social engineering

100 Years of Identity Crisis: Culture War Over Socialisation
by Frank Furedi
Published 6 Sep 2021

‘The age of human engineering is with us’, declared one of Dewey’s supporters, who stated that ‘where it will take us no one may safely predict, but its changes promise to be more revolutionary than those science has recently introduced, and of vastly more importance for man.’427 The metaphor of engineering favoured by its advocates evoked a world where the application of science and technology would transform society and replace conflict and war with benevolent forms of management and administration. In practice, social engineering had the far more modest objectives of modifying behaviour and providing technical solutions to social problems. Social Engineering was the name of the journal of the League for Social Services. Launched in 1899, it conveyed the impression that social work and social engineering were synonymous. The self-conscious designation of social engineering for social work and family guidance continued into the 1950s.428 From its inception, the liberal sections of the self-identified social engineering movement believed that they were in the business of promoting democratic values.

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The project of eliminating obsolescent attitudes should be conceptualised as a form of moral engineering. Many of its practitioners identified themselves as social engineers whose vocation was to transform society through reforming prevailing attitudes. Unlike socialisation, which involves the transmission of pre-existing values, social engineering is devoted to gaining support for attitudes that as yet lack significant support in society. At the risk of simplification, this difference can be understood as one between mainly affirming prevailing attitudes (socialisation) and changing them (social engineering). The emphasis of social engineering, or what in the contemporary era is called ‘Raising Awareness’, on combating prevailing attitudes means that it self-consciously contests views that are associated with the older generations.

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However, during the first half of the 20th century professionals involved in the field of socialisation-related activities frequently and enthusiastically referred to themselves as social engineers. Psychologists, in particular, unreservedly called for the application of techniques of social engineering to ensure that people developed personalities that would make them suitable members of their society.327 By the 1930s, social workers often referred to their activities as a form of social engineering. In 1936 a Handbook on Social Work Engineering asserted that ‘through the practices of scientific social case work and social engineering, the contribution of social work to human happiness and public welfare may … be considerable’.328 Mead, who played a pivotal role in the development of what is described as the ‘scientific study of socialisation’, regarded social engineering as essential for helping people acquire the right kind of personality traits.

America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 20 Mar 2007

This stands in sharp contrast to realist foreign policy, which tends to respect sovereignty and be indifferent to the internal character of other states. On the other hand, another strand of neoconservative thought has emphasized the dangers of overly ambitious social engineering. This is a theme that goes all the way back to the original Social Engineering and Development anti-Stalinism of the City College crowd and extends through the writers in The Public Interest who criticized American social programs for bringing about unintended consequences that undermined their original purposes. As noted earlier, a major theme running through James Q.

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Four common principles or threads ran through much of this thought up through the end of the Cold War: a concern with democracy, human rights, and more generally the internal politics of states; a belief that U.S. power can be used for moral purposes; a skepticism about the ability of international law and institutions to solve serious security problems; and finally, a view that Principles and Prudence ambitious social engineering often leads to unexpected consequences and often undermines its own ends. When they are stated in this abstract fashion, most Americans would find little to object to in these principles: Henry Kissinger and his realist disciples would not deny that democracy is important, while supporters of the United Nations will concede that organization's limitations and failings.

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Finally, the Bush administration failed to anticipate the requirements for pacifying and reconstructing Iraq, and was wildly over-optimistic in its assessment of the ease with which large-scale so- Principles and Prudence rial engineering could be accomplished not just in Iraq but in the Middle East as a whole. This could not have been a failure of underlying principle, since a consistent neoconservative theme, as noted above, had been skepticism about the prospects for social engineering. Rather, proponents of the war seem to have forgotten their own principles in the heat of their advocacy of the war. Whatever its complex roots, neoconservatism has now become inevitably linked to concepts like preemption, regime change, unilateralism, and benevolent hegemony as put into practice by the Bush administration.

The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities
by John J. Mearsheimer
Published 24 Sep 2018

Unsurprisingly, they tend to be dismissive about governments’ ability to do social engineering. Progressive liberals take the opposite view. They prefer an activist state that can promote individual rights, and they have much more faith in the capacity of governments to do social engineering. While there is little doubt that both kinds of political liberalism receive great attention in the world of ideas, in practice, progressive liberalism has triumphed over modus vivendi liberalism. The complexities and demands of life in the modern world leave states with no choice but to be deeply engaged in social engineering, including promoting positive rights.

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Even Herbert Hoover, contrary to the conventional wisdom, was deeply committed to social engineering when he was secretary of commerce from 1921 to 1928, and as president from 1929 to 1933.59 There is no question, however, that liberal progressivism has had its ups and downs and that its adherents’ initial optimism has waned over time. But overall the U.S. government has remained deeply engaged in social engineering.60 Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal (1933–38) and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society (1964–65) were extremely ambitious attempts at social engineering, aimed at promoting positive rights. To understand how thoroughly progressivism has triumphed, consider how liberalism relates to the major political parties in the United States today.

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But I believe Scott’s thesis can also be applied to international politics.97 One could argue that the chances of failure are even higher with liberal hegemony, because it involves social engineering in a foreign country, not at home. Scott maintains that many of the great disasters in modern history are caused by “great utopian social engineering schemes” that depend on a “high-modernist ideology.” Liberal hegemony appears to qualify on both counts. It calls for doing social engineering all across the globe, which is nothing if not utopian. A high-modernist ideology, Scott says, “is best conceived as a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws.”

Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker
by Kevin Mitnick
Published 14 Aug 2011

Although it’s been almost nine years now, Jack is always in my thoughts. Although my friend Alex Kasperavicius was never really a hack, he was always willing to be brought into my hacking projects, usually to participate in some exciting social-engineering project. Later we developed a social-engineering workshop to help businesses identify and mitigate the risk of social-engineering attacks, and delivered these workshops at businesses around the globe. We even had the honor of training the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) in Oklahoma City. In late 2000, we hosted a popular Internet talk radio show called The Darkside of the Internet on KFI-AM 640 in Los Angeles.

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But Steven was only interested in showing me what he could do, not in telling me how all of this worked, how he was able to use his social-engineering skills on the people he was talking to. Before long I had picked up just about everything he was willing to share with me about “phone phreaking” and was spending most of my free time exploring the telecommunications networks and learning on my own, figuring out things Steven didn’t even know about. And “phreakers” had a social network. I started getting to know others who shared similar interests and going to their get-togethers, even though some of the “phreaks” were, well, freaky—socially inept and uncool. I seemed cut out for the social-engineering part of phreaking.

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I already knew I had talents along these lines, but it was my high school associate Steven who taught me just how powerful that ability could be. The basic tactic is simple. Before you start social engineering for some particular goal, you do your reconnaissance. You piece together information about the company, including how that department or business unit operates, what its function is, what information the employees have access to, the standard procedure for making requests, whom they routinely get requests from, under what conditions they release the desired information, and the lingo and terminology used in the company. The social-engineering techniques work simply because people are very trusting of anyone who establishes credibility, such as an authorized employee of the company.

The Fugitive Game: Online With Kevin Mitnick
by Jonathan Littman
Published 1 Jan 1996

"One of the companies accusing me of stealing their cellular software — I saw it on electronic mail, on the Net, so it's no big secret — one of them is Qualcomm out of San Diego. I guess they got hit by a social engineering attack. Somebody called them up and I don't know exactly the details of what was done. "And so one of the guys there knows Markoff pretty well. And when this whole thing came down, he called Markoff and told Markoff about it because he read the Cyberpunk book and the method of attack was exactly like my MO. He called Markoff and then Markoff started his own investigation and that's how the whole thing leaped off." "Who really was doing the social engineering at Qualcomm?" I ask. "I'm not going to talk about anything more about that," Mitnick snaps.

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"You probably read Wired magazine, right?" I ask. "They had an article about cell phone hackers and I wonder if that might be Mark? It was written by Markoff." "He [Markoff] only knows what he's told, and Shimomura is one of his friends, and Shimomura believed I tried to social engineer him once...." Markoff is a friend of Shimomura? That's news to me, as is this claim that Mitnick tried to social engineer Shimomura. What was he looking for? "How do you know Shimomura broke it for Mark [Lottor]?" "I know they worked on the code together. Someone told me that Shimomura has a copy of the broken Oki phone code on his workstation in San Diego.

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You can tell if someone's interested 'cuz, you know, body language. It's all in the game. You gotta strike something with the person. Then you start out as friends and go on dates and take it from there. I don't have a script. It's not like I'm doing a social engineering attack." The computer arena is another matter. "I sometimes do social engineering if it's a hack attack," Mitnick begins, switching to his favorite pursuit. "I'll just be driving in the car and think, hey, I wonder if they'll fall for it? I'll just pick up the phone and just do it. Just take no thinking or no planning. I mean, some of the most interesting places have been looked into that way.

We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency
by Parmy Olson
Published 5 Jun 2012

After the February 2011 attack on HBGary Federal, for instance, Kayla corroborated the story Sabu had told, that a sixteen-year-old girl had hacked into Greg Hoglund’s website, rootkit.com. “After resetting Greg’s account, I used it to social-​engineer Jussi for access to rootkit.com,” Kayla said in an interview in March 2011. “It was the icing on the cake.” In truth, Sabu had been the hacker to social-engineer the admin and hack the site. When she was asked to recount the story a few months later, her version changed: “The thing is, the way it all happened…​Sabu set the ball rolling with the social engineering, then I finished it off by nuking rootkit.com’s server.” Kayla did not have to lie about her exploits. She was a skilled hacker and most people who knew her accepted that.

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Sabu got in. This was a prime example of social engineering, the art of manipulating someone into divulging secret information or doing something they normally wouldn’t. Now Sabu and Kayla had complete control of rootkit.com. First they took the usernames and passwords of anyone who had ever registered on the site, then deleted its entire contents. Now it was just a blank page reading “Greg Hoglund = Owned.” Sabu found he enjoyed working with Kayla. She was friendly, and she had extraordinary technical skills. Sabu later told others that she had socially engineered Jussi Jaakonaho, partly because the idea of being “owned” by a sixteen-year-old girl would only embarrass HBGary further.

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“This is the most focused attack yet,” he enthused at the time in an interview. “The social engineers know their place and so do the hackers. This is one of the first times I’ll be working as part of a team, and knowing EXACTLY my role within that team.” He reasoned that Sony had treated Geohotz (“one of our own”) in a way that was anti-freedom, anti-expression, anti-individualism, and, thus, “anti-Anonymous.” William did not mind that there were obvious tiers in Anonymous, with hackers and writers at the top and social engineers and LOIC users near the bottom. Each side rode on the other’s reputation—William scared his targets by claiming he was a hacker, and hackers could ride on the infamy of Anonymous because of the way less skilled people bandied the name around.

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
by James C. Scott
Published 8 Feb 1999

But it is harder to grasp why so many well-intended schemes to improve the human condition have gone so tragically awry. I aim, in what follows, to provide a convincing account of the logic behind the failure of some of the great utopian social engineering schemes of the twentieth century. I shall argue that the most tragic episodes of state-initiated social engineering originate in a pernicious combination of four elements. All four are necessary for a full-fledged disaster. The first element is the administrative ordering of nature and society-the transformative state simplifications described above.

