Conduits for the Machine
23rd June 2025
In Cyberpunk 2077, Jefferson Peralez is an aspiring politician hoping to be mayor of Night City. After hiring you (V) to aid him with some political detective work, he calls on you again as a trusted contact to once again to help uncover the perpetrator of a break in that happened one night at his luxury apartment in Charter Hill. For some reason, he doesn't remember anything because he blacked out in the corridor after seeing a shadowed figure.
After some digging and investigation, you eventually uncover that his security detail have been keeping tabs on him from a secret control room embedded within his apartment that he "didn't know was there".
Interesting stuff. What could they be up to?
You then find they have installed a military-grade line-of-sight communications antenna on the rooftop, which beams right to a van with a dish, parked some 400m away in the neighbourhood.
Okay, now it's getting even more interesting…
But the real discovery is once you catch the van (after it seems to drive itself to a gang hideout) and take a look at what it has stored on the hefty tech in the back. It's the image above.
Long story short; the Peralezes (both Jefferson and his wife) are being psychologically grooved and played like a fiddle by some mysterious entity which uses their security detail as a front. How, you may ask? Detailed scanning and casting of their brains, combined with neural-computer implants so that they are [allegedly, as you never really find out] being conditioned to certain behaviours.
Any deviation from 'baseline' is monitored and adjusted for. Worst case, they begin to have a headache, or even blackout. But they begin to lose memories in the process, key details about their lives. Jefferson forgets he has a brother who died, for example.
When you try to warn him, his wife tells you to not to, because she's tried already. If you go and tell Jeff anyway, you get a menacing call from a filtered voice which again tells you not to as you approach him. And if you still decide to tell him anyway, he eventually goes insane from paranoia as it sinks in that he essentially has no free will, and is being moved by forces outside his control and real understanding.
Wow. Politicians with no brains or free will, what an idea. Many such cases.
Ironically, no matter whether you tell him or not, he always wins the election to become mayor. Yes, it's a fictional game, but it "all going as planned" adds to his craze and to the mystique at what is causing it all.
You never find out who or what is behind all of this, but all fingers point to a "rogue AI" if you compare it with some of the other plot lines in the game. It's all very conspiratorial and is enough to make you yourself begin to go mad as well, to be honest. But the pieces are all there.
As Johnny's oldhead will tell you about "back in his day" (the 2020s):
There were whispers about this kinda stuff.
Cognitive pattern fluctuators, remote neural re-networking…
In layman's terms - gaslighting
Okay, but we're in the 2020s. What whispers could there be of this stuff? Obviously we don't have the same extent of literal brain-casts to use for personalised memory targeting and upheaval using neurotech.
But as Johnny also snarkily tells you a little while before this:
Citizens don't choose their representatives… the key players, the string pullers… they spy on all the Peralezes, look for weak spots, blackmail, rig elections.
This most certainly has happened. People are susceptible to so many things. It's surprisingly easy to push someone psychologically if you know their weaknesses and where and how to push.
Unrelated, but you know how we all use a smartphone? And on that smartphone we all use social media apps? And all of these apps have an algorithm which mines as much data as covertly possible to build up a profile of your wants, desires, fears, dislikes, hates, etc. in a hyper-personalised manner as you actively use it?
Surely this data will never be used for anything evil, no?
Oh wait. It has been.
Cambridge Analytica was probably one of the biggest scandals akin to this, where Meta (then Facebook) utilised the "political consulting firm" to gather data on many of its users. Long story short, they used this data of many people's personality traits, interests, social circles, locality, networks, etc. to drip feed information in such a way that it (allegedly) influenced multiple elections, such as the 2016 Brexit Referendum to swing "leave" voters and the 2016 US Election to target the "swing state" voters. Let alone the many smaller ones before this that weren't as massively reported on.
Realistically, I doubt we'll ever truly know what happened with them, because both sides will always argue that he stole this or she stole that, but there's a lot of evidence out there that something indeed occurred along those lines.
It always comes back to that one Wendigoon quote:
The next time that someone tells you "The Government would never do that!"
Oh yes they would…
But to get back to the topic - Cambridge Analytica used words like 'audience segmentation' or 'psychographic analysis' or 'behavioural microtargeting' when describing what they do.
What does that even mean? Sounds very similar to what Johnny tells you, does it not?
Psychographics, for example, is a mix of psychology + demographics. Basically, how certain groups think. Measured out, any given group has certain behaviours. And each given behaviour has its own weakness, which can definitely be exploited and utilised.
Meaning; everyone who has been on the modern Internet is almost guaranteed to have been extensively profiled by one tech company or another. If it's not Meta through Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp, it's probably Google, Microsoft, Apple, X/Twitter, or one of the numerous other corporations and services who are collecting everything you do on their platform.
In many cases, we even celebrate our usage of these tools and worship the corporations for their beautified toys that permit us more abilities. We think they are doing us good, almost benevolently. Often, they indeed are, if you ask them. Though their tools' underlying mechanics and closed-door actions may speak otherwise.
But from a certain point of view, if you utilise a form of algorithmic service in one way or another to have probably been Peralez'd. Perhaps not to the I-forget-basic-details-of-my-life extent yet, but in the I-likely-don't-have-100%-free-will extent, maybe.
