CAN PEOPLE BE CONTROLLED BY MEDIA AND SOCIAL MEDIA LIKE DRONES? ARE THERE "IDRONE?

 

Manfred Doepp ¹

 

¹ HolisticCenter, 13 Haupt St., Abtwil 9030, Switzerland

 

1. INTRODUCTION

Drones own the future. During the Chinese New Year celebrations for the Year of the Dragon, thousands of drones conjured up glowing dragons in the night sky Figure 1. They moved breathtakingly fast and - as in a flock of birds or a school of fish - never bumped into each other and landed in an orderly fashion. The swarm intelligence here consists of a jointly programmed consciousness that controls and directs all participants, for example in a computer on the ground.

Figure 1

Figure 1 Dragon in the Sky, Formed by Drones, above Shenzen (China)

 

However, there are also autonomously operating swarms of drones, and have been for almost 30 years. Artificial intelligence also began at this time. Back then, this technology was surrounded by a touch of science fiction, but today it is part of everyday life. However, a permanent focus on the technical aspects obscures the fact that the underlying computational models are also used in social networks to "control people like drones". Figure 2.

Figure 2

Figure 2 A Typical Modern Drone

 

 

 

2. Artificial Life

Craig W. Reynolds (born 1953), is an artificial life and computer graphics expert, who created the Boids artificial life simulation in 1986. Reynolds (1987) Reynolds worked on the film Tron (1982) as a scene programmer, and on Batman Returns (1992) as part of the video image crew. Reynolds won the 1998 Academy Scientific and Technical Award in recognition of "his pioneering contributions to the development of three-dimensional computer animation for motion picture production." Archive.today (2025)

At Sony Computer Entertainment America, he developed the OpenSteer library Semanticscholar (2025), which is used to map swarm behavior in games and animation applications. Reynolds received such orders because, in addition to computer graphics, he had worked intensively on theories of "control behavior for autonomous characters", i.e. swarm behavior. This topic became increasingly important for the development of computer games as computing power grew.

Computer games should give the player the feeling of moving in a real world and among "autonomous characters". To achieve this, these characters controlled by the software - known as "agents" in technical jargon - must behave in a recognizable manner. And without any further external control intervention, i.e. dynamically. This requires rules that are embedded in the program code. Boids is the term for certain interacting objects in a computer simulation. Wikipedia (2025) The term comes from an artificial life program developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986 to simulate the flocking behavior of birds. He called the simulated objects boids. Boid-based models represent a form of emergent behavior, i.e. the complexity of the model results from the interaction of the individual agents (in this case the boids), which follow a simple set of rules.

 

3. Rules for the boids

Further rules can be added, such as avoiding obstacles or searching for a target. The movement patterns can basically be divided into chaotic (random movement and breaking up the swarm) and orderly. Boids are related to the cellular automaton, as they also act in dependence on their neighbors. Reynolds provided these in 1986 as part of the boids simulation he modeled, which states that swarm behavior is based on three simple rules:

1)    Move towards the center of those you see around you: Cohesion.

2)    Move away as soon as someone gets too close to you: Separation.

3)    Move in the same direction as your neighbors: Orientation.

 

This can be described as de-individualization or collectivization. In Reynolds' description of the boid model, one reads in this regard:

"In 1986 I created a computer model of coordinated animal movements (...). It was based on three-dimensional computer geometry, as normally used in computer animation or computer-aided design. I called the generated, simulated swarm animals boids. The basic swarm model consists of three simple steering behaviors that describe how an individual boid maneuvers based on the positions and velocities of its nearby swarmmates. Each boid has direct access to the geometric description of the entire scene, but the swarming behavior requires it to respond only to swarmmates in a specific small neighborhood around it. Swarm mates outside this local neighborhood are ignored.

The neighborhood could be considered a model of limited perception (as in fish in turbid water), but it is probably more correct to consider it as defining the area in which swarm mates influence the steering of a boid. In the first experiments, a more sophisticated behavioral model was used. It included anticipatory obstacle avoidance and target search. For computer animation applications, low-priority homing behavior resulted in the flock following a predetermined path."

If this description reminds you of the structures of a postmodern society and you associate "agents" with "Agent Smith" from the Matrix films, you are not entirely wrong. Cohesion, separation and orientation no longer only define the swarm behavior of autonomous characters in computer games, but also the dynamics of social coexistence in the multimedia panopticon of postmodernity. Just look at the followers of influencers on social media: individuality is difficult to identify. Authenticity or self-realization: no longer present. Rather, these people resemble ants in their behavior.

So it is hardly surprising that a research project funded by the US Air Force Laboratory (AFRL) at the University of Florida (Gainesville, USA) investigated "how social media can be used to control people like drones" back in 2014. Arstechnica (2025) Under this title, Ars Technica reported on July 17, 2014 that the research leader of the AFRL study, Warren Dixon, head of the Department of Nonlinear Control and Robotics at the University of Florida, was primarily working on "how to manipulate a network, once you've identified it, towards a target".

