Doomscrolling addiction. The erosion of critical thinking. The decline of interconnectedness and community. A floundering inability for depth of thought needed for creative problem-solving. The proliferation of AI slop and deepfakes. The rise of confusing, divisive narratives. What if it was all connected? Not just the enshittification of everything. Something far more pervasive and pernicious: Menticide.
It may be a new word to you, maybe you’ve heard it before, but either way it’s worth breaking it down. You’ll have heard of homicide, the deliberate killing of another person. We know genocide: the intentional mass killing of a people. Too many of us know suicide — the killing of the self. Many now recognise ecocide, the deliberate destruction of the environment. But what about menticide?
Welcome to the nightmare that is the intentional killing of the mind through psychological manipulation that erodes autonomy, critical thinking, and consent. Manipulation from our mainstream, malignant media. Commonly we’re used to using the term brainwashing – almost casually – when we sense it. We know the constant barrage of framing or narrative, relentless adverts, the aggressive onslaught of divisive language — and we clock it, but we often dismiss it as just part of the system we live in. But menticide is next-level. Crucially, menticide happens without consent, and with nefarious intent… at scale. Corporate and state-aligned media systems are wiring us into short form content addicts, with shocking headlines, sound bites, rage bait, scroll, scroll, scroll – eroding the autonomy and the kind of critical thought we need to navigate complexity and nuanced information – and it’s strategic.
The mechanisms are many: algorithmic programming, echo chambers, filter bubbles, sensationalism, AI narrative farms and synthetic media. Have you heard of cyber troops? If you thought troll farms were bad – they’ve scaled up. Oxford Internet Institute researchers have documented organised social media manipulation in 81 countries and growing. Professionalised banks of phones are running multiple AI accounts each. Seeding, steering and swamping comment sections and trends to manufacture consent or chaos. The call it an “industrial scale problem” – but that misses a point – it’s an intentional act at an industrial scale. This is by design.
Research shows media construct rather than reflect reality. Inventories of these operations across dozens of countries show just how industrialised the manipulation has become.
We know they’re there, we have an inkling that they’re a problem, but we barely understand the algorithms that now filter our every day reality. Our daily eco-system of information is gate-kept by billionaire owners, hell bent on a particular kind of coercion. All of which is increasingly boosted by a commercial system where whoever pays most, reaches the most people, regardless of the message.
A 2025 analysis of 91,452 misleading posts on X found AI-generated misinformation is more likely to go viral. This is a direct threat to the integrity of our information system.
So what do we do? Start by naming it. We need the word menticide to become common knowledge, for it to circulate, for people to understand it, start spotting who is complicit, how it spreads, and how to protect ourselves. Collectively we can refuse the confusion and crucially — we can divest our attention economy from the places where it poisons content. Building personal and community protection is important — media hygiene, narrative literacy, slow your feed, community curation, explore alternative platforms — but that only mops up the mess. We also have to address the deluge. If menticide continues unchecked, we can expect to keep watching the collapse of democracy, society and the environment in real time. Access to accurate information is a human right that needs defending.
The first time I came across the word, originally coined by Dutch psychiatrist Joost Meerloo – author of the book ‘Rape of the Mind’ – written after he treated victims of Nazi brainwashing in the 1940s and I fully understood it – it was more than a light going of off in my mind it; was 1000 blinding dawns. My thoughts raced back through my years, suddenly seeing the incredible influence and impact on my life. The steer from the invisible hand, the sense that there are forces controlling the collective story – not reflecting it, curating it. My intuitive feeling solidified into a crystal clear knowing. I felt like I had potent power in just one word to describe so much.
“The modern techniques of brainwashing and menticide—those perversions of psychology—can bring almost any man into submission and surrender. Many of the victims of thought control, brainwashing, and menticide that we have talked about were strong men whose minds and wills were broken and degraded. But although the totalitarians use their knowledge of the mind for vicious and unscrupulous purposes, our democratic society can and must use its knowledge to help man to grow, to guard his freedom, and to understand himself”Joost Meerloo 1956
Imagine what Meerloo would have thought of half the world’s media being owned by just a handful of billionaires, who can control what content we see and don’t see – and who curate that content to suit their political ideologies.
I explored my new understanding of menticide to someone close to me and, immediately they breathed a huge sigh of relief. They said recently they thought the world had gone mad — their social feed had become a doom loop with a comments section that made them despair in humanity. Once they knew it had a name, realised how intentional this was, they could see the pattern too – and once they saw the pattern, they felt they could choose a response.
Here’s mine. I’ve learned about menticide this year, and it’s already changing my life. I can see how I’ve been nudged to think the worst of others and the least of myself — to judge quickly, to fear first. I grew up in systems that taught me to stay small, stay quiet, and stay obedient. Standard social programming told me to avoid politics – especially “at the dinner table” for some obscure reason, that there’s one (white) version of history, there’s one religion, and to distrust difference. I was bullied at school for being different – something I now consider a result of menticide of others – and felt forced to subscribe to the latest trend, be it tech or fashion, lifestyle ‘norms’ and other ways of living. That wasn’t “normal life” — it was engineered existence – avoidance and extraction. It shaped how others saw me, how I saw the world, and how I saw myself. Not well. It’s taken me years of deprogramming and self-work to relearn and think differently – I’m still learning and I see it in others. This isn’t our natural way. It’s been programmed into us.
So now, I’m drawing another new boundary. Consent of content is my new super power, and I want it to be available to others too. For us to decide what comes into our minds with intention. Starve the rage loop. Feed what within us that is human, not allow what is harvesting us to take what it pleases and mess with our minds. I’ll seek out grassroots voices, prioritise platforming marginalised groups and indigenous wisdom and share and honour them.
As well as continuing to study menticide – and how to be free of it – I’m also committing to divesting my attention economy from the algorithms and ads – and helping others do the same. One of my first significant steps is to head towards a decentralised social network, and there, build a way to find and easily access media from unlikely places.
We need to do this work together. There are free, open source systems out there, there are millions of users are heading for the fediverse – with others. Since understanding menticide, the Media Revolution work – growing a movement media that coordinates many responses to the media madness has made more and more sense. If this sounds confusing, I get it – but I promise I’ll do everything I can to make it clearer.
Together? We can make it collective. Imagine the power of readers, watchers, makers — moving away from the covert manipulation and towards collective action.
No consent? No attention.
No attention? No business.
That’s how we turn off the tap of manipulation and reclaim our brains. Access to accurate information is a human right – and freedom from menticide is the missing key we need to face the world’s crises – together.