Scott Benzel
Notes on Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
Sha
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus
Notes on Memesis and Death
SCOTT BENZEL FEB 07, 2025
Polybius / Nicolas Poussin, Et in Arcadia Ego , 1637-38
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
1/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
…in tragedy the plausible takes precedence, even if it is false so as to deceive the spectators, while in history the truth takes precedence to benefit the hearer. – Polybius
Bearing cryptic Hellenistic/pseudo-Germanic/quasi-scientific portmanteaus and shadowy RumINT (Rumor Intelligence) pedigrees, Polybius by Sinneslöschen, the (likely non-existent) 1981 arcade game/psyop that surfaced on retro gaming site coinop.org in 2000 (or 1998, or 1999…) and Nitro Zeus , the massive (possibly non-existe cyberwar (psywar) program disclosed by an anonymous NSA operator in Alex Gibne documentary Zero Days (2016) radiate a darkly cryptogenic op-glamor . The historica Polybius, a well born Greek who lived as a captive of Rome and was the progenitor modern historiography, would have been mystified by the chaosmic epistemic verti that these events/assemblages/campaigns opened up and that continue to resonate i the state-sponsored disinformation / surveillance landscape: the “influence campaigns”, PO (psychological operations), and TAO (tailored access operations) of DARPA’s SMISC and INCAS , GCHQ’s JTRIG , and DoD’s PSYWAR programs.
There is an uncanny inverse symmetry, almost a topological reverse-image (think th inside of a Halloween mask), between Polybius’s insistence on facticity and the persistent RumINT and likely non-existence of his namesake machine.
Nitro Zeus is even stranger, with a largely unknown genesis, questionable attribution and (beneath surface rationalizations) unknown targets and goals–likely/known targ include: Iranian technicians duped into bridging multiple airgaps and injecting society-killing levels of malware into their infrastructure, industrial manufacturers infiltrated with critical components compromised; the Iranian state apparatus. Goa cyberkinetic attack crippling critical infrastructure or RumINT ruse fueled by an anonymous interview in a mainstream documentary after mention in an intelligenc connected journalist’s book on cyberwar? Or inexpensive variant of cyberwar, RumWAR? Proof-of-concept cyber-deterrence? More possible/likely targets: The
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
2/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
Iranian population? The U.S. domestic audience? Hackers/cybersecurity profession (recruiting, deterrence)? The international audience (deterrence)…and so on and so o
Polybius’s Histories v. laodogmatika
Polybius, Historigraphii, 1806 Italian edition
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
3/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
Polybius, born around 208 BCE in Megalopolis, Arcadia, was a historian, protohistoriographer, and proto-cryptographer who began his adult life as a statesman an hipparchas (cavalryman). Well born son of an Achaean strategos (general) who possibly bore sentiments against Rome, Polybius, along with 1000 other Achaeans, was taken hostage and held by Rome for 17 years in the wake of the Third Macedonian War.
Taken in by the Roman Consul Scipio, Polybius was allowed to travel while remaini a captive and witnessed the Punic wars and the sack of Carthage. First-hand accoun Histories and inform his lost of these and other world-altering events suffuse his volume on Tactics . The first compendium to emphasize the importance of facticity t the writing of history, Polybius’s intended the Histories to counter laodogmatika, popular preconceptions and myths. Propounding “universal history” or historiograph over the monographic and laodogmatik, he wrote:
“anyone who thinks that they can understand the whole of history by reading monograph on individual subjects is like the person who thinks he can appreciate the beauty and gra of a live animal from looking at the different parts of its dissected corpse” 1
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
4/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
Attributed to Federico Zuccaro, Cupid and Pan , about 1600
Arcadia
Polybius’s birthplace Arcadia, a mountainous region in the Pelopennese, represente in late classical literature and art a mythic, idyllic (and unattainable) Utopia. According to the myth, Pan ruled over Arcadia as dryads and nymphs frolicked in th wilds and shepherds tended their flocks.
Erwin Panofsky, in 'Et in Arcadia ego’: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition’:
Polybius, Arcady’s most famous son, while doing justice to his homeland’s simpl piety and love of music, describes it otherwise as a poor, bare, rocky, cilly countr
5/37
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
devoid of all the amenities of life and scarcely affording food for a few meager 2 goats.
