First series was emergent phenomena that the laughing man did not direct, while the second was centrally planned chaos by coaxing using Kuze, false flag operations and misdirecting.
I should say that it is just my interpretation, not the word of God or the consensus by people far more invested and interested than me.
There has always been psychological operations, but Gist took a look into the future and pretty accurately saw the next evolution given the decentralized informational networks.
