, tailored to seduce a system I did not respect.

I recognised that the recruitment system itself was psychopathic: cold, mechanical, stripped of all humanity. It rewarded detachment and punished vulnerability. To succeed in the system, I learned how to soothe the recruiters’ complexes and mirror their vanity. I became calculating, tactical, psychological. I found myself sharpening the very traits I disliked in others, simply because they got me results. It was a game that forced me to amputate the parts of myself that did not serve the system. I became less human.

By 2010, employment filtering software was becoming more common, and I evolved with it. I responded by matching its energy, experimenting, tweaking, fine-tuning, and even trolling it on occasion. Each application became a test subject. Each response, or lack of one, fed my growing understanding of what the machine wanted. I studied my field’s language like code and its tone like camouflage. The centralisation of desirable roles on Seek widened my field of play, giving me a panoramic view of the job market. I began to decode the subtle correlation between a company’s advertised values and the real corporate culture lurking beneath, and the price they offered and demanded. Over time, I could smell the psychological profile they were fishing for, and I shamelessly served it to them, always remaining compartmentalised and indifferent to rejection. Rinse, repeat, apply became my side hustle.

Within a brief time, I stopped feeling anything about it. Rejection became data; no responses became time savers. I compartmentalised myself so effectively that my inner life became unreachable during the process. Authentic emotions were a liability, so I buried them. When I was overlooked, it was not personal; it was formula misalignment. If I was chosen, it meant I had nailed the formula. The detached mindset made me more resilient. I could pivot fast, bounce back faster and adapt, qualities that looked like strength from the outside. However, beneath it all, there was a strange emptiness. I was not growing; I was cocooning.

Still, the discipline it bred in me was real. I learned to analyse without sentiment, perform under pressure devoid of stress, and maintain a surgical clarity most people do not develop until much later in life, if at all. It laid the groundwork for a psychological toughness I cannot unlearn.

The Rise of Algorithmic Control

At the time, the public hadn’t quite caught on. They were still playing by the old rules. Many still do, submitting hopeful applications, then waiting, obsessively checking their phones for missed calls, mistaking silence for personal failure. But the reality was that they were already submitting to algorithmic filters, coded to favour the spiritually vacant, the predictable, the fluent in corporate doublespeak. Filters designed to reward compliance and output over originality, carefully screening out anyone who brings depth or challenge.

By the 2020s, I had retired from this toxic game, or so I thought. Circumstances, however, forced me back in, stepping into a landscape even more soulless than before. Selection had become a purely mechanical affair. Recruitment was no longer a conversation between people but a transaction between two algorithms or two screens. Just yesterday, I was directed to an interview designed to filter candidates using a bot. I seemed to have missed the exact point where recruitment stopped being a process and became a closed loop: a system perfecting itself until nothing unexpected could break through. The only way to pass through was to strip oneself of all opinions and emotions, suppressing human characteristics such as intuition and even humour.

This hyper-mechanisation does more than just change the process; it trains people to become less human. The relentless demand for perfection, error-free performance and data-driven optimisation turns imperfection into a liability rather than a natural part of growth. As a result, candidates grow increasingly insecure about showing vulnerability or making mistakes, knowing that every slip is recorded.

Such insecurity breeds dependence: dependence on scripts, rehearsed answers and AI tools that perfect résumés and cover letters. The very systems designed to reduce bias and increase efficiency are amplifying the fear of imperfection, pushing candidates to surrender more of their humanity and individuality to algorithms. In this way, AI is not just a filter; it is a social engineer conditioning us to distrust our instincts and values. Forget body image, this goes further, creating a full-blown identity crisis. Yet feminism, Unions and governments remain silent on the psychological effects of identity suppression, failing to apply any pressure on the corporate world. Diversity has never been more restricted.

Much like the beauty industry, with its endless cycle of plastic surgery and concoctions built on dishonest promises and superstition, these systems prey on our self-doubt and dependence. They convince us that perfection is attainable through external means if we surrender our uniqueness. Just as people sacrifice their natural appearance to fit impossible ideals, candidates abandon their authentic voices to appease algorithms. Both systems profit from cultivating insecurities, shaping people into increasing reliance on what is deemed beautiful or successful. The result? A work culture of unsettling uniformity with depression and anxiety on the rise.