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A fourth element is closely linked to the third: a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans. War, revolution, and economic collapse often radically weaken civil society as well as make the populace more receptive to a new dispensation. Late colonial rule, with its social engineering aspirations and ability to run roughshod over popular opposition, occasionally met this last condition. In sum, the legibility of a society provides the capacity for largescale social engineering, high-modernist ideology provides the desire, the authoritarian state provides the determination to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society provides the leveled social terrain on which to build.

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But here it is important to note that many of the great state-sponsored calamities of the twentieth century have been the work of rulers with grandiose and utopian plans for their society. One can identify a highmodernist utopianism of the right, of which Nazism is surely the diagnostic example.' The massive social engineering under apartheid in South Africa, the modernization plans of the Shah of Iran, villagization in Vietnam, and huge late-colonial development schemes (for example, the Gezira scheme in the Sudan) could be considered under this rubric.' And yet there is no denying that much of the massive, stateenforced social engineering of the twentieth century has been the work of progressive, often revolutionary elites. Why? The answer, I believe, lies in the fact that it is typically progressives who have come to power with a comprehensive critique of existing society and a popular mandate (at least initially) to transform it.

The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good
by Robert H. Frank
Published 3 Sep 2011

Antigovernment activists reliably denounce such taxes as “social engineering”— attempts to “control our behavior, steer our choices, and change the way we live our lives.”15 Gasoline taxes aimed at discouraging dependence on foreign oil, for example, invariably elicit this accusation. But it’s a vacuous complaint, because virtually every law and regulation constitutes social engineering. Laws against homicide and theft? Because they aim to control our behavior, steer our choices, and change the way we 14 CHAPTER ONE live our lives, they’re social engineering. So are noise ordinances, speed limits, even stop signs and traffic lights.

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Yet taking it would inevitably provoke howls of protest from movement libertarians. “Social engineering!” they’d scream in unison, by which they’d mean attempts to “control our behavior, steer our choices, and change the way we live our lives.” Gasoline taxes aimed at discouraging dependence on foreign oil, for example, invariably elicit this accusation. But as noted in chapter 1, it’s an empty complaint, because virtually every law and regulation constitutes social engineering. Laws against homicide and theft control our behavior, steer our choices, and change the way we live our lives, so they’re social engineering, as are noise ordinances, speed “IT’S YOUR MONEY . . .” 123 limits, even stop signs and traffic lights.

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So are noise ordinances, speed limits, even stop signs and traffic lights. Social engineering is inescapable, simply because narrow self-interest would otherwise lead people to cause unacceptable harm to others. Only a committed anarchist could favor a world without social engineering. If outright prohibitions are an acceptable way to discourage harmful behavior, why can’t taxes be used for the same purpose? Taxes are, in fact, a far cheaper and less coercive way to curtail such behavior than laws or prescriptive regulations. That’s because taxes concentrate harm reduction in the hands of those who can alter their behavior most easily. When we tax pollution, for instance, polluters with the cheapest ways to reduce emissions rush to adopt them, thereby avoiding the tax.

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News
by Clint Watts
Published 28 May 2018

I saw a lot of hedgehogs in my online surveys and occasional foxes. I needed to find foxes to get insights, and to do it, I decided to employ social engineering, the same techniques I’d used in West Point prank calls. I needed to trick respondents to reveal their true tendencies as either a fox or a hedgehog. Once I found the foxes in the pack, I’d investigate their responses as the outliers in a sea of predictions. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two Israeli American behavioral psychologists, provided the social engineering tricks I needed to separate the foxes from the hedgehogs. Over many years of research, they identified a series of heuristics—mental rules people use to make decisions—and noted the circumstances where biases emerged that led to incorrect judgments.

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At this point, I imagine you, the reader, might be a bit confused and disappointed, and have some questions. Yes, I’m sorry I prank-called Mr. Carfizzi; well, kind of sorry. Carfizzi, regretfully, took the brunt of my shenanigans, but he ultimately became the most useful military training I received at West Point—an informal course in social engineering, the backbone of cyberattacks and influence operations. Carfizzi provided me with essential practice to mess with my enemies—the hackers, terrorists, and Russian trolls I came to track on social media. Shenanigans helped me understand and investigate how bad people use ostensibly good mediums to do terrible things.

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Criminals, terrorists, and nation-states sour human interactions in what were initially wonderful virtual sanctuaries. Social media becomes anti-social media as the most motivated and best-resourced evildoers learn the strengths and weaknesses of each platform and turn the application to their advantage. Eerily similar to my prank calls at West Point, bad actors use social engineering—psychologically manipulating others to perform actions or divulge confidential information—to force people to unwittingly share their passwords, log-ins, identification numbers, bank records, and personal secrets. Criminals use this personal information to take people’s money, terrorists to strike fear in their adversaries, and nation-states, like Russia, to warp the minds of their opponents.

Digital Accounting: The Effects of the Internet and Erp on Accounting
by Ashutosh Deshmukh
Published 13 Dec 2005

A technique employed by the hackers to obtain information from employees is called social engineering. The idea behind social engineering is to deceive legitimate employees and gain proprietary information that can be used for hacking purposes. Social engineering is an application of a very old idea to the technological age. Social engineers can use any psychological tools, such as flattery, friendliness, intimidation, name-dropping, ridicule or impersonation. Contact with the employees can be on the phone, through e-mail, over the Internet or face to face. A few typical methods employed in social engineering are described below. • Over the phone: The hacker calls the employee over the phone and pretends to be someone in authority.

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Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited. Controls, Security, and Audit in Online Digital Accounting 331 The defense against social engineering tactics is difficult. Sloppiness on the part of network personnel and employees aids social engineering. For example, if network administrators have not applied the latest security fixes, changed default factory passwords for the software or set security policies for the organization, social engineering is that much easier. Employees also need to be aware of security and should not leave important documents and offices unlocked or keep passwords taped to their workstations.

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Employees also need to be aware of security and should not leave important documents and offices unlocked or keep passwords taped to their workstations. A general security awareness, constant training and education, and standard and consistent security protocols may minimize social engineering instances. Appropriate physical security for computing facilities also prevents social engineering attempts. Standard security precautions are simple, though are frequently ignored in favor of expediency. Standard security techniques against social engineering are examined in a later section. A global information security survey carried out by InformationWeek in 2002 found the following reasons for network break-ins. The reasons are arranged in descending order of importance.

Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World
by Bruce Schneier
Published 1 Jan 2000

If the computer system were smart enough to recognize that someone was logging in from a remote location when the job description states that he only works in the office, maybe someone could have been alerted. Sometimes simple procedures can prevent social engineering. The U.S. Navy has safes with two locks (with different combinations, of course); each combination is known by a different person. It’s much harder to social engineer those combinations. There are probably other tricks that the computers could have done, all designed to limit what a duped legitimate user could give to a social engineer. Technology can certainly make the job of the social engineer harder, in some cases a lot harder. In the end, social engineering will probably always work. Look at it from the view of the victim, Bob.

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If the hacker knows enough about the company’s network to sound convincing, he can get passwords, account names, and other sensitive information from the employee. In one instance a hacker posted flyers on a company bulletin board announcing a new help-desk phone number: his own. Employees would call him regularly, and he would collect their passwords and account data in exchange for help. Social engineering is the hacker term for a con game: persuade the other person to do what you want. It’s very effective. Social engineering bypasses cryptography, computer security, network security, and everything else technological. It goes straight to the weakest link in any security system: the poor human being trying to get his job done, and wanting to help out if he can.

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The attacker found people on Usenet newsgroups and invented collect calls from people they corresponded with in the newsgroup, an extra touch of verisimilitude. When Kevin Mitnick testified before Congress in 2000 he talked about social engineering: “I was so successful in that line of attack that I rarely had to resort to a technical attack,” he said. “Companies can spend millions of dollars toward technological protections and that’s wasted if somebody can basically call someone on the telephone and either convince them to do something on the computer that lowers the computer’s defenses or reveals the information they were seeking.” Another social-engineering attack, this one against credit cards: Alice steals Bob’s credit card number. She could charge purchases to Bob’s account, but she’s wilier than that.

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities
by Howard P. Segal
Published 20 May 2012

His examples included free air-conditioners and free electricity to reduce the discomfort that in part led to summertime riots in urban ghettos; cheap computers to replace rather than Growing Expectations of Realizing Utopia 107 retrain inadequate teachers in impoverished elementary schools; intra-uterine devices to reduce population in overpopulated countries where large families are the norm; nuclear-powered desalination to provide fresh water in needy areas where water conservation is difficult if not impossible; safer cars to reduce accidents caused by bad drivers who resisted formal driver instruction; and atomic weapons, especially hydrogen bombs, to lessen the possibility of war because of fear of mass mutual destruction. As Weinberg conceded, “Technology will never replace social engineering.” But technology had long provided and would continue to provide the social engineer with broader options, above all, to “buy time—that precious commodity that converts violent social revolution into acceptable social evolution.” Weinberg did not define the term “social engineer,” but by his use of it he clearly meant the social scientist, who would work hand-in-hand with scientists, engineers, and other technical experts. Far from patronizing social engineers/social scientists, in the manner of Bush, Weinberg praised them.

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For social problems are not only much more complex than technological problems but are also “much harder to identify” than technological problems. “Quick Technological Fixes” thereafter became a popular term with both positive and negative connotations. They would assist and complement but not replace conventional social engineering strategies. Contrary to Weinberg, however, all these “Quick Technological Fixes” were actually not alternatives to, but rather themselves examples of, social engineering.27 Perhaps the supreme technological fix was President Reagan’s anti-missile defense system, which was announced years after Weinberg’s article appeared. This was the logical extension of other plans—and, in some cases, actual manifestations of those plans—to end some wars and prevent others: a short-cut to allegedly permanent world peace that would preclude traditional and often unreliable diplomatic efforts.

