Humans seem to have something like an "acceptable target slot" or slots.

Acquiring control over this concept, by any means, gives a person or group incredible leeway to steer individuals, societies, and cultures. These capabilities are sufficiently flexible and powerful that the importance of immunity has often already been built up, especially because historical record overuse is prevalent; this means that methods of taking control include expensive strategies or strategies that are sufficiently complicated as to be hard to track, like changing the behavior of a targeted individual or demographic or type-of-person in order to more easily depict them as acceptable targets, noticing and selecting the best option for acceptable targets, and/or cleverly chaining acceptable targethood from one established type-of-person to another by drawing attention to similarities to similarities that were actually carefully selected for this (or even deliberately induced in one or both of them).

9/11 and Gaza are obvious potential-examples, and most wars in the last century feature this to some extent, but acceptable-target-slot-exploitation is much broader than that; on a more local scale, most interpersonal conflict involves DARVO to some extent, especially when the human brain's ended up pretty wired to lean heavily into that without consciously noticing.

A solution is to take an agent perspective, and pay closer attention (specifically more than the amount that's expected or default) any time a person or institution uses reasoning to justify harming or coercing other people or institutions, and to assume that such situations might have been structured to be cognitively difficult to navigate and should generally be avoided or mitigated if possible. If anyone says that some kind of harm is inevitable, notice if someone is being rewarded for gaining access to the slot; many things that seem inevitable are actually a skill issue and only persist because insufficient optimization power has been pointed at them; the human race is currently pushing the frontier for creating non-toxic spaces which are robust to both internal and external factors and actors. 

Base rates of harmful tendencies are high among humans (e.g. easily noticing or justifying opportunities to weaken or harm others, or the mind coming alive while doing so), but higher base rates (of any dynamic, not just things that impact various people's acceptable target slots) also increase the proportion of profoundly strategic people on earth who find that dynamic cognitively available and hold it as a gear in their models and plots.

I just found out that hypnosis is real and not pseudoscience. Apparently the human brain has a zero day such that other humans can find ways to read and write to your memory, and everyone is insisting that this is fine and always happens with full awareness and consent? 

Wikipedia says as many as 90% of people are at least moderately susceptible, and depending how successful people have been over the last couple centuries at finding ways to reduce detection risk per instance (e.g. developing and and selling various galaxy-brained misdirection ploys), that seems like very fertile ground for salami-slicing attacks which wear down partially resistant people.

The odds that something like this would be noticed and tested/scaled/optimized by competent cybersecurity experts and power lawyers seems pretty high (e.g. screen refresh rate oscillation in non-visible ways to increase feelings of stress or discomfort and then turning it off whenever the user's eyes are bout to go over specific kinds of words, slightly altering the color output of specific pixels across the screen in the shape of words and measuring effectiveness based on whether it causally increases the frequency of people using those words, some kind of way to combine these two tactics, something derived from the millions of people on youtube trying hard to look for a video file that hypnotizes them, etc).

It's really frustrating living in a post-MKUltra world, where every decade our individual sovereignty as humans is increasingly reliant on very senior government officials (who are probably culturally similar to the type of person who goes to business school and have been for centuries) either consistently not succeeding at any of the manipulation science which they are heavily incentivized to diversify their research investment in, or taking them at their word when they insist that they genuinely believe in protecting democracy and the bad things they get caught doing are in service towards that end. Also, they seem to remain uninterested in life extension, possibly due in part to being buried deep in a low-trust dark forest (is trust even possible at all if you're trapped on a planet with hypnosis?). 

Aside from the incredibly obvious move to cover up your fucking webcam right now, are there any non-fake defensive strategies to reduce the risk that someone walks up to you/hacks your computer and takes everything from you? Is there some reliable way to verify that the effects are consistently weak or that scaling isn't viable? The error bars are always really wide for the prevalence of default-concealed deception (especially when it comes to stuff that wouldn't scale until the 2010s), making solid epistemics a huge pain to get right, but the situation with directly reading and writing to memory is just way way too extreme to ignore.