Mass Mind Control

This is a hoary trope that’s been around at least since Herr Goebbels got hold of a radio station, and possibly earlier (“… lend me your ears.”)

If you, for one, welcome our new alien overlords, consider John Christopher’s YA ‘Tripod’ novels. Humanity lives in a rural bliss regulated by the caps they wear, and watched over by Masters of less than loving grace. Fun reads, although Brian Aldiss lambasted them for depicting an alien technology that was ridiculously easy to defeat. Christopher replied with a brief passage in the second novel, and later expanded it into a prologue novel “When the Tripods Came”.

The Masters didn’t conquer Humanity through military superiority. Instead, they relied on subtle psychological cues and subliminal messages in a TV program, and then established ever firmer control via the cult it inspired.

This is eerily similar to certain cable news networks and the targetted advertising on social media that may have led to political dominance by a particular group of cap wearers…

I wondered if the Tripod series might be a commentary on “certain cable news networks”, but found that even the 1988 prequel featuring TV manipulation predates the network associated with caps…

And of course there’s the visi-sonor, found in Asimov’s FOUNDATION & EMPIRE (and the earlier serialized stories). It enhanced The Mule’s mind-control powers, even simultaneously to a large audience. It appears elsewhere, for example as the Holophonor in “Futurama”.

For extra prescience, read the children’s tale “The Elephant and the Bad Baby” (rumpeTa-rumpeTa…)