🧠 Psychic Warheads: Elon Musk vs Sam Hyde

07 Feb, 2025

Disclaimer: This is a subset of the Psychic War Series, focused on messaging strategies in the post-truth era. Psychic Warheads are an analysis of a specific, usually more complex, strategy for replication. For background you may want to read 🧠 Psychic War and 🧠 Sociogenic Cancer

The best Psychic Warriors in the world are still operating on behalf of the far right, developing new cultural weaponry regularly. Here we'll analyse one such example by an extremely effective cultural signaller so you can recognise or deploy it yourself in the future. The message from Sam Hyde to Elon Musk.

But first, some context:

Signalling

Signalling is how you convey information to other people. This sounds simple, but the difficulty comes in signalling the correct information, absent any unwanted additional information. It is often the case that signalling is not a direct and honest explanation of the information one wants to provide, but a proxy war of subtleties built on the back of deep cultural understanding.

Let's take a simple example from dating dynamics: imagine you are a woman who wants to have casual, but enjoyable, sex on dating apps. You cannot simply say you want to have casual sex openly, because you'll be signalling availability that attracts people who will exploit you for sex with no regard for your enjoyment. If you openly said, "I only want to have casual sex that's good", you'll attract people who respond to the much louder signal of availability without regard for the enjoyability of the sex, people who think they'll provide enjoyable sex but won't, and people who don't care whether the sex is enjoyable for anyone else but are willing to be deceptive. All of these categories will be unwanted, and potentially even dangerous to women.

So what's the (imperfect) solution here? Using phrases like "connection before sex", "Not interested in one night stands" and "if the vibe is right". These signal to interested people that an amount of work has to be done beforehand, which raises the barrier to entry and countersignals availability, flushing out the undesired majority. People willing to invest time and energy into you are more likely to consider your needs in other domains, so you improve your filtering by signalling something other than your actual intent.

Signalling is something most people do without a second thought, possibly without any awareness at all.¹ It is a language that induces vibes in those around you, a proxy psychic warzone to avoid the unwanted negative consequences of direct engagement.

This is a fundamental battleground in The Psychic War. The creation and weaponisation of Signals may as well be The Psychic War. Cultural battle lines are drawn up around signalling memes like BLM, ACAB, Trans Sports, Drag Queen Story Hour, Woke etc. For this example we'll look at a recent battle between Elon Musk and the populist far right.

Background: Elon Musk vs The Far Right

Elon Musk has recently hopped on the bandwagon to join the populist far right, despite some obvious incompatibilities (More on New Money vs Old Money in British Aristopopulism coming soon). The first of these contradictions bubbling to the surface is Elon's endorsement of H1B visas, allowing middle-class skilled tech workers and engineers to enter the country, most notably from India. The populist far right has responded to this neoliberal excess with a furious backlash resulting in direct attacks from either side.

One such response from the far right came from Sam Hyde, an edgy, amoral comedian valorised by nihilistic denizens of edgy communities like 4chan. He's a genuinely talented absurdist comedian along the lines of Eric Andre, who unfortunately squandered their potential. He occasionally comes up for air when another news organisation mistakes him for the latest school shooter (an ongoing anti-MSM meme) or when more information about his illicit abusive relationship with a 16 year old comes to light. He's not a great dude and proud of it.

So we come to his message: A viral, 46 minute vaguely coherent ramble targeted at Elon Musk that offers a masterclass in signalling and online cultural manipulation. I want to hone in on a single technique specifically here (though for a more thorough, less precise read you can catch up on The Pondscum Podcast review here).

Recognition Bombing

In the Shadow Realm where the far right operates², there no longer exists a solid baseline reality, yet a common context is necessary for cultural signalling. If Shared Reality has broken down, then a new Shared Reality must be constructed, defined by the populist mob rather than credentialed elites. This is where the attention-economy of social media facilitates the creation of a Shadow Realm. Reality is driven by a combination of captive democracy and algorithmic virality, with the best performing memes becoming established convention.

These memes are simultaneously filtered by the cultural zeitgeist and become the new cultural zeitgeist, with the most narratively cathartic ideas established as Shadow Real. When you engage with someone deep in the Shadow Realm, perhaps a family member, you'll find that they will be surprised that some of their assumptions aren't your own. That these absolutely baseline facts of reality aren't also assumed by you.

