{"id":2295,"date":"2026-04-12T19:35:19","date_gmt":"2026-04-12T23:35:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/?p=2295"},"modified":"2026-04-14T17:34:01","modified_gmt":"2026-04-14T21:34:01","slug":"counter-insurgency-disco-and-color-how-to-make-the-middle-class-confuse-controllable-with-creative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/12\/counter-insurgency-disco-and-color-how-to-make-the-middle-class-confuse-controllable-with-creative\/","title":{"rendered":"Counter-Insurgency, Disco, and Color: How to make the middle class confuse controllable with creative."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Post Second World War-life is marked by an invisible, but real dual forces: imposing homogeneity onto the masses, while making them believe they are creative. This has been a successful campaign which peaked during the rise of social media, but has now collapsed by the introduction of AI to the mainstream public.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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After the war, soldiers came home, and they needed to feel more than just victorious: they had to rebuild the country after a depression, but how could this be done?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, was to reward many with make work civil service jobs: not too taxing, given their injuries and trauma, and almost as much as those private sector salaries. This allowed young men to be viable spouses capable of raising families with stability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But after darkness, people demanded light and, of course, upward mobility. There had to be incentive, but there was just one problem: elites needed the ability to control a public. Government and industry scaffoldings prefer the livestock scaffolding: allow your flock some freedom outside, but always in a controlled environment so they believe they have freedom on the one hand, and the security of the farmer and the barn on the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Control, of course, requires full control: <\/em>a company, institution or government has to be appear deific and that means omniscient. The have to appear as if they can predict and control the masses and have power over them. The simplest way to do that is to control what sanctioned thoughts are rewarded and which less predictable ones are shamed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This, in essence, is counter-insurgency management. Control competing ideas and you control the masses. So as they don’t see sanctioned ideas as crowd control or propaganda, they will invest enough fiat and goodwill in its authorities and follow those sanctioned rules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When we talk about counter-insurgency, we usually associate it with war-time strategies. One of the most important texts in understand the granular-level of propaganda is the Counter-Insurgency Manual<\/a> [CoIn]. However, it is naive to think these methods are left to gather dust during peace. There is no off-button here, but the beauty of it is that it is a self-sustaining mechanism: you just have to have an air of deific knowing, give your Ten Commandments of what ideas are moral, logical, and wise, and then watch as your livestock produce works which follow those ideas to the letter. You become your own propagandist, brainwashing other people while their works simultaneously brainwash you. It is sanctioned insanity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No one is trying to brainwash anyone, or even harm them. It is done in the genuine belief that you have an answer you need to share with other people: partly to be helpful, partly to be creative, but also to control your environment by reinforcing rules you think are rigged to your benefit…and to brag and crow as you feel talented, creative and wise. This is the reason social media caught on as quickly as it did: it gave people a freedom platform for a little DIY propaganda you thought had something to do with reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Show the world the “right” answers so that the “wrongthink” is banished. You, too, can predict and control outcomes because their familiarity brings you comfort and the illusion of stability. You can feel smug and superior to those who can’t quite follow the rules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But rules don’t have anything to do with innovation and creativity. It is about understanding patterns within chaos and experimenting within randomness. That requires primal, analytical, and emotional literacy, and most people shun harmonized thinking and hinge their identity on a single core literacy: “science and tech” people want to be known for their analytical literacy, while “creatives” preen with being uni-literate in emotional thinking. The “tough guys” brag about how all they need is their primal literacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That people have talked themselves into thinking that somehow uni-literacy is superior to multi-literacy is shocking, but the consequences are not all that fun because it means you have to follow someone else’s rules and be obedient to them in order to function because you don’t have the cognitive tools to understand the world around you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which suits governments and corporations just fine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flatter the masses as you indoctrinate them, and then leave the machine take care of the rest. If you make your audience participate in the creation of manipulation, then they will want to take the full credit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Have people paint by numbers, and they will see themselves as artists. <\/em>It’s not art: it’s training people to follow arbitrary rules. Allow for some variation to capture every demographic and engineered psychographic, and you can control them all because see themselves as different than the other groups, and hence, superior to them all because their identities hinged on associating with the “winning” team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paint by numbers or adult coloring books perform the same function: allow non-talent to feel talented.