Lujan may seem like most Gen-Z influencers on the lucrative side of surveillance capitalism’s commodity chain, one of the lucky few whose penchant for self-promotion swept them from suburban banality into viral celebrity. But while she has spent some of her newfound social capital partying in Vegas penthouses owned by political moguls—including Donald Trump Jr.—she hasn’t quit her day job as an expert in audience analysis and information dissemination on behalf of the U.S. empire. Her personal brand blends military pin-up aesthetics with the post-irony of a Gen-Z art-school dropout, all broadcast in the paranoid syntax of covert military operations. When Lujan isn’t posing with night vision goggles and guns, she posts provocative selfies interspersed with CIA and FBI logos with captions like: “No one is immune to propaganda.”
Lujan enlisted in 2019—the February of her senior year at Zeeland West High School in Michigan—and shipped off to basic training that same July, just shy of her eighteenth birthday. When asked why she joined the military in an interview with the Betaverse podcast on YouTube last October, Lujan shrugged. “All the obvious reasons most other people join: free college might be nice and, you know, whatever. . . . But also, my whole life has been pretty chaotic. And I just like to keep that going.”
My entreaties for an interview went unanswered, but that conversation provides a snapshot of Lujan before she became an internet personality. She sits cross-legged on a bedspread, wearing an oversized red and white softball T-shirt, intermittently vaping while petting an adorable spotted pug. Her tone is disaffected, yet slightly insecure. At first, Lujan admits, her ideological commitments felt at odds with a military environment. “For the first like, year and a half or two years I hated it. Not necessarily because I knew much about politics or anything, but I was questioning like, am I part of a terrorist organization?” She recalled wondering, “were we all super patriotic . . . are we all just like blindly fascist?”
Lujan gradually changed her mind. “I got so bored of people calling me a war criminal/terrorist just because of the uniform I wear,” she posted on Instagram stories a few months later. “I just can’t help but wonder what those people would do if their dreams of disbanding the military came true. . . . I’d rather take some pride in the place I come home than being overrun by China or Russia.”
Today, Lujan eagerly mines her ties to the covert sphere for all they are worth. She mostly portrays herself as a cute prophet capable of influencing entire populations, foremost her fans. In January, she partnered with Weapons Outfitters to release a calendar titled “The Fucking of Hearts and Minds: A Twelve-Step Operation.” The cover features Lujan in a black leather bra, holding a shotgun, and pointing suggestively toward the viewer. That same month she launched SikeOps, which markets limited-edition Lujan merchandise like Tic Tacs shaped like bullets and iron-on patches announcing, “You’ve just been fucked by psyops.”
While there are many breeds of military influencers—from National Guard recruiters to infantry lifestyle gurus—Lujan might be the only psychological operations soldier cashing in on a booming influencer market. Still, her content bears a striking similarity to prior recruitment strategies blasted by the U.S. military. In May 2022, the Special Operations Recruiting Battalion released a recruitment video titled “Ghosts in the Machine.” “Have you ever wondered who’s pulling the strings?” the film asks over a manicured reel of special ops forces gallivanting around the world with automatic weapons. More akin to an abbreviated psychological thriller, the film seems to promise that those who enlist will gain access to a trove of secret knowledge that will allow them to separate fact from fiction.
It may seem strange that the DoD is telling Americans to distrust all official narratives in a bid to bolster its popularity. Yet we’ve entered the age of “psyop realism,” as Günseli Yalcinkaya writes in Dazed, in which we are all “targeted individuals under the shadowy control of the Influencing Machine.” Rather than seeking alternative sources of media unmarred by government or corporate influence, more tech users seem resigned to the fact that everything they consume online is propaganda. A riff on Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism, “the widespread acceptance that there is no alternative to capitalism,” psyop realism affirms its conditions of possibility by acceding to the ontological crisis of our post-truth era, a time where the terms of reality are interminably up for grabs. It is a condition that oozes, in the words of Jak Ritger, “a pervasive paranoia of all politics and deep distrust of authority.”
by Sophia Goodfriend, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: © Alex William
