The Art Of Conjuring Alternate Realities: How Information Warfare Shapes Your World

By Shivam Shankar Singh and Anand Venkatanarayanan

HOW DO POLITICIANS IN TODAY'S world attain power? How do nations become powerful? Why do human beings follow others unquestioningly, even if it is to their own detriment? What factors determine which politicians, nations and organizations will dominate the modern world?

Through much of human history, societal control was determined by militaristic strength. Individuals and tribes fought to control vital resources and land. In the next part of evolution marked by colonialism and the emergence of mega-corporations, money determined power. In the recent decade, the key to supremacy has shifted again. The power and control individuals, leaders and nations have is now determined by their ability to mould the information environment.

In The Art of Conjuring Alternate Realities, Shivam Shankar Singh and Anand Venkatanarayanan dive into the operations of political parties, cyber criminals, godmen, nation states and intelligence agencies from around the world to explain how the power to manipulate your thoughts is being harnessed, and how information warfare is shaping your life and world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins India
• Release date: Aug 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9789354227806

Shivam Shankar Singh

Shivam Shankar Singh is a data analyst, campaign consultant and author of the bestseller, How to Win an Indian Election (2019). He started out in politics as a legislative assistant to a Member of Parliament Fellow and went on to witness the process of conjuring political realities while managing data analytics for some of India's largest political parties. He is a panelist on national television and writes for several news publications on data and politics. He is also a 2021–22 Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua University, Beijing.

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CONTENTS

Introduction

1.The Conjuring of Another Star

2.How Scammers Create an Alternate Reality

3.The Art and Science of Conjuring Reality

4.Shaping the Information Environment

5.Inception through Reflexive Control

6.What It Takes to Sustain an Alternate Reality

7.The Necessity of Institutional Dominance

8.Drinking from Your Self-created Cup of Alternate Reality

9.And Then the Cows Came Home

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the Book

About the Authors

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

THERE IS A global war being waged all around us that most people aren’t aware of. Unlike most wars across history, though, the target of this one is not the accumulation of territory, riches or even fame. The reward is something even greater—the power to shape our thoughts. Since your entire world is shaped by the information you come across, it can be argued that you are, in essence, the information you consume. If this information can be moulded, your thoughts and ultimately who you are can also be shaped. When this shaping of people’s information environment is done at scale and enough people start to think along the same lines due to the information they consume, an entirely new shared reality can be created.

Throughout most of human history, shared reality creation was a magical power that was available to very few people. Information had limited distribution and it often took decades, if not generations, for any news to travel from one part of the planet to another. The first major transformation in the relay of information occurred with the advent of the printing press. With printing, information could be stored on a durable medium like paper and distributed across vast distances, shaping people’s thoughts at a pace not possible before. Even then, limited literacy and the effort that reading required meant that very few individuals actively engaged in the activity.

Then came television, radio and cinema. As these mediums used sound and sight, they bypassed the literacy and effort barriers, allowing more people to consume information. This proved to be of great value to those trying to build new realities, and everyone from advertisers to authoritarian leaders and nation states started to rely heavily on these mediums to build consensus. In fact, shaping public opinion through radio broadcasts and cinema were key components of the war effort during the Second World War for both the Axis and the Allied powers.¹ These mediums had their limitations, though. They could really be used only by existing powers in order to build consensus, and a competing conjurer of reality had little influence over the content being broadcasted over radio waves or shown in cinema theatres. For the most part, nation states exercised great control over the information that was shared over these mediums. The reach of these mediums was geographically restricted, and the entire population would receive the same information.

The internet era has changed all of this within the last ten years. With the prevalence of smartphones and cheap data reaching the masses, over 4.6 billion people, comprising over 59 per cent of the world’s population, are now connected to the internet and can be shown targeted information at the click of a button.² While this has revolutionized access to knowledge by putting all of the world’s information in the immediate reach of every individual, it has also created a world where everyone now gets customized information that is unique to them, thus allowing for the creation of alternate realities at scale.

