Subversion¶
Nyan Sandwich has a cunning plan:
Proposal: a secretly NR-run hatefact-respinning and overton-window-lefting blog.
— Nyan Sandwich (@WolfTivy) March 13, 2014
Sister Sarah (@sarahdoingthing) suggests the “hard part is to be somehow different from actual real leftist sites …”
@sarahdoingthing No. Point is to be a perfectly normal leftist site, but secretly an experimental apparatus for Cthulology
— Nyan Sandwich (@WolfTivy) March 13, 2014
Partly because there can simply never be enough of this, but also for other reasons, this idea is perfectly delicious. It would be like a Sokal tar-baby, spreading sticky black paranoid confusion throughout the redoubts of the enemy. To make this work, however, would require a very exceptional type of genius (of exactly the kind demonstrated in the Shea case). Judging the precise extent and flavors of absurdity that the left will endorse — or at least find credibly non-parodic — is a rare and delicate art, especially since they have to be taken to the very edge, teetering prominently into gulfs of roaring madness. In addition, since effectiveness would correspond closely with persistence, the work involved would be immense.
If anyone is embarking on this, I do not (of course) want to know — Omertà.
(Before anyone else brings it up (here) I should perhaps also mention this.)
Modeling strategy on espionage and the double-agent, rather than military confrontation and the hero-warrior, would do much to burn-off ludicrous romanticism, replacing theatrical attitude with realist cunning. As with anything that involves demonstrated performance of a complex feat, rather than grandiose proclamations of antagonism, it would require actual cognitive achievement. Given basic facts about numbers and capabilities, infiltration is almost certainly something that will eventually need to be done.
Such subversion would also be an experiment in practical metaphysics. How are identities assembled? What are agents? How do expressed values coordinate with effective activity? These questions are destined to explosive complication in the ragged, techno-psychological world to come, so it is worth tangling with them early, and intricately. Making biorealism an excuse to regress into paleolithic brotherhoods is a temptation to be torched-out ruthlessly by Internet machinations. Turn social Cyberspace into a jungle, where camouflage and complexity rule.