"The world circumscribing us [the "circumverse"] aims to have stable circuits, equal cycles, the expected repetitions, and trouble-free compatibility. It intends to eliminate all partial impulses and immobilize bodies...such is the madness of the great central Zero, its desire to immobilize bodies that can only ever ‘be’ as representation." – Jean-Francois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy 1
The immobilization of bodies
“Things have found a way of avoiding a dialectic of meaning that was beginning to bore them. " – Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies
On the road to the realization of Lyotard’s “pervasive global automaton”, Weeping Angel plays a small but singular role, a dialectical reversal of the consumer model and its paradigm of personal control, asking: what if we can’t turn it off? The operation weaponized that icon of American and English culture– the television– automating, by means of a software injection, simple deceptions–turning off the screen and switching off the “power” LED– so that the infected TV appeared to be off while collecting and transmitting network and audio data., turning the near-ubiquitous “reciever” into a “transmitter”, a listening device. The two-way television in Orwell’s 1984, collecting audio and video while broadcasting and essentially never “off”, was an obvious model. Another, less obvious model is linked by way of the operation’s cryptonym to the long-running British scifi show Doctor Who: Weeping Angels, alien entities that disguise themselves as statues when observed, first appeared on the show around the time of the Weeping Angel covert operation. From a Dr. Who fan site:
WEEPING ANGELS appear as winged, humanoid statues, often with a weeping or mournful expression.
Quantum-Locked: They can only move when not being observed, meaning they appear as statues when someone looks at them. 2
A collaborative UK MI5/US BTSS (Bioengineering, Technology, and Surgical Sciences within the US National Institutes of Health (NIH)), WEEPING ANGEL equipped Samsung F Series SmartTVs with a “Fake Off” mode. The program illegally targeted domestic populations in the U.S. and U.K. but also, importantly, instantiated an imaginary that reversed the command/control hierarchy for consumer devices, much like the subject/object switch posited by Jean Baudrillard in Fatal Strategies:
“Things have found a way of avoiding a dialectic of meaning that was beginning to bore them.” 3
The infected tv, when shut off, appears like any other consumer appliance in “off” mode: dead screen, no green LED. The relationship between the Weeping Angel alien entity, the software implant, and the surveillance program’s seemingly multiple goals is of more than metanymic importance: the “quantum locked” aliens’ static, stone-like immobility while “awake” mirrors the dead screen’s concealment of the “one-way (black) mirror” of automated surveillance. This is just one of the ways in which Lyotard’s cognitive automaton “plays dead”, assuming the appearance of a “dumb (or ‘dead’) object” rather than an agent of active data collection. The tendency of the automaton to veil itself throws into question our relationship with all of the “dumb (or ‘dead’) objects” that surround us. Further, the “magical” quality of the Weeping Angel entities conveys itself to the intelligence gathering operation, adding a mystical veneer to state-sanctioned illegality– to the electronic stalking and violation of the rights of a public caught unawares and in thrall to consumerism, its codes, and its symbolic order.
From the Oxford Languages online dictionary:
in·duce·ment [inˈdo͞osmənt]
noun
a thing that persuades or influences someone to do something: "companies were prepared to build only in return for massive inducements" · "there is no inducement to wait for payment" 4
The inducements of new technologies extend far beyond their ability to deliver content or mere use-value to include this fantastical, “magical” quality, something like a seduction performed by a hypnotist. Philosophers have, for some time, suggested that the AI assemblage / Lyotard’s cognitive automaton is essentially co-extensive with capitalism. As Todd McGowan puts it in Capitalism and Desire :
“The resilience of capitalism as an economic or social form derives from its relationship to the psyche and to how subjects relate to their own satisfaction. “ 5
The myriad inducements offered by new technologies proliferate in the same way as those offered by capitalism, providing psychic satisfaction and the (partial) fulfillment of unmet desires.
The Elimination of Partial Impulses
The communicating angel weeps secret data flows, similar to cell-tower triangulation or gps tracking but with symbolic uses that extend well beyond them: we are aware that our phones betray us, perhaps we even desire this betrayal– the Weeping Angel, however, is a mnemonic as well as a hermeneutic device– it’s in the name: as with the invisible angels of the religious world, we are watched ever, wept over, never entirely alone. Belief in these invisible entities’ existence subtly modifies minds, constrains behavior, alters approaches to life.
Weeping Angel functions as a didactic, a teaching tool– the lesson: your devices will betray you. This is not accidental but programmatic and, importantly, provable: many a recent immobilization has come by way of devices, apps, texts, etc. Many future immobilizations will come by way of covert, retrospectively-approved surveillance ops, desiloing, and AI-driven prediction/retrospection.
FOXACID
“Because the cute is an everyday aesthetic, and not an institutionally codified artistic style, its manifestation in artistic activity is not securely fixed in space or time, or by nation or period…its vernacular origin, or lack of a clearly established archive, its radical diffusiveness, or way of soaking into culture as a whole – help account for the astonishing variety of artistic movements in which it has made an imprint…links between seemingly divergent activities, from robot design to the domestication of animals, suddenly come into relief when revealed as touched by its logic.” – Sianne Ngai, The Cute 6
Foxacid, precursor to Q-Day’s (Quantum Day’s) looming mass sigint decrypt, is a man-in-the-middle attack on every vector of a given TOR assemblage — scopophilic NEETs, e-girls’ gift-lists, darknet weirdos’ vast repositories, activists or journalists attempts to avoid state surveillance — with all roads leading to the cognitive automaton and/or CECOT-style necropanopticons. Stabilizing circuits sometimes relies on confinement or incarceration, sometimes on killing, sometimes on mass data collection–desiloing–processing, and increasingly on the manipulation of the targets’ own awareness:
According to various top-secret documents provided by Snowden, FoxAcid is the NSA codename for what the NSA calls an “exploit orchestrator,” an Internet-enabled system capable of attacking target computers in a variety of different ways. […]
The servers are on the public Internet. They have normal-looking domain names, and can be visited by any browser from anywhere; ownership of those domains cannot be traced back to the NSA.
