Nature offers a parable of the acacia tree and its ants. Every day, like clockwork, the tree shares a nectar perfectly suited to keep its hungry ants happy. What goes into that nectar makes it especially interesting. Not only does it contain the nutrients ant colonies want, it also contains chemical compounds designed to control how the ants behave. Just as we take our daily doses of coffee or routinely scroll through our news feeds, the acacia’s nectar is good enough to be habit forming so that once entrenched, that habit can be exploited to activate whomever, whenever, for whatever the tree needs. When animals approach the acacia tree to feed on its leaves, the tree releases chemicals that stir its ants into a frenzied mob willing and able to chase an elephant. Should the tree sense an ambitious sapling growing in the soil nearby, it will dispatch its ants to uproot them quickly, maintaining its sovereign territory. Recognizing the presence of an unseen intelligence at work in these strange clearings, Amazonian villagers have long whispered about “devil’s gardens” in the jungle.
I wonder often what it’s like to be those ants. I wonder if they think that they’re the ones taking advantage of the tree. Or maybe they worship it. Maybe they obsessively talk about the tree like we humans debate our gods and the economy. I don’t wonder long before I realize I don’t have to wonder much at all. We are just like the ants. What isn’t so obvious is who or what is our tree.
Manipulation is nothing new. It’s the art of war older than civilization, as old as life itself. What’s new is the depth, breadth, dynamism, and speed with which that manipulation is being waged upon each of us.
Whether or not you know it, you’ve been drafted into World War Three.
You were just never told, because the battlefield is in your mind. Military strategists refer to this as fifth-generation warfare—5GW.
Its primary characteristic is manipulation of behaviors and beliefs in a theater of war that is both nowhere and everywhere at once. All media and all minds are operational spaces. Winners win by exploiting people who think they’re independent, having their own thoughts and plans. The illusion of being in control is the very means of external control.
Like rock-paper-scissors, each generation of warfare emerges by successively absorbing and controlling the decisive element that came before it. Weapons control strength. Strategy controls weapons. Politics controls strategy. Information controls politics. And information systems can be controlled with hackable exploits. After the nuclear bomb achieved the apex of weaponry, the defining variable of victory in warfare in a globally connected world became, perhaps surprisingly, morality. When information rules everything, hearts and minds become comparable in value to oil and land.
Consider the shock of the Vietnam War’s political outcome. It was a moral loss. It ruptured the status quo, tearing social bonds and catalyzing a nascent counterculture into an equal opposition to mainstream. For the ruling powers, the cost was loss of control over the American story. As the countercultural revolution continued to question everything, most especially the moral merit of each subsequent military engagement, it laid bare the American government’s inability to defend their nation’s sovereign idea-space from interference. For the military-minded, this is tantamount to not being able to control the skies.
To create political outcomes, it became necessary to control not just the media, but the information systems cultures operate in. The signals became apparent in the 2010s. The Obama campaign mainstreamed social media politics with street-art polish and the Trump campaign weaponized politics through memes powered by “truther” urgency with an apocalyptic Christian spin. Abroad, the Arab Spring heralded “The Age of Mass Protests” with America’s new export, social media as a primary driver.
For many nations, those protests toppled regimes. No tanks, no bombs. Just the spirit of countercultural rebellion harnessed and inflamed.
Was this the U.S. military advancing its interests across the world to enact its agenda through secretive information warfare? Some would say definitely, yes. Some would say we, of the citizenry, can’t know, can’t handle the truth. That’s the nature of fifth-generation warfare: the unassailable truth is a privilege few, if any get to receive. The rest of us are simply ants drinking our daily nectar from our acacia tree relying on what our information sources lead us to believe.
What I do know is that it is wise to be suspicious anytime anyone or anything is compelling you to get angry and take it to the streets or the feeds.
And to always ask who benefits if you do.
In 2022, retired U.S. Army lieutenant general and former national security advisor, Michael Flynn co-authored The Citizen’s Guide to Fifth Generation Warfare. In it, he coaches readers on how to recognize psychological operations and shares tactics for navigating the “cognitive battlespace” that reaches people through their social media feeds. He warns of a unified adversary; a shadowy network of globalist leftists who have been endeavoring to dismantle America’s sovereignty.
His book landed in the heart of the post-COVID era, following Biden-era lockdowns that stirred immense fears amongst American conservatives of a hidden coup in the halls of power bent on stripping away citizens’ freedoms. Flynn himself participated in the “take the oath” trend propelled by QAnon followers posting videos online swearing on video to “defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” and tagging the end with the meme-ified catchphrase, “Where we go one, we go all.”
This was a movement with all the intents and purposes of a counterculture; proudly self-identifying free thinkers taking to the streets, so to speak, in defiance of the directives of a mainstream media designed to enslave the population of mindless normies toward untold nefarious ends. “Do your own research” was the rallying cry of their counter-programming against the creeping fascism they saw in the Biden administration’s policies.
In doing their own research, they’d search online for hidden truths about vaccine mandates, protestor’s rights being taken, the rigging of elections, and other adrenaline-inducing stories that fueled their revolution. As any savvy marketer can tell you though, when you give people the words and phrases, you can influence the results they find when they go searching for them online. That’s digital marketing 101. We call it search engine optimization. The more absurd the stories, the less competition trying to exploit those same search results. With that, the earnest impulses of freedom-loving Americans’ distrust of institutions could easily be exploited by weapons of mass deception.