Yes, the democratisation of AI has levelled the playing field. Candidates now wield tools that let them reverse-engineer job ads, craft applications with ruthless precision, mimic the system’s mechanics, and even deliver an AI-prompted, rehearsed smile, perfectly timed to sparkle and ding at just the right moment in the conversation to reinforce a key message. The power dynamic has shifted. But in levelling the field, we’ve also flattened ourselves.

The Gatekeepers

What follows is a recruitment landscape devoid of human texture. After countless cut, paste, and apply-button clicks, rejection no longer arrives with an awkward phone call or a strained apology. Instead, it comes via auto-generated emails. At least throughout the 2000s and 2010s, recruiters still hid behind the ‘cultural fit’ excuse, a conveniently ambiguous and weaponised criterion that allowed employers to reject candidates without accountability. But, as manipulative as it was, ‘cultural fit’ at least exposed the insecurities embedded in a workplace’s psyche. Today, even that faint projection has been replaced by the sterile, algorithmic finality of ‘Employer Unlikely to Proceed with Your Application’ digital post-it note pinned to your automated application graveyard.

The filtering AI-authored job applications using HR AI and conducting AI-orchestrated interviews using HR AI bots and HR AI guided questions, renders the whole process fully automated, then role of HR faces increasing obsolescence., Many sensitive functions, once performed internally, are already being outsourced to elite agencies that possess specialised expertise and broader professional networks. This shift is driving the growth of a burgeoning market that continues to expand steadily, reshaping how organisations manage recruitment and administrative processes.

What about maintaining or enhancing a corporate culture? Most HR personnel are neither qualified nor have any notion of how-to social engineer culture. If anything, their dabbling has the opposite effect, as they lack the comprehensive understanding of human psychology and group dynamics. Their insistence on implementing manufactured rituals such as “Welcome to Country” opening statements, “Purple Pride Days” propaganda, diversity workshops and wheelchaired celebrity talks or hiring a trophy trans, is more reminiscent of cult rituals to mask the deeper realities of office life alienation and compliance, keeping employees focused on token acts of care rather than questioning the system itself.

You would be forgiven for asking yourself why such a department has been allowed to pass itself off as corporate psychologists and anthropologists, given that they lack the skills, qualifications, and outcomes required for a People & Culture brand. This cloak is extremely advantageous to a company, as it also conceals the hidden roles within HR, a process of hiring the right kind of people into key positions, not just those who fit the job, but those who fit something else. Something harder to name but always felt. HR’s cultural social-engineering ridiculousness provides the perfect distraction and cloak. And despite how well the corporate fool glove fits, HR personnel appear to be lining themselves to be squeezed out into agencies or redundancy within the decade.

There are advantages to this new system for companies too. Outsourcing not only helps erase accountability and keep complaints external, but it also consolidates power. As corporations offload most of their recruitment functions, they inevitably hand greater control to the digital platforms that now dominate the hiring landscape. These platforms do not merely connect candidates with jobs; they have become silent gatekeepers, controlling access, visibility and opportunity on a scale far beyond the reach of any single HR department.

Centralised platforms such as Seek, LinkedIn and AI-powered applicant tracking systems manage your CV, record the number of job applications you submit, record the number of job applications you submit, monitor your digital activity, seek patterns of rejection or success. Some also store your ID and work visa details. Your application history becomes a dossier: a digital record scrutinised by machines to predict your fit. Recruitment has been transformed into a system of surveillance, empowering these platforms to cancel, ban, ghost or blacklist anyone deemed unfavourable.

