
William S. Burroughs’ Manifesto for Overthrowing a Government with Fake News - DyslexicAtheist
http://www.openculture.com/2019/03/william-s-burroughs-manifesto-for-overthrowing-a-corrupt-government-with-fake-news.html
======
EGreg
Books that predict the future both ways:

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/...](https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-
archive/2012-featured-story-archive/simple-sabotage.html)

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...](http://www.openculture.com/2019/03/william-s-burroughs-manifesto-
for-overthrowing-a-corrupt-government-with-fake-news.html)

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.

~~~
dredmorbius
Thostein Veblen: _The engineers and the price system_ , 1921.

 _“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...](https://archive.org/details/engineersandpri01veblgoog/page/n12)

See also:

[https://macro.economicblogs.org/mason-slack-
wire/2017/11/mas...](https://macro.economicblogs.org/mason-slack-
wire/2017/11/mason-varieties-sabotage/)

~~~
Doxin
A more likely explanation of the origin of the word "sabotage" is that a
wooden shoe is mightily convenient for sticking in the gears of a mill. If you
go look at farmers wearing clogs there's very little about it that's slow,
clumsy, or dragging about it.

------
otakucode
There is at least one defense against this that a government could employ, but
the consequences to the public, while virtually guaranteed to protect and
extend the government, can only be guessed at. The key is in Network Science.

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.

~~~
devoply
... and this friends is how you inadvertently start a revolution. you snuff
those nodes, though nodes notice and go to the public about it via other
channels. the resentment builds. revolution ensues.

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.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWhtcU4-xAM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWhtcU4-xAM)

~~~
otakucode
I completely forgot one big part of the social-graph-manipulation model of
establishing a forever-government. It's not targetted. This isn't aimed at
selectively suppressing certain groups, or stopping something once it's
spreading. It's an architectural attack on the structure of the network.

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.

------
spacecity1971
Reads more like instructions for constructing a Basilisk to me.

