A few years ago I set up a Google Alert for a friend’s name. He was an artist of some renown and after a series of events that I wasn’t fully aware of he disappeared. A Google Alert seemed like the smallest possible action of hope that he might reappear.
What arrives through the alert is about other people. There is a high school teacher in Texas. More than one musician. And occasionally an obituary. When an obituary comes through I read it carefully and check the year and the city, and so far it has always been somebody else. I close the tab and the morning continues.
This has been going on for years. I didn’t set the alert with a plan and I’m not sure what I will do when it pops up with a real alert. But it runs in the background, occasionally dropping a reminder in my inbox of my old friend.
I still don’t know what happened or why. I had a sense about what had happened but no word for the feeling. Thinking about it recently the word I’d use is activated. My friend was activated.
I was watching some garbage YouTube drek about the CIA and they used the term in describing how they recruit.
The CIA doesn’t recruit by straight bribery or argue ideology. The work is more careful than that. The officer studies the asset until he understands what the asset already cares about, and then he constructs a situation in which betrayal becomes the move that protects what the asset cares about most. Save the family. Get the child the surgery. Keep the brother out of the camps. The asset isn’t broken or bought. The asset is activated. The reasoning that produces the betrayal is the asset’s own reasoning, intact, working correctly, applied to inputs the CIA arranged. The CIA case officer isn’t in the room when the asset crosses the line. The work was done weeks earlier, in the slow construction of a frame in which the line was the obvious place to step.
GaryVee is the CIA of the hustle mindset.
I mean this without venom. There is no case officer in the GaryVee setup, no recruitment meeting in a hotel bar, no recruitment dossier in a filing cabinet anywhere. There is a man speaking earnestly into a camera about ownership and discipline and personal responsibility, alongside a hundred similar men, inside a feed architecture that delivers them in series to anyone who shows the slightest interest. The structure of the platforms and the algorithm does the same work the CIA would do. By the time you have watched a few hundred of these, certain conclusions are reachable that weren’t reachable before, and certain other conclusions have quietly become unreachable. You aren’t being deceived. The men on camera (mostly men) mostly believe what they’re saying. You are being supplied with a steady diet of inputs that changes which thoughts are available to you, and after a while the thoughts that are available feel like the only thoughts there are.
My friend wasn’t recruited by anyone. He just started following threads that were interesting to him as an artist. But it started to change his focus. He started to align with these interests. The conversations got harder, though they were always interesting. Things I could have said when we met had no purchase in the period before he disappeared, not because he wouldn’t hear them but because they no longer made contact with the place from which he was reasoning. This was the point he was activated.
The word activated works because the other words don’t.
Manipulation is wrong because it implies a manipulator, and there wasn’t one. Brainwashing is the wrong word because brainwashing implies the person stops being themselves, and my friend stayed himself the whole way through. Coercion is the wrong word because nothing was being held over him.
What actually happened is that the inputs to his reasoning changed, slowly, over a period long enough that the change wasn’t visible from one week to the next. His reasoning kept doing what reasoning does. He was working correctly the entire time. The activation operated on the inputs to his reasoning rather than on his reasoning itself, which is why the activation looked, from inside I suspect, like clarity.
This is not targeted, this is systemic activation. An activation is what it feels like from where my friend was sitting. Systemic activation is what the situation looks like from above. The water he was swimming in, and the river that fed it, and the entire ecosystem that enables and profits from it. Naming it doesn’t solve it, but it lets me point at it, and from there start to dissect it.
This is not a planned activation. That is the spy version, the way the CIA works. A specific person being worked on by someone who is hiding what they’re really doing. The person being activated doesn’t realize that they are being manipulated to make a choice.
And it’s not a voluntary activation. That is like someone converting to a new religion, or, in my case as a teenager, signing up for the Army. In voluntary activation the structures are visible, and the inputs are visible, and the activated person is making a choice even if their friends are telling them it is a mistake.
