Infinite Paranoia

Why does a new U.S. military recruiting video look like it was directed by Alex Jones on a bad trip?

A screenshot from a new recruiting video by the Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group

On May 2, 2022, the U.S. Army’s Fourth Psychological Operations Group posted an unsettling recruitment video titled “Ghosts in the Machine” to YouTube and Twitter. Departing from the optimism of traditional Army recruitment material, this three-and-a-half-minute video—essentially an experimental short film—attempts to persuade viewers that we live in a time of pervasive darkness and justified paranoia.

Rain and thunder play ominously on the ad’s soundtrack, followed by an eerie whistling motif and nightmarish lyrics about “footsteps in the night” and “wolves hiding nearby.” An old TV shows a black-and-white cartoon of a clown dancing. We hear a cacophony of news reports over a montage of empty city streets, a conductor raising his arms, a chess match in progress, the Chinese army on the march, soldiers about to storm a house, desolate underground subway tunnels, and a foggy bank of woods where a pendant decorated with a ghost hangs on a string from a scraggly bush. A legend on-screen asks, “Have you ever wondered who’s pulling the strings?” Further messages warn of “a world at war” and “a threat [rising] in the east” before claiming, “You’ll find us in the dark.” Fingers scroll a screen as the ad announces, “All the world’s a stage.” A midcentury tape reel explains that psychological warfare targets “not the body, but the mind of the enemy.” As the video builds to its climax, an actor paints his face clown-white, and mysterious masked figures emerge from the misty forest where we first saw the ghost pendant. We rejoin the old cartoon: A witch turns the dancing clown into a ghost. Meanwhile, the TV playing the cartoon catches fire. “We are everywhere,” the screen threatens as martial drumming swells.

Uncle Sam, once a sturdy and optimistic figure, has adopted the aesthetic of acid-taking conspiracy theorists as the uniform of a new global information war.

According to the Army website, the PSYOP Group’s mission is “to persuade and influence foreign allies and enemies in support of U.S. Army objectives.” But “Ghosts in the Machine” is a startling tonal departure from traditional Army recruitment advertising, which has tended to appeal to American optimism and individualism.

Despite the necessarily hierarchical and collective character of military life, Army ads used to promise that the institution would deliver the self-actualization and social mobility prized in the United States. The slogans of the major campaigns from the 1980s through the 2010s—“Be All That You Can Be,” “An Army of One,” “What’s Your Warrior?”—sell the idea that soldiers aren’t cogs in the state’s vast war machine but individuals working out their own nature and destiny. The commercials also emphasized that recruits acquire educational opportunities and learn profitable skills, such as languages and computer science, that they can carry with them into the private sector and improve their economic standing.

Even Army advertising’s controversial recent turn toward identity politics upholds these traditional themes. “The Calling,” an anime-style series of ads from 2021 highlighting the Army’s diversity, featured a Haitian American soldier’s immigrant experience, a Latina soldier’s familial mental-health struggles, and a soldier named Emma, who, we’re told, was “raised by two moms.” This campaign provoked outrage in right-wing circles—Sen. Ted Cruz, for example, tweeted his skepticism about “a woke, emasculated military”—but the ads still stress self-reliance and social mobility: Emma leaves her mothers’ nest for the Army in search of what she calls “my own adventures, my own challenge.” Beneath the superficial diversification, the themes of individualism and economic advancement remain the same.

“Ghosts in the Machine,” by contrast, swamps the optimistic individual in a fever of paranoia and illusion. In theory, just as “The Calling” ads were intended to invite members of underrepresented groups to the Army, “Ghosts in the Machine” might beckon internet-savvy and aesthetics-minded recruits into the PSYOP Group by evoking Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending movies, Todd Phillips’ downbeat Joker, or A24 art-house horror cinema. But the ad’s obscure symbolism and spooky imagery seems almost calculated to elicit less innocent explanations.

Colonel Chris Stangle, the commander of the PSYOP Group, told the military journal Task & Purpose “that the video was created in-house, both as a recruitment effort but also to literally show people what they can do.” In other words, the video itself is a psychological operation aimed not at “foreign allies and enemies” but at the American public, or at least the digital public of social media, a public primed for virality, controversy, and conspiracy. Whether it was deliberately designed to alarm and mislead this audience, as psyops often are when unleashed on the enemy, it’s hard to dismiss the sense of creeping dread the video creates—an underspecified dread at that, one tailored to multiple political factions, from those who fear Russian and Chinese interference in our politics to those wary of the U.S. government itself.

Accepting the ad’s tacit invitation to paranoia, we might ask ourselves, What could be the Army’s goal in inflaming an already dangerously mistrustful and fractious populace with horror-movie ghost clowns and a menacing insinuation like “we are everywhere”?

The revelation that the Department of Homeland Security’s recently disbanded Disinformation Governance Board was slated to be led by a serial spreader of falsehoods, who whitewashed Ukrainian Nazi battalions as friendly freedom fighters and promoted the fabricated Steele dossier, proves that state actors have an interest in the dissemination of self-serving lies. But as our economic and political situation deteriorates, state actors may also want to create an atmosphere of universal suspicion to keep the public disorganized and disempowered.

A government that fears its citizens may prefer them to jump at shadows and be obsessed with decoding ambiguous messages rather than optimistic about becoming all that they can be. And if this government can no longer credibly guarantee social mobility, it may stop promising it and start pointing the finger at mysterious puppet masters and threats in the East instead. Too paranoid? To adapt a famous Trump-era liberal slogan about state cruelty … the paranoia may be the point.