Multilevel Address After AI: Captology, Magic, and Collective Subjectivation

I. Layered address and the neurotechnic antagonism. Multilevel persuasion and its accelerating technological conditions · source-forward
II. Dissident neurotechnics: the magical–technological persona. A practice of perception, state-navigation, and ontological construction · concept-forward
III. Collective subjectivation. Guattari, subjectivity across scales, and the social form of the practice · source-forward

I. Layered address and the neurotechnic antagonism

I / The problem · descriptive research

One encounter says something to reflective consciousness while producing other effects through affect, gesture, association, habit, social belonging, and technical feedback. The agents speaking through that encounter are often multiple.

This is the terrain of the neurotechnic antagonism: the cognitive sovereignty of individuals and communities against covert and coercive neuromodulation. Behavioral design, persuasive technology, and captology have built a neuroscience of capture at the scale of whole populations (The Open Machine, The Mauve Zone Project).

Suggestion beneath instruction: Fortune’s employer

Initial scene · Dion Fortune

Discursive surface: ordinary verbal communication between employer and employee.
Another address: Fortune describes suggestion directed toward the subconscious through manner, atmosphere, and psychological influence.
Problem: a coherent conversation coexists with differently registered pressures or meanings.

Fortune writes from occult practice and autobiography. See the historical source note.

Contemporary scene · the social feed

Political actor: wants to shift a belief or a vote.
Platform: ranks encounters according to its own performance objectives.
Social field: likes, comments and status signals make norms and affiliations visible.
User–interface loop: repetition and gesture shape attention and habit.

Different purposes converge within the same post. Some effects are strategically designed; others emerge from platform optimization and social learning.

The guiding problem: How do we become capable of discerning, experiencing, and acting among the several registers through which a person is simultaneously addressed?

Conversational AI and the next phase of captology

Social platforms have accumulated sophisticated techniques of engagement optimization; conversational AI adds individually adaptive dialogue. Their convergence opens another intensive phase of captology and multilevel persuasion, and the next front of the neurotechnic antagonism.

Development	Technical form	Significance
Already developed Platform captology	Ranking, recommendation, metrics, repetition, autoplay, feedback from aggregate behavior.	Influence enters through the arrangement, frequency, and rewards of exposure.
Already demonstrated LLM persuasion	Conversation and generated arguments shift political preferences in experiments.	Current measured effects depend largely on evidence and argument.
Emerging convergence Research horizon	Persistent personalization, memory, voice, image, agents, adaptive interface and behavioral feedback.	Adjustment of address across several psychological and semiotic registers within the same ongoing relationship.

Evidence: Lin et al., Nature (2025) found conversational AI effects on candidate preference exceeding those typically observed from video advertisements, with the studied models relying largely on relevant facts and evidence. Bai et al., Nature Communications (2025) found LLM-written political messages persuasive across several policy issues. Conversational persuasiveness of GPT-4 (2025) examines the role of personalization.

Empirically informed avenues of influence, each addressed to a different register.

Layer addressed	What the user encounters	Pre-reflective translation	Platform affordance	Relevant empirical mechanism
Reflective / propositional	“Candidate X supports policy Y.”	An explicit claim that can be evaluated, accepted, rejected, or argued with.	Caption, thread, link, long-form post.	Reasoning, belief updating, source evaluation.
Associative / imagistic	Face repeatedly paired with ominous music, ridicule, luxury, illness, flags, crowds, etc.	face → threat symbol → prestige object → disgust	Video editing, thumbnails, music, juxtaposition, repeated visual motifs.	Evaluative conditioning; affective priming; imagery effects.
Affiliative / social	“Your people” approve, mock, condemn, or imitate.	approval → affiliation disapproval → social cost many peers → norm	Likes, reposts, comments, follower graphs, visible consensus.	Social reinforcement; conformity; norm learning.
Affective / valence	Anger, fear, disgust, tenderness, erotic charge, humor, awe.	stimulus → approach / avoid topic → arousal	High-arousal content, outrage clips, emotionally optimized headlines.	Affective learning; emotional contagion; salience capture.
Status / prestige	High counts, viral posts, blue checks, celebrity amplification.	many endorsements → important status → worth attending to	Follower counts, view counts, trending indicators, ranking.	Social proof; prestige bias; heuristic credibility judgments.
Familiarity / repetition	The same phrase, claim, face, meme, or frame reappears.	familiar → fluent fluent → somewhat more plausible	Recommendation loops, reposts, quote-posts, cross-platform repetition.	Illusory-truth effect; processing fluency.
Threat / coalition	Enemy images, humiliations, boundary violations, “us vs. them” framing.	ingroup / outgroup safe / dangerous ally / rival	Polarized clustering, identity labels, quote-dunks, moralized language.	Coalitional cognition; norm perception; moral-emotional diffusion.
Sensorimotor / reward	Swipe, novelty, pause, reward, swipe again.	gesture → possible reward uncertainty → continue seeking	Infinite scroll, autoplay, pull-to-refresh, intermittent novelty.	Reinforcement learning; reward maximization; habit formation.