This is a systemic activation. Nobody was hiding anything. Nobody was targeting my friend specifically. He was inside an environment built, by accident or by design, to produce activations at scale, and the environment he was in added a kind of gravity. There is no villain in this version of the story, which is part of why the story is hard to tell. Stories want villains. Stories want a moment when somebody decides to do harm. The shape of systemic activation refuses both. It’s a structural condition paid for by thousands of companies and distributed across a million content creators and a billion small recommender decisions, and the harm it produces is usually small, but in aggregate can be overwhelming even though no individual node in the system meant to produce it.
My friend was activated by hustle culture, and he saw something in GaryVee that intrigued him as an artist. We talked about it a lot, and I got interested in it as well. It’s a fascinating thing to look at aspects of business culture through an artistic lens! But maybe based on who he was, or what he was going through, or just his own obsessive practice as an artist, he kept chasing this idea and I think the platforms and the algos reinforced that he was on the right path. And then one day he was literally gone.
When a friend disappears you can’t help but try to untangle why. I am sure there is more to it, but I believe that this systemic activation played a part. And I’m frustrated I didn’t see anything more at the time.
There isn’t a single moment of before and then after. It exists as a gradient. Each step is rational from inside the previous one. From the outside the destination looks absurd. But as an artist, perhaps that is normal.
And from the inside every step was sensible given what the last step had already conceded. We talked about his approach to this stuff all the time. I helped him write applications to VaynerMedia. Nothing was hidden along the way. Each move was visible as I look back at it. Nobody is dragged down a gradient. And that’s why it’s “activation,” because at some level there is a conscious decision made.
I don’t know how far he’s gone since then but I know he is still walking because he shows up in the GaryVee comments every so often. People remain responsible for where they end up, and this isn’t a theory of innocence or being a victim. It’s a theory of how people end up somewhere they would never have agreed to go if the route had been a single jump instead of a thousand small ones.
The strange thing is how few cultural artifacts are pointed at this. There are essays about social media and the attention economy. There are diagnoses of polarization and the man-o-sphere. There are excellent books about persuasion and propaganda and the architecture of platforms. But this is too small to rise to those levels. It’s just a friend who made a choice to leave and never make contact again. Technically that is ‘allowed.”
And if we can’t have a story about it then it’s just one instance of one person making one choice. Maybe it’s totally normal! Maybe I’m wrong about what activated my friend. But I can look back and analyze how he went step by reasonable step, all the way down a gradient, and none of the individual steps were mistakes.
Analysis can name the pattern, but analysis cannot make you feel the impact. To recognize the impact you have to feel it. First the pain, then the analysis as you try to understand, and then a flicker of recognition as you kind of realize it was a slow and steady path. If I hadn’t spent time with him and shared some of his fascination I wouldn’t come to this conclusion. But I was inside the gradient with him and I know that our reasoning was intact, that we shared a lot of the same ideas, and I even encouraged him to keep going.
I can imagine trying to explain this in fiction easier than my own analysis. Fiction is better at the long-form rendering of a single mind under pressure. At teasing out a mystery so we care without the personal connection. I suspect we’re due for that story because I think we all know someone who has been “activated” to some degree. When it lands it will feel obvious in retrospect, the way a lot of cultural objects feel obvious as soon as they exist and impossible to imagine before they did. I wonder if I’d have been able to see it at the time. If my friend and I went to a movie at the Grove would it even be able to penetrate the slow and steady gradient? Could one of us have recognized it and had a conversation?
A few days ago Linktree sent me an automated email. Years back, my friend and I set up a Linktree for a project we were starting together. The email was the standard service-renewal language. Scheduled to expire unless someone logged in…
I sat with it for a while. I wouldn’t have remembered the Linktree existed if Linktree hadn’t reminded me. There’s a version of my friendship, trapped in the amber of that unfinished project, that is on a server somewhere, pointing at ideas that never happened, and kept alive by an occasional login to a service no one is using. And it’s all scheduled to disappear in a few days time.
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