Excerpt from CIA's Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944)

I think this manual is most appropriately understood as an early reference for the operations of the FBI in COINTELPRO, etc. State employed agents-provocateur and saboteurs were some of the first to literally use these exact reference manuals domestically, and their targets were the various social and labor movements of the day.

All the things in the quote happen naturally, through people’s general incompetence. To put it in a field manual is very tongue in cheek, reads to me as irony. Corporations and political parties run themselves as poorly as if they were infiltrated by sabotagers, but they do it to themselves.

alas, many saboteurs may consider themselves friends.

But I've been ruminating on how to start a political and economic movement committed to dismantling the bureaucratic state by empowering individuals to be ever more autonomous.

Adjacent notions are participatory democracy (a la the Iroquois), banning usury, UBI, worker directed social enterprises, left-libertarian, and healing the world. More to be added as my whimsy and imagination permit.

99% of this is home gown. And infiltrating agent's job would, be to accelerate these natters. Assuming your group matters enough which allike.

But complaining about this has not helped us fix things quite yet either :-/

But when it's an e-mail or other interaction that they understand as "conversational", these people tend to not start acting on the output until the end.

So ask for 3 things, and chances are only the last one will still be in the queue by the time they've read your whole message. The rest will have just popped out of their mind and no longer exist in their world until they're prompted to re-read your message.

For people who act like that, seemingly the only way around it short of drip-feeding them questions one at a time that I've found is to present them with a document attachment and only one request: "Please follow the procedure in the attached document." And make them sign off. And provide a checklist if they're particularly difficult.

You basically need to make it clear that the list is not conversation. You can find people who are pathologically unable to process a list of instructions in an e-mail who are at the same time completely OCD about processing lists of instructions in a document, because they context-switch completely.

Of course in this context of "sabotage" this can be exploited to: Mercilessly attach all information in a bunch of separate documents, and add checklists and signoffs to everything. Especially to unimportant stuff.

I resonate with it because I can name persons who, intentionally or not, do these exact actions within our org; I can even name a few I know do it intentionally as they said as such. Their goal isn't to get fired or to cause "real" trouble, but instead to cause frustration without getting in trouble.

There are similar guides, or were anyways, on how to effectively troll/create chaos online; it's not that the authors of the articles are geniuses that created this stuff in a vacuum, they just had a need for such a specific outcome and turns out humans have been doing this ever since we started making hierarchies.

* (or any other intelligence organization across the globe really)

FWIW, the counter to this though is to just ignore such "saboteurs" as much as you can. Most of the time their ability to frustrate relies on consistently being in places where they can frustrate or by participating with persons who are drawn into such distractions.

If you cannot avoid working with them, the same tactics that are disruptive in this manual (documentation, etc), can be used against the saboteur also. Establish documentation procedures that even if only you are using it, you can define time sinks and inefficiencies.

Bend the rules a little and continue projects without the problematic person, finding a replacement that does help, and when you report on the project, document the saboteur not as a problem, but instead that your chosen replacement was an improvement on them.

These workplace saboteurs thrive on creating confusion, chaos, and disruption, and working in channels that aren't easily observable, and most importantly, by exploiting our tendencies towards good faith interpretations in all things (which is what we're taught is correct and polite).

Businesses live by hard numbers and profit.

It's a sometimes tense experience, but discipline and resistance to getting drawn into the saboteurs chaos can and eventually will get the desired results. If the business truly doesn't respond or the saboteur has such sway/pull that their lack of output/efficiency doesn't prompt some action from the business, then truly the business is not one you want to be in.

Quite a few workplace saboteurs have been removed from my workplace doing this (either by threat of firing that resulted in resignation or outright firing). The end result of a few weeks of just practicing brevity in meetings, taking the time to make a chain of documentation for interactions with such persons, and avoiding getting wrapped up into "games" helped a ton. Follow-up emails from conversations the saboteur wants to keep "just in chat" or "just on a quick call" are extremely useful, just a quick high-level summary and suggestion for next steps and a request to update the thread showed a reluctance of these persons to participate (add in little messages like "hey I pinged you in our chat also and didn't get the response either" to just cover your tracks)

Nazi dogwhistle bullshit.

There is nothing anti-intellectual about pointing out the tactics used within organizations today, learned in the universities, resemble this sabotage manual, especially since the tactics I am referring to are nihilistic and totalitarian, and come right out of what Arendt (as it turns out, a contemporary of members said school mentioned downthread) described as the necessary conditions for a totalitarian movement. There is zero controvsery that academia and its appendant institutions, and now big tech, and even finance has been compromised by a totalitarian movement whose members are trained that power is the highest good, that there is no truth, no God, no consequences, and other downstream effluent of what appears to be a strain of Heideggerian Marxism.

One hopes you apply the same standard of intellectualism to your fellow travelers whose best responses reduce to hysterical canards that are so absurd as to be beneath a denial. I encourgage you all to please, do better.

They’ll probably say you’re promoted!

Note: I think it's a world-wide phenomenon, not localised to the US where clearly, the workers have changed their relationships with productivity and contributions to making the system prevail.

That still doesn't make the headline correct, though. CIA simply didn't exist in WW2.