The 51st State (3/4)

The Data Harvest

Dr. Sarah Whitmore had spent fifteen years building the NHS's patient database into something approaching digital coherence. Now, as she watched American technicians install new servers in the basement of Guy's Hospital, she wondered if she'd inadvertently constructed the infrastructure for her country's undoing.

The integration had been sold as modernisation. "Healthcare Analytics Partnership," they called it—a joint venture between the Department of Health and Palantir Technologies that promised to revolutionise British medicine through artificial intelligence and predictive modelling. The press releases spoke of earlier cancer detection, personalised treatments, and efficiency savings that would rescue the NHS from decades of underfunding.

What they didn't mention was the scope of data being harvested. Within months, every GP visit, every prescription, every mental health assessment was flowing through servers in Virginia. Birth records, genetic screenings, family medical histories—sixty-eight million lives reduced to algorithmic patterns that American analysts studied with the intensity of military strategists.

The environmental data came next. Satellite imagery from American surveillance networks was cross-referenced with NHS postcodes, creating detailed maps of deprivation that went far beyond anything the British government had ever compiled. Air quality readings, proximity to industrial sites, housing density, even the frequency of fast-food outlets—all fed into machine learning models that could predict health outcomes with unsettling accuracy.

But prediction, Facade's advisers soon discovered, was only the beginning. The first stories appeared in The Sun and Daily Mail simultaneously, as if coordinated by some invisible hand. "GENETIC TIMEBOMBS IN OUR MIDST," screamed one headline, accompanied by carefully anonymised case studies of individuals whose DNA suggested predispositions to violence or addiction.

The articles were meticulously researched, citing peer-reviewed studies and expert opinions, yet somehow managed to paint entire communities as biologically predetermined for failure. The Rotherham postcode became synonymous with "genetic clustering of antisocial traits." Tower Hamlets was described as a "hereditary poverty trap." Even middle-class areas weren't immune—Islington found itself branded as harbouring "elevated markers for narcissistic personality disorders."

The genius lay in the scientific veneer. These weren't crude racial stereotypes or class prejudices—they were data-driven insights backed by the most sophisticated analytical tools ever deployed. When critics accused the government of genetic discrimination, Facade's ministers could point to peer-reviewed algorithms and claim they were simply following the science.

Employment applications began requiring "health transparency declarations." Insurance companies, now permitted to access NHS predictive models, adjusted premiums based on genetic likelihood scores. Universities started factoring "cognitive potential assessments" into admissions criteria, creating a new form of segregation that felt both modern and inevitable.

The most insidious change was in policing. "Predictive intervention protocols" allowed officers to flag individuals whose data profiles suggested future criminal behaviour. Stop-and-search operations were guided by algorithms that somehow always seemed to target the same communities that had been marginalised for generations, but now with the authority of mathematical certainty.

Dr. Whitmore watched it all unfold from her new office—she'd been promoted to "Director of Healthcare Innovation," a role that involved attending meetings where American consultants explained how her life's work was being weaponised. The irony was suffocating: she'd wanted to heal people, and instead had provided the tools to categorise them into genetic castes.

Late at night, alone in her office across the Thames from Parliament, she would sometimes access the raw data streams and see the patterns the algorithms had found. The correlations were real—poverty did cluster, genetics did influence behaviour, environment did shape outcomes. But somewhere in the translation from data to policy, nuance had been lost, and correlation had become causation.

The British people were being sorted, catalogued, and judged by machines that had learned to see them not as individuals, but as statistical probabilities. And the most terrifying part was how reasonable it all seemed, wrapped in the language of progress and backed by the unassailable authority of science.

The 51st State (4/4)

The Underground Channel

The café in Brick Lane looked unremarkable from the outside—just another Bengali restaurant serving curry to tourists and late-night revellers. But in the basement, beneath the scent of cardamom and cumin, Amara Okafor was coordinating the most sophisticated resistance network Britain had seen since the Second World War.