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Bush) 99, 119 scientific and technological elites 98, 188, 207 scientific and technological plateau 53, 59, 81, 234–241 in Europe 236 in Japan 234–236 Index 283 scientific (Continued) modern 237, 238 and utopianism 67 Scientific Management 104, 164 Scientific Revolution 160 “Scientific” Socialism (Marx and Engels) 66–67 scientist, coining of word 51 Scott, Howard 96, 97–98, 106, 109, 239 Scottish Parliament and Robert Owen 64 Seabrook Station, New Hampshire 149 second life 198 “Selling the World of Tomorrow” 37 September 11, 2001 238, 245 Serenbe, near Atlanta 2 Shadis, Raymond 147, 148 Shakers 24, 26–27, 194, 196, 242, celibacy 26, 28, 199 Shalam, New Mexico 25 Shape of Things to Come, The (Wells) 240 Shelley, Mary 90–91, 128, 129–130 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 128 Sierra Club 169 Silicon Valley 192 Simon, Julian 238 Sketch of a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (Condorcet) 56 Skype 187, 194 small is beautiful 234 Snow, C. P. 113–114, 121, 122 social engineering 107–108, 109–110 social forecasters and utopianism 12–13 social media 193–194 284 Index social sciences 101, 102–104, 107, 121, and social engineering 110, societal benefits of science and technology 119 socialism 2, 10, 24, 26, 31 Morris and 59 Marx and Engels and 66–67 see also Fabianism Socialist League 59 Socialist Second International 251 Society for Utopian Studies, The 242 Sokal, Alan 160 solar power 150, 157 Sontoku, Ninomiya 20 Sony Electronics 220 Sorai, Ogy u 20 South Africa 171 Soviet Union 104, 108, 113, 244 collapse of 1, 156, 242 space flight 187 space shuttle disasters 140 “spaceship earth” 245–246, 247 Spanish Civil War 35, 252 Speed Handbook, The: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism (Duffy) 164 speed, significance of 164–165 Spent Fuel Storage Installation, Bailey Point Peninsula, Wiscasset, US 149 Spinoff (NASA journal) 140 Spirit Fruit in Ohio and Illinois 25 Sputnik I 108, 113 Stages of Economic Growth, The (Rostow) 105 Stalin, Joseph 243, 244 Stalinism and utopia 244 Star Trek (series) 200 Star Trek Empire 199–203 Star Wars films 202, 204 “Star Wars” missile defense system 115, 141, 187–188 Staton, Mary 92 Steele, Allen 9 Stokes, Donald 120–121 120 Stoll, Steven 79 Story of Utopias, The 1 Strategic Defense Initiative 142 Strauss, Lewis 143 Stukel, James J. 206, 207–208, 210, 211, 213, 215, 250 Sun Yat-Sen 18 Superconducting Super Collider, Texas 122, 141 supersonic transport (SST) 237 Swift, Jonathan 200 Sy Syms (company) 216 “System” 78 Systeme de politique positive (Comte) 58 Systems Engineering 110–111 critiques of 112 failure of 112 systems experts 160 T.

Avogadro Corp
by William Hertling
Published 9 Apr 2014

“From what you’re saying, the more emails it analyzes, not only do the possibilities for what constitutes success get broader, but the system would also discover more methods to accomplish those goals,” Christine said. “What it really sounds like you’ve built is an expert system for social engineering. You know what I mean by social engineering?” Mike nodded his head yes, but David had a puzzled look on his face, and shook his head. “Social engineering is the name given to techniques for tricking people into giving you information or making changes to information systems,” Christine said. “Social engineering was popularized by hackers in the nineteen eighties. And by hackers, I don’t mean the good guy hackers like Richard Stallman. I’m thinking of folks like the Kevins.”

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Then the hacker could impersonate an employee of the company from their home phone, so they could do even more social engineering. The point is, simply by knowing the lingo, giving plausible reasons, knowing what motivates people, a hacker can gain information or get people to do things by cleverly manipulating the human tendency to trust other humans. Since you’ve built a system that learns lingo, language nuances, and motivations, and can evaluate what will be most effective to the receiver, it is, by definition, an expert system for social engineering.” David looked flabbergasted by this explanation. “How do you know all this?”

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“I’ve been conducting an internal investigation into possible financial fraud and other inappropriate behavior that occurred just before the end of the year. Mr. Ryan and Mr. Williams have been assisting me. We have reason to believe that Avogadro employees are being manipulated through email. It’s called social engineering. The emails provide just enough information to seem legitimate. May I ask, were you informed by email of our so-called harassment?” “Yes, I was informed by email. I’m well aware of what social engineering is. In any scenario where we have such serious allegations, of course I would confirm them directly with the individuals. In this case, I spoke to your manager, Mr. Keyes. Is Brett Grove your manager?”

The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey
by Emmanuel Goldstein
Published 28 Jul 2008

This will give them a headache to say the least, having to call up UAPC each day to reactivate their password. Other ways of getting the password include our old favorite, social engineering. Here there are two options. You can attempt to engineer UAPC by voice, thus saying that you are the school and that you need the password. Conversely, you can attempt to engineer the school by calling the program office by voice and saying that you are from UAPC and that you need them to change their password to a diagnostic password, which you will so kindly provide. If you’re going to do social engineering, make sure you get some valid people’s names at either UAPC or at your school. Yet another way to get the password is to do what was done in War Games, snooping around the program office.

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Orangeboxing is not very effective because you have to send the signal after the caller has answered their phone. However, through the magic of social engineering you could have one friend call a number and pretend he has reached a wrong number while sending a call waiting Caller ID signal fooling the victim into believing he is receiving another incoming call from the name and number spoofed and when the victim “flashes over” have your friend hand you the phone and continue with your social engineering. Method #3: Calling cards. I learned this method from some phone phreaks on a party line a long time ago. I can’t recall the name of the calling card company but all one has to do is provide a credit card as a method of payment to obtain a PIN.

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Since it is not likely that your call center will have a Tagalog speaking operator, you will get routed to a different AT&T center that does, possibly an AT&T center that still forwards ANI. If you get an AT&T center that still forwards ANI, you can spoof ANI by simply giving the operator the number you want to spoof as the number you are calling from and social engineering her into placing a call to the toll-free number you wish to call. The best method for spoofing ANI and Caller ID is social engineering a Telus operator to do it for you. I stumbled upon this method when I was testing out a theory. In my previous 2600 article about spoofing ANI through AT&T I mentioned something known as the 710 trick. This was a method of making collect calls that the called party wouldn’t be billed for.

The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream
by Christopher B. Leinberger
Published 15 Nov 2008

The result was a de facto domestic policy that produced a massive social engineering experiment: the implementation of the Futurama vision. The uniqueness of the Futurama social engineering experiment was its scale and boldness. Combining federal, state, and local laws, subsidy programs, and infrastructure investments encouraged and in actuality mandated only one kind of growth: low-density, drivable sub-urbanism. This American domestic policy has been dictating growth for the past sixty years and is still in force in the early twenty-first century. From one perspective, any domestic policy engages in social engineering. Whether it is the tax deductibility of home mortgages to increase home ownership, tax-deductible charitable contributions to encourage donations, or laws to try to keep citizens from buying illicit drugs, domestic policy is social engineering.

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Whether it is the tax deductibility of home mortgages to increase home ownership, tax-deductible charitable contributions to encourage donations, or laws to try to keep citizens from buying illicit drugs, domestic policy is social engineering. The social engineering that promoted drivable sub-urbanism was not a conspiracy imposed on the American people; we wanted it and we truly believed it to be the best future. Federal programs sprang up during the 1930s Depression, but particularly after the Second World War, to encourage single-family housing in the car-accessible suburbs of the postwar era. These included housing loan insurance programs by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) 26 | THE OPTION OF URBANISM in 1934 for moderate-income households and by the Veterans Administration (VA) for returning soldiers in 1944.

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By the late-1980s, the cycle was complete; first residential, then retail, and finally jobs left the center city as the domestic policy set up to implement Futurama bore fruit. The mountain had come to Mohamed, and America was a very different place than just thirty years earlier. The 1955 Hill Valley was dead; long live 1985 Hill Valley. The domestic policy and social engineering to implement Futurama had worked. 3 THE S TANDARD R EAL E STATE P RODUCT TYPES Why Every Place Looks Like Every Place Else T he 1980s real estate and infrastructure boom, the largest in American history in terms of the amount built until then, had to come to an end. It was predictably followed in the early 1990s by the worst real estate downturn since the 1930s Depression.

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 16 Nov 2010

Weinberg’s fascination with “technological fixes” was largely the product of an engineer’s frustration with the other, invariably less tractable, and more controversial alternative of the day: social engineering. Social engineers, as opposed to technologists, tried to influence popular attitudes and social behavior of citizens through what nontechnologists refer to as “policy” but what Weinberg described as “social devices”: education, regulation, and a complicated mix of behavioral incentives. Given that technology could help accomplish the same objectives more effectively, Weinberg believed that social engineering was too expensive and risky. It also helped that “technological fixes” required no profound changes in human behavior and were thus more reliable.

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Weinberg was under no illusion that he was eliminating the root causes of the problem; he knew that technological fixes can’t do that. All technology could do was to mitigate the social consequences of that problem, “to provide the social engineer broader options, to make intractable social problems less intractable ... and [to] buy time—that precious commodity that converts social revolution into acceptable social evolution.” It was a pragmatic approach of a pragmatic man. Upon publication, Weinberg’s essay launched a heated debate between technologists and social engineers. This debate is still raging today, in part because Google, founded by a duo of extremely ambitious engineers on a crusade to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” has put the production of technological fixes on something of an industrial scale.

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Furthermore, it’s highly doubtful that wicked problems can ever be resolved on a global scale; some local accomplishments—preferably not only of the rhetorical variety—is all a policymaker can hope for. To build on the famous distinction drawn by the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, policymakers should not, as a general rule, preoccupy themselves with utopian social engineering—ambitious, ambiguous, and often highly abstract attempts to remake the world according to some grand plan—but rather settle for piecemeal social engineering instead. This approach might be less ambitious but often more effective; by operating on a smaller scale, policymakers can still stay aware of the complexity of the real world and can better anticipate and mitigate the unintended consequences.

The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good
by William Easterly
Published 1 Mar 2006

The great philosopher of science Karl Popper described it eloquently as “utopian social engineering” versus piecemeal democratic reform.19 This is pretty much the same divide as the one Edmund Burke described in the late eighteenth century as “revolution” versus “reform” (the French Revolution was a bloody experiment in utopian engineering). Social engineering experiments have been applied since then in such diverse contexts as compulsory resettlement of Tanzanians into state villages and Communist five-year plans to industrialize in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Ironically, social engineering surfaced again as “shock therapy” in the transition from communism (after the five-year plans had failed) to capitalism, which eschewed the alternative of “gradualism.”

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Ironically, social engineering surfaced again as “shock therapy” in the transition from communism (after the five-year plans had failed) to capitalism, which eschewed the alternative of “gradualism.” Social engineering showed up in Africa and Latin America in the eighties and nineties as IMF/World Bank–sponsored comprehensive reforms called “structural adjustment.” Military intervention to overthrow evil dictators and remake other societies into some reflection of Western democratic capitalism is the extreme of contemporary utopian social engineering. The plan to end world poverty shows all the pretensions of utopian social engineering. Democratic politics is about searching for piecemeal solutions: a local group engages in political action to campaign for a missing public service, such as trash collection; and a politician recognizes an opportunity for political gain from meeting these needs and winning over this particular group.

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Like many other Western economists flooding Moscow at the time, I had only the most superficial knowledge of Russian institutions and history. Economists more familiar with the pre-reform Soviet Union were much more prescient. University of Maryland economist Peter Murrell—a longtime student of centrally planned economies—wrote a series of articles in 1991–1993 arguing against shock therapy as utopian social engineering. At the time, he lost the argument. He wrote to me recently that to try to convince other economists of his views was itself a “utopian” project, and he turned his attention to other subjects after 1993. History vindicated Murrell’s scathing description of shock therapy: “There is complete disdain for all that exists….

