ATTN: FSM SCUMBAGS

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

 

I love how well you all play together

OK, I'm going to pretend like this is going well and push on.

Cain, I agree with your point that massive numbers (80+) online would easily take down most sites, including most major ones. I think that the Internet has taken the role of our master communication system. It's made it very easy to get right in front of many, many faces and it can, if handled by smart people turn 80 into half a million, in the perception of others. To ignore the importance and potential of this medium would be folly.

Vex and ECH do have a point as well... there still exists somewhat of a wall between the net and reality. As long as we only attack in cyberspace, we exist as a threat only in some sense. Even a small physical force can accent a well designed Cyberspace attack, leading to something far larger than the sum of its parts.

Here's my thought. Right now we have a very small presence, both physically and virtually. We need to grow both... virtual is the most simple and will de facto grow our physical presence (since each virtual foot soldier has a physical presence). Recruiting seems an easy split... I recommend we ask the Professor to create some flyers that will pique the interest of new converts and all existing physical members stick them in physical places... the flyers point to here (or our recruitment center etc.)

At the same time we craft some sort of message to post at all known Discordian websites/forums, directing interested people here. That should get us a response.

We next need to plan out a series of projects to keep everyone interested and active... Discordians get distracted easily, I think.

1. Virtual Education: We need classes, essays and chat sessions on training, both for virtual and physical mayhem. I recommend we tell all newbies that the schedule is two weeks of training, Labs in local mayhem, forming your own cabal, restoring the "balance" of a virtual community and an Orbital Bombardment for the Final Test. It gives them training and us a chance to see who is useful and who is cannon fodder.

2. By the end of the first two weeks, we should have a large virtual force and a small (yet larger than now) physical cabal presence. At that point we need to have two or three real/specific projects in the works, both physical and virtual. Virtual attacks are usually in a specific time attack On till the site dies... Physical projects can have a wider berth (these 1000 flyers need posted around your city in the next week).

That means that we need to have class stuff ready BEFORE the n00bs show up and have the forst several projects ready by the time that they graduate.

Once we get that far, we can start arguing about which is better.

Thoughts?

[Triple Zero]

(does ANYONE know how to work this thing yet?)

oh, right, thanks for reminding me. i still need to play with that toy.

i'll whip up a new firefox profile right now (as i dont want an unknown FF extension messing up my medium-secure FFox config) and start playing.

(...)

okay, this seems to be really, really easy. check out the two online demos and you can see for yourself (they take about 5 minutes to watch both, and you don't need to install the plugin to view the demos, they're just flash-movie screenshots, showing how to do a few simple things):
http://www.iopus.com/imacros/home/fx/welcome.htm

especially the second, form-filling, example is interesting. as it can easily be used for auto-posting.

i'm pretty sure iMacros has a lot more advanced commands for automating stuff, i'll play with that later on.

[Iron Sulfide]

maybe we don't have to go after direct media attention at all.

in the Anatomy of a meme thread, someone mentioned that it would probably be easier to alter a product to fit the effective meme, than to effectively meme an existing product...maybe we could use a vehicle for the media, like a trojan horse, and market the fuck out of it. it could easily be modeled to appear benign and commonplace, which will be it's charm and defense...obviously, though, it isn't. that's why BiP won't appeal to the masses, necessarily.

of course, the reverse could also be tried: instead of creating a marketing vehicle ourselves, we exploit already existing ones (more of what i felt cain was speaking of).  my opinion on the name, personally, whether GAK or HIMEOBS or some other such is that while attractive to ourselves, doesn't market very well. maybe, i'm more stuck on contemplating the actual "product" than the...whatever it is we're talking about. either way, anything remotely discordian that is presented to the media- mainstream or indy, doesn't really matter- really shouldn't appear remotely close to that.

i know, these are retarded points that you've all already thought of, but i'm feeling frustrated that this is turning into a creation/evolution style rift.

i'm serious about my intents with this, but i don't have much time to devote to online stuff, personally. there are several people in my vicinity who do, who are fellows, or at least sympathetic. as such, i'm on the middle path: we really have to combine the two venues of action. obviously, not everybody will have the same availability and level of commitment. cain, you have limited physical opportunity to do much, you say, but you're capable of more than five times what i would be in technical application. that's great. I'm more capable of discrete dissemination and other physical projects right now. it's not about reducing either of the areas to a part, we're supposed to be connecting those parts- or i'm obviously missing something, somewhere.

manually breathing...now.

