The Story of Evil Marketing - A Conspiracy Theory for 2020

Ok folks, it's Conspiracy theory time.  

Long ago, Soros, The Koch Brothers, Davos, Qanon, the Knights Templar, whoever.... hired a company

EVILMARKETING .COM

This group was very very good at marketing. They had a process, evolved over time, that worked well, delivering quality product with a minimum of work on the client's part.  They made the person who hired them look good.

The process is simple... the customer supplies a few pieces of very important information, and then they go to work, show a version for approval, and then the product is given to the client for use.

Item #1 - Who do you want to listen to your message  - The Target Market
  Client:  The 99%, those who want to take our wealth and power

Item #2 - What are the top 3 messages you want them to remember
  Client:

Their neighbors are not like them

Their neighbors are stupid

Their neighbors are evil

Item #3 - What are signs we did our job so you can prove it to your boss? - Metrics
  Client:

Increased division

Increased violence

Ignoring us completely

Item #4 - What are your goals for this campaign? - Goals
  Client:

Divide the 99%
Divert attention from us
Social Media Profit

The team went away... and came up with a brilliant strategy to accomplish the goal.

They came up with a few simple phrases that sounded a bit odd, but contained different meanings, depending on the audience. Turns out, you can test this.... tell the phrase to a sample from each target market, and see how they interpret it. If the answers diverge, you're on the right track.... if the answers oppose, you've hit the mother load.

But that wasn't enough for Evil Marketing... they had a better idea, and had to explain it to the client.

In this campaign there are 2 phases, in phase 1 we'll spread specially crafted phrases. "Received Words" - These are phrases that have an obviously evil meaning, and a plausible good meaning. To help explain it, we'll use Alice, Bob, Carol, and Dave as examples.

Alice is a well meaning person who will first use the phrase when talking with her friend Bob, who has heard it before and agrees. Alice and Bob now recognize each other as allies.

Alice them talks to Carol, who is unfamiliar with the phrase, and asks a few questions because it sounds a bit strange. Alice and Carol invest time so that Carol now understands the phrase in the same way as Alice.

Carol later talks to Dave, who also asks questions, but rejects the phrase because the evil meaning is too much for him to swallow. The seeds of resentment are sewn between Carol ad Dave.

Dave later talks to Elaine, who decides she agrees with the Good meaning.

Later Dave is talking to Fred, who agrees with Dave on the Evil Meaning

The client understood how little effort it would take to spread, and nodded in understanding

Phase 2 begins when a critical mass of people are reliably using the phrases we supplied.

Now that Alice, Bob, Carol, and Elaine have invested energy in the phrase, they are strongly oppose to changing it. The phrase practically defends itself from change and dilution.  Dave and Fred also share an understanding that the others are allies, with an easy to recognize flag.

You, and your associates now begin to use the Evil intent of the phrase to accomplish your goals.  Alice, Bob, Carol and Elaine now feel forced to support this new (to them) meaning. They are trapped.

Dave and Fred now think that the others support the Evil intent of the phrase. They are fooled.

So, as you can see... this campaign will be highly effective, dividing and distracting your target market with almost no cost.

The clients loved it, and would be happy to use Evil Marketing again. The Metrics are off the chart!

So that's the story, and here we are... in an country about to rip itself apart, where nobody at the top dares actually lead because admitting mistakes is political suicide, throwing these phrases at each other over and over and over, and expecting that eventually we'll get different results if we try hard enough.

It's as if the phrases all have a good message in them, trapped in an evil spell... if you change the words, you break the spell.

We all have to admit our mistakes because our leaders wont.

I'm just a cranky old white guy with both liberal and conservative views.... actually their neither... they are MY views of the world.
I am more than ready to change my views and admit fault while doing so, publicly. Our "leaders" can't do that.

Please stop using the phrases as given... change a word or two, eliminate the double meaning. Please also be willing to lead us out of this mess by admitting the mistakes of our side as you see them.

Let's all be adults, and snuff this conflict out before it destroys our country.

E Pluribus Unum - One of Many - United We Stand, Divided We Fall.

A tale of rules and their makers

Management had made the choice, there was no disputing it without risking his job, he had heard bad things about the new system, but resigned himself to making it work. So he started reading the documentation and signed up for the support forums. The tutorials showed how rules worked, how to make new ones, the configuration of the auto-update feature, and how to submit a rule to the pool. The system worked by freely sharing rules which helped, so at least he could get the help of his peers.

Soon he was making rules that worked, and after that he learned how to make them simple and elegant. He could make a rule that had very few side effects, and stopped the threat without much cost. The system was getting slower, but thanks to advances in technology, a new system would soon be installed which was more than twice as fast as the old one. The users were fairly happy with things, as it kept disruptions to a minimum.

Over time, he learned about the pros and cons of the other rule systems, and how they worked. He wasn't a big fan of his system, but felt the users of the others were a bit too smug in their claims that there systems were somehow much better. He knew the basics were the same, that it was just a matter of time before theirs had similar problems, and that they mistook temporary conditions as a permanent condition.

One day it occurred to him that there might be a better way to do things. A friend had joked that instead of making rules to stop threats, perhaps it would be better to have a list of things that were not threats. It stuck in the back of his mind, and the more he thought about it, the more sense it made. He tried to explain his new idea to his friends, but they thought it was silly, and it would make it way too difficult to manage things, and would make the users complain too much about things they couldn't do because they weren't in the list.

Eventually he convinced some friends to build a prototype system, it would watch what the user did, and build rules to allow those things, and had a new feature which denied everything else. The idea of denying everything was crazy, but it worked in this case. The prototype system was interesting, but he thought it should go further. He had an even bigger idea, the thought the prototype should become the standard way of doing things.

His friends and peers thought he was nuts! How could you possibly list all the things the user wanted to do? Why would the users, who were the source of profit, possibly allow his group do such an absurd thing. If the list of allowed things didn't have something they needed, they would have to stop work and tell his group and get it added to the list. Such a presumption of power was surely a foolish thing to do.

He was sure his idea was right, but it wouldn't work because of the politics of it. He then wondered what would happen if the users could add things to the list themselves? This would leave the users with a system that would allow them to do what they needed, but without the need to have his group always blocking threats. Such a system would leave his group with a lot more time to work on the other tasks they had to keep interrupting, he was sure it would be worth it, but how to convince his peers?



Well.... by writing this very story. The above is a description of an imaginary world in which firewalls lack the ability to include a default deny rule. This makes it necessary to enumerate every threat and create a rule to stop it, and to share the list of rules. In our world, firewalls do have this ability, and we (network administrators) make rules explicitly allowing each protocol and port connection from the internet to our servers.


The above is also a description of this world. This is the way we currently handle computer viruses. We subscribe to services which list rules to identify bad code fragments, and we have systems which block those fragments when they are found. The point of this story is to get you to consider the opposite... a system which trusts nothing, and lets the users explicitly choose what connections and resources a program should get.

It's called capability based security, CabSec for short.

Thank you for your time and attention.