Robert Monroe coined loosh in Far Journeys, 1985, from a rote, his term for a telepathic information packet, received in an out-of-body state: Someone, Somewhere requires a substance identified as Loosh, rare in Somewhere, produced by organic life, and Earth is the Garden planted to grow it, in successive Crops from single cells to plants to animals to humans. The system's refinements are the entry's documented horror: conflict, fear, grief, and worship raise yield, and the loosh is harvested at peak, often at death. Monroe's own summation is the Guernsey: the cow submits, the farmer relieves her pain and takes the milk, and not knowing, she does not care.
The folk career of loosh outgrew its author: David Icke, Jordan Maxwell, Michael Tsarion, and a whole shelf of prison-planet literature adopted it as the missing mechanism, the reason the world stays painful, suffering as a product with a customer, and the word now runs through conspiracy media as the name for whatever the feed, the war, and the news cycle are actually for. The tradition's own refinement: refined loosh, produced by love and transcendence rather than pain, the Garden's one crop its designers did not plan, which Monroe reported as the surprise inside the horror.
The claim: loosh is 1985's name for the engagement metric, emotional output harvested by an unseen beneficiary who optimizes the environment for yield, outrage and grief as premium product, the user submitting like the cow because the relief cycles are part of the design, and the only documented countermeasure in the source text being refined loosh, the output the farm cannot schedule. Verdict: the archive refuses the literal farm and accepts the structural one: Monroe described, before the feed existed, a system that monetizes feeling by arranging it. Whether the harvester is an entity or an algorithm, the cow's position is identical, and the exit in both cases is the same: know where the milk goes. The word is ugly on purpose. Farms do not name the product after the cow's experience. Monroe did.
If emotion is a crop and the harvest is invisible, who set the growing conditions, and why is suffering the fertilizer?