It’s disturbing that no open discussions are raised for the risk of job platforms carry in passively filtering the job market on a national scale than the risk itself. There doesn’t seem to be any awareness of the possibility that such platforms could pose a serious national security threat. It is rarely acknowledged that a single platform holds the power to exclude or promote an individual, or an entire group, from the job market. The threat of foreign interference in a nation’s labour ecosystem is both plausible and deeply concerning. These platforms do not merely filter candidates; they shape the talent pools of entire industries. With so much control centralised in the hands of a few private entities, the risk of deliberate manipulation, whether by corporate interests, hostile actors or state-level forces, is no longer theoretical. It represents a structural vulnerability that no one is willing to address.

What has happened to the job market, and the direction in which it is evolving, is not simply about recruitment favouring the predictable. It reveals something far deeper: how readily individuals surrender their agency, even their very identity, to systems they neither question nor control, all for the uncertain promise of a stipend. The pressing question is whether society will continue to participate in a game that is, by design, rigged.

Yet the most confronting truth is not just the dehumanisation itself, but the unsettling realisation of how willingly, and even skilfully, we have played along. Perhaps the darkest part of this story is that we’ve been hunting ourselves all along, allowing a system engineered to erase one’s shape to push us toward invisibility. And so, in the face of this relentless erasure, the most radical act we can undertake is to look in the mirror and refuse to disappear.

Annabelle Fearn

Muscle Memory

Posted on by Flag Bearer

Once, eating beef was nothing more than an ordinary decision, a routine, an easy choice. But today? It’s a protest, even an ideology. What used to be straightforward has become something much more significant. On one side: logic, sovereignty, physical truth. On the other: emotional coercion, sedative science, and a collective impulse that’s marketable and profitable.

This ideological divide has real consequences, on what we eat, how we see ourselves, and the stories we tell about morality and health. After years of being told that eating grass and tofu would make us better people, cleaner, leaner, ethical, compassionate, we’re waking up, bleary-eyed and iron-deficient, asking, is this what moral superiority tastes like? Insipid, bland, bitter, lite. And so, quietly, some reached for eggs, others for bacon, but a few went further, past paleo, past keto, straight to the beef rump. No garnish, no carbs, no fillers, just bloody flesh.

What started as quiet rebellion has transformed into a deeper biological revolt, a reawakening of instincts long suppressed by culture and convenience. This isn’t just a trend; it’s a biochemical uprising. A return to something primal and forgotten. We’ve been conditioned to ignore the very instincts that once governed our survival, to avoid the foods that gave us sustained energy and strength. But the body remembers, even when the mind has been programmed to forget. You don’t need to be a biohacker to see what’s happening. People are tired, their hormones are shot, their fertility is down, their osteoporosis debilitating. Their carb addictions on full display, even the gym junkies and diet loyalists steal their lunchtime carrot ration from their lunchboxes to sneak in an early sugar fix during their morning coffee breaks, desperately seeking some carb relief.

You want to know what the next revolution will look like? It’s not another app. It’s not your therapist’s TikTok. It’s someone grilling liver in defiance of a society that thinks your manhood should be traded for tolerance and compliance. That’s what no one wants to admit out loud: carnivore is rude. It doesn’t ask for your approval or soften itself for your sensitivities. It doesn’t care if it offends you, and it certainly doesn’t seek to be liked. And that, paradoxically, is why it’s working. Because in a world suffocated by politeness, endless rules, shame and performative guilt, carnivore is a slap in the face of the madness.

This is not just a diet; it’s an uprising. A reawakening that reanimates its adherents, sharpening their minds and fortifying their bodies until they feel twenty years younger. That’s not wellness, that’s power. A fusion of seasoned wisdom and feral vitality, ruthlessly exposing the vegan and sugar theatre for what it is: an adolescent pantomime of purity, spoon-fed by corporations. Where carnivore builds, veganism performs. Where meat heals, plants poison. Where animal fat liberates, fruit enslaves.

How did we ever get to this point of madness, where man has negated his nature to the point where governments endorse plant-based diets? It didn’t emerge overnight, nor was it driven purely by public health concerns. Its roots lie in systems designed for scalability, to deliver the bare minimum of universal sustenance, to commodify food for economic leverage, to stabilise populations just enough to prevent unrest, and to reassure the wealthy that their interests were secure and steadily increasing.

