Mechanisms of controlling people through media, films and music began with Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908.

Using Edison’s model, significant entities like the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations emerged, shaping knowledge about medicine through strategic grant-making, which contributed to a larger architecture of social control.

While the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird was shaping public perception through the media, Britain’s MI6 was developing methods to control consciousness itself. with the Tavistock Institute playing a significant role, some of which became the foundational algorithms of social media platforms such as Facebook.

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In a three-part series, Joshua Stylman aimed to make visible the hidden systems of influence, enabling others to recognise manipulation and resist it.  His series examines the foundational systems of control established in the early 20th century, exploring how these methods evolved through popular culture and counterculture movements, and analyses how these techniques have been automated and perfected through digital systems.

The following is paraphrased from Part One.  You can read Stylman’s full article HERE, and read Part Two HERE and Part Three HERE.

Engineering Control: A Century of Cultural Control

In 2012, Facebook conducted a secret experiment on 689,000 users, manipulating their news feeds to study how changes in content affected their emotions. This crude test was just a glimpse of what was coming. By 2024, algorithms would not be used to simply shape what we feel, but what we believe it is even possible to think.

Social media platforms are now able to predict and modify behaviour in real time while streaming services automatically and continuously curate our cultural consumption, and digital payment systems track every single transaction. What began as simple emotional manipulation has become comprehensive consciousness control.  This power to mould human perception didn’t emerge overnight. 

The cultural control mechanisms were built over a century, evolving from Thomas Edison’s physical monopolies to today’s invisible digital chains.  Understanding these historical foundations is crucial to resisting algorithmic consciousness control.

Thomas Edison’s establishment of the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908 laid the groundwork for a century of systematic influence, demonstrating five key mechanisms of control: infrastructure control, distribution control, legal framework, financial pressure and legitimacy definition.

These mechanisms have evolved and reappeared across industries and eras, becoming sophisticated tools for engineering public consciousness and controlling the boundaries of possible thought and expression.

Early 20th Century

The early 20th century witnessed an unprecedented convergence of concentrated control across multiple domains, with the breakup of the Edison Trust in 1915 leading to the consolidation of power in an oligarchy of studios that could coordinate content control and messaging.

The Motion Picture Production Code, the Hays Code, established in 1934 demonstrated how moral panic could justify systematic content control.  It controlled the content depicted on screen, setting a template for narrative manipulation that persists in the digital age, similar to Edison’s control of film distribution.

The early 20th century saw unprecedented bureaucratic convergence across domains, including medicine, media, education, finance, entertainment and scientific research, with major foundations like the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations playing a crucial role in shaping academic research priorities and social science methodologies.

John D. Rockefeller replicated Edison’s template in medicine by controlling infrastructure, distribution, legal frameworks, financial pressure and legitimacy definition, effectively controlling what constitutes legitimate knowledge in the field.

Further reading: The Information Factory: How Reality is Manufactured, Joshua Stylman, 12 November 2024

Private foundations, through strategic grant-making and institutional support, established and maintained approved frameworks for understanding society, becoming powerful gatekeepers of acceptable knowledge and extending Rockefeller’s medical model into the broader intellectual sphere.

This administrative alignment established interlocking systems for controlling both physical reality and public consciousness, with each piece contributing to a comprehensive architecture of social control, from Edison’s control of visual media to Rockefeller’s definition of medical knowledge to the Federal Reserve’s monetary control.

Reshaping America’s Global Role

The power of this converged system was first demonstrated at scale in reshaping America’s global role, with the narrative of American “isolationism” emerging as a major shaper of public consciousness, reframing America’s projection of power through banking networks, corporate expansion and gunboat diplomacy.

J.P. Morgan’s acquisition of major newspapers helped establish this narrative framework, while Operation Mockingbird, a US Central Intelligence Agency (“CIA”) programme, formalised the influence of intelligence agencies on public perception through seemingly independent media channels.

The same principles of narrative control persist today, with automated systems operating at a global scale, replacing human intermediaries, and exemplified by the media-intelligence nexus, as seen in the transformation of the US radio and television network Columbia Broadcasting System (“CBS”) into a broadcasting empire under William S. Paley.

The Media-Intelligence Nexus

Paley’s experience in psychological operations during World War II, particularly as supervisor of the Office of War Information (“OWI”) and chief of radio in the OWI’s Psychological Warfare Division, significantly influenced CBS’s post-war programming strategy, which combined entertainment with subtle manipulation techniques.