Who needs ground infantry when you can leverage cognitive warfare to persuade a nation’s own citizens to storm their capital on your behalf? Or even compel just a single malleable mind toward an assassination attempt?
If this is confusing, that’s because it’s meant to be. Those Trump followers and their QAnon priesthood who stormed the capital ended up being tagged and bagged under Biden. What we can say for certain is that their riot presented an opportunity to stress-test the latest technologies in a nationally sweeping surveillance system that bares the grinning teeth of 2001’s post-9/11 Patriot Act. Those very same technologies wielded by the Trump administration and amplified by advanced AI and drones are now tagging and bagging leftists taking to the streets in protest of ICE, whose horrifying antics against communities across America have been pumped into their social media feeds endlessly.
Given the scale of bots pushing inflammatory rhetoric with psychological precision, informed by the massive data trails every human leaves in their wake online — combined with how vastly surveillance has penetrated smart devices — it’s hard not to see the average citizen at risk of entrapment.
Any of us can be compromised and compelled to act against our own interest. How many people were brainwashed into showing up for a riot and then imprisoned for their actions over an idea that was never really theirs?
Regardless of your political leanings—which you’d be wise at this stage to start questioning where they came from in the first place—consider the human cost of collateral damage from warfare in the cognitive domain.
In June of 2025, I sat in a room in Aspen, Colorado as David Petraeus, former director of the CIA, retired U.S. Army general and commander of the 101st Airborne (the Screaming Eagles) for the invasion of Iraq, laid out his description of the future of warfare as informed by the conflict unfolding in Ukraine. He described gamified drone warfare in which anyone around the world could track the leaderboard of Ukraine’s drone regiments, competing against each other for points as tallied by kill counts, which they could then trade in for buying power. Meanwhile, Ukrainian cities have had to resort to placing nets over city streets to mitigate attacks on civilians from Russian FPV (first person view) attack drones.
When war broke out in Iran, autonomous drones became a staple of Iranian counterstrikes, precision targeting hotel rooms and apartments across the Middle East based on intel from Russian sources pinpointing key adversaries through digital surveillance in a merging of bot-based warfare through both cyberspace and airspace.
For the world at large, cyberspace became flooded with what has been coined “AI slopaganda.” Misinformation and disinformation flooded the internet through bot armies on social media showing devastating airstrikes that never happened, but are difficult to discern from real combat footage trickling out through official media channels handcuffed by journalistic integrity, which also now happens to be grounds for being barred from press access to a Pentagon seeking absolute narrative control.
Propaganda used to be flyers airdropped over troops to hurt military morale. Now, they are growth-hacked marketing campaigns disbursed to disturb the citizenry. Smartly written open letters and silly lego-themed vignettes set to AI trap music poking fun at Trump and his administration, citing No Kings protests, Israeli influence, and the Epstein files launched like memetic missiles across the planet and landed on impressionable minds offering exploitable proofs of America’s moral failures entering this conflict. It’s not about which facts are true, but rather how facts and fictions are together used to manipulate your feelings; and by whom toward what ends.
Whichever truth you believe matters less than the fact that this demonstrates the other end of the spectrum of an effective fifth-generation warfare strategy. You either manipulate the citizenry or you manipulate the minds of the people that lead it. Or both.
There is a reason the US government mandated that TikTok could not be under foreign ownership. There is a reason big tech’s oligarchs lined up together in the oval office. There is a reason social media was projected on a monitor in the situation room during the Venezuela operation. There is a reason the FCC banned foreign-manufactured internet routers. There is a reason the US government has invested billions of dollars in AI infrastructure and server farms. There is a reason the more time you spend online, the more angry and depressed and despondent you become. The reality is, the Internet has become an entrenched, bombed-out wasteland of fifth-generation warfare, rife with subversion from multiple foreign and domestic interests that are spending trillions mapping your mind to influence or destabilize it.
The cognitive war is happening everywhere, especially within the minds of those who don’t see or believe it.
In March of 2026, Google’s Threat Intelligence Group released a statement about the proliferation of DarkSword, a military-grade virus that leverages multiple (now patched) exploits in iPhone operating systems that enable data extraction and control without any actions taken by their users, and without leaving obvious traces of its presence, all triggered by visiting an innocuous looking imitation website. Its code was publicly leaked on GitHub where anyone savvy enough to plug it into an AI vibe coder could build with it. This malware breakout happened in the context of a new paradigm of hacktivist warfare with new data leaks of government leaders, military personnel, and corporations by Iranian intelligence operatives announced nearly weekly.
I suppose there’s an assurance in the madness of this that we can see the collapse of the systems that control us.
We’ve become subject daily to visions of apocalypse driving the narratives of why our world should be at war. Between the gods of Abraham’s children and the faceless gods of corporations are countless humans crawling in search of something to believe in. Too often we are offered the strange fruit of someone to hate, corrupting virtue-seeking moral clarity into a vice that festers with self-righteous indignation addiction, making us desperately easy to manipulate.
We can no longer rely on believing what we’re told, or trusting the information we’re being fed. We have to remember how to think for ourselves again.
What will be the next thought you can be sure is wholly your own?
Start with that.
