Psychological warfare. Same stuff Task Force Ares did.
Joint Task Force ARES operators started making all those things that drive you crazy about today’s technology — slow downloads, dropped connections, access denied, program glitches — and made it start happening to ISIS fighters. “Some of these are not sophisticated effects, but they don’t need to be,” Buckner said. “The idea that yesterday I could get into my Instagram account and today I can’t is confusing.”
And potentially enraging. When you can’t get into an email account, what do you do? You think: Maybe I mistyped the login or password. So you put it in again and it still doesn’t work. Then you type it in more deliberately. And every time you type it, press enter, and are denied, you get a little more frustrated. If you’re at work, you call the IT department, you explain the issue and then they ask you if you’re sure you typed your login and password in correctly. It is enough to drive you nuts. It might never occur to you, or to ISIS, that this might be part of a cyberattack.
That part starts halfway down, but it’s an amazing operation.
Reese’s dating practice prescribed that the only chasers you had to avoid were the crypto-trans women, the ones who want to be women but are too closeted to handle it, and so they live their fantasies through you. You can feel it when you’re with a crypto-trans. A crypto-trans has to evacuate you, your personhood, to use you, to fantasize that he is you getting fucked even as he fucks you. You’re just a body for him to live through vicariously. It’s the most alienating thing in the world. It’s like being psychically worn. Like you’re a glove. Reese fled at the first sign of a crypto-trans. She wished they’d just become ladies and stop being so weird.
