About
A field manual, made visible.
The book is the deep dive. This site is the visual companion — a place to see each technique in operation in under thirty seconds.
About the book
Stop Manipulating Me is a non-fiction trade book by Terrence O'Connor about recognizing and defending against psychological manipulation across the modern environment — scams, cults, advertising, social media, abusive relationships, political propaganda, intelligence interrogation, and AI-driven persuasion.
The book's central claim — the angle no other book in the space puts forward in quite this way — is that the apparently disparate worlds above are running on the same ten psychological primitives. Authority engineering. Scarcity and urgency. Social proof and tribalism. Reciprocity and obligation. Identity manipulation. Emotional hijacking. Love bombing. Information control. Cognitive overload. Intermittent reinforcement.
Once you can name them, you start seeing them everywhere. Once you see them, you can interrupt them.
The book is structured in four parts:
- Part I — Why you're a target. The framework: two brains, three phases, the unified-framework thesis.
- Part II — The techniques. Ten chapters, one per primitive, with anchor cases, examples, the phrases each uses, escalation paths, and defenses.
- Part III — Modern manipulation machines. Social media, the attention economy, political microtargeting, AI-driven manipulation.
- Part IV — Defending yourself. The seven rules, the field toolkit, and the long-game posture for living with the framework over years.
Three appendices follow: a library of twenty annotated case studies; a workbook of twenty consolidated exercises; and a glossary.
About the author
Terrence O'Connor has spent twenty-six years in technology and information security. He began as a paid undergraduate software developer and has since worked as an auditor, designer, architect, engineer, practitioner, speaker, and security-organization leader across the healthcare, insurance, banking, payment-processing, travel, and technology sectors. In his current professional-services capacity, his clients include organizations across every major industry and government agencies in multiple countries.
His specialties are the prevention of social-engineering and technical attacks, fraud investigation, OSINT, incident response, threat intelligence, and anti-scam work. He has personally led defense and response from the 2012–2013 wave of denial-of-service campaigns against the U.S. banking sector through to the current generation of AI-enabled fraud schemes. He holds the CISSP and CISA certifications.
He has also, once, been taken in by a raffle scam at a school fundraiser. He tells that story in the first chapter of the book, because the point of the book is that the techniques work on everybody — including the people who study them.
How to use this site
The site has five main areas. Most readers will get the most out of working through them in this order.
- The Framework — the two brains, why the same operating system that works in the village fails in the modern environment, and the three phases every operation runs through.
- The Ten — one page per technique, each with an interactive demonstration designed to make the concept visible in under thirty seconds.
- The Defenses — the seven rules, the rule card, the checklist, and the pause toolkit.
- The Cases — twelve major operations annotated against the framework.
- This page — how the site relates to the book.
The interactive demos do not require any account, download, or login. Nothing is sent anywhere. Everything runs in your browser. The site has no analytics and no third-party scripts.
Credits and citations
The framework presented here builds on a tradition that runs through Robert Cialdini's Influence (1984; rev. 2021), Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), Robert Lifton's eight criteria of totalism (1961), Natasha Schüll's Addiction by Design (2012), Harry Brignull's dark-pattern taxonomy, and the broader cult-research literature including Steven Hassan, Janja Lalich, and Festinger et al.'s When Prophecy Fails. The book's contribution is the synthesis, the unified-framework thesis, and the practitioner voice.
Case facts in this site and in the book come from primary sources — court filings, regulatory reports, whistleblower disclosures, and well-documented long-form journalism. The book's notes section provides the full citations.
This site is non-commercial. Source code is available alongside the book manuscript.
The book is what's underneath.
This site is the visual gloss. The book is the deep account — the cases, the citations, the reasoning, the practitioner voice, the long-game posture. Where the site says here, in thirty seconds, is what the technique looks like, the book says here, with the receipts, is why it works and what to do about it.