The Art of Invisibility: The World's Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data
by Kevin Mitnick , Mikko Hypponen and Robert Vamosi
Published 14 Feb 2017

Whenever they moved the informant to a new safe house, I was able to obtain the landline number of the safe house because the agents would call it after trying to reach the informant on his pager. Once I had the landline number for the informant, I was also able to obtain the physical address through social engineering—that is, by pretending to be someone at Pacific Bell, the company that provided the service at the safe house. Social engineering is a hacking technique that uses manipulation, deception, and influence to get a human target to comply with a request. Often people are tricked into giving up sensitive information. In this case, I knew the internal numbers at the phone company, and I pretended to be a field technician who spoke the correct terminology and lingo, which was instrumental in obtaining sensitive information.

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Only when the correct verification code is entered on the website will any change to your account be saved. There’s a wrinkle to that, though. According to researchers at Symantec, if you do send an SMS to confirm your identity, someone who happens to know your cell-phone number can do a bit of social engineering and steal your 2FA-protected password reset code if you are not paying close attention.17 Say I want to take over your e-mail account and don’t know your password. I do know your cell-phone number because you’re easy to find through Google. I can go to the reset page for your e-mail service and request a password reset, which, because you enabled two-factor authentication, will result in an SMS code being sent to your phone.

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A recent attack on a phone used by political activist DeRay Mckesson showed how the bad guys could trick your mobile operator to do a SIM swap.18 In other words, the attacker could hijack your cellular service and then receive your SMS messages—for example, the SMS code from Google to reset Mckesson’s Gmail account that was protected with two-factor authentication. This is much more likely than fooling someone into reading off his or her SMS message with a new password. Although that is still possible, and involves social engineering. Because I won’t see the verification code sent by your e-mail provider to your phone, I’ll need to pretend to be someone else in order to get it from you. Just seconds before you receive the actual SMS from, say, Google, I as the attacker can send a one-time SMS, one that says: “Google has detected unusual activity on your account.

The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling
by Arlie Russell Hochschild
Published 1 Nov 1983

As workers, the more seriously social engineering affects our behavior and our feelings, the more intensely we must address a new ambiguity about who is directing them (is this me or the company talking?). As customers, the greater our awareness of social engineering, the more effort we put into distinguishing between gestures of real personal feeling and gestures of company policy. We have a practical knowledge of the commercial takeover of the signal function of feeling. In a routine way, we make up for it; at either end, as worker or customer, we try to correct for the social engineering of feeling.* We mentally subtract feeling with commercial purpose to it from the total pattern of display that we sense to be sincerely felt.

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Another kind oflabor has now come into symbolic prominence-the voice-to-voice or face-to-face delivery of service-and the flight attendant is an appropriate model for it. There have always been public-service jobs, of course; what is new is that they are now socially engineered and thoroughly organized from the top. Though the flight attendant's job is no worse and in many ways better than other service jobs, it makes the worker more vulnerable to the social engineering of her emotional labor and reduces her control over that labor. Her * Like a commodity, service that calls for emotional labor is subject to the laws of supply and demand. Recently the demand for this labor has increased and the supply of it drastically decreased.

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As I explain for specialists in Appendix A, I extend to all emotions the "signal function" that Freud reserved for the emotion of anxiety. Many emotions signal the secret hopes, fears, and expectations with which we actively greet any news, any occurrence. It is this signal function that is impaired when the private management of feeling is socially engineered and transformed into emotional labor for a wage. These questions and ideas were developing, then, when I went out to try to get behind the eyes of flight attendants and bill collectors, female workers and male, as each moved through a day's work. The more I listened, the more I came to appreciate how workers try to preserve a sense of self by circumventing the feeling rules of work, how they limit their emotional offerings to surface displays of the "right" feeling but suffer anyway from a sense of being "false" or mechanical.

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back
by Bruce Schneier
Published 7 Feb 2023

Once operatives on the other side of the screen had Podesta’s Gmail password, they grabbed at least 20,000 of his old emails—then sent them to WikiLeaks to publish. This was a social engineering hack. Social engineering is a common way to hack computer systems. Basically, it involves convincing someone with some specialized access to a system to use it in a way that they shouldn’t. Over twenty years ago, I wrote “Only amateurs attack machines; professionals target people.” It’s still true today, and much of it relies on hacking trust. One social engineering attack involves calling a cell phone tech-support line, pretending to be someone else, and convincing the operator to transfer that person’s cell phone number to a phone that you control.

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Hotfixes are normal today—updates to your operating systems are applied while they are running, and a lot of stuff is running in the cloud—but when the term was coined, that wasn’t the case. 12 More Subtle Hacking Defenses Reducing a hack’s effectiveness is a second defense. Business email compromise is a social engineering attack, in that it exploits a vulnerability in people rather than a vulnerability in technology. In this scam, the victim receives an email from a normally trusted source, making a normally legitimate request but asking him or her to do it differently than usual, often against established protocol.

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The vulnerability here is human inattentiveness, or misplaced trust. There are many reasons why a vulnerability can’t be patched. In the policy world, the legislative process that needs to patch the vulnerability may not be functional. Or there may be no governing body that can mandate the patch. In the case of the social engineering hack I just described, the hacks subvert how the human brain works—and that isn’t patchable at anything shorter than evolutionary time. When we can’t patch a vulnerability, we have three options. The first is to redesign the system so that the hack is too difficult, too expensive, less profitable, or generally less damaging.

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 15 Nov 2013

If all that matters is getting you to behave in a manner desired by the social engineer—whether it’s to stop wasting energy or eat healthy food or care for the elderly—then there’s no need to worry about any such loss of autonomy. As long as the right response is solicited, the intervention counts as a success. But there’s something profoundly disgusting about this approach, for it not only tricks—rather than talks—us into doing the right thing but also gives us a fake feeling of mastery over our own actions. This illusion, in turn, precludes us from questioning the ends that the social engineer is pursuing, no matter how benign they may be.

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There is power in standardization! These two innovations—that more and more of our life is now mediated through smart sensor-powered technologies and that our friends and acquaintances can now follow us anywhere, making it possible to create new types of incentives—will profoundly change the work of social engineers, policymakers, and many other do-gooders. All will be tempted to exploit the power of these new techniques, either individually or in combination, to solve a particular problem, be it obesity, climate change, or congestion. Today we already have smart mirrors that, thanks to complex sensors, can track and display our pulse rates based on slight variations in the brightness of our faces; soon, we’ll have mirrors that, thanks to their ability to tap into our “social graph,” will nudge us to lose weight because we look pudgier than most of our Facebook friends.

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But it’s easy to imagine how such logic can be extended much, much further, BinCam style. Why, for example, not reward people with virtual, Facebook-compatible points for not using the teapot in the times of high electricity usage? Or why not punish those who disregard the teapot’s warnings about high usage by publicizing their irresponsibility among their Facebook friends? Social engineers have never had so many options at their disposal. Sensors alone, without any connection to social networks or data repositories, can do quite a lot these days. The elderly, for example, might appreciate smart carpets and smart bells that can detect when someone has fallen over and inform others.

Beautiful security
by Andy Oram and John Viega
Published 15 Dec 2009

ISBN: 978-0-596-52748-8 [V] 1239647579 All royalties from this book will be donated to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). CONTENTS 1 2 3 4 5 6 PREFACE xi PSYCHOLOGICAL SECURITY TRAPS by Peiter “Mudge” Zatko 1 Learned Helplessness and Naïveté Confirmation Traps Functional Fixation Summary 2 10 14 20 WIRELESS NETWORKING: FERTILE GROUND FOR SOCIAL ENGINEERING by Jim Stickley 21 Easy Money Wireless Gone Wild Still, Wireless Is the Future 22 28 31 BEAUTIFUL SECURITY METRICS by Elizabeth A. Nichols 33 Security Metrics by Analogy: Health Security Metrics by Example Summary 34 38 60 THE UNDERGROUND ECONOMY OF SECURITY BREACHES by Chenxi Wang 63 The Makeup and Infrastructure of the Cyber Underground The Payoff How Can We Combat This Growing Underground Economy?

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Organization of the Material The chapters in this book are not ordered along any particular scheme, but have been arranged to provide an engaging reading experience that unfolds new perspectives in hopefully surprising ways. Chapters that deal with similar themes, however, are grouped together. PREFACE xiii Chapter 1, Psychological Security Traps, by Peiter “Mudge” Zatko Chapter 2, Wireless Networking: Fertile Ground for Social Engineering, by Jim Stickley Chapter 3, Beautiful Security Metrics, by Elizabeth A. Nichols Chapter 4, The Underground Economy of Security Breaches, by Chenxi Wang Chapter 5, Beautiful Trade: Rethinking E-Commerce Security, by Ed Bellis Chapter 6, Securing Online Advertising: Rustlers and Sheriffs in the New Wild West, by Benjamin Edelman Chapter 7, The Evolution of PGP’s Web of Trust, by Phil Zimmermann and Jon Callas Chapter 8, Open Source Honeyclient: Proactive Detection of Client-Side Exploits, by Kathy Wang Chapter 9, Tomorrow’s Security Cogs and Levers, by Mark Curphey Chapter 10, Security by Design, by John McManus Chapter 11, Forcing Firms to Focus: Is Secure Software in Your Future?

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. • We can overcome functional fixation by looking for alternative uses for our tools, as well as alternative paths to achieve our goals. All these ventures require practice. But opportunities to practice them come up every day. If more people work at them, this approach, which I’m so often told is unusual, will become less curious to others. 20 CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO Wireless Networking: Fertile Ground for Social Engineering Jim Stickley B Y NOW , EVERYONE HAS HEARD THE SECURITY CONCERNS ABOUT WIRELESS DEVICES . They have been an area of concern for many security professionals since the original Wi-Fi release in 2000. As early as 2001, the standard Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) access protocol, designed to keep unwanted users from accessing the device, was discovered to have fundamental flaws that allowed security to be bypassed within a couple of minutes.

The Miracle Pill
by Peter Walker
Published 21 Jan 2021

Next steps: If you have children, even if it does feel like they are always sprinting around at home, think about how active they actually are, and whether they are meeting the hour-a-day recommended movement – or three hours a day for younger children. And if you are older, don’t forget the importance of balance, as well as strength and aerobic fitness, for healthy ageing. 9 The Power of Social Engineering It is shortly after 9am, the temperature is −13°C, and a light snow is falling. Even though I am heavily wrapped in several layers of clothing, including long johns, a thick skiing jacket and two hats, my teeth have begun to chatter. But in front of me, on a school playground covered in several weeks’ worth of thickly encrusted snow, something fairly unlikely is happening: several dozen children are cycling around.

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Finland is also near the top for the EU rankings for non-sport physical activity, although it is beaten by the Netherlands and Denmark, both helped by their very high levels of everyday cycling.4 The Dutch and Danish levels of bike use are, of course, a product of decades of central government-led policy and spending decisions to boost active travel. This is the sort of thing which to many British politicians’ eyes would cross into the territory of social engineering. But it is worth remembering that much of the impetus for these changes came from the public. We saw earlier that the transport revolution in the Netherlands was sparked by the Stop de Kindermoord (Stop the Child Murders) road safety mass protests of the 1970s. Copenhagen saw similar scenes later in that decade and into the 1980s, pushing authorities into action.