Central to this system was the adoption of the Atwater food calorie system in the late 1800s which gave governments and institutions the perfect tool: a single, flattening number to categorise food by energy, not by biological importance. Marketed nutritional equity, designed to degrade steak to the same level as cubes of sugar, favouring cheap, starchy and fibrous fillers like grains and vegetables over nutrient-dense animal foods. Whether by design or convenience, it aligned perfectly with the emerging need to feed growing urban populations affordably and obediently.

And what begins as a logistical strategy soon calcifies into doctrine. Over time, policy becomes assumption, and assumption gets retrofitted as science. Academia, rather than challenging the givens, tends to inherit them uncritically: too proud to backtrack, too cushioned to disrupt, and too static to remain rigorously self-correcting. We now face a reversal resistance: scientists whose own conclusions defy the data within their own studies, contorting deductions, and possibly evidence, to uphold the very narratives their findings quietly dismantle. It’s almost as if they are aware of the truth.

Despite this, people did know better, if you dig a little. My grandfather, born in the 1800s, carried the battlefield habit of eating meat first, in case rations were cut short. It wasn’t just survival; it was priority, as it was a habit that he took to his grave, instilling the same habit in his children. My father, decades later, cooked steak for my pregnant mother daily, not from a chart, but instinct, ancestral intelligence passed through lived experience. That was all she ate while carrying me, and no one questioned it. Because before calories became the new-age superstition control mechanism, food had a hierarchy. Meat was sacred, and the rest was considered merely filler reserved for the paupers. People, it seems, without government and shoddy corporate scientific interference, knew what built a human.

Focusing back to today, as the vegans who go about terrorising and disrupting our streets and supermarkets’ meat departments, usually seated or lying down, as they’re too anaemic to stand for prolonged periods, the defiant carnivores started doing something even more terrifying: they got better. The chronic illnesses reversed. The pains disappeared. The brain fog lifted. The waistlines shrank. The surplus energy has catapulted their carb sobriety, allowing them to dictate their behaviour and time into reconstructing their lives, their health and their perceptions. The growth isn’t coming from sponsored content or diet fads; it’s coming from people experiencing real and sustained results, from ordinary folks who’ve simply had enough of ingesting a never-ending stream of medicines.

Meanwhile, CorporateScience™ is scrambling. They can’t censor steak; they can’t silence the healing that’s happening. So the signs of doubling down are beginning to show. Attempting to mitigate countless before-and-after testimonies and the growing list of scientists and doctors who are challenging the status quo cannot be easy for them. Scientific counterarguments that don’t come from an OptiSlim packet or a mainstream nutrient poster at your local GP is something they had not considered. Promoting cricket flour, Gates’s petri dish cutlets, revamping old meds through celebrities, and the countless pig-ignorant influencers’ ooga-booga-based diet fads are being manufactured like never before, all to distract and delay the inevitable crows. It’s a battle, ready and poised to erupt, where most governments understand what is at stake here: control, economies, agriculture, supermarkets, processing food plants, health industry, pharmaceuticals, fitness, and dieting industries, all poised to collapse, not to mention a lot of unhappy and vindictive elites who are unable to continue cashing their cows. They’re already projecting their truth onto this nutritional system by calling it toxic, ridiculous, a cult, primitive, dangerous, a fad, ignorant, anything to neutralise the threat and protect their reputations and interests.

And rightly so, because when one peels away all their distractions and looks deeper, despite centuries of research and trillions in funding taken from our pockets, the pharmaceutical industrial complex has produced only six actual known cures -let me repeat that, SIX – as diet and nutrition industries distract you from noting their startling lack of progress by shifting the blame on to you. This isn’t due to a lack of time or resources; it’s a consequence of a profit model that depends on managing, not eliminating, disease. Cures are final; treatments are forever. A cured patient no longer needs medication, but a chronically ill one becomes a lifelong customer. This logic extends beyond the lab and onto the dinner plate. By promoting plant-based diets as ideal human nutrition, despite overwhelming evidence that such diets are anthropologically and ecologically ill-suited for predatory species such as humans, this system expands its customer base, causing mental instabilities, autoimmune disorders, hormonal imbalances, and chronic illnesses, with some indication of even cancer and dementia. These diet-induced health issues feed directly into the pharmaceutical pipeline, generating new waves of patients in need of blood pressure meds, antidepressants, insulin, and much more. It’s a closed-loop business model: create the problem, then sell the solution. Just not the cure.

