"blood" in the digital age
subliminal messaging fears 30 years later
Every time I pay someone on venmo now, I see a subscription promo popup: Disney+ and Hulu bundled for the price of ___. I sometimes open tiktok to find I have to scroll up from an ad before seeing my fyp (“for you” page). Frequently, I am suspicious that I watch more time in youtube ads than content.
Ads are in our faces 24/7. People tend to fearmonger about advertisements and technology, but in reality, we are marketed to more and more across devices as our screen time increases. Private companies require profit to continue, and investors want to see that profit increase exponentially. In times of economic uncertainty, companies work extra hard to get their products in front of a public already stretched thin financially.
Amazon announced last month that it has doubled the amount of ads per hour on Prime Video streaming from between 2.5 and 3 minutes to between 4 and 6 minutes.1 While that is still less time than the average hourly commercial breaks for cable and satellite television, the consumers who stream media often overlap with those who scroll social media on their phones. The advertisements are coming from inside the house, and they’re coming from everywhere.
“Blood” is season 2, episode 3 of The X-Files.2 It’s a heartbreaking and thrilling ride through the world of targeted messaging and corruption. In the small farming town of Franklin, Pennsylvania, murder cases have increased rapidly. When Mulder arrives to the crime scene, he learns that a man has killed four people on an elevator with his bare hands.
Viewers have already seen the lead-in to the episode, which introduces two characters who have been seeing shocking messages on nearby screens. The first is postal worker Edward Funsch, who cuts his finger at work, horrified by the bead of blood that appears. After a meeting informing him that he’s being laid off, he reads the words on the mail-sorting machine screen: “KILL ‘EM ALL.“
The second man is on an increasingly crowded elevator. As his anxiety rises, he reads “NO AIR” on the elevator’s LCD screen. He’s sweating as it blinks through more messages: “CAN’T BREATHE. KILL ‘EM ALL.” It cuts to black before the killing starts.
Mulder, unaware of these harrowing moments of screen-induced paranoia, only knows about the man’s violent acts, and that the elevator screen has been broken. Viewers are aware that Funsch might face a similar fate.
Not knowing Funsch’s future, viewers watch a woman named Bonnie kill a mechanic when his diagnostic display warns her that he will sexually assault and murder her. Mulder sees the broken machine at the crime scene, and since Bonnie was his last appointment, he heads to her house to ask her questions. She violently attacks him when her microwave issues a warning: “HE KNOWS.” The sheriff kills her before she can slit Mulder’s throat.
When Scully performs Bonnie’s autopsy, she finds high adrenaline levels and a green substance also found at the elevator crime scene. Mulder’s resulting theory is that some, perhaps governmental, group has intentionally sprayed LSDM, a pesticide that incites fear in insects, over Franklin’s crops. He suspects an experiment to test if the paranoiac effects can be used with subliminal messaging, or stimuli that attempts to unconsciously affect viewers’ behavior, to incite violence.
“Blood” is a logical story in the aftermath of the American public learning about the CIA’s 1950s-60s MKUltra experiments.3 If the government admits to administering large doses of LSD to unsuspecting citizens with the goal of extracting information from political enemies during interrogation, why wouldn’t they use wholesome (in the American imagination) towns for the site of testing control tactics?
After a helicopter sprays LSDM on him in a field, Mulder fears the television workout ad saying “DO IT NOW!” is targeting him. Edward’s phobia of blood is so heightened by the messages he sees that he brings a gun to the clock tower nearest the college blood drive. If subliminal messages can be that powerful in conjunction with chemicals, it only makes sense to panic.
Subliminal messaging is more complicated in real life examples, mainly meaning that its effectiveness is highly debated. In “How Embedded Subliminal Messaging Affects Consumer Behavior in Advertising” from Boise State’s Department of Marketing4, the authors cite studies that show participants experiencing little to no emotional response to subliminal marketing campaigns. There are too many factors that could “cancel out” its effect, and credible studies have rarely shown an increase in purchases as a result.
