Tutorial: Your First PSYOP-Aesthetic Reading

This is your second reading. The first tutorial — your first rubber-hose reading, on Steamboat Willie — gave you the moral-physics procedure. This tutorial applies it to one specific recent recruitment video produced by the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group, and adds two more analytical operations: strategic infantilization and moral displacement.

By the end you will have done one complete reading of a contemporary state-aesthetic artifact using the analytical apparatus the rubber-hose-realism paper builds. You will see for yourself whether the paper’s claim — that the cartoon and the recruitment video are operating in the same moral physics — survives a hands-on test.

¶Before you start

You must have already done the Steamboat Willie tutorial. This one assumes you have a moral-physics reading in your hands and the procedure is familiar. If you skipped it, go back; this tutorial will not deliver what it is supposed to without that grounding.

You will also need to read these terms first if you have not already:

• Strategic infantilization.
• Moral displacement.
• Soft surrealism.

These are short. Read them before you start the watches.

¶The artifact

The artifact is the first Ghosts in the Machine recruitment video, produced by the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group (Airborne) and released through DVIDS in 2022. It is approximately two minutes long and is publicly available on DVIDS and YouTube.

If you cannot find this exact video, the second video in the same series (Ghosts in the Machine II, 2024) will work for the procedure. The institutional cover, formal vocabulary, and analytical findings are continuous between the two.

You will watch the video four times. Set aside about ninety minutes total.

¶First watch: just watch it

Play the video once through, without notes. Do not pause. Do not analyze. Just watch.

Notice what you feel. Most contemporary viewers feel some combination of:

• Unsettled or “creeped out” in a way that is hard to specify.
• Impressed or fascinated, in a way that is also hard to specify.
• An ironic distance — recognition that this is, in some sense, ridiculous, paired with recognition that it is also working.
• Disoriented about what was actually communicated.

Note what you felt. The unsettled-but-impressed register is itself analytical data. The video is producing it on purpose. We will come back to the question of what it is producing the register for.

¶Second watch: the moral physics

You have done this procedure once. Run it now on the recruitment video. Pause as needed. Track:

• Persistence of harm. When the video shows images of conflict, riot, surveillance, archival violence — does any of the harm carry forward to subsequent moments, or does each cut land fresh?
• Locus of causation. Where do the events depicted come from? Are they presented as arising from structures, from individuals, from no traceable source? Pay particular attention to the voiceover — note whether causes are named or whether things “happen.”
• Reversibility of catastrophe. When the video shows large-scale events (riots, conflicts, ecological imagery, glitches in the social order), are they presented as reversible or as having permanently changed something?
• Weight of bodies. When bodies appear in the video, do they have mass, fragility, friction? Are they in danger? Whose bodies, specifically, are weighted?
• Memory of the world. Does the video present a world that carries forward what has happened across cuts, or does each cut establish an effectively fresh world?

Write down what you find for each axis.

You should find: rapid persistence-decay (most images do not carry forward), unattributable causation (events are juxtaposed rather than caused), high reversibility (no harm is presented as having permanently changed anything), light bodies (bodies appear as visual texture rather than as weighted presences), and short world-memory.

Compare these to your Steamboat Willie findings. Take a moment with this. The match is substantial. The technique is completely different — there is no rubber-hose drawing in the recruitment video — but the moral physics has the same profile. You have just verified, by hand, the rubber-hose-realism paper’s central observation.

¶Third watch: the address mode

Play it again. This time you are watching for strategic infantilization. Use the term’s marker checklist:

• Iconic imagery. Is the video rendering complex subjects as simplified icons? (Globes, masks, eyes, hands, screens, single-soldier silhouettes.)
• Oversized affect cues. Is the music, color, voiceover register, or rhythm telling the viewer what to feel? How explicitly?
• Personification of complex systems. Is the information environment, the enemy, the institution, the audience itself rendered as an agent with intentions? How?
• Manipulable-control metaphors. Are the institution’s capabilities represented as control surfaces — interfaces, dashboards, dials, signals?
• Rhythmic repetition. Are phrases or images repeating with small variations to scaffold reception?
• Reassuring resolutions. Even given unsettling content, is the video closing with cues that return the viewer to a manageable baseline?

Write down which markers are present. You will find that several are operating simultaneously.

Now hold the finding next to the artifact’s institutional context. The video is addressed, ostensibly, to potential recruits — adult, intelligent, often elite-aspirant viewers. The address mode is significantly inflected by children’s-media conventions. That gap is the strategic infantilization. The viewer is being addressed as a sophisticated adult, and the form is positioning them below where their developed defenses operate.

This is the move that produces the unsettled-but-impressed register from the first watch. You felt impressed because the address mode bypassed your defenses. You felt unsettled because some part of you recognized the bypass even though you could not specify it.

