“Are you a one or a zero? That's the question you have to ask yourself. Are you a yes or a no? Are you going to act or not?” - Mr. Robot
Introduction
I had mentioned before that the General had also become my ‘entertainment supplier’ during the years of my programming. The cybersecurity strategy of the General’s game had me use all my electronic devices in a very limited set of ways. This was intended to block attempts by the ‘institutional entities’ to gain any unintended information about me, should they decide to hack my devices. This cybersecurity strategy kept this threat in check by having me use all my devices in very restrictive ways that were consistent with how the General wanted to present my ‘programmed character’.
The technological restrictions that were put on me, permitted me to only view fictional content and engage in a very boring internet browsing of Etsy and Amazon. When I look back now, I understand why the General had to also play the part of the ‘entertainment supplier’. They had to add some minimal level of ‘entertaining distractions’ to the narrative of my world- if I was to survive my programming for as long as I did. This meant from time to time they would download shows or movies for me and give them to me on a thumb drive.
I was an ‘inmate’ in the ‘cognitive prison’ they had constructed for me. This supplying me of shows and movies, would not only keep me distracted while ‘confined’, but at the same time it also gave all the pain and suffering that they put me through a tone of palatability.
There was no other movie or television show that the General would introduce to me, during those years, that would affect me as much as the television series Mr. Robot. The series would last throughout the entirety of my programming. Mr. Robot is important in my story, so much so, that it deserves it’s own stand alone article.
Looping World
Let’s look at a video from the first episode of the second season. This is the season that relates the most to my programming. This is the season where Elliot was in a narrative world that he calls “My perfectly constructed loop”.
Let’s send you into the video with some specific notes that applied to my situation:
1. Elliot is currently living a very regimented life filled with rigid routines. Very similar to rehabilitation after a brain injury.
2. Elliot calls it his “Perfectly Constructed Loop”
3. The television and news clips of President Obama addressing a nation in crisis is playing on the very edges or boundaries of Elliot’s ‘looped world’. This communicates information about the world outside of ‘Elliot’s world’. He can listen to it and take it in here and there but for the most part he disattends to it and continues with the more ‘relevant’ activities of his looping world.
4. As part of Elliot’s daily routines, he frequently meets up at a diner with his friend Leon. This is equivalent to the Mission Briefings, I had with the General and often times we would meet more than once a day.
[Of note Mission Briefings with the General were not always super serious preparations for ‘missions’. There was a lot of ‘filler meetings’ that would fill in the sometimes long gaps between ‘Missions’. So often non-specific mission briefings for me with the General looked similar to ones depicted here between Elliot and his friend Leon. Just hang outs]
5. Elliot says about his meetings with Leon:
- “It’s perfect for me because I don’t have to say anything. I can just listen”
Also
- “The repetition is good for me now, it keeps my regimen intact”
6. Also note that all of Elliot’s analysis in his mind is restricted to content and events that take place within his ‘looped world’ (such as at the basketball court). This is equivalent for me in the sense that my own analysis during the time of my programming was always restricted to only those parts of my narrative world that my narratives would narrow my focus and attention to.
7. Elliot goes to a church group. This was equivalent to my going to regular brain injury groups.
8. Elliot says “My mom has no internet or computer to tempt me in the night”. With the cybersecurity restrictions of my programming in place, it was also as if I had no real internet access at all.
9. If you watch until the end, you will see the verbal and psychological abuse that Mr. Robot subjects Elliot too. This too being shockingly accurate to the General engaging in what was known as “Whipping the dog sessions” with me as part of my programming.
If you’ve already watched Mr. Robot before or watched until the end of the video, then you will know that Mr. Robot is an imaginary creation of Elliot’s Mind. Now I have some final points to make before we move to the next section. In season 2, we find out that the ‘looping world’ that Elliot was in, was also a creation of his mind. He was sent to prison, so he constructed a narrative world to help ‘keep himself safe’ and survive that period of his life. The narrative world that he built for himself transformed the conditions of his prison term, into a setting where he could interact in a different way under those circumstances.
