Tag: AI

The Digital Arms Race

Posted on by Flag Bearer

How the Left Outmanoeuvres the Right

The separation between the left and right, with platforms like Bluesky and X facilitating the estrangement, has undoubtedly widened the ideological gap. As these platforms become more polarised, we’re seeing the influence this division has had on election results, notably, the left-wing victories in Canada and Australia. From a psycho-strategic perspective, it was far more than just a logistical shuffle. Perhaps even a calculated manoeuvre, synchronised with the sudden shaving of heads en masse, a subliminal war-cry signalling a tactical shift. Prior to the migration to Bluesky, Australian political commentators and activists on X were fervently accused of circulating and implementing a ban list of right-wing posters, globally preventing them from posting in their threads. If true, this lends further support to the notion that the left’s migration to Bluesky was a deliberate strategy.

In this context, the abstinence call-to-action broadcasts the left inundated social media with functioned more like a covert signal to remain still and quiet for recalibration, than just plain outright spite. Once the base had resettled and grouped, prominent politicians and influencers quickly followed. Whether these series of movements were intentionally coordinated to protect followers from counterarguments or a deliberate tactic to control the narrative and halt further deradicalisation remains open to debate. What is becoming increasingly clear, however, is that the move functioned as an incubator to isolate the base from dissenting voices and potentially maximise influence within a controlled environment with no external interference.

By contrast to X, Bluesky operates on an entirely different logic. Smaller networks, stricter moderation, and tightly controlled algorithmic exposure give left-wing figures a degree of power to curate what their followers see, shielding them from counterarguments and making narrative influence substantially easier. This environment is highly conducive to left-aligned strategies, allowing their communities to flourish and solidify group cohesion, while the right drifts and splinters. Effectively, the left is acting as a disciplined, unified bloc, consolidating influence with minimal pushback, while simultaneously emotionally manipulating the right by alternating between inflating their ego, eroding traditional identities and provoking rage.

It seems as though the left has refined its toolkit: platform migration, algorithmic leverage, selective moderation, controlled isolation, inward-facing inclusivity, and tightly curated exposure, shaping perception and dominating the narrative. They even seem to be courting key technocratic oligarchs, potentially securing algorithmic advantages in exchange for influence or future favours, perhaps.

The right, meanwhile, has walked straight into a trap. Clinging to decaying legacy platforms with questionable algorithms, fetishising AI, and elevating Elon Musk through a kind of hierarchical hypergamy of mythic God-like status who is destined to save humanity. They consistently fail to grasp that influence is now measured in networked discipline, not theatrical bluster. Platforms like X, TikTok, and even Grok only reinforce the right’s conceit with algorithms funnelling content that validates biases and rewards outrage. The result is a dangerous complacency that leaves the terrain wide open for anyone, not just the left, to exploit.

This complacency has also corroded efforts to rally the right: recent anti-immigration marches briefly sparked unity, but the momentum quickly fractured, events are poorly organised, splintered, and bogged down by infighting over who can or cannot participate, turning potential solidarity into chaos.

Strategy
The right’s passivity is being triggered by the gentle and entertaining lull of superiority generated by absurd video clip theatrics propagated by the left and disseminated by questionable posters on the right, whether it’s over-the-top content that challenges decorum via unattractive transvestites declaring themselves women or hyperbolic displays of hysterical women weeping over tofu. These spectacles feed the right’s sense of self-importance, numbing them into a false confidence that they are intellectually or morally above the left. Effectively this encourages them to underestimate what may be a highly strategic opponent who has learned from its prior mistakes. The buoyancy of this inflated self-assurance, reins in the right to cling to older platforms, fail to respond to shifting engagement patterns, recognise algorithmic manipulation, and miss critical opportunities to consolidate their base.

The aftermath of the Kirk assassination illustrates how events can be leveraged how easy it was to puppeteer the right into the Karen righteousness box by stoking outrage and emotional dysregulation, driving performative moralising, virtue-signalling, doxxing and online rage. Through calculated emotional cues, the left engineered a behavioural shift that flipped the moral narrative: their own sanctimonious virtue-signalling was offloaded onto the right, allowing them to seize the mantle of ‘rebel’ and ‘free-speech advocate’. The right has become the left’s workhorse, lugging the uncool weight of their authoritarian ambitions while the left basks in the stolen Pepe crown.

The psychological warfare the left is waging is akin a Taliban approach, where fighters conduct guerilla strikes from the mountains, fold back to the south to slip across the Pakistani border to dissolve into the population, resupply, regroup, and quietly scheme their next attack, a method which no first world country, despite superior weaponry, has been able to defeat.

