In 1928, Edward Bernays — nephew of Sigmund Freud and the father of modern public relations — published a book called Propaganda. Its opening paragraph is remarkably candid: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."

This was not a conspiracy theory. It was a business plan. Bernays had already demonstrated its power. In 1929, he orchestrated the "Torches of Freedom" campaign, hiring women to smoke cigarettes during the New York Easter Parade to break the taboo against women smoking in public. He framed it as a feminist act. Sales of cigarettes to women skyrocketed. The technique — manufacturing a social movement to serve a commercial interest — became the template for the public relations industry that now shapes nearly every aspect of public life.

The architecture of influence

The question of who holds power is usually framed in terms of governments, elections, and laws. But the deeper question — the one that connects to everything else in Apeiron — is not who holds power, but how power operates when it is invisible.

The most effective control systems do not coerce. They shape perception. If you can determine what people pay attention to, what they believe is normal, what they consider possible, and what they never think to question, you do not need to force compliance. It emerges naturally. The cage is invisible because the bars are made of assumptions.

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky formalized this insight in Manufacturing Consent (1988), proposing a "propaganda model" of mass media. Their framework identifies five filters through which information passes before reaching the public: concentrated media ownership, advertising as the primary revenue source, reliance on official sources, "flak" (organized attacks on dissenting voices), and ideological framing. The result is not a deliberate conspiracy but a structural bias — the system produces ideological conformity not because editors are told what to write, but because the economic and institutional incentives naturally select for content that serves the interests of those who own the means of communication.

The model was proposed in 1988. It has only become more relevant since.

Modern media concentration

Ben Bagdikian first documented the consolidation of American media in The Media Monopoly in 1983, when he identified 50 dominant corporations controlling the majority of US news and entertainment. By the time he published the revised edition, The New Media Monopoly, in 2004, the number had shrunk to five. Today, six corporations — Comcast, Disney, News Corp, AT&T/Warner, Paramount, and Sony — control approximately 90% of what Americans read, watch, and listen to.

Social media has not democratized information. It has created a new layer of control. Algorithms — opaque, proprietary, unaccountable — determine which ideas spread and which are suppressed, not through editorial judgment but through optimization for engagement. The result is not a free marketplace of ideas. It is an environment engineered to capture attention, maximize time-on-platform, and shape behavior at scale. Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) documents how technology companies have built a new economic model based on the extraction and commodification of human behavioral data — predicting and modifying behavior for profit.

Money as control

The monetary system is the most fundamental and least examined control structure in modern civilization. Most people believe that money is created by governments. It is not. The overwhelming majority of money in circulation is created by commercial banks through the act of lending. When a bank approves a mortgage, it does not lend out deposits. It creates new money — typing numbers into an account that did not exist moments before.

This is not a theory. The Bank of England confirmed it explicitly in a 2014 paper titled "Money Creation in the Modern Economy," authored by Michael McLeay, Amar Radia, and Ryland Thomas. The paper states plainly that "whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower's bank account, thereby creating new money." This directly contradicts the "money multiplier" model still taught in most university economics courses.

The implications are vast. The money supply is controlled not by elected governments but by private banking institutions making lending decisions. Central banks — the Federal Reserve, the ECB, the Bank of England — set the rules of this game and can create unlimited currency through mechanisms like quantitative easing. Since 2008, they have created trillions of dollars, euros, and yen through asset purchases that inflated stock and real estate prices, transferring wealth upward on a scale without historical precedent — not through taxation or legislation, but through monetary mechanics that most citizens do not understand and most journalists do not cover.

This is not hidden. It is published. It is documented. And almost nobody understands it, because the system is designed to be too complex for casual examination. The most effective control systems are not secret. They are boring.

The spectacle

Guy Debord anticipated much of this in 1967 with The Society of the Spectacle. Debord argued that modern capitalism had achieved something unprecedented: the transformation of lived experience into representation. Everything real — social relationships, political life, personal identity — had been replaced by its image. People no longer live their lives; they watch representations of life and mistake the watching for living. The spectacle is not a collection of images, Debord wrote. It is "a social relationship between people that is mediated by images."

Written before the internet, before social media, before the smartphone, Debord's analysis reads today like prophecy. The average person now spends more hours consuming mediated reality — screens, feeds, streams — than engaging with unmediated experience. The distinction between the real and the represented has, for many, collapsed entirely.

The deeper question

The connection between power structures and Consciousness is not metaphorical. The most effective form of control is the control of attention — determining what enters conscious awareness and what does not. Bernays understood this in 1928. Chomsky formalized it in 1988. Zuboff documented its digital evolution in 2019. The mechanism is the same across a century: if you control the informational environment in which people form their beliefs, you control the beliefs.

This raises a question that connects to The Simulation Hypothesis in an unexpected way. If we live in a simulation, the question of who controls the parameters of the simulation is the ultimate version of the question of invisible power. But even if we do not live in a simulation, the principle is the same: the deepest form of control is the control of what people are able to perceive, and the most effective prison is one the inmates do not know they are in.

Sources

Bernays, Edward. Propaganda. Horace Liveright, 1928.
Herman, Edward S. and Chomsky, Noam. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books, 1988.
McLeay, Michael, Radia, Amar, and Thomas, Ryland. "Money Creation in the Modern Economy." Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, Q1 2014. Link
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Buchet-Chastel, 1967 (English translation: Zone Books, 1994).
Bagdikian, Ben H. The New Media Monopoly. Beacon Press, 2004.
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs, 2019.