Who's in charge around here?
You are sitting at a small movie theater, watching the latest Wes Anderson espionage thriller, when the screen goes blank.
Is it…broken? Or is this…art?
5 seconds pass - this is a REALLY long pause if it’s an artistic decision…
30 seconds - what if the point of this scene is for the audience to sit in the discomfort, and the movie is about to come back in the next second with a big plot twist…
NO ONE wants to get up and miss it - and no one wants to be the fool who asked “is this thing broken?” in the middle of the great masterpiece.
The audience sits there for a full minute before someone decides to get up & talk to the theater staff, who go “oh shit” and restart the movie.
The original title of this essay was “How responsibility falls”.
If the people above you who are formally in charge drop the ball, it falls on you. You gain the power to solve the problem, without any of the resources, grace, or formal authority of those above you.
All the weight of the responsibility, none of the reward.
It is not fair, it is not good. You are dealt a losing a hand in a game you didn’t ask to play, but you have a choice to make:
Accept this responsibility for your world, and get it done. Find the peace, somehow.
Let the ball keep falling. Toss the hot potato of power that fell in your lap, for the people below you to deal with
Most importantly: if you screw up in your good intentioned attempt to make things better, you WILL bear the consequence. It will be unequivocally your fault - a direct result of your choice acting on your world & everyone who shares it with you.
When do you decide to pull the trigger?
Good news! I come bearing the answer. The formula is thus:
First, understand your own competence. Test it to be sure.
Second, scan your environment to see (1) who is in charge, if any, and (2) test their competence
IF you are satisfied with their competence, THEN you may relax.
IF you cannot find them, OR cannot test their competence, THEN you have the moral imperative to grab the steering wheel.
You may apply this formula at any scale:
Your corporate job & your manager
Your friend group or family
Your local city government
Thanks for reading!
This essay is a psyop - it is written with the intention of a specific behavior change on the readers. We measure success here by observing the expected behavior change. We observe this via self reports1.
The “original meme” that we propagate in any territory that we operate in is:
“Where did that change come from?”
My neighbor the other day reported to me a behavior change that was triggered by me. I told her that one was not intentional, but I appreciate the report and will add it to my file2.
P.S. - if you are a social engineer, or know anyone who is, you should send them the Psyops Hackathon event: https://luma.com/psyop-hackathon
I want people to at least declare themselves as such. I believe many people want to declare themselves as such but don’t have the language for it, and we can just standardize on something here so we (those willing to do it openly) can recognize each other.
Here is how I applied to the event under “Defender” - explaining what territories I operate in, and an example of the active operation(s) I am doing:
Aella for example is high up on my list of “notable people who are actively social engineering society in a transparent & open way”. So it was surprising to hear her reject this label:
But I think what she’s saying here is “I’m not doing the nefarious things that 90% of social engineering companies do” - which is accurate! We (the general public) can tell Aella’s methods are “clean” because her operations signal their intent, and follow through on said intent3.
The proof that you are being transparent with your operations is that other people notice it and participate in your operation. The transparency about your operation makes it vulnerable (to attack), but also creates surface area for allies to contribute. Adam Mastroianni noticed & wrote about people who seem to be editing our cultural norms intentionally in Nov 2024:
Anyone who is capable of noticing who is influencing their ideas & behavior I consider in “safe territory” or “charted waters”. You can perform social operations in those territories and rely on someone flagging it if the change is producing bad outcomes. If they don’t yet have the capacity to notice this, then someone has to decide to propagate that awareness or wait for it to emerge on its own.
The good news is that the landscape is now biased in our favor. Almost all media territories on earth now organically have people emerging who recognize the techniques, and use them for good. We just have to all find each other now.
In a typical social engineering operation, they surveil the targets. We, in “the open source intelligence agency” / open social engineering world, wait for the target to come to us and give us the data. Because they understand that we are doing steering work and they want to participate in making sure it goes in the right direction.
It has been really weird since I came out to my friends and family and community as an “open social engineer”, but I think it’s far healthier than working on this stuff in secret. And also, way more fun and we can do much more ambitious things because we know there are real guard rails.
This thread from Nov 2022 is a good & honest “declaration of social engineering intent”. She describes her motivation as noticing something that seems normal today, that in the future we look back on as definitely wrong.
Therefore: what do we consider normal (or not normal) right now that may change once we understand it better? That is Aella’s project & it had been quite successful.
I described Aella’s work in my own words as:
survey art that normalizes things you know to be true but people are embarrassed to admit to the betterment of society is social engineering (and it's good!)
Have been in a situation where people involved were either incompetent or malevolent.
So I grabbed the steering wheel but it turns out I didn't have the necessary competence either.
Are there valid situations where the best thing to do is nothing at all? Or how does one recognize that beforehand?
🤩😍🥰
Terrifying if true.
I must figure out how I want to go about framing this