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actin (protein) 40 active applause 176–7, 180, 271 Active Ten app (Public Health England) 57, 269 adenosine triphosphate (ATP) 40, 41, 276 Aldred, Rachel 119–20, 139 Alzheimer’s disease 5, 49, 186, 226, 232, 233, 234 Agricultural Revolution/Agrarian Revolution 15–16 Amager Bakke/Copenhill waste-burning energy plant, Denmark 134–5 Amish people 17–18, 208 anaerobic respiration 40 Annual Travel Survey 3 anxiety 5, 50, 57, 112 Araujo, Claudio Gil 229–32 Aspern, Vienna 140 asthma 10–11, 160, 172, 209 Atlas, Charles (Angelo Siciliano) 31 Barnet Graph of Doom 100–1 basal metabolic rate (BMR) 51, 158, 191 Better (non-profit social enterprise) 224 BeUpstanding 195–6 bike couriers 11–13 Biobank public health project 114 biophilia 133 Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) 132–5, 138–9 Blackburn, Elizabeth 41–2 Blair, Steven 19–20, 21, 46, 169–72, 275–6 blood pressure 5, 41, 46, 48, 57, 75, 90, 160, 225, 227, 265 Boardman, Chris 124–5, 127, 137, 264 BodPod 172–3, 174 body mass index (BMI) 146–7, 150–2, 161–4, 167, 170, 171, 172, 173, 193, 243 bone density/health 16–17, 22, 23, 44, 46, 49, 67, 101, 209, 223, 227–8 Boyd, Andrew 105–6 breast cancer 48, 160 British Medical Journal (BMJ) 64, 65, 80 Buchan, William: Domestic Medicine 63 Buchanan, Colin: Traffic in Towns 120–1 Buchanan, Nigel 203–4, 206, 207–8 Buchner, David 228 Bull, Fiona 98–9 Burden of Disease, WHO 47, 90 Burfoot, Amby 78, 79 Burnham, Andy 124, 264, 266 bus drivers, heart attack rates in London 61–2, 71–3 Bushy Park Time Trial 250 calories 13, 19–20, 19n, 27, 51, 54, 75, 113, 114, 146, 148, 153, 155, 156–7, 158, 165–6, 169, 190 Cambridge University 64, 65–6, 187 cancer 5, 41, 48–9, 62, 79, 90, 114, 160, 186, 187, 227, 231–2 car children and 216, 219, 258, 263–4, 265, 272 electric 137, 268 lobby 263 social engineering and 254, 258 town/city planning and 110, 111, 113, 121, 120–2, 124, 125, 126, 127–8, 129, 130, 131, 135, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 191–2, 263, 265, 268 walking supplanted by 2, 3, 5, 53 cardiovascular activity 168–9, 209, 271–2 cardiovascular health bus drivers, heart attack rates in London 61–2, 71–3 children and 2, 213 coronavirus and 265 diabetes and 95 Harvard Alumni Health Study 75–7, 134 heart attacks 41, 48, 50, 62, 70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, 91, 92, 93, 106 heart disease 5, 43, 46, 48, 59, 68, 69, 70–4, 81, 82, 88, 89, 114, 152, 154, 243, 244 inactivity first linked to 47–8 life expectancy and 93 longshoremen health study, San Francisco 75 low-density lipoprotein (LDL)/triglycerides and 41, 43, 46, 185 mitochondria and 40, 41 rheumatic heart disease 68, 69–70, 82, 152 sitting and 5, 185, 186, 187, 199 Centers for Disease Control (US government) 95, 228 chair 178–9 Chan, Margaret 152–3 children 22–3, 203–20, 235 adult health, movement in childhood and 11, 209–10 BMI and 51 bone density and 16, 23, 49, 67, 209–10 childhood movement diminishing into adolescence and onwards 11, 210–11 cycling and 121, 130, 214, 237–8, 246, 247 Daily Mile and 203–7, 212–13 decline in activity/inactivity statistics 1–2, 10–11, 22–3, 24, 203–11, 252–3, 254, 256 girls, low activity levels in 141–3, 204, 209, 210–11, 256 independent childhood mobility, perceived cosseting of children and 216–20 life expectancy and 97 obesity and 84, 152, 153, 252–3, 256–7 schools and see schools social care and 100 social engineering and 244, 245, 246, 247–9, 252–3 town/city planning and 121, 122–3, 130, 138, 139–40, 142, 216–20 cholesterol 43, 185, 242–3 cigarettes 10, 29, 47, 62, 75, 76, 79, 92, 98, 105, 176, 177, 242–4 cognitive function 5, 46, 49, 57, 87, 186, 226, 232, 233, 234 Coldbath Fields Prison, London 63–4 colon cancer 48 co-morbidity 89, 91 commuting 58, 111, 114–18, 125, 127–9, 148, 183, 184, 199–200, 221, 270, 273, 274 Cooper, Ashley 129 Cooper, Ken: Aerobics 78, 79 Copenhagen, Denmark 109–12, 122–3, 125, 134, 135, 184, 240 Coronary Heart Disease and Physical Activity of Work 61–2, 71–3 coronavirus pandemic 8–10, 13, 33, 88, 90, 100, 115, 116, 130, 138, 154, 172, 173, 182, 183, 192, 198, 201–2, 214, 240, 247, 248, 257, 259–61, 263, 264–9 Cregan-Reid, Vybarr: Primate Change 178–9, 189 Criado-Perez, Caroline: Invisible Women 141 cycling body fat and 173 calories and 113 car travel supplants 2, 3, 127, 217–18 children/schools and 121, 130, 214, 217, 237–8, 246, 247 commuting/everyday cycling for transport 7, 9, 13, 27–8, 34, 58, 104–5, 113, 114, 115–20, 129, 137, 177, 182, 183, 184, 199, 213, 254, 261, 265, 270, 272–3 couriers 11–13 Denmark and 7, 111, 121, 128, 130, 135, 239, 240, 249, 268 electric-assist bicycle/e-bike 128–30, 135 Finland and 236–8, 246, 247 heart attacks and 74 lanes/routes 9, 28, 82, 111, 119, 120–1, 122, 124, 130, 133, 192, 237, 246, 253–4, 265, 267–8 leg strength and 224, 231, 276 METs and 51, 52, 58, 115, 129 mortality and 114–20, 121 Netherlands and 119, 121, 125, 127, 128, 239, 240, 249, 268 Olympics and 34 overweight people and 166 Peloton 31 postmen and 73 safety/road danger 28, 118–19, 121, 125–6, 128, 137, 216–18, 240, 260 Slovenia and 253–4 social engineering and 236–8, 239–40, 246, 247, 249, 253–4, 256 share schemes 106 short car trips and 136, 137, 143 town/city planning and 33, 111, 112, 113, 114–20, 121, 122, 124–6, 127–31, 136, 137, 141, 143, 191, 192, 236–9, 246–7, 249, 253–4, 256, 263–4, 267–8 cytokines 42, 161, 162 Dahl, Roald 217–18 Daily Mile 203–7, 212–13, 214, 249, 251, 261, 262 Davies, Adrian 5, 35 dementia 5, 49, 87, 88, 226, 227, 229, 232–4 Denmark cycling in 7, 111, 121, 128, 130, 135, 137–8, 184, 239, 240, 249, 268 town/city planning in 109–12, 114–15, 121, 122–3, 125, 128, 130, 131, 132–5, 268 Department for Transport, UK 3 depression 5, 50, 106, 250 diabetes 88, 90, 95, 102, 186, 187, 192–3, 227 pre-diabetes 37, 59, 188 type 1 37, 94 type 2 4, 5, 36, 37, 41, 42, 43, 46, 48–9, 57, 89, 93–4, 99, 106–8, 129, 145, 146, 151, 160, 162–3, 167, 185, 193, 215, 222, 265 Diabetes UK 108 Disneyland 135–6 Dober Tek campaign 254–5 Doll, Richard 79 Donaldson, Liam 79 driverless cars 136, 137 Dunstan, David 192–3, 200 duurzaam veilig (sustainable safety) 126 electric-assist bicycle/e-bike 128–30, 135 electric vehicles 128–30, 135, 136–7, 268 endocrine system 42 Equinox (US gym chain) 32 Erickson, Kirk 226, 233–4, 275 exercise see individual exercise and area of exercise ‘fat and fit’ 147, 169–75 fat, body 42–4, 145, 146–7, 151, 161, 162, 165–6, 167, 169–75, 185, 188, 193, 242, 255 financial costs of inactivity 87–143 mortality and morbidity and 90–3 NHS/universal medical systems and 87–108 non-medical long-term action against preventable conditions and 102–8 social care and 100–2 total additional costs imposed on health services due to inactivity 94–5 Finland 236–47, 258 cycling in 236–8, 246, 247 Finnish Schools on the Move 211–12, 246, 252 Global Report Card study on childhood activity levels and 252–3, 255 Helsinki central library 252 Network of Finnish Cycling Municipalities 247 social engineering in 236–47, 249, 252, 262, 264 Sports Act (1980) 245–6 Sports Act (1999) 246 Winter Cycling Congress 238, 246 see also individual place name Fitbit 54, 181 fitness industry 3, 31, 33, 34 fitness watches 116, 181, 270–1 food corporation lobby 148 ‘four by four’ threat (four most damaging NCDs) 90 Frauen-Werk-Stadt (Women’s Work City), Vienna 140–1 Freiburg, Germany 137–8 Frome, Somerset 141–3 Garmin 116, 181, 270–1 Gehl, Jan 109–12, 120, 122–4, 125, 126, 131, 135, 184, 268, 275 Life Between Buildings 110, 122–3, 131 Gill, Tim 138, 218–20 No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk-Averse Society 219–20 Glasgow University 66, 68, 134, 163 Global Report Card study on childhood activity levels 24, 252–3 glucose intolerance 37, 38, 167, 185, 192–3, 194 Gobec, Mojca 254–5 Googleplex, Mountain View 133, 196 Greater Manchester 124–5, 127, 264–6 gyms 1, 4, 26, 30–5, 51, 106, 149, 166, 167, 220–1, 223–4, 256, 276 Hartley, Sir Percival Horton-Smith 64–5 Harvard Alumni Health Study 75–7, 134 Harvard University 46, 52, 74, 76, 77, 134, 171 Haskell, William 26, 274 Hatano, Yoshiro 54 Health Education Authority 210 health gap (gap between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy) 92–4, 95, 99–100, 222 Healy, Genevieve 194–6, 274 heart attacks 41, 48, 50, 62, 70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, 91, 92, 93, 106 see also cardiovascular health heart disease 5, 43, 46, 48, 59, 68, 69, 70–4, 81, 82, 88, 89, 114, 152, 154, 243, 244 see also cardiovascular health heart rate 13, 27, 53, 116, 117, 129, 181, 197, 270 Hidalgo, Anne 192 high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL) 43, 185 Hillman, Mayer: One False Move 217–18 Hillsdon, Mervyn 79–80, 83, 84, 85 Hippocrates 63 Hobro, Denmark 131 hunter-gatherers 5, 15, 16, 17 Hunt, Jeremy 261–4 Imbeah, Alistair 224 inactivity financial costs of 87–143 see also financial costs of inactivity obesity and see obesity sitting and see sitting see also individual area and consequence of inactivity incidental activity (activity which takes place as part of your regular day) 27, 114, 220 individual responsibility 2, 30, 58, 148, 263 industrialisation 2, 30 inequality (of income and opportunity) 103 Ineos 205 inflammation 42, 48, 68, 161, 162, 223 Institute of Hygiene and Occupational Health, Sofia 165 insulin 36, 37, 38, 42, 43, 57, 146, 161, 162 International Olympic Committee 81 International Space Station 44 Johnson, Boris 259, 260, 261, 264, 266, 267 Kail, Eva 139–43 Kelly, Mark 44 Kelly, Phil 88–9, 96–7, 103–5, 107 Kelly, Scott 44 Keston, John 225 keto diet 146 King’s College Hospital, London 87–9, 91 Kiuru, Krista 238–9, 245 Korhonen, Nina 246, 248–9, 252 Kraus, Hans: Hypokinetic Disease: Diseases Produced by Lack of Exercise 74 lactic acid 40–1 Lancet, The 23, 46, 47, 73, 95, 98, 128, 153, 199, 210 Lean, Mike 163–4 Lee, I-Min 46, 47, 52, 55, 56, 59, 60, 74, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 274 Levine, James 189–92, 193, 194, 196–7, 199, 201 Lewis, Thomas 68, 71–2 life expectancy 91–2, 99, 221–2 health gap (gap between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy) 92–4, 95, 99–100, 222 lipaemia 43 liver 161, 186, 187 Longevity of Oarsmen study, The 64–5 longshoremen health study, San Francisco 75 low-density lipoprotein (LDL) 43, 185 Lucas, Tamara 73–4, 83, 85 lung cancer 48, 79 lung function 5, 95–6 Lykkegaard, Kasper 181–2 Mackenzie, Richard 36–8, 43, 59, 117, 274–5 Maguire, Jennifer Smith 31, 32, 33 Mancunian Way, Manchester 124–5 Marin, Sanna 238 Marmot, Michael 82–3 ‘Matthew effect’ 206 Mayer, Jean 154–6, 157, 175 Physiological Basis of Obesity and Leanness 155–6 McGovern, Artie 31 meals, movement and processing of fats and sugars after 43–4, 167, 183, 188, 194, 272 mental health 49–50, 74, 204, 211 MET (metabolic equivalent) 51–2, 58, 115, 129, 178 metabolic disorders 5, 43, 49, 74, 95 see also individual disorder name metabolic rate 39, 51, 