The irony wasn't lost on her that the very communities Facade's algorithms had branded as "genetic risks" were now the backbone of organised opposition to American rule. Post-colonial immigrants from an Empire, who had for decades been told they didn't belong, were suddenly the most British people in the room—the only ones willing to fight for what the country used to represent, the mother of all modern democracies.

The funding had arrived through channels so convoluted that even Amara wasn't entirely sure of its origins. Shell companies registered in Luxembourg, cryptocurrency transfers bounced through Estonian servers, cultural exchange programmes that seemed unusually generous with their grants. But the European Union's fingerprints were everywhere, even if Brussels maintained plausible deniability.

"Operation Britannia," they called it—a network that stretched from the Polish community centres of Ealing to the Turkish social clubs of North London, from the Somali neighbourhoods of Sheffield to the Romanian enclaves of Luton. Each cell operated independently, connected only through encrypted messaging apps developed by German hackers who'd learned their tradecraft fighting surveillance capitalism.

The genius lay in exploiting the very diversity that Facade's government had weaponised. A Syrian refugee could move through Birmingham's immigrant communities without triggering the facial recognition systems calibrated for "indigenous" British faces. A Polish electrician had access to infrastructure that American security contractors had overlooked. A Nigerian doctor could access NHS databases that Palantir's algorithms hadn't yet learned to monitor.

Dr. Kowalski had been the first to notice the pattern. As a consultant neurologist at St. Bartholomew's, she'd watched American technicians install monitoring equipment with growing unease. When she discovered that patient data was being cross-referenced with immigration records, she'd reached out to old contacts from her Solidarity days in Warsaw. Within weeks, she was running dead drops in hospital supply closets and using medical conferences as cover for resistance meetings.

The network's first major operation had been almost embarrassingly simple. A coordinated series of "technical failures" across London's transport system—nothing dramatic, just enough glitches to demonstrate that the new American-managed infrastructure wasn't as secure as advertised. Traffic lights malfunctioned in patterns that spelled out "RESIST" in binary code. Tube announcements briefly switched to Polish, Arabic, and Urdu before returning to English. Digital billboards flickered with messages in languages the surveillance algorithms couldn't yet parse.

But the real breakthrough came when they infiltrated the grassroots movements that had sprung up to support Facade's regime. The "Patriots for Atlantic Partnership" rallies were packed with genuine believers, but scattered among them were resistance operatives who'd learned to speak the language of populist nationalism while quietly documenting security arrangements and identifying key targets.

Maria Santos, a Portuguese cleaner who'd spent five years invisible in Westminster office buildings, now found herself with access to classified briefings simply by emptying the bins in the right rooms at the right times. Her reports, encrypted and transmitted through a network of encrypted WhatsApp groups, provided Brussels with real-time intelligence on American strategic planning.

In soho, American businessmen would be wined and dined by West End stars and Premier League heros. Little did the "Suits" appreciate how deep the tentacles of the resistance ran. Its greatest asset was its invisibility. While American security services focused on monitoring traditional British institutions—the military, the civil service, the established political parties—they'd largely ignored the parallel society that immigrants had built over decades of marginalisation. Community centres became command posts, halal butchers served as communication hubs, and mosque prayer groups provided cover for operational planning.

The breakthrough moment came when they discovered the Americans' greatest vulnerability: their reliance on algorithmic profiling. The surveillance systems were sophisticated, but they'd been trained on American data patterns. They could spot a potential terrorist or political dissident who fit familiar profiles, but they struggled with the cultural complexity of modern Britain.

A Bangladeshi grandmother carrying encrypted USB drives in her shopping bags didn't register as a security threat. A group of Romanian construction workers discussing resistance tactics in their native language flew under the radar of systems designed to monitor English-language communications. Even the facial recognition software struggled with the diversity of London's streets, occasionally flagging tourists as potential threats while missing actual operatives who'd learned to game the system.