The research by Dixon et al. - titled "Containment control for a social network with state-dependent connectivity" - highlights that the mathematical principles used to control autonomous agents and robot groups can also be applied to social networks to manipulate human behavior. Zhen et al.  (2015) Starting from an optimal calibration, the models developed by the AFRL researchers could be used to steer opinion on social media portals towards a desired behavior. Similar to the cyber weapons of the NSA (National Security Agency) or the corresponding arsenal of the GCHQ (Government Communication Headquarters, in the UK), which uses its nudge unit not only against critics of coronavirus measures, but also against climate skeptics. The mainstream narrative is enforced. Fact-checkers use what the mainstream tells them as facts.

 

4. Swarm behavior

Swarming behavior can therefore not only be observed in China's skies - or in Ukraine, where deadly mini-drones are hunting down enemy troops - but everywhere in principle. This is because drones are no longer just the standard on the battlefield. The man himself is now considered a drone.

The coronavirus crisis was the dress rehearsal for the introduction of the model of rule of the future developed by behavioral economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (Nudge, Yale University Press, 2008): hive-mind technocracy. Remote control of the masses via social media nudging, via shared consciousness. Thaler et al. (2008) In other words: ruling by means of platform economics, manipulative communication and emotion. With "soft power", at least until the mindless swarm is finally connected to the cloud.

So anyone who thinks it makes sense to worry about the preservation or decline of freedom of expression on a corporate marketplace like X is fulfilling the role ascribed to them by AFRL, Nudge-Unit, the NATO Innovation Hub with its "sixth dimension of warfare": that of the mindless, will-less and unstable "agent" in an overloaded simulation. Act (2025) Not for nothing were all the Big Tech bigwigs participants in the social engineering seminars of John Brockmann's Edge Foundation. Longnow (2019), John Brockman (2019)

 

5. Increasing efficiency through AI

It is no coincidence that artificial intelligence (AI) is now supposed to make everything "more efficient". However, if you take a look at the board level of OpenAI - the ChatGPT provider - and the primary partner of Elon Musk's Stargate project, which is intended to bring together AI and mRNA with a budget of 500 billion dollars Stargate-project (2025), alongside the Mossad-affiliated IT group Oracle, which is financed by the CIA, it becomes clear that efficiency means nothing other than an expansion of the surveillance state.

The US military in particular has been focusing for years on the use of open source intelligence - meaning cell phone data, social media content, data leaks, hacks and AI - to track down insurgent cells.

In 2011, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, USA) Darpa (2025) founded the SMISC program (Social Media in Strategic Communication) Information-professionals (2025). Equipped with a budget of almost 50 million US dollars, scientists investigated the question of how social networks can be used for propaganda and psychological warfare. In April 2015, the initiator of SMISC, Rand Waltzman, a DARPA manager, described the four core objectives of the program he had launched Information-professionals (2025):

"Recognizing, classifying, measuring and tracking the emergence, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes) and targeted or misleading news and misinformation.

Recognize the structures of persuasion campaigns and influence operations on social media sites and communities.

Identify participants and intentions and measure the impact of persuasion campaigns.

Spreading counter-information in the event of recognized enemy influence operations."

 

Waltzman also explained the technical scope and focus of the analysis processes:

"Linguistic cues, patterns of information flow, analysis of topic trends, analysis of narrative structures, mood recognition and opinion research.

Meme tracking in communities, graph analysis, probabilistic thinking, pattern recognition, cultural narratives.

Inducing identities, modeling emerging communities, trust analysis, modeling network dynamics.

Automated content generation, bots in social media, crowdsourcing."

 

6. Psychological guidance

In July 2014, DARPA published a list of 181 projects funded by the SMISC program, all of which dealt with the topic of psychological warfare on social media. Information-machine (2014) In each case, the focus was on graph theory, i.e. the analysis of people's behavior based on social data. The formula language used by the projects to mathematically describe the interactions between people and products was the same as that used to control groups of autonomous vehicles. It forms the core of Google's understanding of search contexts and is a fundamental component of control systems for controlling autonomous robot swarms.

However, Warren Dixon and DARPA are now investigating whether the same math can be applied to the control of autonomous people and groups of people. To understand what this means, here is an explanation of the Facebook graph, which Ars Technica reported on March 14, 2013 Arstechnica (2013):

"The graph is a database that stores information about users, pages and other objects in the Facebook universe. It also contains the relationships between them. Each entity, i.e. each node in the Facebook graph - identified by a unique number called fbid (Facebook ID) - is associated with a set of attributes or metadata. The relationships between these nodes, known as edges, contain their own metadata to describe the nature of the relationship between them. The graph database used by Facebook is similar to Google's Knowledge Graph and Microsoft's Satori Graph-based concept."

Dixon's AFRL working group used such data to model how collaboration between "key influencers" in social networks could influence the behavior of groups within that network. Keyword: "containment control". Dixon himself explained this concept by saying:

"There is a group of leaders, each of whom has their own goals and focus. Our aim is for these people to change their minds and put pressure on the group of followers - people who belong to their social group but don't know the overarching goal."