[Steady]

so long, woodwork.




this is a screenshot of the FRONT PAGE of cnn.com, taken about 5 mins ago. a large portion of the stories are about totally ridiculous, irrelevant, "funny" shit that involve a very small amount of players. obviously having so many of these stories attracting this much attention at once is rare, but i DO see a lot of this in the media, especially local, "quirky" sources.

i agree with cram. obviously there needs to be a motive before talk about method gets too involved, but the media does pick up on small events. the issue is what events it decides to pick up on, with countless weird things happening every second. LOST RING TURNS UP IN FUDGE. a year or so ago, my grandmother discovered a wedding ring in a crabcake and returned it to the worker at the deli who had lost it. it's an almost identical situation. would cnn have written that story up if my family had made the effort to communicate it? we live in maryland, crab-town; it would have made a nice blurb. if not cnn, i'm almost certain a baltimore/local-based newspaper would have picked it up. and that's a larger audience than almost any stray forum.

if we want a REVOLUTION, yeah, manpower is key. but if all we want is attention, or advertising, it might be possible to manipulate the media on a smaller scale.

tl;dr: cnn posts neighborhood oddities on their front page. i am interested, and i have time. i would need training. hi, PD. thanks for letting me lurk forever.
-Steady

[Cain]

You need a definitive goal.  And if that goal is the opening shot in a campaign, you need to use it to be able to make a plausible promise to the right sort of audiences (the sort of people you want to attract or aid you).

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

I am reminded of the class I took on starting your own cult. It was taught by Rev. Ivan Stang and covered a lot of these sorts of topics. In Stang's case, he found that creating the propaganda in a convincing manner was the key... goals were a later game. People want to feel like they are part of something bigger, perhaps our natural "cog" tendency. People that are "Discordian" or who might be recruited by Discordians often seem keen to be a cog in the machine that fucks with the machine. Once the cogs are in place, the machine tends to work (if you apply energy and keep this mechanical metaphor lubed). I think its obvious what the initial goal seems to be here... at least a thread that seems common among all of the posts is a need for numbers of participants (IRL or IVL) willing to engage in ELF/LDD/OM/HIMEOBS/etc.

I see this new machine as a Time Sharing sort of device, like an old mainframe... we have some number of cycles dedicated to IRL we have some number of cycles dedicated to IVL and we have developers (Cain, Vex, Cram, etc) who, I think could easily use this new platform to further develop concepts that are currently in need of more RAM and CPU.

So I would hazard that our first goal is to design the machine (figure out the logistics of how we want to put this together), then get the cogs in place (advertise, advertise, advertise), finally turn it on and start hacking brains (take to post graduates on virtual attacks and use them as cells to do IRL shit.

I'm gonna start working on essays etc for n00bs and come up with a couple projects for post-grads. I hope everyone else does the same.

[Cain]

I'll work on an essay on the guerrilla/netwar mindset.  Its something I have a lot of time invested in, and is probably the single most useful model to work from currently.

Edit: this will take a while.  Much of my excellent dead tree reference work is locked up 500 miles away from me.  If someone else can work on other aspects in the meantime, I'll either reconstruct what I can from my memory, or else work it into my writing when I get back a week from now.  But steam may run out without other inputs before then.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

This is a good direction.

Rat: I like the points you bring up about the machine you build tending to work if you design the parts and assign those parts. For this reason I think we should design the organization, begin going through the motions of membership, and then define its direction.

To stretch your metaphor, the organization is like a computer program. Once you embed that program into the members, it will determine what gets done.

So far, it's been a complete free-for-all -- which is good as far as it goes -- but if we want to start accomplishing things we need to set definitions and variables, and put the thing into practice.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

This is a good direction.

Rat: I like the points you bring up about the machine you build tending to work if you design the parts and assign those parts. For this reason I think we should design the organization, begin going through the motions of membership, and then define its direction.

To stretch your metaphor, the organization is like a computer program. Once you embed that program into the members, it will determine what gets done.

