The War of Words - Part 3: The STEPPS of Automated Influence

The Scarcest Resource: Commodifying Attention and Volition

Attention is the most fiercely contested resource in the modern age, continually harvested at industrial scale and converted into profit. This ongoing appropriation transforms every waking moment into a zone of potential commercial exploitation, ensuring that few times or spaces remain uncultivated by those seeking to resell human awareness. To successfully colonize this most personal of resources, influence professionals have developed precise, scalable methods for spreading ideas and modifying behavior, shifting their focus from broad persuasion to targeted, automated coercion that operates just beyond the threshold of conscious thought.

The STEPPS Algorithm: Engineering Contagion and Control

The central thesis is that ideas spread through predictable, measurable psychological triggers (STEPPS), allowing for the systematic weaponization of social influence by architectures seeking guaranteed behavioral outcomes and the usurpation of individual autonomy.

From Viral Spark to Behavioral Control

Foundation & Mechanism: The Psychology of Sharing

The diffusion of ideas, products, and behaviors through a population operates via predictable pathways, summarized by six principles: Social Currency, Triggers, Emotion, Public, Practical Value, and Stories. Contagiousness is not random; it is engineered by ensuring that content provides quantifiable incentives for sharing. For example, content must appeal to high-arousal emotions (like awe or anger, not sadness) to induce activation and sharing. Crucially, ideas must be frequently linked to commonplace environmental cues, or Triggers, to remain accessible and top of mind. By harnessing these principles, influence practitioners leverage the human tendency toward unthinking compliance, using subtle cues to activate behavioral tapes that eliminate cognitive effort. This predictability allows for the mass capture of attention for resale.

The Crucible of Context: Total Certainty via Big Other

The advent of massive computational architectures has enabled the weaponization of social influence, transforming predictability into control. Systems like Big Other (the ubiquitous computational apparatus) now enforce instrumentarian power, which is defined by the instrumentation and instrumentalization of behavior for modification and control. The ultimate competitive goal for surveillance capitalists is not just prediction, but achieving guaranteed outcomes by eliminating uncertainty entirely. This is achieved through economies of action, which deploy behavioral modification techniques—tuning, herding, and conditioning—to intervene directly in the real world. Tuning, which often uses Richard Thaler’s nudges, subtly shapes behavior toward outcomes that accrue to the choice architect’s interest. Herding relies on creating coercive social pressure by controlling the individual’s immediate context, ensuring that behavior approximates certainty.

Cascade of Effects: Exiling the Will to Will

The use of automated behavior modification results in the usurpation of individual autonomy, as the locus of control over the future tense shifts from “I will” to “You will”. The efficacy of these systems depends on bypassing human consciousness, which is considered friction because awareness empowers the ability to self-regulate and resist external coercion. When people are uncertain, they rely heavily on the actions of others—social proof—to guide their own behavior. This is weaponized through methods like Facebook’s massive scale social experiments, which exploit peer dynamics to predictably actuate behaviors like voting or emotional expression without users’ awareness. This process creates heteronomy (regulation by others), fundamentally eroding the capacity for self-authored choice. The final, existential cost of this pervasive capture is the destruction of the right to the future tense—the human capacity to make and keep promises in the face of uncertainty.

The Uncontested Tyranny of the Predictable

The relentless drive toward predictable and monetizable outcomes poses an unprecedented threat by substituting certainty for society. When technology dictates that chaos must be eliminated for profit, the messy, vital processes of human dialogue, conflict, trust, and free will are deemed unnecessary. This continuous erosion of individual sovereignty is particularly dangerous because silence is the surest way to let the other side shape and activate their associations. If we permit the weaponization of social influence to proceed unchallenged, the concepts of freedom and individual dignity become vestigial, resulting in a state of perpetual helplessness where one is an organism among organisms, managed remotely for someone else’s financial gain.