Under Paley’s leadership, CBS became known as the “Tiffany Network,” masterfully blending entertainment with social control, setting a template for modern media operations that would adapt to emerging technologies.

The 1950s payola scandal revealed how record companies, including Paley’s CBS Records, shaped public consciousness through controlled exposure, maintaining deep institutional ties to military and intelligence networks.

Companies like RCA, formed as a Navy-coordinated communications monopoly in 1919, expanded into broadcasting, records and consumer electronics, preserving connections to military and intelligence networks.

Social Engineering and Global Conflict

While historians typically treat the World Wars as discrete conflicts, they are better understood as phases in a continuous expansion of social control mechanisms.  World War I marked the birth of systematic coordination between Hollywood and intelligence agencies. During World War II, these connections were formalised through the Office of Strategic Services (“OSS”).

The development of cultural control methods was part of a broader system of social engineering that expanded during periods of global conflict, with the World Wars providing justification and testing grounds for increasingly sophisticated systems of mass psychological manipulation.

Military installations like Lookout Mountain Air Force Station in Laurel Canyon served as centres for psychological warfare operations, producing classified films and maintaining high-level connections to Hollywood production.

By 1943, the OSS outlined its strategy to exploit motion pictures as a weapon of psychological warfare, recognising their potential to stimulate or inhibit action and fundamentally alter people’s understanding of reality.

The integration of the entertainment industry into intelligence operations dates back to World War I, with examples including Harry Houdini’s rumoured collaboration with British intelligence and Charlie Chaplin’s films being analysed for propaganda potential.  During World War II, these connections were formalised through the OSS, evolving into today’s Entertainment Liaison Office, which actively shapes desired military-themed film narratives.

British Intelligence and Consciousness Control

British intelligence developed methods to control consciousness itself, recognising that shaping beliefs, desires and worldviews could be a permanent form of control, transforming social engineering forever.

In 1914, the entity ‘Wellington House‘ was established, which later evolved into the ‘Department of Information’ and eventually the ‘Ministry of Information,’ systematising mass psychological manipulation through new principles.

These principles, which included the effectiveness of indirect influence, emotional resonance and peer sharing, would become the foundational algorithms of social media platforms a century later and are still used today by companies like Facebook.

The Tavistock Institute and Psychological Warfare

The Tavistock Clinic, later the Tavistock Institute, played a significant role in the development of these principles through the treatment of shell-shocked soldiers and the study of trauma and group psychology.

Dr. John Rawlings Rees and his colleagues at the Tavistock Institute discovered how psychological trauma could be used to reshape individual consciousness and entire social systems, and developed methods to shape not just what people could see but how they would interpret reality.

The Institute’s work revealed how psychological vulnerability could be used to reshape both individual and group behaviour.  But, as Stylman noted, Tavistock’s influence extends back generations:

Though largely unknown to the public, Tavistock would become one of the most influential organisations in shaping modern social control methods. While most people today know Tavistock only through recent controversies over gender-affirming care, the institute’s influence extends back generations, shaping cultural narratives and social transformation since its inception. Their current work represents not an anomaly but a continuation of its long-standing mission to reshape human consciousness.

Engineering Reality Part I: A Century of Cultural Control From Edison’s Monopolies to Algorithmic Manipulation, Joshua Stylman, 19 December 2024

Cultural Engineering Through Music

The Tavistock Institute’s influence can be seen in its transformation of psychological theories into practical tools for cultural engineering, particularly through popular music and youth culture.

The Institute’s methods were first tested through music, with the US State Department’s jazz diplomacy programme of the 1950s-60s revealing how power centres understood music’s potential for cultural design.

The Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, a member of the Rothschild banking dynasty, became a patron of bebop artists like Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker, coinciding with the era when the State Department and CIA were actively using jazz as a tool of cultural diplomacy.

The involvement of European banking aristocracy in supposedly revolutionary musical movements foreshadowed a pattern of institutions designing and igniting cultural movements that appeared organic but were actually part of a systematic programme of cultural engineering.

(Note: Stylman further explored the Tavistock Institute’s work and influence in Part Two.)

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Rhoda Wilson

While previously it was a hobby culminating in writing articles for Wikipedia (until things made a drastic and undeniable turn in 2020) and a few books for private consumption, since March 2020 I have become a full-time researcher and writer in reaction to the global takeover that came into full view with the introduction of covid-19. For most of my life, I have tried to raise awareness that a small group of people planned to take over the world for their own benefit. There was no way I was going to sit back quietly and simply let them do it once they made their final move.

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