As winter approached, the resistance was ready to move beyond symbolic gestures. Safe houses had been established, weapons caches hidden, and communication networks tested. The European Union might not be able to intervene directly, but they could ensure that Britain's new American overlords would face the kind of asymmetric warfare that had humbled superpowers from Vietnam to Afghanistan.

The immigrants who'd been branded as Britain's greatest threat were about to become its last hope for independence. And in the basement of a curry house in East London, the future of British sovereignty was being planned in a dozen different languages by people who'd never stopped believing in what the country could be.

The 51st State (2/4)

The Puppet's Dance

Six months after the Stars and Stripes first flew over Westminster, a new Prime Minister, Michael Facade, stood in the marble foyer of the recently renamed "Atlantic House," formerly known as Conservative Party headquarters. The irony wasn't lost on him—a lifelong Eurosceptic now serving as the face of Britain's absorption into an even larger union.

The transformation had been swift and surgical. Within weeks of the American "stabilisation," his far right party Reform UK found itself flush with campaign funds that seemed to materialise from thin air. Super political action committees with names like "Friends of British Democracy" and "Atlantic Partnership Foundation" poured millions into targeted social media campaigns, all bearing the subtle watermark of Silicon Valley sophistication.

Facade's message had evolved with practiced ease. Where once he'd railed against Brussels bureaucrats, he now spoke of "Anglo-Saxon partnership" and "shared democratic values." The enemy was no longer European integration—it was the "Westminster establishment" that had failed the British people so catastrophically.

"We didn't lose our sovereignty," Facade declared to packed rallies across England, his voice carrying that familiar populist cadence. "We reclaimed it from the incompetent elites who drove us into the ground. America isn't our master—it's our partner in rebuilding the Nation that they destroyed."

Behind the scenes, the machinery of influence operated with clockwork precision. American political consultants, veterans of countless election cycles, crafted messages that resonated perfectly with British grievances. Focus groups in Ohio tested slogans that would later appear on billboards in Oldham. The data analytics that had swung American elections now turned their algorithms toward British constituencies.

President Chen's special envoy, former Secretary of State Michael Harrison, maintained a discreet office in Canary Wharf. Officially, he was there to coordinate humanitarian aid. Unofficially, he held weekly meetings with Facade and his inner circle, offering gentle guidance on policy directions that would "best serve British interests."

The genius lay in the illusion of choice. Elections were still held, debates still raged in Parliament, and the BBC still maintained its editorial independence—within carefully managed parameters. Yet somehow, every major decision seemed to align perfectly with American strategic interests. The Trident replacement programme would use American missiles. The new trade deals favoured American corporations. Even the curriculum reforms in British schools began emphasising "shared Atlantic heritage."

Opposition voices found themselves marginalised not through censorship, but through irrelevance. Labour MPs who questioned the new arrangements discovered their constituencies flooded with targeted disinformation campaigns. Liberal Democrats who called for genuine independence watched their funding dry up as donors mysteriously withdrew support.

Facade himself seemed to relish his role as Britain's new strongman, even as whispers grew about who truly held the strings. In private moments, when the cameras weren't rolling and the crowds had gone home, he would sometimes catch his reflection in the windows of his American-funded office and wonder if this was what victory was supposed to feel like.

The puppet had become king, but the puppet master remained an ocean away, pulling strings with such subtlety that even the puppet sometimes forgot they were dancing to someone else's tune.