However, if a browser tries to visit a FoxAcid server with a special URL, called a FoxAcid tag, the server attempts to infect that browser, and then the computer, in an effort to take control of it. The NSA can trick browsers into using that URL using a variety of methods, including the race-condition attack mentioned above and frame injection attacks.
Anyway, the fox is kinda cute. This “animal spirit” somehow defangs the op even as it bathes in acid. Another form of inducement, call it a “cutification” op, the cryptonym and image operate on the same subtle principle: where the harsh or strange crytonyms of the past– ULTRA, OFTEN, GRUDGE, CHAOS, ECHELON– conveyed menace and mystique, the “cutification” op softens us up, maybe all this covert mass surveillance is not so bad…
"She had high animal spirits." – Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Animal Spirits per Keynes:
…there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than on a mathematical expectation, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as a result of animal spirits – of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities. 7
Quantumsquirrel: Psychic infrastructure to truly covert infrastructure
QUANTUMSQUIRREL doppelgängs IP’s, messing with receivers’ heads or injecting soothing disinfo into “maladaptive” circuits.
Into the tattered psychic infrastructure landscape of unmade-bed/grids (borrowed from the olde Quantum Cat meme), a pissed-off (still cute) squirreloid sewing-machine inserts itself, rerouting queries via gaps in semi-spontaneous info flows. Its “truly covert” flows rip the fabric of official reality off the faces of that ever-multiplying pantheon of dying gods, secure IP’s. With QUANTUMSQUIRREL, cutified doppelgängers soothe a black propaganda balm onto the bedsores of their targets, further summoning the pervasive global automaton.
With FOXACID and QUANTUMSQUIRREL, and other “animal spirit” ops, we have either liberated slide-decks pointing to something like “state evil” or an injection psyop with cleverly illustrated ideas culled by black propagandists from r/conspiracy and beyond.
With the pseudo-psi “synchronicities” of purloined data Möbius-looping betwen the “proper agencies” and their targets and “animal spirit” ops softening, cutifying the ops themselves, the pervasive global cognitive automaton increasingly reflects/reveals its targets– in online and phone conversation, in uncontrollable utterances prior to orgasm, via Klarna purchases, footpaths or carpaths, in the constantly triangulated dance of surface movement across rotting maps of both globe and mind.
Just what is it that makes today’s “Strategy of Tension” so different, so appealing?
A Strategy of Tension is designed to improve on mere passivity or mild anxiety with a heavy secondary dose of Fear and Distrust, Getting the Fear, and Giving the Fear. Televisions / transmitters, broken-down vans stuffed with high-tech surveillance equipment, doorbells connected to police departments…in each one finds its powerful opposite, like the gravitational blobbing of black-and-white on either side of the Technocracy Inc. logo (formerly the yin-yang minus the dots), a given target’s exterior calm increasingly tagged to interior tension and lack of resolve…
Imagine a world where the actual CIA spends its time figuring out how to spy on you through your TV. That's today.
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) March 7, 2017 8
New York Times, May 30, 2025: Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans
The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work with the government, spreading the company’s technology — which could easily merge data on Americans — throughout agencies.
In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.
Mr. Trump has not publicly talked about the effort since. But behind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm.9
Soon: More Steps to a Pervasive Global Cognitive Automaton:
Wholly parasocial relations
Inducement, fascination, laziness, keys that unlock the Human Trap.
DDD (Don Draper is Dead), pirate funnels, viral loops
Rational marketing no more. Pirate funnels, viral loops, instantaneous purchase (Apple Pay et al.). Don Draper is Dead.
Maven, Gotham, et al. Palantir’s fusion matrix Flock, Clearview AI, Fog Reveal, ECHELON, Pegasus, Predator, Cytex, Intellexa, NSO Group, and mercware, Predpol
Tools against Cognitive Automata
MAI (making analysis inefficient)
Obfuscation, false tells, babble tapes, et al.
Operation Vula, quote stuffing, hydras, Vortex, “Bayesian flooding” and “unselling” Generalizing FaceCloak; exploits and asymmetry…
Fogging, Flooding, and Surfacing, Amplification, Inhibition, Wiping…
Lyotard, Jean Francois. tr. Ian Hamilton Grant. Libidinal Economy. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Weeping Angel. Online: https://ficspecies.fandom.com/wiki/Weeping_Angel
Baudrillard, Jean. tr. Beitchman, Phil and Niesluchowski, W. G. J. Fatal Strategies. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Semiotext(e)/The MIT Press, 1990.
Oxford languages online: https://languages.oup.com/
McGowan, Todd. Capitalism and Desire, The Psychic Cost of Free Markets. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
Ngai, Sianne. ed. Sianne Ngai. Introduction to Documents of Contemporary Art, THE CUTE. London: Whitechapel Gallery and Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2022.
Keynes, John Maynard. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. New York: Harper, 1965.
Snowden, Edward. Online: https://t.co/dQHBrsyIoI, 2017.
Frenkel, Sheera and Krolik, Aaron. Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans. The New York Times, May 30, 2025. Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/technology/trump-palantir-data-americans.html