The key word here is yet, because once you have a Neuralink or some other form of Apple iTrode or Meta/Google brain implant, I think its safe to say you no longer have full control of yourself as a body.
Media is scary. Information is a tool, and information warfare is a real thing. Literally all you have to do is go on Wikipedia is look at the following pages:
Go ahead. Look at them. This page isn't going anywhere.
Done?
Good.
Underneath all the jargon of corpobabble and militaryspeak, you'll realise the bottom line is your mind is a node that can be hijacked. It's scary to realise, and you most definitely bear the risk of ending up all paranoid like Peralez himself on the realisation, but it's a fact and you can't exactly deny it out of existence.
I personally do find this one memorable Garfield image helps me to lighten the mood and cope:
So, what can be done about this, you now ask?
I'm glad you did. I honestly do not know.
With this newfound knowledge in mind, I would probably suggest you stop using anything algorithmic which steers you to do stuff you otherwise wouldn't be going to do. As difficult as that may be in 2025, where almost everything you may not openly suspect (e.g: search, map routes, pricing, etc) has an algorithm somewhere for tailored outcomes.
Ultimately, I doubt any such algorithms are designed with the active intention of gradually eroding your free will out of existence. It's probably not a boogeyman AI somewhere pushing you to end up like this (although with the rumours of the current Trump administration using ChatGPT for tariff advice, you never know these days…) Like most cases, it's probably just a team of out-of-touch designers and engineers somewhere in an AC'd office living out-of-touch lives and saying how it's going to "empower you to make easier choices" or something along those lines, oblivious to the fact that whilst they use ChatGPT for half the decisions they make, influenced by fictional media for affirmation in everything else, they have no free will also.
Whew. Hefty ideas, as usual.
Speaking of, though, I have noticed that last point is a real phenomenon.
I have legitimately witnessed people offhand their entire decisions day-to-day to ChatGPT or some other AI model. They have 0 decision making and "vibe-decide" their entire day (a word I just made up which stems from "vibecoding"; letting AI code everything for you and trusting it all works with no actual programming skill).
I don't think anyone can say with a sane mind that it is a good thing that people are offhanding their decision making to technology like that. Their bodies and their person now end up as shells for an AI to run on them, and they become the mere actor for the AI to do things through. Not too dissimilar to Mr Blue Eyes (a whole other Cyberpunk 2077 discussion for another time).
The funniest example I've envisaged is this;
A board of directors use ChatGPT to brainstorm guidelines for a curriculum in a school.
A teacher uses ChatGPT to interpret this curriculum, and then brainstorm and plan a class assignment in line with it.
The students use ChatGPT to do their work, where it brainstorms and tells them what to do for the best grade (reading against the curriculum mark schemes).
The teacher uses ChatGPT to mark their work and write appropriate feedback more easily.
The students use ChatGPT to summarise their feedback into bullet points, and get it to remember for next time so it does their work even better on the next assignment.
Isn't that crazy. No one is actually doing any work. It's ChatGPT all the way down.
And you'd hope this is not real, but knowing elements of this in people I've legitimately met and seen in real life, I can assure you that there are cases where at least elements of this actually happen.
AI wrapper humans. Conduits for the machine.
You see this also in talking points. How many times have you spoken to someone and all they talk about is a meme they saw online that you didn't, or drama that is from their hyper-personalised bubble because their feed only shows them that? Or, how many times have you spoken to someone and their entire politics or personality is wildly out of touch with reality because of said feed?
Once you learn the landscape of information you can eventually figure out what infoscape someone hangs around in based on what they act like, to a relatively decent accuracy.
He's a Redditor.
She's a TikToker.
She uses Instagram Reels for sure.
That guy is a YouTube Shorts user.
He's a 4chanite.
God forbid… Facebooker.
Each algorithm produces a certain kind of person out of their base input/output interactions with their proprietary algorithm. Then it steers them as the global noosphere shifts in the "current thing" to become flat-earthers or Antifa radicals or anti-vaxxers or foot fetishists and God knows what else.
Once again, as I've said before; use tools, or they use you, lest ye fall victim to this fate.
At the end of the day, you can't exactly avoid this entirely, as per Jim Rohn "everyone is the sum of the 5 monkeys they hang around with", but when the only thing you and everyone you meet hangs around with nowadays is a social media algorithm and ChatGPT… yeah. We're all now the machine incarnate, and we do its bidding for corporate shareholder value and for our algorithmically defined roles operating within the broader social fabric of networked pawns on the world's chessboard.
It's almost like you can think of these things as technological deities to guide us all, in a way. Cyborg theocracy, and all that.
But as I said; ultimately, it's not too late to take back control. You can't exactly stop this all from unfolding into a very bad outcome, but you can still choose not to participate in it on a localised individual scale. As far as I know, it's not an offence (yet) to stop using algorithmic feeds and make your own decisions.
And yes, before you say it; "what about the people around me most definitely still affected by this?"
Congratulations, you're now enlightened as well. Send them this page. Teach them about it. Help them to "get gud" and not become a ChatGPT wrapper, before they soon go out and buy a Neuralink because they get 50% off when they sign up early.
It's not too late.
But I wouldn't doubt that the Peralezes are gonna become real a lot sooner than by 2077.