People ask me why if I was being mistreated by the General for so many years, why did I go along with what they were telling me to do? Well, I was stuck in a narrative system constructed for me by the General. This ‘narrative world’ transformed the added pain and suffering of my directives into trails and tribulations that I had to face, so that I could develop into the ‘ultimate version’ of myself for a time after ‘Victory-Day’ [Code word V-Day]. This was similar, and yet different, then the state Elliot achieved with his mind to cover over the harshness of his prison term.
My rehabilitation itself had kept me to a very repetitive therapy based ‘looping world’, disconnected from normal living circumstances on many counts. My programming would develop congruently with my rehabilitation. This meant that the General was slipping in programming directives alongside, and into, my rehabilitation routines, in ways that I could not discern or distinguish as being different from one another. Which is why years later when I refer to what happened to me I say my programming/recovery.
Mission Template
Now we can get to see a template for how ‘Missions’ looked like for me in a visual way and even felt like. As I said above, the Mr. Robot fictional representations were not exactly the conditions of my programming, but are somewhat close to them, that I can reference to, years later.
Also some notes here to send you into the video with:
1. Mr. Robot has sent Elliot into a ‘mission’. Elliot is to physically install a device at a secure data storage facility. He goes into the mission under the cover of a tech billionaire Sam Sepiol [Mission dubbed as the Steel Mountain Hack]
2. At one point in the ‘mission’ Mr. Robot is pushing Elliot to act very rudely against the facility employee Bill, so Elliot can ‘get rid of him’. Under immense pressure of the demands of the mission, this causes Elliot to hallucinate about his mom and younger self. He then uses the deeply disturbing emotional state that the hallucination cultivates in him, as fuel to push himself through and perform his part as directed.
[Note that Mr. Robot’s style and tone in the way he instructs Elliot- is very similar to how the General conducted themselves with me]
3. Elliot has some sort of concealed audio equipment on him that allows him to communicate with his team in the van outside. [This is similar to the General’s Safe phone system they had in place for me, and how it functioned during the Easy Mitchell Assignment]
4. Note the difference in strength level between the Bill-type and the Trudy-type opponents. Bill-types were the predominant ‘non-boss’ opponents of my programmed years. When Trudy unexpectedly crashes the mission, the command and confidence Elliot has over Bill is reduced. When facing Trudy he becomes more nervous. [My programming typed everyone for me, as I touched on in the Truckstopper article]
Mr. Robot and Elliot are the same person. This episode presents an interesting consideration to the category of ‘intelligence games’. What is actually happening in this episode is that Elliot is sending himself into a mission and also guiding himself through it. At this point in the series, he has forgotten that Mr. Robot is very much a part of who he is. Looking back on this clip, and now being aware of what I was made to go through, I am convinced, that we don’t even have a proper grasp of most of the ‘games at play’ in society and neither do our authorities.
This is where my story and Mr. Robot differ. Elliot is himself ‘a polymath and also the disabled man’. Elliot is super intelligent but also has severe mental and psychological problems. However, the General was not conjured up by me but they were an actual person. They played a similar role to that of Mr. Robot in my handling and programming. The above also gives a good approximation for all of us to see what it could look like to make an operative out of someone with a disability and send them into a mission. I felt very much the ways Elliot did here throughout my years being sent on ‘Missions’ by the General.
Cybersecurity Referencing:
Mr. Robot was known for it’s accurate portrayals of hacking and the uses thereof. To this day, the media downplays the very real possibility of advertisers listening in on our conversations through our devices. This listening in through our devices was both explored in Mr. Robot as well as was an important security measure of my programming. I came across an article recently from Gizmodo which again was downplaying this whole listening in on our devices debate.
Subagents
Now in the final part, I’d like to focus on the hallucinatory aspects. Mr. Robot, his mother, and his younger self are all creations of Elliot’s mind. They serve a purpose and even help him out in situations. To shed some light on the purpose of these types of ‘imagined entities’, let’s look at two quick references on consciousness research by the Qualia Research Institute.
The Thermodynamics of Consciousness and the Ecosystem of Agents
The Ecosystem of Agents: our minds work somewhat similar to a next-token prediction engine like GPT-4, where the existing constraints help resolve the ambiguity of the regions of experience which remain amorphous. In order to make accurate predictions of the world, we need to actually simulate agentive behavior (because of the world full of agents). To do this we create "subagents" that play the role of agentive forces so that we can predict them (and ultimately remain safe).