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Post-WWII life was about forced minimal investment into highly structured mundane facets of life, from frozen dinners to model cars to prefab homes: make it simple enough for anyone to produce something passable, and people will feel more than just accomplished, but an expert who can weigh in with their opinions and pass judgement on those who reject the rules of the sanctioned activity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For middle-class people, this represented an illusion of culture. For elites, the name of game was controlling millions of people and distracting them with cultivating their prefab image to their neighbors. He’s an intellectual! She’s quite the artist! He’s so handy with tools!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Breeding out creativity wasn’t going to happen in a single generation, however. This took several decades to achieve. That’s why there was more musical variety in the 60s than in the 40s, but also the 80s and today. That’s why most movies today rely on a handful of IP to succeed (Disney rides, video games, and comic books, for instance); whereas, previous decades had more texture. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But if someone sees a film, or makes one, they can feel cultured and artistic. Yet all of it is a form of paint by numbers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 60s was more than just having more variety in sound. Disco music was literally churned out factory-style, not surprising considering the number of powerful anti-authority protest songs that made the mainstream, from For What It’s Worth by Buffalo Springfield to Masters of War by Bob Dylan to War by Edwin Starr in 1970. Even the Monkees had two: <\/em>Last Train to Clarksville to Zor and Zam. This was too rebellious, and then disco erased the emotional nuances as it cleansed the notion of saying no to elite decree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Journalism was completely co-opted by post WWII automation of thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It requires writing at a grade school level. Not university or high school level: grade school level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet even here, paint by numbers if evident: journalism students are drilled into starting articles with “color” (something I discuss in my book Don’t Believe It!: How lies become news<\/em>): the flowery details that have no factual basis. It is there as a set piece to show the journalist can write in flowery detail. While the journalist has to keep in lines of the canvas with little numbers on it, they can feel like talented writers because they slapped on colors on the black and white canvas. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But try to rebel against even that: when I went into journalism in order to study its mechanisms, I lost more than one gig for my refusal to add “color”: I began my stories with detailed research and verified facts. Editors frowned because information sounded “dry” with the implication that I wasn’t a creative writer, even if the assignment was writing about how magazines in the late 1990s were trying to stay relevant amid declining circulation numbers for a journalism trade publication. The indoctrination was so intense and complete in the profession that editors and journalists would rather have color instead of information they absolutely needed to stay a relevant industry. They could not imagine an alternative way of presenting information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We often talk about self-censorship. We never talk about self-indoctrination or self-brainwashing. Reporters who dutifully add color think they are creative, original, and talented. They are none of these things. They have agreed to be compliant and their own puppetmaster. They are following the CoIn manual and using it to silence themselves as they make decrees and preen on social media which rewarded their lack of creativity with chasing audiences for validation and profit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And now these are the same people who are violently against AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because AI shows that they were painting by numbers all along and they wasted entire careers and lives being complacent and self-indoctrinating. AI is trained on billions of human generated works, sees the patterns, and can reproduce it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And worse, as AI moves toward agentic models, it is proving it can produce original ideas and solutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People agreed to a structure than even AI rejects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AI Doomerism has nothing to do with idea theft or the threat to the arts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s a threat to the illusion of talent, creativity and freedom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that alone makes AI one of the most powerful and essential humblers ever created. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Post Second World War-life is marked by an invisible, but real dual forces: imposing homogeneity onto the masses, while making them believe they are creative. This has been a successful campaign which peaked during the rise of social media, but has now collapsed by the introduction of AI to the mainstream public. After the war, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,460],"tags":[185,7,186,40,166,26,42],"class_list":["post-2295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alexandra-kitty","category-the-damage-report","tag-ai","tag-alexandra-kitty","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-dont-believe-it-how-lies-become-news","tag-journalism","tag-propaganda","tag-united-states"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2295"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2356,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2295\/revisions\/2356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}