So far, it's been a complete free-for-all -- which is good as far as it goes -- but if we want to start accomplishing things we need to set definitions and variables, and put the thing into practice.

I agree entirely.

Meatspace recruitment is something I'll try to wrap my head around for a first essay.

[LMNO]

I'm still interested in using my limited and meager abilities/resources in whatever way I can, be it conceptual, or actual.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I think this "project" would be easier to discuss if we had a concrete target or goal. This is in danger of getting talked to death on the floor because we're disagreeing not about intent, but about methodology. Right? Which doesn't mean much anyway unless we have a plan. I'm sensing that a lot of you are restless and want to get something done. This is the same sort of energy which produced the BIP metaphor, and we should follow it.

I think 20-some odd operatives are capable of a fuckton ...if they're coordinated.


Just to toss a silly jake idea out there:
(an attempt to threadjack towards productivity)
(but also to illustrate how 20-some odd netgoons can make a difference)

TGRR mentioned pranking the election cycle.

The Ron Paul followers are rabid. They're all over the web. And they respond IN FORCE and COORDINATION to nearly any mention of Ron Paul's name.


We don't have the manpower to blanket the web with propaganda, but we sure as hell have the manpower to pollute one or two of the more important information venues.


Imagine a significant push to identify Ron Paul as a Freemason (or something to that effect). We generate images and news and gossip which talks about his Masonic participation.

IRL calls or e-mails can be made to campaign headquarters and news outlets. We pick a big name blogger and swarm on him, causing him to mention Ron Paul = Freemason in some way. Work towards these ends is totally possible over the net or IRL.

This causes the Ron-Paulites to launch an equally large "RON PAUL IS NOT A FREEMASON" campaign, which is an awfully funny thing to spend manpower on.




Let's not become these four guys in this clip from Waking Life:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=OtuYWyjk4ZI 

I love this.

[Cain]

The only problem with pranking the Ron Paul lot, as I see it is

1.  We might alienate the sort of people who would otherwise be on side with us (obviously not the Nazis, Christian militias and extreme Libertarians, but everyone else)
2.  The PaulBots look for revenge
3.  We waste the resources of people who were never going to win anyway.


Now, if we were to do a false flag action which bought the PaulBots into direct conflict with a major Presidential player, on the other hand...their considerable online resources will be doing in targets we want. 

In Australia's recent election, the ruling Liberal Party had members who had been handing out leaflets pretending to be an Islamic group thanking Labor for, essentially, supporting terrorism, for example.

You can download campaign logos and contact information for nothing, and a decent quality printer and decent paper will make the flyer look like a real one.  It's really just a matter of choosing who you think, out of the Repubs and Democrats, who will provoke the largest and most interesting reactions from the Ron Paul camp, if an attack campaign were launched against him.  It seems, so far, to be a fairly open race still, but I would suggest Hillary, Huckabee and Giuliani.

[Cramulus]

Good points Cain, thanks for the response.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

The only problem with pranking the Ron Paul lot, as I see it is

1.  We might alienate the sort of people who would otherwise be on side with us (obviously not the Nazis, Christian militias and extreme Libertarians, but everyone else)
2.  The PaulBots look for revenge
3.  We waste the resources of people who were never going to win anyway.


Now, if we were to do a false flag action which bought the PaulBots into direct conflict with a major Presidential player, on the other hand...their considerable online resources will be doing in targets we want. 

In Australia's recent election, the ruling Liberal Party had members who had been handing out leaflets pretending to be an Islamic group thanking Labor for, essentially, supporting terrorism, for example.

You can download campaign logos and contact information for nothing, and a decent quality printer and decent paper will make the flyer look like a real one.  It's really just a matter of choosing who you think, out of the Repubs and Democrats, who will provoke the largest and most interesting reactions from the Ron Paul camp, if an attack campaign were launched against him.  It seems, so far, to be a fairly open race still, but I would suggest Hillary, Huckabee and Giuliani.

Lots of good info here. I concur.

[Cain]

I once worked dirty tricks for a similar, if less important campaign.  There were only 2 runners however, so setting up and using the disinformation machine, once it was in place, became much easier.

Alternatively, if we could find some Ron Paul activists we could "work with", things become even easier.