Everything we like is a psyop

Last year, I was telegraphed a subliminal mandate from the indie rock powers that be: I was supposed to like Geese. The young Brooklynites make good music, but are they the saviors of rock and roll, the defining rock band of Gen Z, the second coming of The Strokes?

The buzz around the band would suggest so. After their album “Getting Killed” came out in September, the band was unavoidable if you’re the kind of person who refers to concerts as “shows.” When frontman Cameron Winter played an “extremely sold-out” solo set at Carnegie Hall, people in the audience seemed convinced that they’d be able to look back on that night in 50 years and tell their grandchildren that they witnessed a seminal moment in American musical history — the birth of the next Bob Dylan. How could anyone live up to that hype?

That’s why, when Wired reported that Geese’s popularity was a psyop, I felt vindicated — I was right! I knew it! I was smarter than everyone for only casually enjoying Geese!

But it’s never that simple. The real story is that Geese worked with a marketing firm called Chaotic Good, which creates thousands of social media accounts designed to manufacture trends on behalf of their clients, which also include TikTok favorites Alex Warren and Zara Larsson. This revelation has inspired a range of reactions, from feelings of betrayal to confusion at why anyone is mad about a band doing marketing, a normal thing that bands do.

“On TikTok, it’s really easy to get views. You just post trending audios. But artists can’t do that, because they want to promote their own music,” explained Chaotic Good co-founder Andrew Spelman in an interview with Billboard. “So a big part of what we are doing is posting enough volume across enough accounts with enough impressions to try to simulate the idea that the song is trending or moving.”

When you learn how prevalent these marketing strategies are, it kind of feels like you’re a kid who just learned that the Tooth Fairy isn’t real — you probably had a hunch that something was up, but you want to believe in the fantasy that a fluttering fae is sneaking into your room, and every viral success story is a fairy tale.

It’s not just the music industry taking advantage of this marketing strategy — young startup founders are following the same playbook.

While preparing for an interview with the Gen Z founders of the fashion app Phia, I searched TikTok to see what real people were saying about the app. I found videos repeating the same talking points about how Bill Gates’ daughter created an app that helps you save money on luxury products, or how using Phia is like having a personal shopping assistant that wants you to get the best deals. When I clicked on these accounts, I found that many of them only ever posted videos about Phia.

It’s not like I caught Phia in some “gotcha” moment. Founders Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni aren’t trying to hide their social media strategy — this is just how marketing works now.

“One thing we’ve been trying lately is basically running a creator farm, so we have a ton of different college students that we pay to make videos about Phia on their own accounts,” Kianni said on her podcast. “This is an approach that’s really focused on volume. We have like ten creators, they post twice a day, and we ultimately reach like 600 videos total.”

On TikTok-like feeds, people watch videos in a vacuum, separate from the rest of a creator’s account. Few viewers will stop to look at what else that person is posting, so they won’t suspect that the post about this cool new app could be an inorganic promotion.

Creators will similarly pay armies of teenagers on Discord to make clips of their streams and post them en masse.

“That’s been going on for a bit,” Karat Financial co-founder Eric Wei told TechCrunch last year. “Drake does it. A lot of the biggest creators and streamers in the world have been doing it — Kai Cenat [a top Twitch streamer] has done it — hitting millions of impressions … If it’s algorithmically determined, clipping suddenly makes sense, because it can come from any random account that just has really good clips.”

Marketing firms like Chaotic Good scale that same approach — instead of paying college students or teenage fans to make videos, they buy hundreds of iPhones and make a bunch of social media accounts that they can use to fabricate a viral trend. Spelman told Billboard that Chaotic Good’s office is “overrun with iPhones,” and that they have so many phones that they’re treated like VIPs at Verizon.

“Unfortunately, a lot of the internet is manipulation … Everything on the internet is fake. One thing that we always say is all opinions are formed in the TikTok comments,” Chaotic Good co-founder Jesse Coren noted.

This is the same line of thinking that fuels the Dead Internet Theory, which argues that bot-generated content dominates the web.

If Chaotic Good’s content armies aren’t posting trending audio, they’re commenting on posts about the company’s clients to control the narrative. Instead of waiting to see how fans will respond to a new song, they can use their accounts to flood the comments of videos and talk about how much they love the song.

For Geese, it’s an insult to be called an industry plant. After songwriter Eliza McLamb wrote the blog post that first connected Geese and Chaotic Good, the firm removed mention of Geese and “narrative campaigns” from its website. (The company told Wired that it did this to protect artists from being “wrapped up in false accusations or misconceptions about how their music was discovered.”)

But like the unapologetic marketing behind some Gen Z startups, the global girl group Katseye has been incredibly clear that they are the definition of industry plants — there’s literally a Netflix docuseries, “Pop Star Academy,” that illustrates how a room full of global record executives turned these six young women into superstars, even pitting potential members against each other in a surprise K-pop-style survival show.

When “Pop Star Academy” came out, I watched it in a state of horror — HYBE and Geffen treated these aspiring teenage pop stars like cattle to mold into human billboards that they could use to sell Erewhon smoothies and hair serums. But over the course of the eight-episode series, I became deeply invested in these girls’ lives. I wanted to watch them thrive in the face of unrelenting industry pressure.

I’m sure that this is exactly what Katseye’s management wanted from the documentary — to cultivate a fervent sense of support and defensiveness over the girls, even if it means painting the executives as the bad guys. Fast-forward a few years, and Katseye is performing a song called “Gnarly” at the Grammys — a track that fans hated at first until, suddenly, they didn’t.

It’s hard not to think about Chaotic Good’s “narrative campaigns,” flooding comment sections to control discourse. Though I hated “Gnarly” when it came out, I decided over time that it’s actually an avant-garde masterpiece. Did I change my mind on my own, or was it changed for me? For as much pride as I took in resisting the hype around Geese, I am so wrapped up in Katseye that I’ve spent hours speculating on Reddit forums about the real story behind Manon’s hiatus.