The 51st State (1/4)

The Reluctant Empire The year was 2034, and Britain had become the sick man of Europe once again. What began as post-Brexit economic stagnation had spiralled into something far worse. Scotland's third independence referendum had passed by a whisker, only to be blocked by Westminster, sparking civil unrest that spread like wildfire across the Highlands. Northern Ireland teetered on the edge of renewed conflict, whilst Wales watched nervously from the sidelines. In London, Chancellor Rebecca Morrison stared at the latest economic projections with growing dread. GDP had contracted for the sixth consecutive quarter. The pound had fallen below parity with the dollar. Blackouts rolled across major cities as the energy grid, starved of investment, finally began to collapse. Across the Atlantic, President Sarah Chen convened an emergency session of the National Security Council. The satellite images were stark: queues outside food banks stretching for miles, protests in Manchester turning violent, emergency services overwhelmed in Birmingham. "We cannot allow a failed state ninety miles from continental Europe," Chen declared to the assembled officials. "The refugee crisis alone would destabilise NATO. The nuclear arsenal falling into uncertain hands is unthinkable." The intervention began subtly. American "humanitarian aid" arrived at Dover, accompanied by military logistics specialists. Emergency loans came with conditions: American oversight of key infrastructure, joint management of defence systems, gradual integration of currencies. Prime Minister James Hartwell, exhausted after eighteen months of crisis management, found himself signing agreements he barely had time to read. Each concession seemed reasonable in isolation—temporary measures to restore stability. Yet collectively, they amounted to something unprecedented in modern history. The tipping point came when Scottish separatists seized control of Faslane naval base, threatening to hold Britain's nuclear deterrent hostage. Within hours, American Marines had secured the facility, ostensibly at Westminster's request. They never left. By Christmas 2035, the Union Jack flew alongside the Stars and Stripes above Downing Street. The "Special Administrative Region of Great Britain" maintained its Parliament, its traditions, its afternoon tea. But the real decisions were made in Washington, by officials who spoke of burden-sharing and democratic values whilst quietly absorbing the world's oldest democracy into their own. In the end, it wasn't conquest that claimed the British Isles—it was competence. America had simply proven more capable of governing Britain than the Norman aristocracy that had held power since 1660.

Asylum: When/Where/How the Dominant Social Narrative is Contested

I set ChatGPT the following thought experiment: 

"OK, let's just accept the basic theory that individuals within a tight-knit semi-rural community are usually connected to each other through a shared lexicon/language. They may not physically need to be in each other's presence but their social proximity means they see the same world, although they might differ in their evaluation of it. 

Lets call this the normal process of the social construction of reality. Let's add to this a hierarchy within the community that privileges some people to have a greater voice in the social construction of reality than others. And lets assume that this dominance hierarchy is in some way based on the balance between the underlying forces of testosterone and estrogen that we see in more traditional medieval and primate cultures. 

Then, if, as an experiment, we were to locate within this community a large number of extremely traumatised people from a variety of foreign language communities across the world, but keep them separated from the host community by a relatively safe security system. And then we expose both communities to horror stories in the national press about the crimes that have been committed by people living in similar sorts of hotels elsewhere:

1) How might we expect that any resulting conflicts in the social narratives of any of the individuals would be distributed across the population as a whole?

2) And then how might we expect this to trigger any underlying mental health problems within the community?"

And this was its' answer:

"Treating this as a thought experiment rather than a claim about any real community, there are some reasonable predictions that follow from social psychology, psychiatry, and communication theory.

The first point is that conflict would probably not be distributed evenly across the population. Most people would likely experience little or no clinically significant distress. Instead, the effects would tend to concentrate in subgroups that are already vulnerable or highly engaged with the issue.

One way of visualising this is:

Group	Likely response to contested narratives
People with stable social networks and low personal stress	May update opinions without major emotional consequences
People directly interacting with the newcomer population (healthcare staff, teachers, volunteers, police)	More likely to experience cognitive and emotional complexity because personal experience may differ from public narratives
People already experiencing economic insecurity or social isolation	May perceive greater uncertainty or threat, potentially increasing stress or mistrust
People with pre-existing mental health vulnerabilities	May be more susceptible to anxiety, depression, or symptom exacerbation under additional stress
People with strong ideological commitments on any side	May become more polarised as they interpret new information through existing beliefs

The role of language and shared narratives

If a semi-rural community has a relatively stable local discourse—shared assumptions about neighbours, institutions, and social norms—then the arrival of a new population with different languages and backgrounds could create a period of narrative adjustment.