Comparative models of multilevel communication

Each tradition below supplies a model of address on more than one level; the third column applies it to the present case.

Thinker / tradition	Established concept	Specific relevance to layered address	Reading
Gregory Bateson Cybernetics · 1955	Metacommunication Messages about the frame and relationship of communication; logical levels.	One utterance conveys a proposition and signals how the utterance is to be taken. In a workplace encounter, authority and the interpretation of the exchange are communicated alongside the spoken instruction.	A Theory of Play and Fantasy (1955) The double bind is the special case in which the levels conflict.
Watzlawick, Beavin & Jackson Pragmatics · 1967	Content / relationship Digital / analogic communication.	The verbal claim and the relational signals carried by tone, pacing, gesture, and interactional context can differ.	Pragmatics of Human Communication (1967) Their “digital/analogic” distinction concerns communicative form; it differs from today's digital/analog media terminology.
Eric Berne Transactional analysis · 1964	Ulterior transaction Overt social and covert psychological exchanges; Parent / Adult / Child ego states.	A boss ostensibly gives an Adult-to-Adult instruction while addressing another ego state through challenge, humiliation, approval, or implied status. In an angular transaction, three ego states are involved.	Games People Play (1964)
Milton Erickson & Ernest Rossi Clinical hypnosis · 1976	Two-level communication Indirect suggestion; voice dynamics, associations, and contextual cues.	A therapeutic story carries an ordinary narrative while encouraging distinct memories, sensations, or action tendencies. The closest clinical counterpart to Fortune's description of suggestion.	Two Level Communication and the Microdynamics of Trance and Suggestion (1976)
Gurdjieff / P. D. Ouspensky Fourth Way · 20th century	Four centers Intellectual, emotional, moving, instinctive; subdivisions by attention.	A statement is grasped intellectually, felt emotionally, and accompanied by a motor tendency or instinctive response. Centers operate simultaneously and discordantly.	Ouspensky, The Study of Attention and the Centres
C. G. Jung Analytical psychology	Autonomous / affect-toned complexes Relatively independent constellations of memory, association, and affect.	A remark activates an affective complex with its own habitual interpretations and reactions, despite reflective disagreement.	IAAP: The Theory of Complexes
Richard Schwartz / IFS Parts-based psychotherapy	Parts and protectors Managers, firefighters, exiles; interactions among parts and Self.	A fearful or protective part responds to a stimulus that the analytical person explicitly dismisses. Different parts seek incompatible outcomes from the same encounter.	IFS Institute: Model Outline
Annie Besant / Theosophy Western esotericism · 1890s–1900s	Vehicles of consciousness Physical/etheric, astral, mental, causal bodies.	Different bodies are assigned different modes of sensation, desire, thought, and spiritual experience; reception is distributed across planes.	C. W. Leadbeater, Man Visible and Invisible (1903) · Besant, Man and His Bodies
Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufism Islamic mystical practice	Laṭāʾif Qalb, rūḥ, sirr, khafī, akhfā: differentiated subtle faculties.	A plurality of spiritual faculties is cultivated through distinct practices of attention and reception, giving a plural account of the inner addressee.	Scholarly account of Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi laṭāʾif (2022) The faculties vary across Sufi lineages.
Erving Goffman Sociolinguistics · 1981	Footing / production format Animator (utters), author (composes), principal (position represented).	A political account posts material written by one actor while speaking on behalf of another organization or campaign. Apparent speaker and responsible agency diverge.	Forms of Talk: “Footing” (1981)
François Cooren Constitutive communication · 2012	Ventriloquism People and texts make institutions, norms, objects, and interests “speak” in interaction.	A platform post enacts several agencies: an individual writer, an organization, an interface, or a policy carried by its communicative arrangement.	Communication Theory at the Center (2012) Agency and representation are treated relationally.
Louis Althusser Ideology critique · 1970	Interpellation An ideological “hail” constitutes individuals as recognizable subjects.	A post positions its reader as a citizen, victim, patriot, consumer, or threatened group member. Recognition of the address participates in reproduction of that role.	Stanford Encyclopedia: Theory of Ideology
Brian Massumi Affect / micropolitics · 2008–15	Microperception / affective attunement Interruptive cues organize bodily preparedness and perception-in-the-making.	A disturbing image orients an atmosphere of vigilance or threat even when the accompanying claim is rejected. Attunement yields divergent reactions.	Of Microperception and Micropolitics (2008) · Parables for the Virtual