For the most part, these tools for conjuring reality that the internet made possible were designed for the use of advertisers. The idea was that they could sell their products more easily by showing information to consumers who were most likely to buy their products. Advertisers soon realized, though, that they could sell more product not by detailing their product’s features and specifications, but by instead trying to elicit emotions like happiness, sadness, fear, admiration, envy and more from their audience. They also realized that it was more efficient and profitable for them to focus on individuals who were the easiest to convert through the powers of targeted advertising instead of trying to target the entire world. To make such targeting more effective, internet giants and marketing firms focused on building psychological profiles, data analytics tools, advanced algorithms and new systems for the delivery of information to internet users.

Very soon though, other modern-day conjurers of alternate reality, including politicians, religious godmen, garden-variety cyber scammers and even nation states, realized the power that these targeting tools offered. They all started to analyze what their target audiences look like so that they could target other individuals with similar psychological characteristics using the preferences that people revealed to social media giants. The conjurers then pumped money into ads to bombard these individuals with messaging that was designed to recruit them to the conjurer’s cause. As more people saw information on a daily basis that was different from the information seen by their neighbours, similar people start to believe extremely different realities.

In the world of products, this might manifest itself in a cultish following for brands like Apple or Android, where individuals feel emotionally connected to a brand and need to stand with their tribe. In other realms, though, such targeted creation of different realities for different individuals has more pronounced consequences. In the US, two realities exist on who won the 2020 US presidential elections. There are people who believe that Joe Biden won the election, and then there are those who believe that the election was stolen from President Donald Trump through nefarious means. The algorithmic nature of social media that is designed to get the most engagement and time spent on the platform from each user means that those who believe that the election was stolen will be trapped in an echo chamber and shown more evidence in support of that notion on every platform, from Facebook to YouTube.

As the prevalence of social media and the availability of data on each individual continues to grow, the power that these conjurers have over our reality also expands. This doesn’t just impact the domain of advertising or politics; it also has serious implications for modern nation states. When we hear the word ‘hacker’, we envision a hooded figure with a crooked smile, typing away furiously on a computer, surrounded by numerous life-sized monitors. While simple and powerful, this image has very little to do with reality. The main aim of the most proficient modern ‘‹hacker’ is not to gain access to protected computers but to access our minds and create an alternate reality that we believe in by exploiting vulnerabilities in our thinking processes. In cyber parlance, the creation of an alternate reality is referred to as ‹Information Operations’ or ‹Influence Operations’. While creating narratives through propaganda has been in existence from ancient times, modern societies are uniquely vulnerable to ‘reality creation’ due to the new technologies that dominate our lives.

While large-scale influence operations run over social media are now a part of the mainstream conversation, few people understand the mechanism of this alternate reality creation. This book will attempt to demystify the dark art of conjuring reality through influence operations by using theory and real-life examples from India and the world. It will dive deep into how the mechanics of conjuring reality work, and why it is one of the most important skills for anyone who wants to accumulate power in the modern world.

Through an exploration of how authoritarian leaders maintain power, we will demonstrate why the conjuring of alternate reality inevitably leads to a spiral where the conjurer will try to exercise ever-increasing control over institutions and the means of information dissemination in order to maintain their reality. The book will explore the hidden side effects that start to surface once a significant portion of the population starts believing in a conjured reality, and how this phenomenon is shaping a large part of our world.

As we explore the broader impact these side effects will have in shaping our future, as a civilization and as individuals, we will also lay out the patterns that will allow readers to detect the creation of alternate realities around them. The concluding chapter explores how individuals, technology, policy and political systems must evolve and respond when confronted with the devastating side effects of influence operations and the conjuring of alternate realities.