According to Pliny the Elder in ‘The Natural History,’ 77-79 C.E. (in an example of laodogmatika that Polybius would have contested ) the art of painting originated with people tracing the outlines of one another’s shadows. Pliny later alludes to a young woman whose lover is called away–she traces a line around his shadow cast on the wall, mem(e)orializing him. In Poussin’s The Arcadian Shepherds, also called Et in Arcadia Ego (per Panofsky (below): Even in Arcadia, am I (Death)), 1637-38 , an Arcadia shepherd traces his shadow –cast on a stone tomb– while another points to the inscription Et in Arcadia Ego , reenacting Pliny’s example of the first instance of representation/mimesis in art while symbolically linking it to the recognition of dea
Nicolas Poussin, Et in Arcadia Ego (And in Arcadia, am I), 1637-38
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
6/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
Panofsky writes:
In 1769 Sir Joshua Reynolds showed to his friend Dr. Johnson his latest picture: t double portrait of Mrs. Bouverie and Mrs. Crewe, still to be seen in Crewe Hall i England. It shows the two lovely ladies seated before a tombstone and sentimentalizing over its inscription: one points out the text to the other, who meditates thereon in the then-fashionable pose of Tragic Muses and Melancholi
The text of the inscription reads: "Et in Arcadia ego." "What can this mean?" exclaimed Dr. Johnson. "It seems very nonsensical-I am in Arcadia." "The King could have told you," replied Sir Joshua. "He saw it yesterday and said at once: 'O there is a tombstone in the background: Ay, ay, death is even in Arcadia.'
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
7/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
print of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mrs. Bouverie and Mrs. Crewe (Et in Arcadia Ego) , 1770
Polybius’s square and fire signals
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
8/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
Polybius square
The Polybius square is a matrix cipher that fractionates plaintext, breaking the alphabet into five columns with five letters each except for the last (with four). Each letter is represented by two numbers, allowing the 24 characters of the classical Gre alphabet to be represented by 5 numeric symbols. According to Polybius in the Histories, the square allowed for long-range communication/telegraphy via fire sign It was precursor to later cryptographic systems and the “magic squares” employed b Renaissance magi and artists including Dürer (below):
The Polybius square is the first of the early systems developed for substituting numbers for letters through fractionating to obscure plaintext message. To this date, cryptographers find the Polybius square extremely valuable. Its ability to convert letters sequences to numeric sequences, reduce the number of different characters, and allow encoding of plaintext into two separately manipulatable un are known to be its advantages. With this at hand, modern cryptographic system have embedded the Polybius square as a fundamental component of the
encipherment process, such as in the key generation procedures used by modern ciphers. 3
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
9/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
10/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I , 1514, magic square in upper right
The ‘magic square’ in Dürer’s Melencolia I contains a number of combinations that result in the number 34 (Dürer’s age at the time was 43) and the date of the work ‘15 in the bottom squares. Several squares adding to 5 and 17 may refer to his mother's death in May 1514 – perhaps a cryptographic memorialization.
Polybius by Sinneslöschen - RumINT, PSYOP, Vaporware
‘screenshot’ from coinop.org
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
11/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
Polybius by Sinneslöschen was a mythic 1981 arcade game/psyop of urban legend/RumINT circulating online for years before showing up (as recreation/simulation) in gaming and popular culture. Its first documented appeara was on the retro gaming website coinop.org in the late 90s or early 2000s, followed by : an article in GamePro magazine Issue 180 (September 2003). Per coinop.org
This game had a very limited release, one or two backwater arcades in a suburb o Portland. The history of this game is cloudy, there were all kinds of strange stori about how kids who played it got amnesia afterwards, couldn't remember their name or where they lived, etc.
The bizarre rumors about this game are that it was supposedly developed by som kind of weird military tech offshoot group, used some kind of proprietary behavi modification algorithms developed for the CIA or something, kids who played it woke up at night screaming, having horrible nightmares.