And
Qualia Computing on Subagents:
The subagents are created to achieve a goal, they don’t really like existing, but will continue to hang in there until they’re convinced the goal has been met. The subagents are spun up in order to accomplish goals that would normally require you to spend a lot of attention but that cannot be simply offloaded to muscle memory (e.g. like driving a car). Typical examples are things like the response one may have to living in an environment with very negative people (say, dark triad personalities) where you need to spin up subagents that behave like them so that you can predict their next move. In cases of PTSD, it may be that part of the problem is that one created a lot of rather negative subagents (of people, situations, dynamics, actual physical hazards, etc.) and that as a collective they reinforce each other.
As a result of being programmed, my mind created three subagents so that I could better deal with the post-injury nightmare that had engulfed me- even then I was always barely hanging on.
Subagent modeled after the General:
This subagent had physical similarities, style, tone, and mannerisms to the real life General. The purpose of this subagent was to re-review lessons with me after ‘Mission Briefings’. For specific missions, this subagent would rehearse parts or lines that I needed to memorize for missions (such as in Operation TM). This subagent would also get me to review my performances from past missions by replaying the memories in my mind. Also this subagent would engage in verbal beatdown sessions with me just like the real General did.
Subagent modeled after Ray Donovan:
Ray Donovan was another show that the General had introduced me to. The General would even say I needed to develop into my own version of Ray Donovan. This subagent was created in my mind to reinforce a specific area of lessons from the General- where I needed to be more tough [Similar to video in last section]. Specifically, this subagent would work with me on how I needed to toughen up to, stop being a scared child, and how I needed to stop always being a ***sy. [All of these being directives from my programming and repeated by ‘subagent General’ too]
Subagent modeled after Elliot:
The Elliot subagent was created so that I could tolerate and hold the extreme stress that the real-life General, ‘subagent General’, and ‘subagent Ray Donovan’ constantly put me through. If you watched Mr. Robot you’d know how long suffering and how much extreme stress Elliot could hold himself within. Not so different then what was required for me during my programming. Frequently, this subagent and I would tolerate and process my pain together.
Back then, I didn’t know at all about subagents or consciousness research in any capacity. During my programming, I simply referred to these entities as ‘apps’. Just like apps on our phones, they were just ‘apps’ in my mind. That is how I came to understand and make sense of them. Also the SSRI’s I was on, would increase the energy, and to a large extent the imagined realism (as well as the torturous quality) of the subagents in my mind.
Psychonautic Referencing
Immersion Intensification [One can also be immersed in a narrative world contained in one’s mind]
Autonomous Entity
Mr. Robot was one of the darkest shows to ever hit our television screens. For me it was a horror series. It was similar to what was going on at the time for me and only added to the General’s narrative hold over me. Mr. Robot has a lot of praise for trying to accurately portray hacking, but I also think that it got the psychological piece right as well.
Late in my programming, the General would say at one point that “The average person only thinks of intelligence operations as 007. While that is definitely true, it is not always the case”. Now looking back and understanding the circumstances of my programming, I can say that an intelligence operation is simply about ‘violating the rules of a space’. This could be a physical space, virtual space, cognitive space, legal processes, and yet others. We could think of violatory actions on one end of the spectrum as taking recordings of contents in a classified room, while on the other end sabotage.
If personal injury law was not nominally about safe-guarding the injured parties, then I would never have been the ‘perfect exploit’ for the General to run a serious game against the legal apparatus. Mr. Robot depicted average citizens as being capable of running serious operations against the system. Based on what happened to me, I can say that they got this piece right as well. What the General did to me is nothing less than persecution and the only reason they were able to do this to me, was because they were able to hack the legal system.
The General is long gone now. But the enduring consequences of my years of being programmed, still have me dealing with subagent General to this day.
I want to end by thanking my readers. This was no simple fraudulent game that overtook me. The General targeted fundamental institutional processes of a nation state. That makes this a national security issue. Even more important is that what happened to me indicates vulnerabilities that the system may not even be aware of having. This should concern all of us. However, our system of filing complaints is broken. I need your help to get my story out. Please consider sharing my Substack and also becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks again.