Insidiously, this is often subconscious - the comfort content you consume for light entertainment becomes the content that programs you. Let's take a look at the first example here.

This is the first in a series of seemingly distracted, tangential moments in the rant. "110 IQ, which is the worst IQ to have". Funnily enough, while watching this on stream you can see me immediately agree with it, almost uncritically. Moments later I realize I'd fallen for the tactic: Recognition Bombing.

I vaguely recalled a very specific Twitter meme, which was a nightmare to find again³, and realized it had gone viral just a few weeks earlier on December 16th (Sam Hyde's message came out 31st December):

With a million views, this was seen by the core twitter usergroup that would also be watching and amplifying Sam Hyde's messaging here. The meme itself is extremely comforting to its target demographics. If you're in this group, will likely see yourself in the upper two categories of the graph, commiserated by the recognition that your depression and isolation is due to your genius, or having your sense of superiority reinforced if you are in the upper echelons. Importantly, it is now old enough in the internet memory to be almost impossible to find again, or for anyone to really reference it directly.

This signal from Sam Hyde, "110 IQ, which is the worst IQ to have" creates a recognition resonance that carries additional meaning from parts of the psyche uncritically programmed by these successful memes. That additional meaning being the understanding that the "110 IQ" class are exploiting normies, and as "Introverted Hell" or "Autist Hyporborean" geniuses we can see through the ruse. You have already tied the meme to a small and positive portion of your identity, so the recognition of the memes authenticity is euphoric. You experience a moment of connection, understanding and recognition from your peers.

Building your messaging atop these frequent moments of connective resonance is Recognition Bombing. Mainstream media has been doing this long enough that it's cynically lambasted by the very people now doing it more insidiously themselves. The old method of cameos and referencing emphasised the original object, the actor from Star Wars, the superhero from Marvel, the aesthetic of a simpler time. This new method obliterates the original, focusing instead on the psychic impression, the crater, it left behind. Gently tilting the ground towards the aims of the messaging.

Leveraging the existing psychic energy generated by memes is a highly effective method of changing hearts and minds. You are essentially using existing polls of the zeitgeist (the popularity of a given meme) to understand the target population, before speaking to them in a language that resonates with the aftermath of these pieces of media. Your messaging will be felt deeply and reverberate with the wasted energy generated by memetic comfort content.

How to Orchestrate a Recognition Bombing Campaign

The barrier to entry is high, you must be terminally online, unlikely to miss resonant and successful memes. Due to the temporality of this content, it is difficult to do this retroactively without expensive tools. You must also be attuned to the resonant frequency of those you want to manipulate. If you are a leftist aiming at other leftists, that is easy. If you are aiming to Recognition Bomb enemy territory, you must build a part of yourself that recognises and respects, at a deep level, the messaging and values of the enemy.⁴ As mentioned in previous articles, disgust is a severe blocker to understanding. You must love the enemy, otherwise why would you be trying to save them? Loving the enemy means understanding them deeply and feeling what they feel.

Log these high profile resonant memes with a mix of focused intuition and virality. Given that 90% of the content is produced by 1% of the people, do not dismiss less viral content if it is being consumed by the content creators. If resonance amplifiers in particular are excited about a meme, it will likely go further in other forms. Once logged, you have some semi-permanent Shadow Realm structures you can appeal to.

Finally, build your messaging with a firm narrative structure. The first act is always spent winning over the viewer/reader - do not introduce new and scary ideas until they are won over. Feed back to them what they already believe in a palatable format adjusted slightly where necessary to facilitate your actual messaging later on. You are morally obligated to be entertaining.

If you are more used to the quantitative style of essay-writing and argumentation, consider these resonant memes your new facts, studies and conventions. Treat them as if you were citing a source in a liberal text (though ideally avoid referring to them directly lest they be dismantled) and construct a new reality atop them. Take ideas formed in memes to their logical conclusions. You can gently bend the arc of an idea towards any conclusion, given enough space and time. Purchase space and time with entertainment and resonant messaging, spend it on novel ideas. Do not go into debt, respect your real ability to accumulate time and space. If you aren't naturally entertaining, you need to be more succinct, or rely more heavily on memes to compensate.

I would advise against Recognition Bombing in friendly territory. Fly Safe!

Footnotes