That adjustment need not be negative. Outcomes depend on many factors, including:

• frequency and quality of contact,
• local leadership
• media coverage,
• economic conditions,
• and whether people perceive institutions as trustworthy.

In many cases, direct contact reduces anxiety by replacing abstract fears with concrete interpersonal experience. In other cases, especially where contact is limited and information comes primarily through media or rumours, uncertainty may persist or increase.

Interaction with trauma

Your scenario specifies that many of the newcomers are highly traumatised. Trauma can affect behaviour in ways that are easily misunderstood by observers. For example:

• hypervigilance,
• withdrawal,
• sleep disturbance,
• irritability,
• or difficulty trusting authority figures.

These symptoms are not synonymous with violence or criminality, but they may influence how interactions are perceived if there is little mutual understanding.

The influence of media narratives

If residents are repeatedly exposed to stories about serious crimes committed by asylum seekers or migrants elsewhere, several things might happen psychologically:

• Some people may overestimate the prevalence of those events because vivid examples are easier to recall (sometimes described as the availability heuristic).
• Others may discount such stories if they conflict with their own experience.
• Still others may become more uncertain rather than more certain, depending on the consistency of the information they encounter.

Crucially, there is no reason to expect everyone in the community to converge on the same interpretation.

Distribution of mental health effects

If you adopt a diathesis–stress framework, the prediction would be that additional social uncertainty acts as one stressor among many. Its effects would be expected to be strongest in people who already have relevant vulnerabilities.

You might therefore hypothesise increases in:

• anxiety symptoms,
• stress-related presentations,
• interpersonal conflict,
• sleep disturbance,
• or help-seeking behaviour,

among susceptible individuals. However, most members of the community would not be expected to develop mental illness simply because public narratives are contested.

If you wanted to study this empirically

Rather than asking whether “the community narrative has broken down,” it may be more productive to examine whether different discourse communities emerge within the same locality.

For example, compare:

• local newspaper coverage,
• council debates,
• GP or healthcare staff accounts,
• interviews with long-term residents,
• interviews with asylum seekers,
• and social media discussions.

If your underlying hypothesis is that language helps organise emotional regulation and social expectations, then you might expect to observe clusters of distinct narratives rather than a single homogeneous community story. The interesting empirical question would be how those clusters relate to trust, perceived safety, civic engagement, and patterns of mental health service use."

So, I guess my next question is what would be the impact of the horror stories in the national press on the NHS staff who are tasked with helping all the people caught up in this conflict? Many NHS staff come from the same countries that the asylum seekers are running away from. What are the protective factors for each individual? What are the accelerants that help fuel the conflict and escalate the tensions? What is the cost to the taxpayer overall?

However, I will leave the reader to write the next chapter of that debate..... 

Dialectical Hermeneutics: The Ghost within the Machine

My starting point is Marx, but my conclusion is not Marxism.

Marx provided one of the most powerful analyses ever written of the internal structures and contradictions of industrial capitalism. His account of production, labour, capital accumulation, and alienation remains enormously valuable. However, I believe Marx made a fundamental error when he elevated material conditions to the primary explanatory principle of social life.

The history of the twentieth century provides evidence for this limitation. The Soviet Union and other Marxist-Leninist systems attempted to solve the problem of alienation through changes in ownership and economic organisation. Yet alienation persisted. Indeed, new forms of alienation emerged through bureaucracy, centralisation, and the suppression of local identities and perspectives. The problem, therefore, cannot be reduced to material relations alone.

My position begins by removing Marx's materialist absolutism while retaining his insights into the structures and processes of capitalism. What remains is not orthodox Marxism but a form of dialectical hermeneutics rooted in the self-other relationship and informed by Hegel, phenomenology, systems theory, and modern psychology.

The Welfare State and Human Flourishing

My practical perspective comes from working within the NHS. Healthcare reveals the limitations of purely economic models of society. Patients are not units of production. Nor are healthcare professionals. Both are persons embedded within networks of meaning, responsibility, and care.