While this revolution brews in the corners of the internet, the mainstream is already exhibiting signs of damage control, feeding the fear machine to protect profit margins. All the same, wherever there is profit to be made, opportunists and adaptors enter the scene, leaving behind those who can’t or won’t evolve. One such case are the supermarkets, the ultimate Western symbol of exploitation, control, and dumbing people down, are catching on and implementing survival backups. Tri-tip, marrow bones, beef ribs, high-fat beef mince, and more are creeping back onto their shelves. A battle is stirring, and if you look closely, you’ll see it.

Meanwhile, as this recalibration unfolds, where new players emerge, old ones shrivel, and adaptive ones evolve, the alpha bull himself charges into the paddock, using beef to carry his tariff message specifically to Australia, not as punishment, but as preparation. Think about it: neither country needs beef imports to feed their people; both are cattle-rich nations, with enough land, livestock, and infrastructure to stock their own shelves a dozen times over. When Trump made an example of beef in an already meat-plentiful nation, the logic wasn’t scarcity; it was an announcement for sovereignty.

Indirectly forcing meat exporters to implement a 10% levy increase, suddenly the internal meat economy becomes more accessible and resilient to that nation. Its supply is protected, the population is retrained; it’s not just protectionism, it’s incubation. This was a move to secure the correct food for the common man and prevent internal scarcity, an adjustment that does not duplicate the problems Australia is experiencing with its energy resources. Add to that the growing distrust for the health industry post-COVID, acting as a fuel source. Say what you will of Trump, for all his bombast and ego-driven troll marketing, he is a man who knows how to scent an uprising. He doesn’t follow trends; he sniffs out revolutions, then greases the wheels.

All the same, it’s important not to underestimate the subtlety of corporate tactics. They didn’t rely on brute force to turn the West into a population of sickly blubber; instead, they outsourced the job to science and media, who skilfully transformed obsession into discipline and metabolic chaos into supposed balance. Even more insidious, this manipulation is disguised where you least expect it, embedding everything from sauces to so-called health foods, peddling or spiking our foods with addictive substances designed to keep us enslaved, much like pimps addicting prostitutes to heroin. Because instability breeds control, and this is just another calculated move in a larger game.

This manufactured instability doesn’t just affect our food supply, it shapes how we live and feel day to day. Despite health industry’s claims, people don’t micromanage their food and exercise because they’re vain or have been lazy. They do it because carbs demand it. Anything requiring such a high maintenance level gives rise to obsessive behavioural loops that feed off insecurities and obsessive behaviours, weakening identities, which is especially true in women in this age. Blood sugar volatility, caused by constant spikes and crashes, translates into emotional volatility. Fatigue, cravings, brain fog, mood swings: it all gets internalised as personal failure. And so begins the spiral. Count the calories, track the macros: restrict, slip up, punish. Exercise isn’t joy; it’s religious penance, pushing health into becoming a health performance.

This cycle of chaos and control forms the foundation of, nutrition, diet and supplement industries. These industries are built on the back of carb-induced dysfunction. They thrive on metabolic and psychological instability, not just because chaos facilitates profits, but because exploitation is facilitated by blame-shifting and continual inconclusiveness. If you’re tired, hungry, bloated, or binging, it’s your fault; you lack willpower, you didn’t follow the plan, you didn’t buy the right supplements, you didn’t avoid red meat. Shame, guilt, and fear are their levers, giving them more opportunities to create another powder, another pill, another injection, another enema, another promise built on fantasy. They monetise your distress and dress it up as empowerment where the cure is always more sugar consumption, in one form or another.