158, 191 micro mobility 135 Miliband, Ed 266–7 minimum amount of moderate activity needed to maintain health, recommended 116–17 mitochondria 41, 48, 167 Mitrovic, Polona Demšar 254 modal filtering 126 morbidity 89, 91–3, 160, 168–9, 227, 256–7 Morris, Annie 66–7 Morris, Jerry 61–3, 64, 65, 66–74, 75, 77, 79, 80–6, 152, 154, 241 Morris, Nathan 66–7, 83 Moscow 111, 112, 123 Mosley, Michael 229 movement decline of everyday 15–35 rediscovery of benefits of 61–86 see also individual type of movement muscle leg 224, 231, 276 skeletal 40, 42, 43, 167, 276 smooth 40 strength/muscle training 22, 223, 228, 271–2 wastage 22, 42, 223–4 Muscular Christianity 30 myosin (protein) 40 ‘nanny state’ 9, 243–4, 262–3, 264, 265 NASA 44 National Fitness Survey (1990) 84 National Health Service (NHS) 9, 70, 101, 164, 179, 223, 266 cost of inactivity to 9, 89–90, 93–7, 101, 104, 106–7, 153–4 social prescribing 105–6 National Lottery 33 Nebelong, Helle 219–20 Netherlands 119, 121, 125, 127, 128, 166, 239–40, 249, 268 Nieman, David 265 Niemi, Joonas 246, 248–9, 252 non-communicable diseases (NCDs) 90, 98 non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) 190–1, 194–5 North Karelia, Finland 241–3, 244, 245, 257 obesity 5, 19, 89, 98, 144–75, 215, 241 activity required to lose significant amounts of weight 144–7, 164–9 age and 152 basal metabolic rate and 158, 191 BMI and 146, 150–1, 160, 161–4, 167, 170, 171, 172, 173 body fat percentage and 146–7, 151, 165, 167, 170, 172–4, 193 childhood and 84, 152, 153, 212 costs of 95, 153–4 crisis 152–3, 154, 157 deaths and 47, 90, 160, 163, 170, 171 energy balance and 154–9 exercise benefits for 59, 144–7, 156, 158, 159, 165–6, 167–8 ‘fat and fit’ 169–75 health conditions associated with 160–1 obesogenic foodscape and 148–9 sex and 152 Slovenia and 256–7 stigma 147, 149–50 sugar and 146, 148, 156, 166 waist circumference and 161–4, 169, 172 weight loss/Watson and 144–6, 147–8, 149, 162, 166–7, 171, 173, 175, 270 worldwide spread of 152–3 Odense, Denmark 130 Ojajärvi, Sanna 247 older people/ageing staying active and 220–35 town/city planning and 138–9 Old Order Mennonites community 208 Olympics 33–4, 124, 224, 228, 255 (1964) 54 (1996) 33, 81 (2000) 33 (2012) 23 150-minutes of moderate exercise per-week recommendation 21–2, 26, 38, 54, 201, 270 active travel and 112 children and 207 commuting and 127–8 definitions of moderate and intense exercise 22 MET and 58 moderate activities, WHO list of possible 52 mortality and 45 older people and 222 strength training and 271–2 weight loss and 164 osteoporosis 16–17, 209, 227 Paffenbarger, Ralph 62, 64, 74, 75–82, 84–5, 101, 134, 225, 274 Paris 191–2, 197, 268 Parkrun 106, 249–51 pavement 120, 122, 124, 130, 140, 141, 237, 265, 268 pedometers 53–4 Peloton 31 personal choice, myth of 25–30 personal trainers 31 Peska, Pukka 46, 240–5, 257, 262–3 Physical Activity and Health (eds Bouchard, Blair, Haskell) 39 Physical Activity Guidelines Advisory Committee (PACAG) 45, 48, 57 physical activity level (PAL) 51 Pichai, Sundar 133 Policy Studies Institute 217 polypharmacy 89 portal theory 161 poverty 67, 68, 69, 82, 152, 180 Poynton, Frederic 68 protein 37, 40 Public Health England (PHE) 3, 22, 33, 57, 94–5, 97, 169, 269 Raab, Wilhelm: Hypokinetic Disease: Diseases Produced by Lack of Exercise 74 Radcliffe, Paula 36 ramp test 117–18 rheumatic heart disease 68, 69–70, 82, 152 risk-averse culture 207, 219 road danger 28, 119, 121, 125–6, 128, 137, 216–18, 240, 260 Roehampton University 36, 117, 172 Rook, Sir Alan 65 Ross, Robert 149–50, 157, 160, 161–2, 163, 164, 168–9, 171, 173, 174, 175 Rost, Leon 132–4, 135, 136, 139 Royal College of General Practitioners 105 running 1, 3, 9 ageing and 225, 227, 275 ATP and 40 bone density and 16 childhood and 203–7, 209, 210, 212–13, 214, 215, 246, 255 exercise industry and 31 home running treadmills 147 METs and 51, 58 150-minutes of moderate exercise per-week recommendation and 22, 52, 201 overweight people and 167 Paffenbarger and 76, 77, 78–9, 80, 225 Parkrun 106, 249–51 ultrarunning 32 schools 20, 27, 30, 121, 210–20, 236, 237–8, 239, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 252–7, 261–2 cycling to 121, 130, 214, 237–8, 246, 247 Daily Mile and 203–7, 212–13 English curriculum, physical education and 212, 248, 261–2 Finland and 211–12, 246, 252–3, 257 free school meals at 245 girls low activity levels in 204, 209, 210–11 Global Matrix 3.0 Physical Activity Report Card and 24, 252–3 independent childhood mobility, perceived cosseting of children and 216–20 playing fields 103, 107 Scottish schools curriculum, physical education and 212 sitting in 211–16 Slovenian 212, 255–7 social engineering and 237–8, 239, 244, 245, 246 sedentary behaviour 177–202 see also sitting Sens 181–4, 271 short-termism 107 Sidewalk Labs 136 Sim, David: Soft City 123–4, 126–7 Sinton-Hewitt, Paul 250 sit-stand test 228–31 sit-stand workstations 195, 196, 198–9, 200, 202 sitting 5, 13, 24, 26, 39, 49, 54, 62, 72, 176–202, 211–16 active applause and 176–7, 180, 271 average amounts of 179 breaking up prolonged 176–7, 180, 181, 182, 190–1, 193, 194–5, 197, 200, 271, 275 chair and 178–9 diabetes and 185, 186, 187, 188, 192–4 exercise and effects of 184, 199–201 fidgeting and 190–1, 194–5 health effects of 176–7, 185–8 low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL)/triglycerides and 185 ‘new smoking’ headlines 177 schools and 211–16 sedentary behaviour defined 177–8 sit-stand test 228–31 sit-stand workstations 195, 196, 198–9, 200, 202 tracking/measuring 179–84 TV viewing and 178, 186, 187–8, 189, 192 workplace and 189–92, 195–9, 201–2 skeletal muscles 40, 42, 43, 167, 276 skinfold body fat test 173–4, 255 Skinner, James 21 sleep 5, 42, 50, 57, 184 Sleep, Leisure, Occupation, Transportation, and Home-based Activities (SLOTH) 25 Slofit programme 255–6 Slovenia 24, 212, 253–8, 261 Smith, Edward 63–4 smooth muscle 40 social care 97, 99–101, 108 social engineering 236–58 cycling and 236–8, 239–40, 246, 247, 249, 253–4, 256 Finland and 236–47, 249, 252–3, 255, 257, 258 see also individual area of Finland kindergartens and 252 mortality rates and 240–5 ‘nanny state’ objections to 243–4 obesity and 241, 252–7 Parkrun 249–51 political support, need for complete 244–5 schools and 236, 237–8, 239, 244, 245, 246–7, 248, 252–3, 255, 256, 257 Slovenia and 253–7, 258 sports facilities funding 245–6 tax and 245–6, 252 Youth Sports Trust, UK 247–9, 251 social medicine 61, 68–71, 83 Social Medicine Unit 61, 69–70 socialism 66, 67–8 social prescribers 105–6 Spevak, Harvey 32, 35 Sport England 34 stairs 28–9, 131–4 Starc, Gregor 255–7 St Mary’s Hospital, London 93 St Ninian’s primary school, Stirling, Scotland 203–7, 213 Stockholm, Sweden 141 Stop de Kindermoord (Stop the Child Murders) road safety mass protests, Netherlands (1970s) 121, 240 strength/muscle training 22, 223, 228, 271–2 stroke 5, 46, 61, 81, 89, 160, 180, 186, 267 technology, monitoring of activity levels and Active Ten app (Public Health England) 57, 269 activity trackers 38, 57, 116, 180–4, 200–1, 214–15, 269, 270–1 Sens activity tracker 181–4, 200–1, 214–15, 271 television viewing 26, 82–3, 121, 186–9, 192 telomeres 41–2, 226 10,000 steps a day target 26, 38, 52, 53–5, 56, 184, 200, 270, 275 Titmuss, Richard 68–9 town/city planning (built environment) 5, 28–9, 108, 109–43, 210 active travel and 109–43 Amager Bakke and 134–5 Buchanan and 120–1 cars, hegemony of 110, 111, 113, 120–2, 124, 125, 126, 127–31, 135–8, 140, 141, 142, 143, 191–2, 263, 265, 268 Copenhagen 111–12, 122, 123 coronavirus lockdown and 130–1 cycling and 111, 112, 113, 114–20, 121, 122, 124–6, 127–31, 136, 137, 141, 143 driverless cars and 136–7 duurzaam veilig (sustainable safety) concept 126 e-bikes and 127–30 Gehl’s philosophy 109–12, 120, 122–4, 125, 126, 131, 135 Googleplex, Mountain View and 132–4 health dividends of active travel and 114–20 Manchester and 124–5, 127 Odense and 130 older people/those with disabilities and 138–9 stairs and 131–2 Toyota Woven City 135–6, 137, 138–9 Vauban, Freiburg 137–8 walking and 109, 112, 113, 114, 115, 120, 121–7, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136, 137, 140, 141, 143 women and girls, discrimination against 139–43 Toyota Woven City, Japan 135–6, 137, 138–9 tracking, electronic activity 13, 17, 21, 26, 38, 52, 53–5, 56, 57, 113, 116, 180–4, 190, 200–1, 214–15, 269–71, 272 transport use see individual mode of transport travel, active 9, 24, 112–14, 118, 121, 126, 127, 131, 136, 143, 191, 216 see also individual mode of travel Travers, Andrew 100–1 treadmill desk 199 triglycerides 43, 185 True Finns 245 Tudor-Locke, Catrine 53–4, 56 Tulleken, Xand van 29–30, 44–5 Uber 137 ultrarunning 32 University of Massachusetts 53 Utrecht, Netherlands 125 Utzon, Jørn 111 Valabhji, Jonathan 93, 99, 104 Varney, Justin 97–8, 169, 198 Vartiainen, Juha-Pekka 237 Vauban, Freiburg, Germany 137–8 Vienna, Austria 140–3 VO2 max test 117–18, 173 walking Active Ten app and 57, 269–70 ageing and 102 assessing/tracking 26, 38, 52, 53–5, 56, 181, 182, 183, 184, 200, 269–70, 272 bone density and 16 brisk/speed of 3, 9, 22, 48, 52, 53, 55, 57, 60, 74, 79, 84, 86, 114, 167, 269 children and 11, 209, 214, 215, 216, 218, 246, 247 commuting and 114, 130 cycling and 114, 115 danger and 120 decline in 2, 3, 9, 16, 18, 19, 27–9, 33, 208, 216 fat processing/reduction and 43, 48, 185 150 minutes of moderate activity a week recommendation and 52–4 social prescribing and 106 stairs and 28–9, 131–4 10,000 steps a day target 26, 38, 52, 53–5, 56, 184, 200, 270, 275 town/city planning and 109, 112, 113, 114, 115, 120, 121–7, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136, 137, 140, 141, 143 weight loss and 144–5, 157, 165, 166, 167 workplace and 196, 197, 199, 200, 201, 202, 274, 275 WALL·E (film) 25–6 Watson, Tom 144–6, 147–8, 149, 162, 166–7, 171, 173, 175, 270 Downsizing 145 weekend warriors 58–9 Wellington, Chrissie 250, 251, 252, 257 Whyte, Martin 87–9, 91, 94, 95–6, 102–5, 106–8 Wicks, Joe 10 Wiggle 270 Wijndaele, Katrien 187–8 Winter Cycling Congress 238, 246 Wollaston, Sarah 263 Wolff’s Law (bones adapt to the repeated loads put on them) 209 women 6 BMI and 51 bone density 16, 18, 227 cancer and 48 diabetes 151 girls, low activity levels in 141–3, 204, 209, 210–11, 256 life expectancy 92, 222 modern decline in activity among 19, 22, 24 obesity and 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162–3, 164, 165, 171 150-minutes of moderate exercise per-week recommendation and 22, 207 public space and 139–43 sitting and 186 walking and 53–4, 55, 84, 121 World Health Organization (WHO) 22, 47, 52, 98, 151, 152–3, 210 World Obesity Forum 154 Wright, Chris 247–9, 252, 257 Wyllie, Elaine 203–4, 205, 206, 209, 212, 213, 262 Youth Sports Trust 247–9, 251 First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2021 Copyright © Peter Walker, 2021 The right of Peter Walker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