The welfare state functions best when it mediates between economic production and human flourishing. Its purpose is not simply redistribution. It is the maintenance of the social conditions that allow people to participate meaningfully in society. 

When institutions cease to recognise people as persons and begin treating them merely as cases, metrics, costs, or targets, alienation increases.

From Material Production to Meaning Production

Marx focused on the production of material goods. I focus on the production of meaning through identities, relationships, narratives, institutions, trust, knowledge, and culture. Human beings do not simply produce objects. Thoughts and feelings are not secondary effects of economic life. They are constitutive elements of it. 

The economy is therefore not merely a system of material exchange. It is also a system of psychological and social exchange. People continuously invest and accumulate different forms of capital: material; social; cultural; knowledge; health; and identity. 

I have chosen to focus on Identity Capital as it occupies a special position within the psychiatric systems within which I work. Drawing on the Core Self-Evaluations model developed by Timothy Judge, I understand Identity Capital in terms of: Self-esteem; Self-efficacy; Locus of control; Neuroticism/Emotional stability. 

This assumes that individuals continually evaluate themselves in relation to others and to the social structures they inhabit. Their interpersonal perceptions can be distorted to fit pre-determined schema. Their evaluations influence individual willingness to take risks, engage in cooperation, pursue opportunities, and participate in institutions.

In modern economies, Identity Capital increasingly functions as a productive asset. Professional credentials, reputations, brands, social networks, and public trust all derive value from identity. Under certain conditions, identity can even be transformed into material opportunities through mechanisms such as credit ratings, professional licensing, educational credentials, and reputation systems.

Alienation Reinterpreted

Marx identified alienation as the central contradiction within capitalism. I believe he was correct, but I interpret alienation more broadly. It is not merely separation from the products of labour. It is the breakdown of meaningful relationships between people and the systems through which they create value.

Alienation can occur between: Workers and their work; Citizens and institutions; Communities and decision-makers; Patients and healthcare systems; Individuals and their identities; Producers and the products of their labour. The painter is connected to the painting. The mother is connected to the child. The nurse is connected to the patient. The teacher is connected to the student.

These relationships involve the exchange of assets in the co-production of identities. The process possesses a value that cannot be fully captured by market prices or production statistics.

The problem with many modern systems—capitalist and communist alike—is that they frequently default much of this value to administrative or technological processes. Mass production increases efficiency, but it often weakens the relationship between human beings and what they create.

The Self-Other Dialectic

The foundation of my approach is the self-other relationship: Human beings do not exist as isolated individuals. Identity and Identity Capital emerge through interaction, recognition, and interpretation. Every individual occupies a particular position within a social system. This position generates perspectives that shape how they interpret their experiences.

Unmet needs are experienced emotionally. These emotional experiences require interpretation. Social narratives provide that interpretation. Through this process, narratives contribute to identity formation, group boundaries, and semantic hierarchies. Institutions emerge to stabilise these identities across larger populations and time frames.

Political conflict therefore arises not simply from material interests but from competing interpretations of reality and attributions of value. The key question is not whether conflict can be eliminated. It cannot. The key question is how conflict is interpreted, communicated, and resolved in the dialectical production (e.g. the thesis, anti-thesis, and synthesis) of Identity Capital.

Communication as the Central Political Problem

Most political theories focus on either freedom or ownership. I focus on communication as the main medium for producing Identity Capital. Healthy societies depend upon effective communication between the centre and the periphery. The centre requires accurate information about local conditions. The periphery requires meaningful influence over collective decisions.

When communication breaks down: Small conflicts accumulate; Trust declines; Identities become polarised; Institutions lose legitimacy; Systemic instability increases. Many political problems can therefore be understood as failures of feedback between different groups, boundaries, and thresholds within the system. 

