Digital Warriors - The next MK Ultra?

(Douglas Rushkoff, the author of Life Inc., is a guest blogger.)
I've been working on a year-long PBS Frontline project called Digital Nation, which will culminate as a one-hour tv documentary next January. We're looking a whole lot of subjects, all from the perspective of how what it means to be human is changing as we migrate further into the digital realm (if that metaphor even holds). We're posting as much video as possible as we go.

The above piece about the "infantry immersion trainer" looks at the integration of virtual simulations into military training, as well as for treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder after tours of duty. The weird part for me - well, the two weird parts - were that this training was also developed, in part, to "desensitize" soldiers to certain aspects of war. They say it is to lessen the effects and reduce post-traumatic stress. But all of the psychologists I've spoken with since then say it doesn't work like that - that the stress simulations just compound the total stress. And, second, that I had nightmares for a good week after all this - less from the shooting of civilians part than the little driving simulation, which reminded me of a fatal car crash back in 1985.

I guess the lesson for me was that the resolution of the simulation is a lot less important than the intention and mindset with which one approaches the experience. As with any hallucinatory experience, set and setting are everything.

• [Anonymous]

  I thought stress inoculation was pretty widely accepted science. For example, there’s the SERE program. Can we get a credible source to back up “all of the psychologists I’ve spoken with since then” who say that it doesn’t work?

• [Ernunnos]

  This is just a whole-room version of the FATS simulators that police academies have been using for years. The first one I ever used actually ran pre-filmed scenarios off of a laser disk. Sometimes a suspect pulls out a gun, sometimes a wallet. Now it’s in hi-def and dynamically generated. But the goal is the same: To practice the skills needed to avoid harming innocents.

  I’m very thankful that our military and law enforcement have those tools.

  If you really think the goal is to create unfeeling killers, then be afraid, be very, very afraid. Because most of the cops you encounter (at least in larger cities that can afford the hardware) will have been through training very similar to this.

• [Anonymous]

  “The S3 Plan does not stand for Solid Snake Simulation. What it does stand for is Selection for Societal Sanity”

• [mkultra]

  Meh.

  There’s only one of me, and one is enough.

• [Brainspore]

  Of course they’re going to say it’s for reducing PTSD. They can’t get very good PR with “creating an army of unfeeling killing machines.”

• [cycle23]

  http://www.myspace.com/themkultraexperiment

• [rushkoff]

  Yeah, you have a point there Brainspore. I am consistently amazed by how consistently amazed I get.

• [Ernunnos]

  So that explains the shooting of innocent train passengers and the tasing of wizards, six year olds and paraplegics.

  If it does, police shootings should be much more widespread. So ordinary they don’t even make the news or provoke outrage.

  You might have a point about tasing though. Since tasers are considered less-than-lethal they aren’t subject to the same level of shoot-no-shoot training. Instituting the same type of training for tasers would probably reduce those incidents as well.

• [Pantograph]

  If you really think the goal is to create unfeeling killers, then be afraid, be very, very afraid. Because most of the cops you encounter (at least in larger cities that can afford the hardware) will have been through training very similar to this.

  So that explains the shooting of innocent train passengers and the tasing of wizards, six year olds and paraplegics.

• [Anonymous]

  I’ve watched and re-watched [and seeded generously] The Persuaders and The Merchants of Cool and I can’t wait to see your next explorations of the meta worlds we wander about in!
  Also, according to an uncited note in your Wikipedia entry, you played the keyboard for a lineup of Psychic TV, founded by Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson, who were just in the last BBVideo episode back in 2003? Neat!

• [GregLondon]

  Take a random person off the street, give them a gun, put them into urban combat, have them be part of a team that has to raid a room with civilians and combatants, and a lot of them will die and a lot of them will kill innocent civilians before they get killed.

  There’s a very strange assumption that a lot of people have that they think they can pick up a gun and will be a good fighter in a war. It’s the hollywood version of reality, the good guys will somehow win and the bad guys will magically die.

  And it doesn’t work that way.

  You need to train over and over again for combat. Over and over again. Over and over again. Many people off the street will hesitate to pull the trigger and will end up getting killed. Many will shoot anything that moves. Watch the video again and watch the marine who says he screwed up and shot a civilian. He’s not happy about it, but he’s glad it’s a simulation.

  If that had been his first real room entry, a real civilian would have been dead, and he’d probably developing some totally messed up coping mechanism.

  I’m going to take a wild guess here and say that the “They say it is to lessen the effects and reduce post-traumatic stress” was cherry picked from a brochure of information describing what virtual training does. You think if that marine had killed a real civilian that he wouldn’t get PTSD? I say he’d be having nightmares about it for the rest of his life. If this training ends up making him NOT shooting a civilian in a similar situation, then I say he won’t have PTSD, and it was because the training prepared him for it. And that means, yeah, it reduces PTSD.

• [Ratdog]

  I wonder if they are ever assigned to protect the Xeni Avatar.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqnzFoT74DY