Online, the left appears to be mirroring this same strategy: striking suddenly with narrative attacks baked in emotional play, withdrawing into tightly curated platforms where they dissolve into their own population, recalibrate, and quietly coordinate the next psychological blow. They seem to be acting as a disciplined, unified bloc, consolidating influence with minimal pushback or interference, while simultaneously manipulating the right by alternating between inflaming ego and provoking rage. They are becoming so effective at exploiting emotional dysregulation to scramble logic that the right has become completely blind to the digital guerrilla tactics being deployed against them. The right’s naïveté simply isn’t built for this type of asymmetrical strategy. If this sleepy trajectory continues, the US, Australia, Canada, and the UK could potentially see left-leaning radicalism influence increasing in upcoming elections, with many restrictions inadvertently being promoted by the right.

Consequences
There are many existing patterns unfolding that indicate that the battle for ideological supremacy is no longer fought through policy or persuasion, but through the architecture of platforms themselves, with electoral consequences that may already be reshaping politics and law, as seen in Australia. Such trends expose urgent questions about media literacy, public resilience, technocratic oligarchs’ political power, and voter awareness. Are citizens equipped to recognise algorithmic amplification and how it affects their psychology and will, the potential weaponisation of cult-like social strategies, or qualified to critically assess the content that floods their feeds? There are many lessons to be learned from the left’s digital manoeuvres, which appear to resemble the inner workings of a secretive religion led by messianic psychologists and marketers. When a bloc can control the narrative by confining and containing dissent within a closed system that channels rage into inaction, it represents a profound challenge to the functioning of democracy.

The stakes before us extend beyond elections, they shape civic perception, social trust, and the very mechanisms through which society deliberates and decides. Without an awareness of these tactics, citizens risk becoming unwitting participants in a digital theatre that enables control, amplifies division, and undermines collective judgment. It is the lack of strategic cunning, the state of a population educated ‘senza scienza,’ that corrodes democracy and freedoms. The mildly educated yet fiercely street-smart hyper-vigilance of my 1800s grandparents has vanished. Our education system, obsessed with rigid classifications instead of practical, real-world pattern recognition, a control system of engineered ignorance, is now catching up to us. The predators are loose, unchecked and there’s no one to stop them.

Annabelle Fearn

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

The Curdled Melting Pot

Posted on by Flag Bearer

We have long accepted the notion that the West depends on skilled immigration to sustain its economies and address recurring labour shortages, a narrative repeatedly reinforced by the media, academia, governments, and correlation-based studies. It’s a convenient, self-contained construct, where the problem and solution are neatly packaged into one concept to prevent people from venturing beyond its confines.

Growing up through this immigration transition, I have witnessed four generations of non-European immigrants embed themselves into my Western ecosystems, reshaping its landscape. I’ve watched suburbs transform into brown, black, or yellow. I’ve seen shops evolve into stalls, malls into street markets, steakhouses into noodle joints, flower beds into garlic patches, and pet dogs into goats. Yet, the elites march on, arrogantly assuming no one will notice, even going so far as to rescript history.

From the Industrial Revolution to the birth of modern computing, the majority of technological breakthroughs have been overwhelmingly driven by native European innovators. Acknowledging this does not negate contributions from other races but does challenge the narrative that innovation is equally distributed across all cultures. And therein lies the issue, the prioritisation of ‘skilled’ immigration risks diluting the intellectual resources of developed nations while perpetuating the false narrative that credits technological progress to diversity.

Even if we accept the conclusions of these correlational studies at face value, that skilled immigration is associated with increased innovation in the West, it is worth interrogating what kind of innovation is actually being measured. The overwhelming majority of these studies rely heavily on patent counts as their primary metric. But does filing a patent for a minor technical tweak, for instance, moving the closure of a zipper from one side to the other,  truly constitute meaningful innovation, or is it merely a reworking of pre-existing ideas within a narrowly defined legal framework? And who’s to say that the studies’ report, say, a 4% increase in innovation in a Western multicultural segment, that in a more homogeneous society the increase wouldn’t have been 6%, 8%, 10%, or even 2%? In this context, the 4% figure is largely meaningless. If our measures of progress are so granular and procedural, then an apparent rise in innovation may mask stagnation in genuinely groundbreaking or transformative technological advances.

This concern becomes even more pressing when set against the backdrop of declining academic standards, literacy, and numeracy across the West. PISA and OECD data show that both students and adults are performing more poorly in reading, math, and problem-solving than in previous decades, suggesting that the intellectual foundation necessary for truly original innovation is weakening even as patent counts rise.

If the evidence is so inconclusive, then why do Western governments permit, even encourage, the immigration of non-Western workers who, as a group, may be retarding technological progress? The answer appears to lie more in broader strategic considerations than in the purported economic or innovation gaps.

To understand the schemes at play, certain concepts must first be clarified, one of which is the technocrats’ leverage. In a globalised economy, multinational corporations and influential business leaders wield extraordinary power over national economies. If Western nations were to restrict immigration, elites could, and have, relocated operations to countries offering cheaper labour and fewer regulatory constraints, using global mobility to maintain strategic advantage.

