This workshop examines the growing convergence of militaristic and occult ways of making sense of everyday digital experience and inhabiting platforms as experimental and opaque sites of various modalities of human and algorithmic ‘influence’ steering thoughts and behaviors, and the anxieties they give rise to. How is online engagement figured as essentially a site of ‘psychic warfare’ in the sense of a continuous information ‘front’ without end or limit, but also in the more techno-occult, cyberdelic sense as remotely acting on (expanding, controlling) the mind? The workshop will explore how these psychic warfare imaginaries manifest in contemporary digital culture, but also at the longer historical entanglements between war, media, and the occult. In The Birth of Psychological War: Propaganda, Espionage, and Military Violence from WWII to the Vietnam War (2023), Jeffrey Whyte offers a Foucauldian genealogy of psychological warfare, tracing its emergence and evolution from WW2 onward. Sophie Publig recently published (with Mikkel Rørbo) a book on Digital Occultism (2026) where they explore the countercultural and esoteric roots of PSYOPS, ‘psyberwar’ and other forms of ‘reality warfare’.

Schedule:

13:00    Thematic introduction by Daniël de Zeeuw
13:15    Talk by Jeffrey Whyte on psychological warfare
14:00    Q&A
14:15    Break
14:45    Talk by Sophie Publig on digital occultism
15:30    Q&A
15:45    Panel discussion
16:30    End

Jeffrey Whyte (University of Lancaster)

Occult Imaginaries of Psychological War

While political imaginations of ‘psychological warfare’ often draw on high modern ideals of clinical, scientific, and technical acumen, its history remains shot through with perennial invocations of magic, occult power, and mystical appeals. This talk attends to this ‘occult history’ of psychological war, treating it not as a vestige of pre-modern superstition, but as integral to modern constructions of psychological war as both a guarantor of, and risk to, national security. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s analysis of modern governmentality’s genealogical roots in the Christian pastorate, this talk considers psychological war as an outgrowth of ‘pastoral power’ that intervenes simultaneously at the scales of both population and the individual. I pay specific attention to how the individual is constructed as a ‘mystical’ object subject to spiritual epiphany, demonic possession, and baptismal purification. Throughout, I show how psychological warfare enrols the individual as a spiritual object into the logic of national security. I consider especially the later Foucault’s concept of ‘alethurgy’, a term he uses to describe ‘manifestations of truth’ in excess of governmental savoir-faire. This talk concludes that, independent of psychological war’s governmental in/efficacy, its popular construction as a personal, intimate, and spiritual battleground has helped produce geopolitical imaginations in which the individual becomes war’s ‘double subject’, what Foucault (2014, 81) describes as the condition of “being subject in a relation of power and a subject through which, for which, and regarding which the truth is manifested.”

Sophie Publig and Mikkel Rørbo (University of Applied Arts Vienna)

Digital Occultism and the Weaponization of Reality

We have entered the psyberwar condition, marked by the logics of psychological warfare becoming embedded within the ordinary infrastructures of digital culture. Beginning with twentieth-century psychological operations and their ambition to intervene in the conditions under which belief itself becomes possible, we trace a genealogy through countercultural experiments in reality-hacking, occult practices, conspiracy cultures and contemporary platform environments. Under conditions of algorithmic curation, engagement optimisation and information saturation, the destabilisation of shared reality increasingly emerges through the routine operation of digital systems themselves.

Within this environment, occult and militaristic imaginaries begin to converge. Algorithms appear as hidden agents, feeds become sites of revelation and mass manipulation, and online participation is experienced through the language of brainwashing, psyops, egregores, reality tunnels and psychic warfare. These imaginaries register a broader transformation in how agency, influence and belief are understood under platform capitalism. Drawing on Digital Occultism, the lecture considers how fictions, desires and collective beliefs acquire material force through networked feedback loops, and how the resulting struggle over reality unfolds across military doctrine, technological infrastructure, political mobilisation and everyday digital experience.

ECs, assignments and workload calculation (NB: one EC indicatively corresponds to 28 hours of work)

1EC: participants are required to read the following texts that are sent out two weeks beforehand. Based on the texts and the talks, they prepare at least one question for the presenters. They also write a short reflection (600-800 words) on the event which they submit via email.

• Whyte, Jeffrey. 2023. “Conclusion” in The Birth of Psychological War: Propaganda, Espionage, and Military Violence from WWII to the Vietnam War. British Academy Monographs. Published for the British Academy by Oxford University Press.
• Publig, Sophie, and Mikkel Rørbo, eds. 2026. Digital Occultism. Aksioma. https://aksioma.org/digital-occultism.
• De Zeeuw, Daniël, Clare Birchall, and Peter Knight. 2025. “On Psyop Realism.” Cultural Politics 21 (2): 240–57. https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-11720272.