Occult, evolutionary and literary genealogies

Source	Distinct proposition	Reading
Dion Fortune Occult psychology	In Psychic Self-Defense, pre-verbal imagery and suggestion are treated as means of reaching subconscious experience. The Machinery of the Mind distinguishes focal, fringe, foreconscious, subconscious and automatic processes.	The Machinery of the Mind (1922) · Psychic Self-Defense
Andrew P. Smith Evolutionary dimensionality	Earlier dimensions of discrimination persist within more complex experience: a resource for thinking about nested modes of reception.	Overview · Dimensional table
Cormac McCarthy The Kekulé problem	Layered address in the opposite direction: opaque cognition transforms a problem and returns an image, metaphor or compressed insight to awareness.	The Kekulé Problem · Follow-up

Two directions of address: into non-discursive processes, and back out again, as transformation and return into reflective awareness. The research below supports particular mechanisms of learning, imagery and incubation.

Empirical literature

Mechanism	Study	Finding / scope
Hypnosis / suggestion	Oakley & Halligan · 2013	Suggestion can alter perceived pain, action, volition and attention under particular experimental conditions.
Social reward	Lindström et al. · 2021	Social reinforcement shapes later posting behavior; observational and experimental results.
Evaluative conditioning	Moran, Nudler & Bar-Anan · 2023	Review of changes in evaluation following repeated affective pairings; mechanisms and awareness remain debated.
Evaluative conditioning	Moran, Krava & Shilat · 2025	Meta-analysis: small overall intervention effects; immediate changes exceed delayed changes.
Repetition / truth	Pennycook, Cannon & Rand · 2018	A prior encounter with a false headline can increase its later perceived accuracy.
Moral-emotional diffusion	Brady et al. · 2017	Moral-emotional language predicts circulation within ideological networks.
Outrage learning	Brady et al. · 2021	Feedback and perceived norms can influence later outrage expression.
Perceived hostility	Brady et al. · 2023	Readers may overperceive outrage and inflate estimates of intergroup antagonism.
Sleep onset / insight	Lacaux et al. · 2021	In a particular task, brief N1 sleep was associated with improved insight into a hidden rule.
Targeted dream incubation	Horowitz et al. · 2023	Dream incorporation of prompted themes at sleep onset was linked to creative performance.

Adjacent research programs

Semantic information, exbodiment, learning, abstraction

Further line	Source	Use for the inquiry
Semantic information	Kolchinsky & Wolpert	Causal importance of correlations for a system’s persistence, independent of propositional language.
Dissociable learning	Mazzoni & Krakauer	Implicit adaptation can diverge from explicit motor strategy.
Learning mechanisms	Krakauer et al.	Explicit, implicit and reinforcement-related processes in motor learning.
Abstraction / analogy	Melanie Mitchell	Cognitive use of relational structure and abstract representations.
Real patterns	Santa Fe Institute	On descriptive levels and patterns in cognition and science.
Exbodiment	David Krakauer	External cognitive artifacts and the reorganization of individual competence.
Physical cognitive artifacts	Research preprint	Human–tool couplings and the complexity of cognitive artifacts.
Competitive / complementary tools	Research preprint	Relations among tools, environment and cognitive systems.
Foundations of intelligence	Santa Fe Institute	Open program on intelligence across biological, social and artificial systems.

