Digital Discernment: Perceiving More Clearly in an Engineered Reality (Parts 1-3)

Hi All, I’ve just landed in North Carolina where we will welcome our retreatants for 5 days of Living Tantra- embodiment, connection, waking down into the body. This week on the podcast I have the pleasure of speaking with Lucy Caldwell, cofounder of Impact Circles.

This is a new line of thinking, parts 1-3 of 8 in a series on digital discernment and limbic defense and coming back to the sovereign body, tantric attention as a discipline, and right relationship with technologically-aided consciousness. During our 5/18 community satsang, we will be practicing some digital awareness together. It’s free to join. Love, Christine

Part 1: Shaping Our Identity

The scroll is shaping you. Each time you pause on a post, click a headline, linger on a reel, the system learns more about what moves you. Not just what you like—but what enrages you, what makes you feel helpless, what leaves you obsessed. In the background, a profile of what you’re likely to respond to forms.

That profile feeds the algorithm, which then feeds you a version of the world that confirms your fears, fuels your outrage, and deepens your sense of belonging to a particular narrative. This is both confirmation bias and profit-driven psychological engineering. Over time, your media environment becomes so finely tuned to your digital behavior that you begin to believe it is the world. But it’s not. It’s a projection. A high-resolution hallucination. And it’s tailored differently for each of us.

This hyper-speciation, this fragmentation of reality into emotional microclimates means that instead of a shared public square, we each inhabit a parallel world—reinforced by personalized headlines, selectively edited stories, and invisible content filters.

In this fractured reality, disinformation comes in the form of overt lies— as well as lies of omission, tone, and selective intensity. One person’s feed might be filled with righteous indignation over immigration. Another’s, with righteous indignation over climate collapse. Neither is seeing a complete picture. Both are being manipulated. We are not in neutral territory.

The result is a kind of low-grade trance of where the subconscious gets stuck in polarities, the collective nervous system locked into sides, unable to remember what nuance feels like.

If we are tired of the vitriol the incivility gaslighting and fighting, we just start by naming what it is. Naming it draws the outline of the wound, but doesn’t offer the healing.

Part 2: In My Limbic Brain: Neuromarketing and Neurotorts

Neuromarketing, or the use of neuroscience and psychological principles to study how people’s brains respond to marketing stimuli, has helped brands shape messages, visuals, and experiences to tap directly into subconscious attention, emotion, and decision-making.

Neuromarketing began in research labs, where scientists measured things such as galvanic skin response, pupil dilation, and heart rate to track subconscious reactions to images and slogans. It revealed that the body registers emotion before the conscious mind can catch up. These insights migrated into advertising, allowing brands to design messages that bypassed logic and went straight to the limbic system.

Already this was sneaky, cheat behavior- science arrayed against you to separate you from your wallet, and you have little defense.

But when this went digital, everything changed, amplified, accelerated.

Today, your nervous system is tracked not by electrodes, but by scroll velocity, tap frequency, pause time, and swipes—subtle gestures turned into biometric data. This data feeds machine learning models that know how to stimulate your fear, desire, or outrage with uncanny precision.

The result is what I call a neurotort: a soft, persistent assault on the subconscious and nervous system, delivered through persuasive technologies, against which we have no built-in defense. It’s not overt violence, but a cumulative erosion of agency—delivered through content we think we’ve chosen.

A tort in law refers to a civil wrong—something that causes harm or loss and can be grounds for a lawsuit. Torts don’t require criminal intent; they can also arise from negligence, manipulation, or reckless harm. So when we speak of a neurotort, we're naming a category of harm—not to the body in the traditional sense, but to the nervous system and subconscious mind—inflicted through intentional or negligent use of persuasive technology.

A neurotort, then, is any act—usually digital—that causes psychic, behavioral, or emotional harm by exploiting the body's unconscious processing systems. It’s not just about getting you to buy something or vote a certain way. It's about:

• Shaping identity through repetition (you are what you consume)

• Destabilizing mental health (doomscrolling, social comparison, algorithmic shame)

• Hijacking desire and attention (turning your longings into compulsions)

• Polarizing communities (building social cohesion on outrage and tribal fear)

• Undermining consent (you’re nudged before you’re aware, often without knowing what’s being collected or inferred)

• Chipping away agency (reinforcing dependency on digital validation and engineered feedback loops)

This form of harm is hard to trace and even harder to legislate because it’s often internalized as “normal.” But the cumulative effect—especially on children, on those in vulnerable states, or on entire voting populations—is real, measurable, and in many cases devastating.

So to call it a tort is to insist that this isn’t just "the cost of using the internet"—it’s a moral and structural harm. It’s damage by design.

I want to emphasize here that we are not just talking about marketing tactics anymore. We’re talking about the nervous system substrate of a planetary civilization. Commerce, politics, entertainment, education—all increasingly optimized for manipulation, divided, addicted, and consuming.

Part 3: The Feed: The Hyperspeciated Ecology Making Identity

You know by now that in the age of algorithmic media, we no longer share a common reality—we are each living in a customized echo of the world, built by machines that are optimized not for truth, but for engagement.

Every time we pause, click, or share, we feed the system data—not just about what we read, but about who we are: our moods, beliefs, values, even our insecurities. From this, algorithms build a psychological mirror, a behavioral prediction model. And then they feed us back a version of the world that aligns with our profile—designed not to inform us, but to keep us watching, reacting, and believing.

In political marketing, this is called microtargeting. Campaigns use your online behavior, search history, even location data, to craft ads and content tailored precisely to move you. One person might be shown a video warning of border invasions and cultural collapse; another, in the same neighborhood, might see a message about protecting reproductive rights and community gardens. These messages never need to be false to be manipulative—they just need to be incomplete, emotionally charged, and tailored to bypass rational thought.

Let’s say two people wake up and open their phones.

Person A’s feed shows headlines like:

• “Chaos at the Southern Border: Why the White House Won’t Act”

• “Woke Mob Demands Gender-Neutral National Anthem”

• “Fentanyl Deaths Skyrocket—Where’s the Accountability?”
  

Meanwhile, Person B sees:

• “Florida Bans Teaching Black History”

• “Another Billionaire Dodges Taxes While Schools Crumble”

• “Melting Arctic Ice May Trigger Climate Refugee Crisis”

A person might believe they are seeing the news. In fact, they’re seeing a warped timeline, shaped by emotional resonance, cognitive bias, and machine learning. It pushes each person further from center, further from each other, until even basic facts become contested.

When we talk about disinformation and media manipulation, it’s easy to imagine it as something happening “out there”—to other people- when it’s far more intimate- because it’s happening inside us, and it is shaping of what we fear, what we believe is possible, and what we think is real.

The subconscious doesn’t filter like the conscious mind. It receives tone, rhythm, repetition and stores impressions. If it hears something often enough, with enough emotional charge, it starts to integrate that into our worldview. Even if we think we’re skeptical or rational people.

So the question becomes not only: What am I seeing?
But also: What is shaping me while I see it?

Stay tuned.

Also in this series:

Part 4: The Territory

Part 5: Knowing the Tells of Digital Manipulation

Part 6: New practices of perception.

Part 7: Working with AI and LLMS in a conscious way

Part 8: Promptcrafting to become unbiased