They are preventing you from experiencing life without sugar, because what emerges from this is integration via deconversion. There’s no compulsion to control the chaos when one recognises the chaos is external. The psyche stops swinging between guilt, overcompensation, and shame, and one begins setting boundaries. This is where the carnivore diet moves beyond nutrition and becomes a psychological rite of passage. It doesn’t just remove processed food groups; it removes the noise, distraction, projections and control mechanism.

No food labels to decode. No hunger games. No chemical tricks masquerading as appetite. With every day of meat, the system resets. Simplicity at the metabolic level gives rise to clarity at the cognitive and emotional levels. When the body no longer needs management, the mind is finally freed from its hyper-vigilance. No need to negotiate with cravings or calculate redemption for last night’s snack—the bandwidth is returned to the self. And what once went into food obsession can now be directed towards meaning, insight, and creation. It’s the end of needing to prove it. Carbs have created the instability in women’s psyches that requires constant tabulating and correction. Carnivore removes the instability, and with it, the compulsion.

This clarity is not just a physical advantage, it is a moral one. In an age where food has become a virtue signal, the carnivore steps outside the approved narrative entirely. This advantage gives carnivores the perfect armour to fight the upcoming war of morality that will surely be waged against them. It is vital to remember that humans don’t merely interact socially; we compete through morality. We all step into shared circles of virtue, where the aim is to outdo one another as the most virtuous adherent of the prevailing code: vegan, organic, plastic-free, guilt-free abortions, climate change, oat milk, refugees welcome, eat your broccoli. It’s how we attract mates and build our reputations. Should any one of them dare to question the code, they are instantly branded low value, cast out, and stripped of social (and by default) mating status. Why? Because rebellion without the leash of virtue is dangerously attractive, a magnet that can only be extinguished by attacking their moral reputation.

This social pressure doesn’t evolve in a vacuum, it’s carefully engineered. Once this Darwinian process mutates into piety based on glue-heavy IKEA furniture and plant-based malnutrition, it becomes rot, even cultural suicide. Manipulated by industries that understand the power of moral performance and social enforcement, it turns everyone into foot soldiers for food substitutes not even fit for livestock feed. It was never about health; it was about ownership, of your body, your instincts, your will, your human rights, all in the name of the economy and investors. A devil’s contract between a quasi-fascist government and corporate unity. But we’re on the verge of a game change: carnivore is a biological insurgency. A biochemical middle finger to every institution that has neutered the West into compliant, sickly drones. When that hunger becomes undeniable, when enough people remember what it means to feel in control of their bodies, no amount of propaganda or manufactured morality will be able to stop it.

You are not designed to be weak. You are not meant to be anxious, depressed, flabby, sickly, reduced into an economic host for elite parasitism, and then mocked on top of it. You’re not here to be pacified. You were designed to hunt, to assert, to build, and sometimes, to burn. It’s about energy. It’s about self-direction. It’s about the quiet, focused rage that builds when you realise how much of your suffering was engineered, manipulated, and profited from. The hunger for meat will open into a hunger for truth, vitality, liberation from the shackles of sugar grocery shopping, from laborious prepping and cooking that requires hours of work to infuse our fundamental drive for animal fat into a semblance of flavour. But here’s the truth: no empire, no matter how glossy its ads or how big their influencer’s butts are, nothing can stand against biology once it starts to roar. And when it does, the world will change.

You are not designed to be weak. You are not meant to be anxious, depressed, flabby, sickly, reduced to an economic host for monetary parasitism, and then mocked on top of it. You are not here to be pacified. You were designed to hunt, to assert, to build, and sometimes, to burn. It’s about energy. It’s about self-direction. It’s about the quiet, focused rage that builds when you realise how much of your suffering was engineered, and profited from. The hunger for meat becomes a hunger for truth, for vitality, for a return to instinct. It liberates you from the shackles of sugar, the choreographed rituals of grocery aisles and the hours lost trying to make plant paste taste like nourishment.

Because here’s the truth: no empire, no matter how glossy its ads, or how big its influencers’ bums are, nothing can stand against biology once it starts to roar. And when it does, the world will change.

Annabelle Fearn