William S. Burroughs’ Manifesto for Overthrowing a Government with Fake News
openculture.com
openculture.com
First it was the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, designed by the CIA for people to degrade the Soviet Union in Eastern Bloc countries, which pretty clearly predicts today’s average corporation’s middle management lol
https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/...
And I thought that was funny. But today I found out it works the other way, private to publi : a satire manifesto from the 60s for destroying mainstream media by fake news and conspiracies:
http://www.openculture.com/2019/03/william-s-burroughs-manif...
McLemee titles his review of Burrough’s rediscovered manifesto “Distant Early Warning,” and much of it does indeed sound eerily prophetic. But we should also bear in mind the book is itself a countercultural pastiche, designed to scramble minds for reasons only Burroughs truly knew.
It was clearly a bit of passive aggressive satire even at the time. It’s not like bureaucracy was invented in wwii.
“Sabotage” is a derivative of “sabot,” which is French for a wooden shoe. It means going slow, with a dragging, clumsy movement, such as that manner of footgear may be expected to bring on. So it has come to describe any manoeuvre of slowing-down, inefficiency, bungling, obstruction....
https://archive.org/details/engineersandpri01veblgoog/page/n...
See also:
https://macro.economicblogs.org/mason-slack-wire/2017/11/mas...
Most people by now are familiar with the '6 degree of Kevin Bacon' game where most any person involved in the film industry can be linked to Kevin Bacon through 6 or fewer links via projects worked with others. Less entertaining, and thus less well known (just in the mainstream, this is common knowledge amongst anyone who has read anything about network science) is that if you wanted to make it much more difficult to 'connect' to Kevin Bacon on average, you would only need to ban a couple dozen nodes from being used. Any communication network populated by humans seems to have a similar character, forming 'clumps' that are mostly disconnected but share a few points of commonality. The only thing necessary to isolate the clumps is to identify those 'bridge' nodes and prevent the bridge from being used.
In terms of people relating to one another, this doesn't mean anything extreme like 'eliminating' the person providing the bridge. By their very nature, these bridging links that provide a path (through which ideas can flow) from one group to another are shaky and weak. If you had to change your phone number for some reason, for instance, it is unlikely that you would recall updating your number with people you spoke too very rarely and had little contact with. Even if you did, if occasional messages got dropped, you would be unlikely to notice.
Society is very big, and it is probably impossible to actually 'manage' the space of ideas circulating around. But, there is one trait that every successful revolution that led to rebellion shares and must share - acceptance across vastly disparate groups. A revolution in thinking amongst one group, or even several groups, will just fizzle out if it's not able to get buy-in across all demographics and interest groups. Those groups have to come together in common cause to have a chance of actually changing the government. So if your job is to maintain and protect the status quo, and to ensure that nothing like a revolution occurs on your watch, why not just make this sort of spread impossible or nearly so? If you have access to information about who communicates with who, you can, very quietly (maybe silently, I'm not aware of any techniques by which this strategy could be detected though I suspect such would exist), identify the tiny number of 'bridge' nodes and subtly interfere with their communications, resulting in the average 'distance' an idea has to travel to get from one group to another exponentially.
There is fake news and then there is fake news. Absolutely fake news is easy to identify and snuff out. What's harder to snuff out is a religion or an ideology, fake news that people believe because they are convinced that it's in their best interest to believe it to be true -- i.e. Communism will free us all. When those interests converge then as a government you have problems that are difficult to solve and trying to engineer the network can easily backfire and lead to revolution.
The point is never to get to that point, not try to engineer the situation at the end.
It is unlikely that anyone would notice this because of a few factors. First, the important 'bridge' nodes are almost always poorly connected generally. (I picture a bridge node person like a member of a biker gang who keeps in contact with his elderly aunt, providing a way for ideas to spread from a biker gang to her knitting circle.) If they complain that they think someone is interfering with their ability to communicate with this other group which, by definition, their in-group is unconcerned with... it is unlikely the group would care much. Also, the 'interference' would optimally be as innocuous-seeming and quiet as possible. The fact that you only have to manipulate a small number of connections to have large effects on the networks overall average distance between clusters supports this.
And yes, it should go without saying that this is a monstrously unethical and terrible thing to do. It would probably have a lot of unforeseen consequences. I've been wondering if it would change how things like fashion trends or fads occur and if monitoring that might be a way to detect it. It would seem intuitively that it might lead to echo chambers and amplification of ideas within clusters since whatever moderating influence the slight connection to a different cluster provided would be removed.... but I haven't seen any research about that and I'm not sure how to simulate it without it just being a self-fulfilling prophecy.