The purpose of institutions is not to eliminate conflict but to process it constructively before it becomes destructive. This is why a free press, local government, professional associations, trade unions, community organisations, and democratic institutions remain important. They function as communication channels through which societies detect, interpret, and respond to emerging tensions.

Attention, Trust, and the Contemporary Economy

As identities and their associated perspectives compete for psychological survival, attention has become a major economic resource in modern societies. News, media, and digital platforms increasingly operate as markets in which conflicting narratives are paraded for public attention and trust. Identities become issuers of symbolic value. Public attention functions like an investment. Trust acts as a form of currency.

Like all markets, attention markets can produce bubbles, herd behaviour, and systemic distortions. They therefore require regulation and institutional safeguards. The challenge is not to suppress communication but to preserve the conditions under which truthful communication remains possible. Respect for individual turn-taking thus becomes part of the moral conditions of a successful society.

Toward a Dialectical Hermeneutics

My position can be described as a dialectical hermeneutics. It is dialectical because reality emerges through ongoing interactions between self and other, centre and periphery, identity and institution, subject and object. It is hermeneutic because interpretation sits at the heart of social life.

Human beings continuously interpret their experiences, construct identities, negotiate meanings, and revise their understandings in response to changing circumstances. The economy is therefore not merely a material system. It is also a system of interpretation. Politics is not simply a struggle over resources. It is also a struggle over meaning.

The task is not to abolish capitalism, nor to restore some imagined past. The task is to build institutions capable of sustaining communication, recognition, trust, and participation while managing the inevitable tensions of complex economic life. In this sense, politics resembles public health. 

Conflict, competition, and stress are unavoidable. The goal is not their elimination but their regulation.

A healthy society is one that can process tensions without destroying the people who constitute it. The central political question of the twenty-first century is therefore not who owns the means of production, but how we preserve meaningful relationships between people, the things they create, and the institutions through which they can thrive.

Cognitive Warfare in the Palm of your Hand

Have you ever been doom-scrolling your social media accounts, and stopped to wonder if some foreign intelligence agency might be exerting some kind of mind control over you? No? Me neither really: But, all indications currently are, that they actually could be. This AI-assisted article looks at the technology behind our addiction to social media and leaves it up to the reader to decide, who is in control?

AI bots are reportedly being trained to hijack the brain's attentional guidance system by using "clickbait" - personalising sales and marketing content, selling us our fantasies, and "othering" our demons. Everyday we are now consuming industrial size quantities of undiluted political propaganda. This dystopian vision may not be new, but given the overwhelming power and current direction of the US military - the sporadic anti-UK/EU rhetoric of Trump 2.0 - it deserves some serious consideration.

The cognitive science behind this technology connects the neuroscience of the brain with a digital record of our behaviour. This creates a feedback loop between person and machine - bypassing the normal social construction of reality. This means our private property could be sequestered, and used against us, in covert psychological operations, that we are not aware of, by any foreign power who holds the keys to this kingdom.

Powerful unelected and unaccountable interests will soon be able to condition what we fear; bias what our purchasing priorities are; manipulate who we trust; destabilise our emotional responses to a specific set of stimuli; reduce our impulse control; and determine how an entire demographic decides to vote at election time. That’s an extremely powerful proposition. 

Here's how it could work: The salience network is a brain system (mainly involving the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex) that filters out the noise to focus on what it believes, conceptually, is important - to the individual. Like an early warning system, it detects what is important, novel, or emotionally relevant; switches attention toward those stimuli; and helps decide “this is your priority — focus on it now”. It’s essentially your brain’s radar system.

“Clickbait” is content engineered to trigger that priority filter repeatedly and reliably. AI systems (especially those used by platforms like YouTube, Facebook, or TikTok) optimize content using huge datasets of user behaviour. Over time, they learn which stimuli most strongly activate salience detection and can target individual patterns of consumption in the following ways:

1. HYPER-OPTIMISED NOVELTY

Your salience network is highly sensitive to unexpected or new information. AI learns to trigger this by cuing you with: “You won’t believe…”; “This changes everything”; “Scientists hate this…” type scenarios. These create prediction errors—your brain didn’t expect this, causing attentional resources to spike. The result is a compulsive clicking driven by curiosity tension.