 

7. Social Media

With the help of graph theory, Dixon et al. developed a communication model that made it clear how much influence a social media influencer needs to exert power and determine the behavior of their followers. While DARPA issued several press releases assuring that it neither stores personal data nor manipulates social media users, GCHQ in the UK had fewer inhibitions. As the documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden show, the British intelligence service had a whole arsenal of digital weapons at its disposal to infiltrate individuals and their devices, create fake identities, spread misinformation and "shape" public opinion. GCHQ shared these tools with the NSA, which in turn used them to control what information enemy groups could access online and via smartphone in Afghanistan and other crisis zones.

Warren Dixon: "People don't like to think that they are being manipulated. But we are manipulated every day. Through advertising, through government leaders, religious leaders and even to go to work. We work largely because we are paid to do so. But how much do I have to pay someone for their work?"

How much do you have to pay someone to lie or betray their best friend? Behavioral researchers who advise big tech and intelligence services, who create algorithms and social feedback loops, are concerned with questions like these. After all, search engines and social media are not a service, but a weapon of cognitive warfare, projectiles of information warfare. Most people are uncritically and therefore defencelessly at their mercy.

 

8. Manipulation?

Agent Smith" Matrix (2025) from the movie "Matrix" is a perfect and dark parable for the modern man of utility, who leads his life online and makes decisions in the digital space within seconds for which he lacks any substantive basis. Decisions that permanently change their self-image. Smith began as an agent, an AI program in the Matrix programmed to maintain order in the system by eliminating human simulacra that would make the simulated reality unstable, as well as any rogue programs that no longer serve a purpose for the machine collective. Smith's true power comes from his ability to absorb the memories and powers of his victims - humans and programs alike. Smith gains the power to copy his physical form on any being in the Matrix by plunging his hand into their body and dispersing a black liquid that transforms them into a copy of himself, resulting in an ever-growing army of Smiths linked by a single consciousness.

Anyone who wonders why his former companions who were critical of measures and authority are now paying homage to the MAGA cult orchestrated by the deep state Artikel (2025) will find the answer in DARPA studies on the topic of "Controlling group behavior using social media".

This is not new. The US Air Force began researching autonomous drone systems - known as the Low Cost Autonomous Attack System (LOCAAS) Designation-systems (2025) - back in 1998. The LOCAAS systems used an algorithm based on Craig Reynolds' Boids model to fly in a swarm formation. When a stealth bomber dropped its up to 192 drones, they began to communicate with each other and attack enemy troops in formation. Tanks are also "out", as a tank costs around USD 20 million, whereas a drone that shoots it down only costs around USD 10,000.

 

9. Drones

Today, drones are part of everyday civilian life. In Switzerland, for example, Swisscom operates a "Drones-as-a-Service (DaaS)" network in cooperation with Nokia for "efficient inspections and securing large areas and central infrastructure". Nokia (2025)

Drones are also part of day-to-day business in real warfare. Long-range drones controlled by joystick are "democratizing" the airspace in the Middle East. Preferably with laser-guided "GBU-12 Paveway II" bombs. Wikiwand (2025) Mini drones inconspicuously monitor the area of operation and kill with targeted head shots. Kamikaze drone swarms swoop down in groups on the targets exploding with them.

US military projects and Chinese Guinness World Records in drone formation flying show that it will probably not be too long before autonomous swarms, distributed and recharged by equally autonomous carrier vehicles, monitor - and protect - crisis areas, borders and inner cities.

The common agent, the "iDrone" - the "homo demens" overwhelmed by media dynamics and polarization dialectics - is naturally relaxed about these developments. For he "moves towards the center of those he sees around him, moves away as soon as someone gets too close, and walks in roughly the same direction as his neighbors".

 

10. Conclusion

All signs point to the fact that no one can prevent the misuse of the listed technologies, which are of high quality in themselves. However, if the increase in destructive energies continues or even increases, then higher spiritual beings (the planet Earth also has a soul, as does our sun) will probably intervene. All it would take is an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) from the sun to paralyze all the electricity on Earth. Or if a pole shift were to cause disastrous conditions. Or if a meteorite/asteroid were to hit the earth.

There are two ancient fields of consciousness on Earth that deal with the cyclical course of time: the time descriptions of the Vedas and the Maya. They agree in part, especially that we are at the end of an age known as the Kali Yuga. William Montgomery (2016) Kali Yuga (from Sanskrit) means: the age of strife, discord and hypocrisy. It is the ethically lowest-spirited and most loveless age, and it is approaching its climax in the present and at the same time -maybe - its end.

 

CONFLICT OF INTERESTS

None. 

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

None.

 

REFERENCES

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Matrix (2025).

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Reynolds, Craig W. (1987). "Flocks, Herds and Schools: A Distributed Behavioral Model". Proceedings of the 14th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques.  21. ACM. 25-34. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.317.3619. https://doi.org/10.1145/37401.37406

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Thaler, R. H., Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Yale University Press.

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Zhen Kan, Justin R. Klotz, Eduardo L. Pasiliao Jr. Warren E.  (2015). Dixon: Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity☆ Elsevier Automatica,  56, 86-92. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.automatica.2015.03.026