On Psyop Realism

This article charts the emergence of a “psyop-realist” aesthetic in online culture and art. Embodying the feeling of unreality of the pandemic years, psyop realism speaks to new anxieties of influence brought about by the convergence of military psyops, mis- and disinformation, and behavioral manipulation as a paradigmatic condition of being “terminally online.” The article first turns to Trevor Paglen's recent work on psyops, tracing what he sees as a slippage from surveillance into psyop capitalism. It then offers a close reading of various online psyop-realist memes as a vernacular media critique of the growing zones of indistinction between commercial, political, and military forms of personal and mass targeting. Psyop realism, the article shows, envisions the immanentization and universalization of the target as the psychological locus of the online subject and the platform as its allotted theatre of operations. Extending and applying the logic of psychological operations to social media, psyop realism oscillates between the literal and the figural, creating an ambivalence that, far from needing to be resolved, speaks to the very condition of datafied experience today.