According to an operator who ran an arcade with one of these games, guys in bla coats would come to collect "records" from the machines. They're not interested quarters or anything, they just collected information about how the game was played.
The game was weird looking, kind of abstract, fast action with some puzzle elements, the kids who played it stopped playing games entirely, one of them became a big anti videogame crusader or something. We've contacted one person who met him, and he claims the machines disappeard after a month or so and no one ever heard about them again.
Until the ROM showed up.
Here's what we've found so far:
Found english strings "insert coin" and "press 1 player start" and "only" - looks like a 1 or 2 player game.
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
12/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
Text in the game says "(C) 1981 Sinneslöschen" Maybe a German company?
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
13/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
Polybius in GamePro magazine Issue 180 (September 2003
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
14/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
Polybius in The Simpsons, SE18 EP3 (2006)
Sinneslöschen
Sinneslöschen, agrammatical German for “senses” “delete” (“sensory deprivation”), with the syntax suggesting that it was likely written by an English speaker.
A 2017 FOIA request for information on Polybius received a summary FBI denial:
Memesis and Death
15/37
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
knowyourmeme.com
In 2011, Dr. Robert Finkelstein, President of DARPA-sponsored Robotic Technolog Inc. and a professor at the University of Maryland gave a talk on “Military Memetics” the Social Media for Defense Summit in Alexandria, Virginia. From his slide-deck 4 Tuturial : Military Memetics :
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
16/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
17/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
18/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
19/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
from the Tutorial: Military Memetics slide deck
Since the mid-20th Century memetics has become increasingly pervasive in the socalled “battlespace” (the UK’s XX Committee, CIA’s MK-ARTICHOKE, MK-ULTR CIA-cutouts the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Human Ecology Fund, the USAF’s Project GRUDGE), with MILDEC (Military Deception), psyop, and “influen campaigns” regularly targeting both international and domestic populations. Since advent of the internet, mimetics has been institutionalized (see SMISC, INCAS, JTRIG, and PSYOP School, below) and has come to dominate the Neuro-Cognitive warfare space (see slide two above). Not unlike the Military Memetics field itself, the slide deck drifts from a relatively benign discussion of the history and theory of memetics to increasingly disturbing, necropolitical terrain (see final slide above.)
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
20/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
Necropolitical Memetics
Achille Mbembe coined the word ‘necropolitics’ in the journal Public Culture in 20
The exercise of sovereignty…consists in society’s capacity for self-creation throug recourse to institutions inspired by specific social and imaginary significations. (Mbembe is referring here to Cornelius Castoriadis’s L’institution imaginaire de la société , 1975)
This strongly normative reading of the politics of sovereignty has been the objec numerous critiques, which I will not rehearse here. My concern is those figures o sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy but the
generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of hum bodies and populations. Such figures of sovereignty are far from a piece of prodigio insanity or an expression of a rupture between the impulses and interests of the body and those of the mind. Indeed, they, like the death camps, are what constitu the nomos of the political space in which we still live. 5
the generalized instrumentalization of However effective mimetic warfare might be at “ human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations, ” the combination of cyberkinetic warfare and memetic warfare has, in recent decades produced an even greater number of military “successes” – Olympic Games / Stuxne and Nitro Zeus chief among among them:
No Air Gap – Olympic Games (Stuxnet), NZ (Nitr Zeus), and NSA (No Such Agency)
Stuxnet was the first acknowledged cyberkinetic attack, relying heavily on TAO monitoring and injections (see below), MILDEC (Military Deception), and what is increasingly referred to as 4th Generation Warfare–incorporating a mixed modality “battlespace” that includes civilian contractors, industrial manufacturers, and non-
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
21/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
state (or loosely state-adjacent) hackers operating (sometimes unwittingly) as nodes the operation in order to obscure methods and attribution.
