Imagine a Giant, Unstoppable Tank
Zoom Today, Noon PT / 3PM ET
Imagine an enormous tank is headed to your small town. The tank is going to destroy everything and kill everyone it finds, but it’s a pretty slow tank so you have a little time. You have no weapons, explosives or heavy equipment. What do you do?
Pretty hard problem if it’s just a “tank,” right? A giant unstoppable metal box with a cannon can’t be fought with a kitchen knife. But if you have the engineering plans of the tank—a model of how it works—suddenly you have more options. You know where the gas tank is specifically located and how it’s armored. You know how the treads work and might be sabotaged. You know where the electronics and the people are. You know how its comms work and might be hacked. You have information to work with.
One of the biggest problems I see right now in America is that it’s not so much that people don’t know there is a tank coming for us. They do. It’s that they don’t know anything about how the tank works or who’s driving it. It’s just an imminent threat hanging over everyone.
When threatened, as we all know, the mind goes into “fight or flight” mode. Now, when faced with a tank inexorably headed your direction, what is the natural reaction going to be? Well, if you have any sense it will be flight.
However, if you love your town and your heart wants to fight the tank, if you can get your hands on those engineering plans, suddenly the decision is not so easy, right? Maybe you can fight the tank. Maybe if you and your neighbors get together you can devise a plan of action, through strategy and tactics.
My goal has been to steal the engineering plans of the tank so we can try to MacGyver a counteroffensive. I’m no one special; I saw the tank coming along with everyone else. But I did have the advantage of having built friendly tanks before—without the cannon.
I believe this is a pretty good set of engineering plans for the tank. Now the question is how to use them.
My next article will be an effort at creating a framework for mounting both a cognitive defense and a cognitive insurgency—a counteroffensive—to try to sabotage the tank.
Zoom today at Noon PT / 3PM ET for paid subscribers. I will go through my “How It Happened” theoretical framework and try to explain it in straightforward terms—it will be the first time I’ve pitched it to anyone, so be gentle—and then turn the conversation to your questions with a focus on ideas for how to use this information in the real world. Details below. Hope to see you!