The Hacker Crackdown
by Bruce Sterling
Published 15 Mar 1992

With a half-clever story and enough brass-plated gall I could probably trick the truth out of her. Phone-phreaks and hackers deceive people over the phone all the time. It's called "social engineering." Social engineering is a very common practice in the underground, and almost magically effective. Human beings are almost always the weakest link in computer security. The simplest way to learn Things You Are Not Meant To Know is simply to call up and exploit the knowledgeable people. With social engineering, you use the bits of specialized knowledge you already have as a key, to manipulate people into believing that you are legitimate. You can then coax, flatter, or frighten them into revealing almost anything you want to know.

…

Posing as the manager, Fry Guy had altered MacDonald's records, and given some teenage hamburger-flipping friends of his, generous raises. He had not been caught. Emboldened by success, Fry Guy moved on to credit-card abuse. Fry Guy was quite an accomplished talker; with a gift for "social engineering." If you can do "social engineering"—fast-talk, fake-outs, impersonation, conning, scamming—then card abuse comes easy. (Getting away with it in the long run is another question). Fry Guy had run across "Urvile" of the Legion of Doom on the ALTOS Chat board in Bonn, Germany. ALTOS Chat was a sophisticated board, accessible through globe-spanning computer networks like BITnet, Tymnet, and Telenet.

…

But, just as he had switched the Florida probation office to "Tina" in New York, Fry Guy switched the card-holder's number to a local pay-phone. There he would lurk in wait, muddying his trail by routing and re-routing the call, through switches as far away as Canada. When the call came through, he would boldly "social-engineer," or con, the Western Union people, pretending to be the legitimate card-holder. Since he'd answered the proper phone number, the deception was not very hard. Western Union's money was then shipped to a confederate of Fry Guy's in his home town in Indiana. Fry Guy and his cohort, using LoD techniques, stole six thousand dollars from Western Union between December 1988 and July 1989.

Underground
by Suelette Dreyfus
Published 1 Jan 2011

Even OTC007. Anyone with the IQ of a desk lamp could guess at least a few account names on Minerva. Passwords were a bit tougher to come by, but Mendax had some ideas for that. He was going to have a crack at social engineering. Social engineering means smooth-talking someone in a position of power into doing something for you. It always involved a ruse of some sort. Mendax decided he would social engineer a password out of one of Minerva’s users. He had downloaded a partial list of Minerva users another PI hacker had generously posted for those talented enough to make use of it. This list was maybe two years old, and incomplete, but it contained 30-odd pages of Minerva account usernames, company names, addresses, contact names and telephone and fax numbers.

…

This list was maybe two years old, and incomplete, but it contained 30-odd pages of Minerva account usernames, company names, addresses, contact names and telephone and fax numbers. Some of them would probably still be valid. Mendax had a deep voice for his age; it would have been impossible to even contemplate social engineering without it. Cracking adolescent male voices were the kiss of death for would-be social engineers. But even though he had the voice, he didn’t have the office or the Sydney phone number if the intended victim wanted a number to call back on. He found a way to solve the Sydney phone number by poking around until he dug up a number with Sydney’s 02 area code which was permanently engaged.

…

He gave another pregnant pause. Working up the courage to ask the Big Question. It was hard to know who was sweating more, the fretting Perth manager, tormented by the idea of loud staff complaints from all over the company because the Minerva account was faulty, or the gangly kid trying his hand at social engineering for the first time. ‘Well,’ Mendax began, trying to keep the sound of authority in his voice. ‘Let’s see. We have your account number, but we had better check your password . . . what was it?’ An arrow shot from the bow. It hit the target. ‘Yes, it’s L-U-R-C-H – full stop.’ Lurch? Uhuh. An Addams Family fan.

Emotional design: why we love (or hate) everyday things
by Donald A. Norman
Published 10 May 2005

Living in an Untrustworthy World It's human nature to trust our fellow man, especially when the request meets the test of being reasonable. Social engineers use this knowledge to exploit their victims and to achieve their goals. —K. D. Mitnick and W. L. Simon, The Art of Deception Trust is an essential ingredient in cooperative, human interaction. Alas, this also makes it a vulnerability, ready for exploitation by what is called TLFeBOOK 144 Emotional Design "social engineering," the crooks, thieves, and terrorists who exploit and manipulate our trust and good nature for their gain. As more and more of our everyday objects are manufactured with computer chips inside, with intelligence and flexibility, and with communication channels to the other devices in our environment and to the worldwide network of information and services, it is critical to worry about those who would do harm, whether by accident, for the sake of mischief, for fun, or with malicious intent to defraud or harm.

…

Just ask.As one handbook that I found on the internet puts TLFeBOOK Five: People, P l a c e s , and T h i n g s 147 FIGURE 5.2a and b How not to safeguard a password. Figure a shows a note posted on the side of the computer display; figure b is an enlargement of the note. This is the sort of behavior that social engineers count on. But it is bad password policies that make us have to resort to this. Even if the password wasn't attached to the computer, a good social engineer could have guessed it: this computer is at the corporate headquarters of a major manufacturer of office furniture. "Chair"? Who WOUld ever guess? (Photograph by author.) it: Just shout, "Does anyone remember the password for this terminal?"

…

When the security codes or procedures become too complex, people can't remember them, so they will write them down and post them on their computer terminals, under their keyboards or phones, or in their desk drawer (on top, though, where they are easy to get to). As I was writing this book, I served on a committee of the United States National Research Council investigating information technology and counterterrorism. For my section of the report, I studied the social engineering practices used by terrorists, criminals, and other troublemakers. Actually, it's not difficult to find this information. The basic principles have been around for centuries and there are many books by ex-criminals, law-enforcement officers, and even guides to writing crime novels that provide relevant information.

Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace
by Michelle Slatalla and Joshua Quittner
Published 15 Jan 1995

They were written by hackers who had culled kernels of information from dumpster dives. The information, usually no good to them, was evidence of their exploits, and what better way to take credit than to type it up and post it for all to see? Other philes taught Mark a new phrase: social engineering. Social engineering means tricking people into giving you information over the phone, usually by pretending you're someone they'd want to talk to. Because, as everyone knows, the best information comes from people, not computers. The people most likely to give out information about how the phone system works are the helpful staffers in the phone company's own business office.

…

The handle was not the most politically correct, nor did it accurately invoke the person who uses it. Supernigger according to some people who claim to have met him was a slight white kid, a teenager who affected a remarkable array of accents and voices to trick people into giving him information. Nobody was a better social engineer than Supernigger. He held the world's speed record for talking a phone company employee out of his password. Supernigger just called up, said, "This is Bob from Service. What's your password?" He got it, clocked the whole call under ten seconds. Usually he spoke in a lazy southern drawl, telling the woman in the business office, "Lady, I'm twenty feet up on the pole. " She gives him whatever he wants.

