SHUSH For Indy. Some of you may remember this meme emerging towards the end of a frankly bruising Scottish General Election campaign this May.

It was coined by indy supporters who wanted to voice a critical distance from the governing party, but felt hustled and harried by the “Both Votes SNP” campaign slogan – which was relentlessly pushed through social media by avid party members and supporters.

This week, Shush For Indy was shifted from snarky leftist trolling, to precise media strategy.

Andy Collier has been a tireless rower in the SNP’s press galleys for well over a decade. Now free to opine on the open market, Collier was complaining about the way that indy supporters in social media (collective noun: “cybernats”) harried and sniped at journalists in the “mainstream” media. “Yes supporters need to befriend the media, not constantly vilify it”, wrote Collier. “The best way to sell the idea of a mature, responsible and tolerant democracy is to have a mature, responsible and tolerant campaign to project that democracy to those who remain sceptical." For the cybernats – “people at the medicated end of the national cause”, said Collier rudely – “that means nurturing the messengers, not shooting them.”

Some powerful wee insects, these cybernats (medicated or not). One minute turning their digital fire on wibbly left-greens who might have a problem with Nato and an unchained Edinburgh finance sector. The next generating such tumult that thousands amass on the forecourt of BBC Scotland, or raise funds for alternative media platforms, scaring the bejeezus out of Lunchtime O’Booze (who doubtless, in 2016, would actually be down the gym at 12.30pm).

So at the very least, let us say that the multitude of practices, people and positions that might lie behind the term “cybernat” need a little unpacking. And that perhaps their persistence isn’t going to be waved away by any seasoned, “professional” media operator.

But we heard another voice at the “control” end of media-political strategy this week – and it’s one we certainly can’t ignore. In a 2015 YouTube video from a German marketing conference, the Better Together’s marketing guru Rob Shorthouse gave his own explanation – no doubt tidied up with the benefit of hindsight – as to how his campaign won the first indyref.

It makes fascinating (if painful) viewing. There’s nothing too surprising about the mechanics of modern, multi-media campaigning that it reveals. Like Yes Scotland, BT did their audience research and found that a middle-third of the population wasn’t sure how to vote (the other bits were implacably Yes or No, though in BT’s polling Nos were already in a 10 per cent lead).

So they concentrated their energies on the doubtful 30 per cent. Audience research identified that invoking worries about the risk of indy (Project Fear, as Shorthouse notoriously coined it), and then answering them with something positive to vote for (“more powers”/The Vow), would secure their majority. “Give them the problem, but at the same time give them the solution”, is Shorthouse’s shorthand.

Now, did Yes Scotland’s “positive campaign” undersell the “problem” (the costs of staying in the Union), and oversell the “solution” (a fully-detailed working plan for indy)? It’s not as if the darker psychological arts weren’t deployed on the indy side.

I remember the SNP’s “Kirsty” video in 2013 (which the US political consultant Mark Westen praised highly at the time), taking this method the opposite way round. That is, it presented scenes of a flourishing post-indy lifestyle, undercut them with images of Tory apocalypse, and ended with a rousing teen-romance moment.

So if you wanted to follow a winning formula … One might imagine that a Yes2 campaign would exploit the “risk and insecurity” implied by Brexit ripping Scotland out of Europe (this “tells them the problem”). You would then present those anxious constituencies with a “solution” – that is, Scotland maintaining its stable, prosperous “union” with Europe.

Yes marketers could also have further reasons to rub their hands in glee. Independence could even be presented as “averting” a substantial “loss”. The behavioural experts (or “nudge” thinkers) say that loss-aversion will always beat the prospect of greater gain, if the latter demands a degree of risk in reaching for it.

Do you find this kind of psycho-political calculus limited, depressing? I certainly do. Perhaps this is just a personal reaction, but I’m happy to leave this political marketing arms-race to those who have the patience and resources for it.

I used to wonder why No figures like the political consultant John McTernan were so adamant that Yes cybernats were being coordinated from some central command (McTernan repeated this belief when I chanced upon him in a London TV studio the other week).

Now, as Shorthouse’s video reveals, I know why. Better Together actually did set up “banks of people” in their campaign HQ, specific “squads” that piled on to social networks during leaders’ debates. They aggressively rebutted on Twitter (where the media influencers were), but used a more human and personalised approach on Facebook (where they found most people were getting their information on the campaign, in the later stages).

Again, the shoulders slump at the prospect of all this being “tightened up” and “professionalised” in the advent of an indyref2. The winds blow in its favour.

Merely chart the successes of various “Project Fear” operations – mini-Miliband dangled from the fingers of Salmond and Sturgeon; the European establishment’s blitzkreig on the Greek vote; the acrid tang of racism deployed by Leave.EU.

From these, one could easily conclude that the “risk and insecurity” button should be adroitly and tactically pressed in the next independence campaign. And that social media should be tightly enmeshed with that strategy.

I will watch with interest to see how many cybernationalists decide to knuckle down to the demands of an SNP-led, “security-first” Yes2 campaign. But there’s something appalling about this prospect. Can we really beat the neoliberal establishment at their own game – threatening ruin and disorder, unless voters submit to our own plans for orderliness?

I don’t think so. In losing the referendum, remember what the Yes campaign’s media strategy actually built. Their choice wasn’t “banks of people” battering out Twitter messages in Glasgow’s Savoy Centre – but citizens given the tools and skills they needed to craft their own versions of the core Yes messages.

In the words of an old hand in the campaign, “Yes’s social media strategy was based around the power of sharing and creating inspirational, sometimes playful content”. What that built was a carnival and festival of democracy. The passion and optimism which that unleashed has supercharged the SNP to its current supreme position.

Can Yes2 be a “both-and”? The cool calculations of a top-down campaign, tightly syncing data and messaging – alongside the spontaneity and creativity of a diverse, self-propelling grassroots movement? Does one have to supersede the other?

All this raises a final question about the ultimate endpoint of social-media-driven political campaigns. Are they about inciting primal reactions – fear, hope, anger, anxiety – and then harnessing those to one rare political act, on one designated day?

Or are they occasions where those whose voices are rarely considered get their due? Where communities tangibly feel their own power? Where we use mass self-communication tools to defy doom, despair and incapability – those vapours that ruling elites like to funnel into our heads and hearts?

Whatever the answers – and if you have them, this is the place to send them – it’s bigger than a big man’s disgruntlement about those pesky cybernats.

Shush For Indy, in whatever mode and to whatever end, won’t do.