1

THE CONJURING OF ANOTHER STAR

The Sage Who Created Stars

How can one even explain the concept of alternate reality? And what are the tools useful in explaining it? Since reality is simply mental perception, the tools used to explain alternate reality should appeal to the mind. Hence, stories are the natural choice to deconstruct alternate reality, and it doesn’t really matter whether the stories contain kernels of truth in them or are entirely fictional.

Any story can serve as an explainer of how alternate realities are created, but an analysis of an existing story that many in India believe to be true would be helpful to understand how the process works. The tale of King Trishanku, who became an immortal star in a galaxy created by another human, Sage Vishwamitra (loosely translated as ‘friend of the world’), is one such.

The story itself is interesting because while there are mythologies all around the world about how a divine power created the universe, here, a human sage created an entire galaxy of stars out of pure ‘spiritual power’. He then went on to place another human (King Trishanku) in the centre of that galaxy. For those who are unaware of this story, a short summary follows.¹

Sage Vishwamitra was once a king who had everything—a prosperous kingdom, a big army, many sons and no enemies. One fateful day, he met Sage Vashishta, who had a divine cow, Nandini, which could fulfil all material desires. Vishwamitra tried to snatch the cow from Vashishta but could not, as he was defeated by Vashishta’s spiritual powers. And so, he went on to perform penances for thousands of years to become his equal.

During this period, there was another king, Trishanku, who wished to go to heaven with his body intact but was rebuffed by Vashishta and told that such a thing was impossible. He also lost his kingdom because of the curse of the sons of Vashishta. In his attempts to fulfil his desire of going to heaven in his mortal body, he eventually reached Sage Vishwamitra. As Vishwamitra had an existing rivalry with Vashishta, he agreed to help Trishanku as a counter to Vashishta’s claim that such an act was impossible. Vishwamitra performed a ritual, and using all of the spiritual powers that he had attained over his thousands of years of penance, he propelled Trishanku towards heaven with his body intact.

The king of heaven, Indra, however, thought of this as an abomination and kicked Trishanku out. Trishanku started to fall upside down towards earth. Enraged at this attempt to stop his ritual, Sage Vishwamitra stopped Trishanku midway and proceeded to create an entire galaxy of stars with Trishanku in the centre. He then proceeded to even create an alternate heaven so Trishanku could satisfy his wish. At this point, Indra, feeling threatened, asked Vishwamitra to stop as he would upset the balance of the universe by creating another heaven equal to the heaven that Indra ruled. Vishwamitra gave in, but to honour his word to Trishanku, made him the king of this alternate heaven, ruling that this version of heaven would not supersede Indra’s original heaven.

It’s possible to imagine a different version of this story that illustrates how Vishwamitra succeeded in making Trishanku immortal without invoking spiritual powers to create galaxies, wish-fulfilling cows, a lifetime of many thousand years and divine weapons. That story goes something like this:

King Vishwamitra was a powerful king who feared no one. One day, while he was engaged in his favourite sport of hunting, he got lost. Hungry and thirsty, he chanced upon the dwelling of Sage Vashishta, who welcomed him and gave him a hot meal. This intrigued the king, who asked him how he could make a hot meal in the middle of the forest and that too at an odd time. In those days, preparing a meal would ordinarily take hours of work. A person would have to start a fire and then proceed to cook, a task that would normally take at least a few hours.

The sage explained to him that he always kept a log of wood, dried out and chopped, and also knew how to kindle a fire using ghee extracted from a cow’s milk. The king asked, but whom did you learn all this from? The sage replied that no one had taught him all this. Through his imagination and experimentation, he had arrived upon a way to cook food at a moment’s notice, even in the forest.

He then patiently explained to the king that while he may not have wealth, power and a formidable army, he had imagination and hence was widely revered as a sage. Imagination was the one thing that fulfilled all the material desires he could have—when it was applied correctly over time via experiments. This power of imagination that he had cultivated through his long penance was his most precious wealth.