2. EMOTIONAL AMPLIFICATION

The salience network can process quite complex emotional interpersonal needs. This can be targetted, for example, by prioritising content that triggers: moral outrage (“this crime is disgusting”); existential fear (“you’re career is at risk”); or wish-fulfillment fantasies (“this will make you rich/ attractive/ successful”). This can be very distabilising, especially if the emotional schema being targetted was laid down during a difficult childhood. This makes it harder to switch off. Strong emotion = stronger salience tagging = harder to ignore.

3. PERSONALISED SALIENCE MAPPING

AI doesn’t just use general clickbait—it builds your specific salience profile over time. It learns: What you stop scrolling for;  What you hover over; What you click, rewatch, or share. So instead of generic hooks, it creates individually tuned triggers that are intentionally hooking you in to an addiction. The self-preserving instincts of your salience network are being “reverse-engineered” to serve the interests of a machine in real time.

4. INTERMITTENT REWARD (The Dopamine Loop)

Borrowing from behavioural psychology (similar to gambling mechanics) most content presented to you is selected for its mediocrity, but occasionally something is highly rewarding, tempting you to go further. This is called a variable reward schedule, known to strongly reinforce behaviour. You keep clicking because the current one maybe good, but the next one might be even better.

5. COGNITIVE "OPEN LOOPS" 

Clickbait often creates unresolved questions: “What happened next shocked everyone…”. This exploits the brain’s drive for closure whereby, unfinished information sets up a  persistent signal to finish the task. Too many unfinished tasks can overload the system with stress and anxiety. Apparently, this is known as the Zeigarnik effect -  but to me it sounds like the obsessional thoughts that drive compulsions in OCD. Your brain keeps allocating attention to the task, creating its own unmet needs, you cannot escape the anxiety, until the loop is closed.

6. THREAT PRIORITISATION BIAS

Humans have evolved to prioritise threats. This is intimately linked to our survival instincts and the fight or flight response. AI can bring to the surface, conflict, scandal, and danger signals. These are traditionally things that news feeds have used to keep us glued to an unfolding story. Even if low relevance, your salience network lights up: “This might matter for survival— you'd better pay attention.”

With these six strategies, AI is clearly being trained to mesmerise and exploit the consumer, at the same time as making access to you cheaper, by replacing an army of workers in the industry. It’s not just grabbing our attention—it is systematically overriding our political and personal priorities. This is no longer a science fiction. It is a global phenomena that is changing the way we perceive the world, and in the wrong hands. According to the BBC, OCD spectrum symptoms in under 25s have reportedly tripled over the last ten years.

Our goals (work, relationships) are slowly being replaced by artificially selected stimuli that are designed to: fragment attention; increase compulsive checking; bias our feelings; distort our perceptions of reality (e.g., thinking the world is more dangerous or extreme than it is); and therein, re-shape our interpersonal relationships.

AI can unintentionally (or potentially deliberately) amplify childhood trauma-linked salience triggers: if someone is sensitive to rejection, for instance, social comparisons may get prioritised; if they have been a victim of crime, neighbourhood threats may get amplified; if they have suffered a serious illness, stories about healthcare may dominate. 

Either way, the system has the intention of locking onto pre-existing neural sensitivities to strengthen them in its favour. This starts to resemble a mind altering substance that increases the risk of developing a mental illness. If this interacts with underlying neurodevelopmental traits it could predispose young people to an addiction to toxic social media channels, and a life of disengagement from mainstream education or employment.

Ultimately, cognitive science can be used for good or evil purposes. AI-driven clickbait works because it aligns almost perfectly with how the salience network evolved: It can be used to promote love, peace and interpersonal resilience, or force attention to focus on our trauma histories, and the causes of our interpersonal stress.