Stuxnet propagation / air gap bridge from the documentary Zero Days (2016)
“Operation Nitro Zeus…was Cyber Command’s piece of the Op Plan 1025 puzzle to shut down Iran's electrical grid. If Olympic Games was the cyber equivalent of a targeted drone strike on Iran, Nitro Zeus was a full-sca attack. Nitro Zeus would be the opening act of the war plan: turning off an entire country so fast that retaliation would have been extremely difficult. This included tunneling inside Iran’s grid—along with its ce phone network and even the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ command-and-control systems. Nitro Ze
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
22/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
was a military plan, intended to unplug Tehran if diplomacy failed. “–David Sanger, The Perfect Weapon
Anonymous NSA source (played by an actor) on Nitro Zeus in Zero Days (2016)
"We spent hundreds of millions, maybe billions on it," a anonymous National Security Agency source says in th film. "We were inside, waiting, watching. Ready to disrupt, degrade, and destroy those systems with cybe attacks. In comparison, Stuxnet was a back alley operation. [Nitro Zeus] was the plan for a full scale cyb war with no attribution. 6
NZ (Nitro Zeus) never went kinetic, but its combination of RumINT, (alleged) cyberkinetic capability, and (once again, possibly unwitting) Hollywood-assisted MILDEC achieved many of the goals of active cyberkinetic warfare.
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
23/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
TAO (tailored access operations)
So just what is Tailored Access Operations? According to a profle by Matthew M Aid for Foreign Policy, it's a highly secret but incredibly important NSA program that collects intelligence about foreign targets by hacking into their computers, stealing data, and monitoring communications. Aid claims TAO is also responsi for developing programs that could destroy or damage foreign computers and networks via cyberattacks if commanded to do so by the president.
So, TAO might have had something to do with the development of Stuxnet and Flame, malware programs thought to have been jointly developed by the U.S. and Israel. The malware initially targeted the Iranian nuclear program, but quickly made its way into the digital wild.
According to Aid, TAO's primary base is in the NSA headquarters in Fort Meade There, he says, some 600 members of the unit work rotating shifts 24-7 in an "ultramodern" space at the center of the base called the Remote Operations Cen (ROC). 7
DARPA SMISC (Social Media in Strategic Communication to INCAS (INfluence Campaign Awareness and Sensemaking); GCHQ JTRIG
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
24/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
Announcement:
The general goal of the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program is to develop a new science of social networks built on an emerging technology base. In particular, SMISC will develop automated and semiautomated operator support tools and techniques for the systematic and methodical use of social media at data scale and in a timely fashion to accompl four specific program goals:
1. Detect, classify, measure and track the (a) formation, development and sprea of ideas and concepts (memes), and (b) purposeful or deceptive messaging and misinformation.
2. Recognize persuasion campaign structures and influence operations across social media sites and communities.
3. Identify participants and intent, and measure effects of persuasion campaign
4. Counter messaging of detected adversary influence operations.
The conditions under which our Armed Forces conduct operations are rapidly changing with the spread of blogs, social networking sites, and media-sharing technology (such as YouTube), and further accelerated by the proliferation of mobile technology. Changes to the nature of conflict resulting from the use of
25/37
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
social media are likely to be as profound as those resulting from previous communications revolutions. The effective use of social media has the potentia to help the Armed
The development of a new science of social networks and the solutions to the problems posed by SMISC will require the confluence of several technologies including, but not limited to, information theory, massive-scale graph analytic and natural language processing. While SMISC will not directly support natura language processing development efforts, it will certainly use the results of previous programs as well as contribute new challenges to further stimulate ongoing efforts.
Technology areas particularly relevant to SMISC are shown here grouped to correspond to the four basic goals of the program as described above:
1. Linguistic cues, patterns of information flow, topic trend analysis, narrative structure analysis, sentiment detection and opinion mining;
2. Meme tracking across communities, graph analytics/probabilistic reasoning pattern detection, cultural narratives;
3. Inducing identities, modeling emergent communities, trust analytics, netwo dynamics modeling;
4. Automated content generation, bots in social media, crowd sourcing.
Recent research has shown that traditional approaches to understanding socia media through static network connectivity models often produce misleading results. It is, therefore, necessary to take into account the dynamics of behavior and SMISC is interested in a wide variety of techniques for doing so.
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
26/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
INCAS page at DARPA
Program Summary
The U.S. is engaged with its adversaries in an asymmetric, continual, war of weaponized influence narratives. Adversaries exploit misinformation and true information delivered via influence messaging: blogs, tweets, and other online multimedia content. Analysts require effective tools for continual sensemaking o the vast, noisy, adaptive information environment to identify adversary influence campaigns.
