Digital Occultism and the Weaponization of Reality

Abstract

We have entered the psyberwar condition, marked by the logics of psychological warfare becoming embedded within the ordinary infrastructures of digital culture. Beginning with twentieth-century psychological operations and their ambition to intervene in the conditions under which belief itself becomes possible, we trace a genealogy through countercultural experiments in reality-hacking, occult practices, conspiracy cultures and contemporary platform environments. Under conditions of algorithmic curation, engagement optimisation and information saturation, the destabilisation of shared reality increasingly emerges through the routine operation of digital systems themselves. Within this environment, occult and militaristic imaginaries begin to converge. Algorithms appear as hidden agents, feeds become sites of revelation and mass manipulation, and online participation is experienced through the language of brainwashing, psyops, egregores, reality tunnels and psychic warfare. These imaginaries register a broader transformation in how agency, influence and belief are understood under platform capitalism. Drawing on Digital Occultism, the lecture considers how fictions, desires and collective beliefs acquire material force through networked feedback loops, and how the resulting struggle over reality unfolds across military doctrine, technological infrastructure, political mobilisation and everyday digital experience.

Description

This workshop examines the growing convergence of militaristic and occult ways of making sense of everyday digital experience and inhabiting platforms as experimental and opaque sites of various modalities of human and algorithmic ‘influence’ steering thoughts and behaviors, and the anxieties they give rise to. How is online engagement figured as essentially a site of ‘psychic warfare’ in the sense of a continuous information ‘front’ without end or limit, but also in the more techno-occult, cyberdelic sense as remotely acting on (expanding, controlling) the mind? The workshop will explore how these psychic warfare imaginaries manifest in contemporary digital culture, but also at the longer historical entanglements between war, media, and the occult. In The Birth of Psychological War: Propaganda, Espionage, and Military Violence from WWII to the Vietnam War (2023), Jeffrey Whyte offers a Foucauldian genealogy of psychological warfare, tracing its emergence and evolution from WW2 onward. Sophie Publig and Mikkel Rørbo recently published a book on Digital Occultism (2026) where they explore the countercultural and esoteric roots of PSYOPS, ‘psyberwar’ and other forms of ‘reality warfare’. Schedule: 13:00 Thematic introduction by Daniël de Zeeuw 13:15 Talk by Jeffrey Whyte on psychological warfare 14:00 Q&A 14:15 Break 14:45 Talk by Sophie Publig and Mikkel Rørbo on digital occultism 15:30 Q&A 15:45 Panel discussion 16:30 End

Titel der Veranstaltung

Planetary PSYOPS: Psychic Warfare and the Digital Occult

Veranstalter*innen