It may seem strange that the DoD is telling Americans to distrust all official narratives in a bid to bolster its popularity. Yet we’ve entered the age of “psyop realism,” as Günseli Yalcinkaya writes in Dazed, in which we are all “targeted individuals under the shadowy control of the Influencing Machine.”

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A riff on Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism, “the widespread acceptance that there is no alternative to capitalism,” psyop realism affirms its conditions of possibility by acceding to the ontological crisis of our post-truth era, a time where the terms of reality are interminably up for grabs.

I love reading about this stuff.

Lujan popped up in my YouTube feed a few days ago and I was captivated immediately. In an appropriately meta fashion I first saw a video about her before then being recommended videos from her own channel. The original video was called "On The E-Girl Army Psyop Phenomenon." How could anyone not click on that?

There's obviously a lot to unpack about all this, so in true post-truth fashion I'll just share some of my initial reactions without trying to make sense of everything or frame it in terms of right and wrong:

• Lujan's a talented content creator and the aesthetics of her videos are peak internet culture/psyop realism.
• It's probably a good thing for more people to be thinking and talking about propaganda in general.
• I'm honestly impressed that the army allows and/or encourages her to do what she's doing. It seems risky but smart. Edgy, even. Not exactly the kind of thing one would usually expect from a large, conservative institution.
• I guess that means the psyop has worked on me.