The Behavioural Architectures of Coercion and Control

I’ve long wanted to write a book or blog about behavioural marketing and communication for social change—about unpicking the systems of coercion and control and becoming architects of influence who make a difference. But I’ve swung between two voices: the polished professional versed in SEO, digital tactics, and data-driven behaviour change, and the activist-hacker craving raw impact and authenticity.

For years, I’ve written cyberpunk and dystopian fiction alongside non-fiction on persuasion. Psychologically, I couldn’t fuse them. My fiction sprang from passion and imagination; my non-fiction from a drive for recognition and a quest for a “pure,” meaningful path forward.

Now, as I grow older, it’s clearer than ever that these strands are inseparable. I’m a cyberpunk at heart—that’s how I stumbled into marketing in the first place, hacking SEO to push my early websites to the top of search results. In chasing my writing dream, I discovered the craft of copywriting—using words to persuade—and from there I learned about NLP, as in “natural language processing,” the algorithms parsing human interaction, and then “neuro-linguistic programming,” the way our minds process language and thought.

Writing non-fiction served two goals: 1) to master SEO so my sites would rank, and 2) to plunge deeper into research and truly flesh out my understanding of influence. All the while, I was fuelled by a passion to decode and direct positive change.

Born into a high-control religion—what experts might call a cult—I lived under coercion, information control, and mind-control techniques. I naturally became a student of persuasive psychology, seeing undue influence at work in my family, congregation, and community. Indoctrinated to expect Armageddon, my worldview has been dystopian since day one.

After thirty years inside that religion and about twenty-four years navigating from SEO hacker to marketing professional and cyberpunk writer, I can finally map how these pieces interlock. We’re in an unprecedented moment where the slide into dystopia feels more real than ever. I won’t list all the reasons now—I’ve done that before—but until recently, I wrote from despair and dread.

Through therapy, meditation, Buddhism, Chaos Magick practice, and deeper immersion in my cyberpunk art, I’ve begun to see light again. I sense hope, purpose, and a place where all my talents align. That’s the allure of cyberpunk: its politics, its activism, its celebration of the protagonist—the hacker who sees the matrix, tears it apart, repurposes it, and wields its tools of suppression against itself.

So, I’m bringing every stream of my conscious desire into one current. I am a cyberpunk, a Buddhist and Chaos Magickian, a behavioural hacker, an activist, and an architect of digital systems—both the ones that suppress and the ones that liberate. I will share this fusion with you, my fellow cyberpunks, here and wherever our collective journey takes us, so together we can shape a better world—and avert the worst of that dystopian future.

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Hack the system and get your message heard: Become a Cyberpunk: Hacking the Behavioural Architectures of Coercion and Control