The battlefield is no longer a place. It is you.
For three thousand years, the most effective weapon of war has not been the sword or the missile, but the lie. From the Persian kings who painted cats on their shields to exploit Egyptian superstition, to the "Ghost Army" of World War II that fought with inflatable tanks, the history of warfare is a history of deception.
But the age of the trickster is over. The age of the machine has begun.
In Mind Fields, Joshua McDonald traces the terrifying evolution of Psychological Operations (PsyOps) from the ancient world to the digital frontier. He reveals how the tools of statecraft, propaganda, subversion, and influence have been democratized, automated, and weaponized by Artificial Intelligence.
We are entering an era of "Cognitive Warfare," a new domain of conflict where the objective is not to capture territory, but to hack the human operating system. Through historical case studies and cutting-edge analysis, this book explores:
The Manipulation Machine: How Generative AI creates millions of personalized narratives in seconds, tailoring lies to your specific fears and biases.
The Deepfake Dilemma: The destruction of objective evidence in a world where video and audio can be forged in real-time.
The Rise of Autonomous Agents: How swarms of AI bots are manufacturing consensus, silencing dissent, and rewriting the rules of democracy.
This is not science fiction. The technology is here. The weapons are live. Mind Fields is a chilling, necessary roadmap to the invisible war being fought for our reality, offering not just a warning, but the tools we need to defend the most dangerous terrain of the 21st century: the six inches between our ears.
