An increasingly connected and financialized world in which all assets are highly and increasingly correlated with each other and are easily influenced by news cycles, means that psyops will become increasingly common, sophisticated, and effective. But also, combined with a higher stakes political climate.
For example, I argued a few weeks ago that the the reason why social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are now hyping cryptocurrency so much after being opposed to it just a year ago, is so that Trump voters (who own more crypto compared to Biden voters) lose money from the inevitable and ongoing crypto crash and become discouraged in 2024. So far, BTC is down 15% over the past month. This reversal of social networking companies suddenly becoming pro-crypto occurred in mid 2021, when Biden’s approval ratings began to precipitously fall. A coincidence? Maybe not. This could have some impact on the 2024 election, especially in battleground states in which the results may come to down to just thousands of votes. Having your political enemies become poorer is just another form of warfare.
This also works in conjunction with a strategy of social networks filtering news and stories based on voter preferences, such as showing users who live in battleground states a slight bias/skew of anti-Trump/GOP stories: enough to not be detected but possibly enough to affect the outcome of elections. If someone on Twitter or Facebook follows 100 users whose profiles suggest they are pro-trump and 100 users whose profiles suggest that they are pro-Biden, out of 100 stories maybe algorithm would show 60 of the pro-Biden ones and 40 of the pro-Trump ones, or something like that.
Regarding Russia and Ukraine, it’s conceivable that Putin keeps intimating war, without actually doing anting, to profit from gyrations of the stock market. My belief has always been that Putin is too cool, wealthy, and dapper to want to even get into a war, or worse, lose one. Traders working on Putin’s behalf could ‘go long’ stock futures, before peace talks commence and things suddenly resolve; of course, it was planned all along. So they profit on the way down and on the way back up.