Today, geopolitical influence campaign detection and sensemaking is largely manual and ad hoc. Analysts use social listening tools to formulate complex keyword queries; track trending keywords, hashtags, and topics; and read hundre to thousands of documents to identify influence themes. New or “low and slow” campaigns are hard to detect early as their message volume may be beneath platform “trending” thresholds and pertinent hashtags may be unknown. With current tools, it is difficult to connect messages over time and across multiple platforms to track evolving campaigns and to assess confidence in analytic
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
27/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
conclusions in a rigorous manner. Confidence assessment by analysts is ad hoc, manual, subjective, qualitative, and susceptible to analyst cognitive biases (e.g., confirmation bias). Analyst reports often cover static time ranges, and static repo quickly become stale.
Diagram from INfluence Campaign Awareness and Sensemaking (INCAS) document HR001121S0008
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
28/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
GCHQ JTRIG slides (Snowden leaks)
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
29/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
30/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
31/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
32/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
Ghosts in the Machine: DoD’s PSYWAR School
Re-established in 2024, the PSYWAR School is the original name for the U.S. Arm John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center & School. The PSYWAR School trains an qualifies U.S. Army Psychological Operations (PO) personnel for the missions to conduct worldwide Special Operations.
As the only PO military occupational specialty (MOS) qualifying course in the Department of Defense (DoD), the PSYWAR School trains and qualifies all PO personnel within the DoD, to include Air Force, Marine Corps, and other services and also provide advanced PO training to those who qualify.
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
33/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
DoD PSYWAR School homepage
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
34/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
As Polybius of Arcadia, captive of Rome, champion of facticity and ‘universal histor against tragedy and spectacle, fades, his namesake game, one (of many) early vector overwhelming facticity with spectacular memesis and incipient necropolitics, come under a new light. As ‘military memetics’ overtake culture, ‘mem(e)orialization’ fade and the necropolitical aims of disinformation become increasingly clear…
Polybius / Nicolas Poussin, Et in Arcadia Ego , 1637-38
35/37
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
1 McGing, B. C. Polybius’ Histories (Oxford Approaches to Classical Literature). Oxford University Press, 2010.
2 Panofsky, Erwin. ‘ Et in Arcadia ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition’ Orginally: 'Et in Arca ego: On the Conception of Transience in Poussin and Watteau', in Philosophy and History, Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1936.
3 Arroyo, Jan Carlo T., Dumdumaya, Cristina E. et al. Polybius Square in Cryptography: A Brie Review of Literature in Advanced Trends in Computer Science and Engineering, 9(3), May June 2020, 3798 – 3808 3798 ISSN 2278-3091 Volume 9, No.3
4 Finkelstein, Robert. Tuturial : Military Memetics. Robotic Technologies, Inc. slide deck Online: https://archive.org/details/PresentationMilitaryMemeticsTutorial13Dec11
5 Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Public Culture (2003) 15 (1): 11–40 Online: https://web.archive.org/web/20151010043651/https://www.dartmouth.edu/~lhc/docs/achille embe.pdf
6 Anonymous NSA agent, quoted in Zero Days (2016) dir. Alex Gibney. Magnolia Pictures, Participant Productions
7 Petersen, Andrea. The NSA has its own team of hackers , The Washington Post, August 29, 2013, Online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/08/29/the-nsa-h its-own-team-of-elite-hackers/
Subscribe to Scott Benzel
==> picture [201 x 12] intentionally omitted <==
----- Start of picture text -----
Type your email... Subscribe
----- End of picture text -----
By subscribing, I agree to Substack's Terms of Use, and acknowledge its Information Collection Notice and Privacy Policy.
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
36/37
9/7/25, 11:24 AM
Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus - Scott Benzel
==> picture [522 x 36] intentionally omitted <==
© 2025 Scott Benzel ∙ Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice Substack is the home for great culture
https://scottbenzel.substack.com/p/polybius-by-sinnesloschen-nitro-zeus
37/37