King Vishwamitra was disheartened because he did not have this superpower called imagination. He tried in vain to coerce the sage to teach him imagination, but in those days, sages were held in such reverence that they could topple kingdoms by withdrawing their support to kings. Vishwamitra’s efforts to coerce Vashishta into teaching him the powers of imagination ultimately failed.

Dejected, Vishwamitra renounced his kingdom and embarked on a quest to unlock the secrets of imagination. He contacted other sages, who told him that the secrets of imagination could be unlocked only by learning to keep the mind still. He practised stillness, investigated his own mind and came to a number of startling conclusions.

The first conclusion was that the mind is never still, always moves and can see things that are not real. It can join things that are themselves real but in a fashion that is completely untrue. He had once actually seen, with his eyes open, a five-headed snake talking to a flying horse with wings, both of which disappeared as soon as he paid attention to them.

The next conclusion was that the more unreal the things it sees, the more the mind is overrun with emotions. This avalanche of emotions is what overrides all the other responses and prevents a person from differentiating between the real and the unreal.

The most startling conclusion that he arrived at was that when he shared the story of the unreal things that he conjured up in his mind to others, they also saw the same thing. If the unreal thing he described in his story created strong emotions, then the person hearing the story also seemed to believe that it was all as real as anything could be.

He then returned to studying warfare and used his newly found skills of conjuring reality to create new weapons and strategies with great success. In his heart, though, there was always the lingering desire to be treated with the same reverence as Sage Vashishta. That opportunity came indirectly when King Trishanku walked into his dwelling, asking for his help.

Trishanku had a problem that every mortal has—how to ensure that his legacy would continue long after he himself was dead? He was not a great warrior or a conqueror, but he wanted his name to be known forever. And so, he approached Sage Vashishta to have his name added to the hymns that Vashishta was composing that were being sung in every corner of the known world.

Vashishta brushed him off, and his sons and disciples added fuel to the fire by declaring Trishanku unfit to be king. This condemnation from the followers and sons of a renowned and respected sage eventually led to Trishanku losing his kingdom. After this, he looked for other sages who could help him and eventually, he landed up at the door of Sage Vishwamitra, who had himself been a great king once but renounced it all to become a sage with powers equal to those of Vashishta.

To cement his own legacy and to establish the fact that he was now an equivalent of Vashishta, even though the sage had refused to teach him the powers of imagination, Vishwamitra agreed to help Trishanku in his quest. Using his understanding of the human mind and a recent discovery of his—of a new star constellation—Vishwamitra crafted a story that fired everyone’s imagination. Until that point, everyone believed that heaven existed as a separate world up in the sky and was made up of a galaxy of stars ruled by a king called Indra, but they were not yet aware of a new constellation called Crux.

For a while now, Vishwamitra had been thinking about how best to reveal this constellation to the world so that it could have the greatest impact. Trishanku gave him this great opportunity to craft an origin story for the constellation that would help him cement his own legacy, along with that of Trishanku.

Vishwamitra conducted a great ritual and announced to everyone that when it was done, Trishanku would ascend to heaven. With his knowledge of astronomy, he timed the ritual just right, and when a shooting star was seen at the end of the ritual, he told everyone that it was Indra trying to throw Trishanku out of heaven. He then went on to tell the world that he would not be defeated, and that he was now going to create a heaven for Trishanku to be placed in. This alternate heaven, located in his newly found constellation, wouldn’t look as grand as the heaven that people of the time would have imagined it to be, so to justify this discrepancy between expectation and reality, he told them about his pact with Indra—that he could create a heaven for Trishanku and keep his promise, but it wouldn’t be as grand as Indra’s, so that Indra’s position as king of heaven would remain unthreatened and the order of the universe could go on unaffected.

The effect that this grand story had on everyone was exactly what Vishwamitra had expected, based on his understanding of the human mind—rapture. The story he told had the right ingredients:

It was novel: No one had ever before heard of a human ascending to heaven with their mortal body intact.

Elements of it were verifiable by anyone: No one could unsee the Crux constellation once they had been made aware of it.