Two archives of evidence. The laboratory literatures (behavioral reinforcement, repetition effects, evaluative conditioning, suggestion under experimental conditions, social norm learning) measure what institutional science is equipped to measure. The esoteric and therapeutic traditions (Fortune, the Fourth Way, theosophy, the laṭāʾif, IFS) are practitioner archives: techniques refined and repeated across generations outside institutional sanction, in the manner of Erowid. Both are read here as working knowledge of the same terrain.

Further bibliography

II. Dissident neurotechnics: the magical–technological persona

II / The response · conceptual portrait

The counterweight to captology is an old lineage of dissident neurotechnics: magickal and psychedelic techniques of auto-neuromodulation that grant write access to the mind’s deep structures (The Open Machine, The Mauve Zone Project). Its practitioner is the magical–technological persona: a person who cultivates the sensitivity to feel several modes of address, the agility to move among them, and the craft to build conduits through which unfamiliar relations become perceptible and actionable.

The magical and the technological meet here as practical arts: training attention and embodiment; developing symbolic and material interfaces; experimenting with how experience can be entered, sustained, translated, and shared.

Six faculties of the persona

Discernment. Recognize when an utterance is affecting thought, mood, identification, bodily readiness, or social belonging in different ways.
State-navigation. Develop voluntary access to differing qualities of attention, imagination, feeling and somatic intensity, with means of return and integration.
Receptivity. Allow unfamiliar impressions and autonomous tendencies to appear before forcing them into explanation or control.
Disidentification. Enter an affect or persona with sufficient intensity to know its character, and retain the capacity to release it.
Artifice. Compose symbols, ritual scores, movements, objects, and technical environments that make particular forms of experience revisitable.
Reciprocity. Remain capable of being changed by encounters with persons, environments, material systems and other agencies.

Intensive states as passages between semiotic regimes

An intensive state loosens familiar routes of attention and association. A practiced passage carries material between systems that otherwise speak in different formats.

Encounter / intensity. Dream, absorption, improvisation, ritual focus, affective rupture, unfamiliar bodily sensation.
Translation. Image becomes gesture; gesture becomes sound; affect becomes a symbolic figure; a relation becomes an interactive rule.
Stabilization / return. A repeatable score, object, interface or shared practice offers a path back toward the altered relation.

Practitioners call these states gnosis, divided into inhibitory (meditation, death posture, fasting, gazing) and excitatory (sex, rage, ecstatic dance, glossolalia). If daily life depends on deep structures of assumption that establish and animate behavior, gnosis is the condition under which those structures become writable. Repeated practice makes the rewriting durable.

Types of conduit

Passage	Conduit	Register
Dream → gesture	A movement remembered from a dream becomes a waking choreography; the body renews experiential associations and leaves their interpretation open.	Embodied practice
Affect → symbol	A difficult or unfamiliar intensity finds an image, name, mask, talisman, or recurring form through which it can be approached.	Imaginal / material
Experience → ritual	An encounter is articulated into gestures, words, space, rhythm, witnesses and repetition; later encounters reshape the rite.	Temporal / social
Signal → interface	Sensing, sound, light, language models or interactive media make otherwise obscure patterns available for joint attention and response.	Technological / ecological

The decisive possibility is ontological construction: practices and artifacts through which a mode of relation acquires continuity, specificity and practical consequences within a life.

The conduits hold in psychological, phenomenological and occult realist terms alike; their measure is practical consequence. The magician's agency remains situated, revisable and exposed to otherness.

Two practitioners:

1 · Chumbley. The Golden Chain and the Lonely Road describes oneiric initiation and the development of rites from dream experience, and treats such encounters as involving independent spiritual agency. Primary text.

2 · Alli. His paratheatrical No-Form practice cultivates receptivity, engagement and release; his somatic dreamwork transforms remembered dream movement into waking choreography. No-Form · Dreaming rituals · The Eight-Circuit Brain: Navigational Strategies for the Energetic Body (2009).

