C.A.R.P. Ch. 06 - Sex Stories

C.A.R.P. Ch. 06

... were actually smart enough to know that we couldn't know everything, but we could know somekey things, and how to leverage those into progress.

"If you wanted to," Michiko said to us, "you could even set out to start activelyplanning to sedate large groups of people. Karl Marx said that religion is the opiate of the people, but television is becoming the new religion. If you control that, you can control the narrative. You can start setting forth paths for factions, classes. You can make people voluntarily stratify themselves, to encourage them to self-segregate and divide instead of unify."

"Even better," Nate said, "you could form new tribes of people, and simplify their way of thinking, so they have a default pattern ready to apply for any new information, much like the way people used to use religion to do that. The key is just repetition and persistence, and to escalate in small amounts of scale over long periods of time. It's like that prank we played on Ali last year, where we kept changing one small thing in her dorm room every day until like three weeks in when everything just went haywire on her."

"That shit still wasn't funny, Nate," Ali grumbled.

"It wasn'tsupposed to be funny, Ali," Michiko said. "It wassupposed to teach us all a lesson about how easy it is to sneak by little changes that can add up to big effects."

"Itwas kinda funny, Ali," I said with a smirk.

"Yeah, okay," she admitted. "Maybe a little."

"Isn't someone going to call them ...

... out on it, though?" Kevin asked. "Like, someone somewhere's going to have to stand up and go 'The Emperor has no clothes,' don't they?"

"That's the flaws with systems, though," I said. "You can overwhelm most of them by volume. You put enough junk into the input end of any system, it's usually enough to force them to shut down. Look at the spreadsheets we've been doing for economic theory. Imagine what would happen of, in place of any of the automated systems we've built to input basic market signs like GDP or growth, I targeted one of our inputs and instead force fed it, say, the entirety of the script of 'Hamlet.' Now, I know we'd like to think that our systems would just reject it, but would they? We, as systems makers, have to figure out how to reliably discern between good data and bad data, and have to learn how to do that quickly, because you could automate sending bad data into any system, and just like that, you've crashed a system, no matter how well thought out you thought it was. I bet you could do that with almost any of the systems of the world."

"Oh sure," Josephine said. "The financial systems arerife with too many 'trusted' sources that you could easily pollute, and cause all sorts of havoc with, and the minute you automateany of that, you're opening up all sorts of new problems."

"Like what?" I asked.

"Hmmm. Okay, how about this? Let's extrapolate past what we already know and into the realm of near-future. I can see a point where stock market ...