It was incremental: He cleverly exploited the existing belief everyone had about heavenly bodies and a king who ruled over them.

It was emotional: The story he told was a positive one that created hope that mortality was not the end, thus quashing the great fear of death among humans.

Then another effect kicked in: virality. The story spread everywhere and spawned multiple sub-stories through the retellings, thereby cementing the legacy of both Vishwamitra and Trishanku. The sub-stories even had effects on the real world, some of which have lasted till the present day. In one of these sub-stories, when Trishanku was held upside down, his saliva dripped down and became the River Karmanasa (meaning ‘destroyer of religious merit’), and the waters were hence shunned as being unholy.² The people of that region are still afraid to use the water of the Karmanasa river, which is on the border between UP and Bihar, and consider it cursed, even if they don’t know the story of Vishwamitra and Trishanku, or why the river was considered unholy in the first place. The fact that the river had a tendency to change course, destroying fields and houses in the process, only added to the legend and served as proof that the river was indeed unholy.

The extent of the geographic spread of this ancient story can be gauged by the fact that a popular temple in Tamil Nadu’s Thiruporur has an origin story that claims that Trishanku visited the temple and met Vishwamitra there, thus forming another thread in the rich tapestry of the legend.³

As such sub-stories accumulate and become intertwined, they take on the quality of a fractal (of infinite variety and yet contained within the larger story, with more relevance), become part and parcel of the culture and hence, reality.

The Man Who Stopped the Sun

Sage Vishwamitra’s fame was the result of clever imagination and a story about him creating an alternate heaven. There are several modern-day equivalents of the same phenomenon. Swami Nithyananda, the now-fugitive priest living in his own island nation (which he’s named Kailasa) after being charged with rape by the police in India,⁴ claims that he in fact stopped the sun from rising for a full forty-five minutes.⁵

In another instance, he was seen advocating, along with Rajiv Malhotra, the founder of Infinity Foundation, an inter-life reincarnation trust management service to manage the wealth of Bill Gates. The discussion between them was as follows:

Malhotra: So, the proposal is we go to Bill Gates and say you got a hundred billion, and you are giving philanthropy, this, that, because charity will get you to heaven, what not—that is your tradition. Out of the 100 billion, you give 50 billion to us in trust to be given to you in your next life when we find you.

So, to do that, we form a trust management company. Normally, [a] trust is formed to transfer your wealth to your biological offspring and all that and these banks take a lot of commission and they pass it on to your kids and whatnot. This will be the world’s first ‘Inter-life Reincarnation Trust Management’.

Nithyananda: I think if we do [a] little more research and establish the authority. It is possible, sure.⁶

Without getting into the fantastical nature of these claims, it is important to note the enthusiastic reception both these claims got from the gathering and ponder upon the nature of this enthusiasm. Is it possible to understand this enthusiasm through an intellectual framework without calling people ignorant or misled? The intellectual framework of logic and reasoning is the wrong frame of reference to evaluate the response that these claims often get.

We propose the following framework instead:

There is an existing belief system (whose correctness we don’t have to get into) that a large number of people subscribe to for a variety of reasons.

This belief system forms the foundation of their reality and provides some level of order or understanding to navigate a chaotic world. Hence, they are already invested in believing the tenets of this belief.

However, unlike every belief system, it is incomplete and does not work all the time. This creates a cognitive dissonance and hence needs reiteration.

There are two ways to do this reiteration. The first is to eliminate conflicting information and continue to claim the original as the truth. While this is doable, it does not produce the same effects as the second method—creating novel ideas out of thin air that mix up concepts from various domains, and presenting them as a new interpretation of the existing reality.

The effectiveness of novel ideas even when they are randomly generated can be illustrated by a small experiment we ran on social media, using a sophisticated tool called GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3). A bit of context about GPT-3 is warranted before we delve into the experiment itself.

GPT-3 is an AI (Artificial Intelligence) tool that