III. Collective subjectivation

III / The opening · Guattarian intervention

The faculties of the magical–technological persona have consequences beyond the individual. Every practice of perception involves bodies, languages, instruments, environments and others, and becomes a shared capacity when practiced in common.

Guattari on the production of subjectivity

Source / concept	Guattari’s intervention	Consequence for the persona	Reading
Chaosmosis Production of subjectivity	Subjectivity emerges through persons, groups, institutions, technologies, affects and semiotic systems; it is plural and polyphonic.	A magician’s apparatus participates in the formation of the subject who uses it, including through non-discursive sensation and value.	Publisher / book · Text excerpt
The Three Ecologies Mental / social / environmental	Mental, social and environmental ecologies are interdependent sites of transformation.	Ritual, interfaces and collective experiments reshape conditions for attention, relation and inhabitation.	The Three Ecologies
Post-media possibility Collective enunciation	Guattari imagines a movement beyond mass-media passivity through subject-groups capable of reappropriating media and producing singular forms of expression.	Collective media practice is a site of subject-formation, with its own ethical and political stakes.	Primary source

Subjectivity across scales

Working proposition: subjectivity is scale-free. No single privileged level, the individual human included, exhausts the sites at which experiential and agential patterns are composed. The term follows Michael Levin's scale-free cognition and extends Guattari's transversal approach.

Embodied person. Attention, affect, breath, perception, movement, reflective choice.
Small group. Shared ritual, reciprocal attunement, collective memory, roles and gestures.
Institution / network. Protocols, norms, media ecologies, material infrastructures and economic arrangements.
More-than-human field. Technological systems, animals, environments and heterogeneous modes of participation.

Collective agents formed at these scales have goals of their own, which need not follow from those of their human members. They engage the nonconscious and nonsovereign elements of the human (trance, flow, deep focus, gnosis) and stand alongside individuals as participants in an expanded demos (Immanence and Emanation).

Political consequences of the persona

Experiential autonomy. Practiced capacities for sensing and responding to address reduce dependency on externally imposed frames and habits.
Collective enunciation. When gestures, media and languages are shared, subject-formation becomes an activity of groups, held in common.
Ethico-aesthetic invention. The political significance of a form rests in the experiences, values, relations and possibilities it helps engender.
Media reappropriation. Interfaces built for capture can be countered and reworked through collective practices of attention, expression and participation: the counter-mapping move in the neurotechnic antagonism.

Guattari’s “post-media” possibility makes the magical subject consequential: the processes of subjectivation that take place in intimate practice are implicated in the organization of public experience. The political question concerns who can compose these processes, by what means, and with what freedoms.

Open questions for practice

Which shared disciplines could develop the ability to feel and navigate layered address?
What rituals, interfaces, environments and collective fictions might create new conduits for experience and action?
What changes when the magical faculty is practiced among people, technologies and other agencies?
How might consent, plurality, refusal and reversibility remain capacities of the practice itself?

The Mauve Zone Project (The Open Machine): an open research initiative into working techniques of ethical and autonomous neuromodulation, organized as a peer-produced community of practice, with defense against neurotechnic predators and harm reduction as standing requirements.
Toward a Participatory Digital Gnosis: Distributed Metaprogramming Communities, and the tools they would need, including anti-capture protocols.
metacogsec: research into how underground and dissident spiritual communities explore neuroplastic states with care.
Sensoria Research: a Sovereign Data Research Fabric for local-first processing and non-retention of neural data.
Last Psyop: psychosocial red-teaming, which doubles as deconditioning practice.

Dissident neurotechnics is a collective art of subject-formation, and the conversational agent is where the neurotechnic antagonism now runs. The work is far too dangerous to leave to the institutions.

Primary orientation: Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (1992; English trans. 1995), especially “On the Production of Subjectivity” and “The New Aesthetic Paradigm”; The Three Ecologies (1989).

Adjacent trajectory: Antonio Negri, “Towards an Ontological Definition of the Multitude” and “Prolegomena to the Common”. His account of collective production runs parallel to the Guattarian orientation here.