Everything we like is a psyop

The Geese moment

It has been reported that the indie-rock buzz around Brooklyn band Geese wasn’t purely organic — the group allegedly worked with a marketing firm called Chaotic Good that builds large networks of social accounts to simulate viral trends. The band’s album Getting Killed and a sold-out Carnegie Hall set were framed by some as inevitable cultural milestones. Now that the wiring behind the applause is visible, fans are asking: did we cheer for the music or for a very polished PR stunt?

Chaotic Good co-founder Andrew Spelman told Billboard that the firm posts high volume across many accounts to “simulate the idea that the song is trending.” That line lands like a cold splash. It’s marketing, sure — but the scale and secrecy make it feel different. Betrayal, confusion, a little comic relief: who doesn’t secretly want a small, messy origin story rather than a factory line?

Creator farms, startups and the new normal

The same playbook is cropping up in tech. When researching the fashion app Phia, it has been reported that journalists found waves of TikTok accounts repeating the same talking points; founders Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni have described paying college creators to post in volume. “We have like ten creators, they post twice a day, and we ultimately reach like 600 videos total,” Kianni said on her podcast. Call it promotion, call it performance — either way, the audience sees tidy virality without the messy provenance.

So what changes? Not the existence of marketing. The change is that platform feeds are engineered to hide context. Viewers consume clips in a vacuum and rarely check whether the person endorsing a product or band is part of a coordinated campaign. The tooth-fairy moment here is less about exposure than about trust: once you know, can you still enjoy the song, the app, the moment? Cultural moments used to arrive messy and human. Now they’re often manufactured, fast and anonymous — and frankly, a little hard to stomach.

Sources: techcrunch