STORY AT-A-GLANCE Mass formation involves the formation of a hypnotic state around a shared consensus Those under its spell obsessively focus on a failure of the normal world or a particular event or person, who becomes the focus of the attention and can effectively control the masses Mass formation can occur in a society with feelings of social isolation and free-floating anxiety among a large number of people; it leads to totalitarian thinking and, eventually, to totalitarian states After Dr. Robert Malone mentioned mass formation on an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the term went viral The technocrats quickly took action, manipulating search results and populating Google with propaganda to discredit Malone and the mass formation psychosis theory