The recent Musk-H1B controversy on X seems to fit squarely within this framework. Western governments permit ‘skilled migrants’ to enter our countries to effectively devalue high-paying roles as leverage to dissuade industries from relocating abroad. Simultaneously, these opportunities help our nations strengthen their alliances by assisting in building a technically skilled ethnic workforces, thereby alleviating some of the pressure caused by their nation’s limited economic resources.

Zooming in, however, if one looks past this layer, a pool of temporary immigrants could serve as fertile ground for intelligence agencies to recruit, train and exert influence and control over these workers and students. It’s not unreasonable to deduce that such agencies test, evaluate, and train select individuals from these pools. Upon their return to their respective native countries, these individuals can then fulfil technical roles within intelligence operations, address shared security concerns, and maintain unofficial channels of communication between nations. A readymade network of spies in an ‘ally’ country.

Historically, intelligence agencies have consistently recruited foreign-born individuals, migrants, and temporary workers for technical, linguistic, or cultural expertise, most famously exemplified by the Ritchie Boys in WWII. Such cases establish a credible precedent: when state actors require specialised skills that are scarce domestically, immigrants naturally become prime candidates for recruitment. In today’s context, waves of ‘skilled’ migrants, international students, and temporary workers provide a large, concentrated pool of technically trained individuals who are often socially or legally vulnerable, making them particularly susceptible to influence or recruitment. While there is no public evidence of a fully systematic, global program, the structural incentives are clear: intelligence agencies benefit from cultivating technical and cultural assets within these communities, whether for domestic security, allied cooperation, or strategic leverage abroad. This convergence of historical precedent, structural logic, and observable patterns makes the hypothesis that skilled migrants could serve as covert assets plausible and worthy of serious consideration.

Such programmes would facilitate alliance building through dependency, but also enables spying with minimal presence, as there must always be a return on investment for hosting such programmes. A country like India, burdened by systemic inefficiencies and lack of funds, may readily embrace this setup, even at the risk of employing individuals whose loyalties may align more closely with American interests than their own.

However, after decades of this mutually beneficial arrangement, the oligarchs and technocrats have at their disposal fully trained technical workforces in numerous countries, ready for rehiring at a substantially lower cost. This allows them to leverage their power to hold Western governments hostage, using the threat of relocating operations overseas if their demands are not met.

It stands to reason that strategic intelligence based counter to this behavioural and technological prediction would make ways to gradually infiltrate and reshape the IT industry. Over time, intelligence agencies may position themselves so deeply within the digital and technological framework that they reduce their reliance on direct funding and instead guide development from within. In exchange, these majority owners enjoy unchallenged market niches and various local and global favours, while the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood covertly steer the trajectory of humanity. A neatly tiered ecosystem: corporate profit at the top, geopolitical leverage beneath it, and at the very base, the labour and intellectual capital of entire Western populations underwriting the architecture of control.

If we assume that much of this analysis is even approximately correct, then it naturally follows that foreign nations would not passively accept such asymmetric intelligence harvesting. Any country with a functioning strategic mind would respond in kind by embedding its own operatives within Western nations, not through dramatic Cold War theatrics, but through the quiet, deniable mechanism of permanent migration. A steady stream of technically trained individuals, professionals, students, and entrepreneurs offers the perfect cover for long-term placement. Unlike temporary workers who eventually return home, permanent residents and citizens gain deeper access: to infrastructure, institutions, defence contracts, research labs, social networks, voting blocs and political ecosystems. Their loyalties may remain dual, or strategically fluid, and their integration into Western systems anchored in bonded communities gives their home nations a slow burning but potent form of intelligence leverage. In such a landscape, migration becomes not merely a demographic or economic tool, but ac battlefield where every visa category doubles as a potential intelligence vector.

Historically, such infiltration has been referred to as a “fifth column” to describe internal actors working in support of an external enemy. Perhaps this is what Nigel Farage was alluding to when he invoked the concept in his political commentary, framing certain groups as potential internal threats undermining national cohesion. If a public figure like Farage can recognise and openly gesture toward this dynamic, then it stands to reason that intelligence services and governments are not only aware of the growing danger but have already factored it into their geopolitical calculations. They may accept, even facilitate, a degree of such an internal risk as an unavoidable trade‑off for maintaining access and leverage across the entire spectrum of undeveloped nations. In this model, infiltration is not just tolerated but strategically priced in, a manageable hazard exchanged for global reach, informal influence, and quiet compliance from weaker states.

As we navigate the complexities of AI, robotics, dysgenics, greed, and a class of individuals or groups willing to use unethical psychological tactics and strategies to control public belief, we face hard choices. Western societies must safeguard their intellectual and technological foundations from the subtle encroachments of global technocrats and dependent alliances. Preserving the integrity of innovation networks, maintaining independent strategic capabilities, and scrutinising the incentives behind migration and industry policies are not just matters of policy, they are essential to ensuring that the future is shaped by those who inherit it, not those who profit from it.

Annabelle Fearn