However, advertising in the digital age means that sometimes, attention is the currency. In paying with our free (and on-the-clock) time, I’d argue that some forms of subliminal messaging are working to keep us on the apps. Creating and using an account on tiktok is free monetarily. However, when we scroll and like posts or search topics, the algorithm of our fyp hones further into the content we like and can better predict what to show us to keep us engaged with the app.
I read through Buffer’s “TikTok Algorithm Guide 2025,”5 and it illuminated some information about how tiktok prioritizes attention when suggesting content to users. According to Lang, while it’s unclear exactly how it works, it seems that analytic data, including length of time spent watching a video, impacts how often a video is shown to users with similar interests. With the ability to tap into the data that shows our subconscious desire to continue watching some videos over others, the software engineers can craft a more marketable app for advertisers.
Spending more time on the app means seeing more ads, including sponsorship posts for products our favorite creators use. Even if we don’t directly buy any products, we are shifting our lifestyles to fit frameworks laid out by algorithms we don’t control. We are setting aside time to catch up on Labubu commentary content and unconsciously adding clothes to pinterest boards we only like after seeing a few people wear them on our feed.
In the modern advertising climate, I’m only kind of worried about government manipulation. Yes, I feel a sense of dread when Tiktok is “saved by the President.” However, private companies, and especially tech companies, have a history of profit over everything, including human life.6 Companies will go to lengths to avoid accountability while using their consumer base’s dopamine responses to increase usage. With AI being touted as the next disruptor for tech companies, lack of government regulation is my main concern.
My fears lead me to comment sections I wouldn’t go to with a gun. I seek the worst engagement bait blue check responses on twitter when I’m especially ready to ruin my day. It suggests a world full of anger and individualism, but I know it’s only a snippet of people seeking control in the ways they can. I stretch my limbs, and I pick up my cross stitch project. I take a breath and focus on making more x’s.
notes from the field report: things that have caught my eye recently
I loved this essay on AI and bot animism from default.blog
this x-files tumblr post completely changed my life
Kimberly Drew discusses photography as an extractive medium and reviews fields harrington’s photos in NYC exhibition “Clocking In, Clocking Out”
Morris, Chris. “Planning to watch a show on Prime Video? Brace yourself for twice as many ads,” Fortune, Published June 12, 2025, https://fortune.com/2025/06/12/amazon-prime-video-commercial-increase-2025/.
I used The X-Files Wiki to help me summarize events from the episode.
“Blood,” X-Files Wiki, Fandom, Accessed July 9th, 2025.
https://x-files.fandom.com/wiki/Blood.
I consulted the basic Wikipedia page for quick info on MKUltra’s development, timeline, method, and aims, but you can also find the full project document on the CIA’s website.
Wikipedia contributors, "MKUltra," Wikipedia, Accessed July 9, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MKUltra&oldid=1299609430.
C. Mohler, E. Pascal, E. Russell, B. Smith & A. Zavala. “How Embedded Subliminal Messaging Affects Consumer Behavior in Advertising,” Department of Marketing, Boisestate.edu, Published April 26, 2024.
https://www.boisestate.edu/cobe-marketing/2024/04/26/how-embedded-subliminal-messaging-affects-consumer-behavior-in-advertising/.
Lang, Kirsti. “TikTok Algorithm Guide 2025: Everything We Know About How Videos Are Ranked,” BufferBlog, Buffer, Published May 12, 2025.
https://buffer.com/resources/tiktok-algorithm/.
The article linked, from NBC News, includes discussion of suicide and teen death. AI chatbots are a source of many calls for regulation of technology that uses generative AI.
Consumerism is killing our souls. The bombardment of advertising wherever I look is exhausting. I’ve taken up returning to reading real physical books because they keep me off screens. When I read the screens, the temptation to check apps is intensified and there I am again captured by the ads. Great essay, and tie in to X-Files.
Nikita, I always love your essays! They’re so well written and you can tell the research you put into them. But they have so much juice and aren’t dry like usual well-research pieces. I know I started reading you because of The X-Files, but I’m glad being a fan brought me here.