¶Fourth watch: the displacement

Play it once more. This time you are running the moral displacement procedure in compressed form.

• What structural condition does the video acknowledge? (Almost certainly: the existence of psychological-influence operations, the reality that contemporary conflict is conducted partly through manipulation of information environments, the moral weight of the institution doing this work.)
• What personal question does the video substitute? (Almost certainly: whether you, the viewer, are clever enough, perceptive enough, complex enough to belong to the group that does this work.)
• What is the unaskable question the displacement defends against? (Should this apparatus exist? What is the political relation between U.S. influence operations and the audiences they target — including, recursively, the audience watching this very recruitment video? How is the production of this artifact itself an instance of the apparatus the artifact is acknowledging?)
• What is the affective reward for accepting the substitution? (A sense of being addressed as sophisticated and morally serious. An invitation into a complex, knowing, insider community.)
• At what level is the viewer’s moral agency engaged? (At the level of personal aspiration: do I want to be the kind of person who belongs?)

Write these down.

¶What you have just produced

You now have, written out:

• The video’s moral physics along five axes.
• The strategic-infantilization markers operating in its address mode.
• The structural condition it acknowledges and the personal question it substitutes.
• The unaskable question its displacement defends against.

This is the rubber-hose-realism reading of a contemporary state-aesthetic artifact, and you produced it yourself.

Now place the artifact on the state-aesthetic continuum. Where does its institutional cover put it? (Recruitment.) Where does its formal vocabulary put it? (Significantly into platform-native creator content and openly into open-PSYOP territory.) The gap between cover and vocabulary is exactly what makes this artifact analytically interesting. Note the gap. The fact that the gap is openly playable — that audiences engage with the gap ironically, that the institution probably knows they will, that the irony is itself part of how the artifact recruits — is the contemporary form of the state-aesthetic continuum at work.

¶What you can now see

Compare what you have on paper for Steamboat Willie and what you have on paper for the recruitment video. The technical surfaces are unrelated. The moral physics is approximately the same regime. The institutional contexts are radically different. The audience formation each artifact participates in — what the audience is being trained to expect about how worlds work — is recognizably continuous.

This is what the rubber-hose-realism paper claims, and you have now verified the claim by hand on two artifacts at the opposite ends of the regime’s chronological span. You did not have to take the paper’s argument on faith. You watched the artifacts, applied the procedure, and produced the reading.

This is the moment of the tutorial. Sit with it.

¶What is unique to the contemporary case

Some things in the recruitment video that did not appear in Steamboat Willie, that you should note:

• Self-thematizing operation. Steamboat Willie does not, on screen, discuss the fact that it is an animation studio’s product designed to shape audiences. The recruitment video does — it openly discusses psychological influence as its subject. The thematization is part of the contemporary form. The apparatus has come to operate, in its open-PSYOP register, by naming itself even as it operates on you.
• Audience self-awareness. Steamboat Willie’s 1928 audience did not, mostly, ironize the cartoon. The recruitment video’s audience routinely does. The continuum has come to assume an audience that is fluent in its own reception. Rather than disabling the apparatus, the audience’s irony is part of its operation. (The recruit who finds the video ridiculous and applies anyway is the recruit the video is for.)
• Soft-surrealist surface. The recruitment video deploys soft surrealism: collage, screens-within-screens, distorted voiceover, motif-return. Steamboat Willie does not. The surface is contemporary; the moral physics underneath is not.

Note these as analytical findings about what is specific to the contemporary case. The continuity (moral physics) and the discontinuity (surface, self-thematization, audience-reflexivity) are equally important.

¶What you have completed

You have now done two readings. You can read a 1928 cartoon for moral physics; you can read a 2022 recruitment video for moral physics, address mode, and displacement. The procedure is portable. With these two artifacts as your training set, you have the analytical muscle to read most artifacts in the regime.

The next reasonable steps:

• Read the rubber-hose-realism paper itself, now that the procedure is in your hands. The paper will land differently than it would have before the readings.
• Apply the procedure to an artifact of your own choice — a wellness app, a brand campaign, a music video, a film, a platform-native creator’s recent post. Find the moral physics. Find the address mode. Find the displacement.
• Use the how-to procedures for fuller, more thorough work on a specific artifact.

¶What this tutorial has not done

This tutorial has not made a moral judgment of the 4th Psychological Operations Group, of the workers who produced Ghosts in the Machine, of the institution that distributes it, or of the audiences (yourself included) that engage with it. It has produced an analytical reading of what the artifact is doing at the level of audience formation. The political question of what to do with that reading — refuse the artifact, ironize it, study the apparatus, produce counter-content, or accept the recruitment — is downstream of the reading. The reading is what makes that question accurate.