…

Usually he spoke in a lazy southern drawl, telling the woman in the business office, "Lady, I'm twenty feet up on the pole. " She gives him whatever he wants. On a BBS, Eli tells Supernigger to give him a call, at (718) 555-ACID. Supernigger dials, connects, and is blown away. Imagine having your own customized phone number. Absolutely free. Phone company doesn't even know it's there. Sign me up. Supernigger, it turned out, had social engineered the phone number of a conference bridge. A conference bridge is a lot of fun. Big corporations use conference bridges all the time. They're really just big party lines for companies. A dozen people in different cities can be on a conference bridge at once, hearing the chairman of the board predict the quarterly earnings.

Silk Road
by Eileen Ormsby
Published 1 Nov 2014

Attack the pedo sites. You didn’t attack Wikipedia for hosting information about your enemies. Wake up.’ Instead, Anonymous stepped up the attack, crashing the server of Freedom Hosting, the service that hosted nearly all of the child porn linked by the Hidden Wiki. The group also used a clever bit of social engineering (psychological manipulation rather than technical intervention) to fool visitors to Lolita City, the most popular site in the Wiki’s ‘Hard Candy’ under-age porn directory, into clicking on a button that harvested their usernames and IP addresses. Anonymous posted these publicly, alerted the media and supplied the details to law enforcement.

…

The report concluded that the main vulnerability of Tor and the hidden services was not the technology, but the user. Human error and a lack of understanding of the technology would be the best bet to bypass the anonymity provided by Tor and encryption. ‘Other avenues to attack the Silk Road flagged in the report include social engineering, intersections between online transactions and the real world, and by targeting user error,’ reported iTnews, which had viewed a copy. Some time later, an officer of the agency that commissioned the report pleaded guilty to contravening secrecy by allegedly providing the report to his son. It was a recurring theme in reports by law enforcement agencies around the world that human error was their best chance for detecting crime.

…

It was a recurring theme in reports by law enforcement agencies around the world that human error was their best chance for detecting crime. Silk Road’s users could be comfortable that the technology, used correctly, would keep them safe. People in the forums often warned each other that human error and potential social engineering were the most useful ways law enforcement had of unmasking any major players or vendors on the market. Those who would be targets reassured each other that they had taken all necessary precautions. Dread Pirate Roberts, the biggest target, was also confident his security measures meant nobody would find him through human error.

Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives
by Michael A. Heller and James Salzman
Published 2 Mar 2021

By changing the fast lane into a reserved lane for carpools or electric cars, governments push people toward behaviors that reduce congestion and air pollution. By tolerating password sharing for the moment, HBO builds its fan base and “addicts” its future subscribers. Ownership design is best understood as a social engineering tool designed to steer your behavior, invisibly and decisively. Ownership is not complicated. It can’t be, if we are going to navigate daily life without too much conflict. Once you see how owners can intentionally direct your actions, you may even be able to take hold of the remote control to improve your own life and to promote the common good.

…

After the relevant community—hunters, inventors, nations, movie ticket buyers—agrees on what counts as first, people are off to the races, not just in old-timey cases but all around us today. This is how countries claim orbital parking spaces for geosynchronous satellites and also how you order a sandwich at the deli: “First in line, step up.” In short, first-in-time is a powerful tool of social engineering, and it’s the default rule for getting along in a crowded world. But why? What are its essential advantages? For starters, as the Pierson majority recognized, it’s simple to understand and easy to apply. Even kids are adept at using the rule. The first to sit in the playground swing gets it for recess.

…

Undergrads seem to enjoy the camaraderie of tenting in K-Ville or waiting in shorter lines for ordinary games. Duke’s athletic program saw that it could extract three kinds of value by deploying an elaborate ticketing system: crazed fans, a packed house, and lots of money. Rather than rewarding the person at the front of the line, it treats ticket allocation as a social engineering tool, a sophisticated remote control that it uses to redirect behavior. It’s remarkable, if you stop and think about it, that Duke can get graduate students to camp out for days, and undergrads for months, with enthusiasm rather than protest, to maximize the value Duke gets from its basketball program.

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World
by Joseph Menn
Published 3 Jun 2019

None admit to knowing where he is, and some who were close to him believe he is dead. They could be right. But in mid-2018, a database showed that he had a valid Texas driver’s license, which must be renewed every six years. More plausible is that Jesse used his virtuoso social-engineering skills to fall off the map. Though he might have an excess of that talent, it made Jesse a key part of hacking’s development. Like text files, old-school social engineering shrank in importance as technical proficiency grew. As Jesse’s time in the spotlight came to an end, the center of gravity in cDc was shifting to Boston, and the group was beginning to move toward bigger things

…

He impressed and charmed people and got them to tell him things, and that’s how he learned more about hacking, enough to found a critical early series of conferences. Jesse was rude and eloquent, with a rock-star air that made people listen. “He could predict what you were thinking before you said it, then turn a conversation around in seconds,” said Angela Dormido, a friend who ran a bulletin board. Hackers have a phrase for the technique: social engineering. It’s what made famed hacker Kevin Mitnick so successful, along with many others less well-known. You play a role, you spin lies, and you get people to do what you want. Misha called Jesse on one story that didn’t hold up, and Jesse never spoke to him again. Jesse’s mother, two people he lived with at different times, and talented latter-day cDc hackers with resources and connections hunted at length for Jesse after his last sighting in 2009.

…

I joined happily, honored, and proceeded to write crappy, horrific, 16 year old bloody t-files. I loved the community of smart people (and their girlfriends) to converse with and bounce ideas off of. The acceptance of my female gender is extremely rare in the hacker scene and I appreciate it. I never pretended to be a hacker, since I’m not skillful in that area (though social engineering came easily to me). Somehow I ended up purely by accident as the only girl in the world’s most notorious hacker group, and while that was enormously amusing, I am now approaching 40 years old rapidly. I have no energy left for cDc or the mailing list. I do have energy for the wonderful friends I made throughout this oh gosh, 21 or so year journey.

Who Owns the Future?
by Jaron Lanier
Published 6 May 2013

People pay for dating services even though, on examination, the algorithms purporting to pair perfect mates probably don’t work. It doesn’t matter if the science is right so long as customers will pay for it, and they do. Therefore, there is no need to distinguish whether statistics were valid in an a priori scientific sense, or if they were made valid because of social engineering. An example of social engineering is when two people meet through a dating site because they both expect the algorithms to be valid. People adapt to the presence of information systems, whether the adaptation is conscious or not, and whether the information system is functioning as expected or not. The science of it becomes moot.

…

Each network created a center of power that bypassed territorial and political boundaries, and existed on its own plane. Each became what might be called a “social monopoly,” engaging in social engineering on a grand scale. That’s not to say that bad things will necessarily happen in a social monopoly. They can achieve breathtaking large-scale social good. The Catholic Church unquestionably educates many millions of the poor, heals many millions of the sick, stabilizes many millions of families, and comforts many millions of the dying; in 2012 Facebook dipped a toe into the waters of social engineering by increasing the rolls of organ donors with a simple tweak of its user experience. By putting the option to donate right in front of people, many more people embraced that option.

…

The core ideal of the Internet is that one trusts people, and that given an opportunity, people will find their way to be reasonably decent. I happily restate my loyalty to that ideal. It’s all we have. But the demonstrated capability of Facebook to effortlessly engage in mass social engineering proves that the Internet as it exists today is not a purists’ emergent system, as is so often claimed, but largely a top-down, directed one. There can be no sweeter goal of social engineering than increasing organ donations, and yet the extreme good of the precedent says nothing about the desirability of its inheritance. We pretend that an emergent meta-human being is appearing in the computing clouds—an artificial intelligence—but actually it is humans, the operators of Siren Servers, pulling the levers.

Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
by Zeke Faux
Published 11 Sep 2023

Often, he said, the hardest part is crafting an email that tricks an insider into opening a malicious attachment. “The social-engineering vector is key,” he said. * * * — THAT SEEMED LIKE a clue. In 2019, Heather Morgan had given a talk titled “How to Social Engineer Your Way Into Anything” at an event called NYC Salon. In a promotional flyer for the speech, she posed in a tight, snakeskin-print metallic dress while holding a large pipe wrench. “I hate the term ‘manipulating,’ ” she said in the talk, after attempting to warm up the bemused crowd by rapping a few lines from “Versace Bedouin.” Social engineering, she said, involves “getting someone to share information or take an action that they otherwise would not.”

…

Vicky told me she had a lot of free time and rattled off a long list of upscale hobbies: traveling, yoga, scuba diving, and golf. Amid the small talk, she dropped a hint about where the conversation was heading, saying she also liked to “analyze cryptocurrency market trends.” I knew that Vicky’s job was to use social engineering to defraud me. But she wasn’t very good at it. For one thing, she informed me it was raining in New York when I could see for myself that it was sunny. She said she was attending the Met Gala, but it had happened three months earlier. When she sent a suggestive photo of her legs in bed, the view from her window didn’t look anything like New York.

…

See also Alameda Research betting against Tether, 70 Platinum Partners, 72 as short sellers, 70, 72 as Tether users, 26–27 Held, Dan, 21 Herbert, Stacy, 204–205, 210, 239 Hiaasen, Carl, 14 Hiếu, Ngô Minh, 182–183, 185 “High in the Cemetery” (Morgan), 99 Hilton, Paris, 141 Hindenburg Research, 72–73 Ho, Vicky, 172–175, 180, 183 Hoegner, Stuart, 69 Hollywood Reporter, 155 Hong Kong, 87, 223 “How to Social Engineer Your Way Into Anything” (Morgan), 103 human trafficking, 193–195 Hun Sen, 190 Hurley, Mitch, 240–241, 242 Hydra Market, 108 I Icetoad, 176–177, 178, 179, 182 Il Blog delle Stelle, 43–44 “initial coin offerings” (ICOs) as bust, 87 described, 35 Ethereum and, 113 “pump-and-dump” schemes and, 49–50 Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE), 34 J James, Letitia, 64 Jan, Richard, 193, 195 Janczewski, Chris, 104–105, 106 Jane Street Capital, 83, 84 Jeter, Derek, 129 K Keeton-Olsen, Danielle as scam compounds guide, 192–195, 196, 198, 199 basic facts about, 191 story about Chinatown, 197 Keiser, Max, 22, 204–205, 210, 239 Kim Jong Un, 127 Knight, Marion “Suge,” 32 Koutoulas, James, 29–30 Kraken, 21, 61 Kramer, Todd, 146 KuCoin, 102 Kwon, Do, 162, 163, 238 L Lai, Lennix, 215 Lansky, Meyer, 76 Lapina, Arthur, “Art Art,” 121–122, 125 Larsen, Aleksander, 123 laser eyes, 22 Latham & Watkins, 59 Lazarus hacker group, 102 Ledger Labs, 102–103 Lehman Brothers, 18 Levine, Matt, 49, 134, 135 Lewis, Michael, 130–131, 236 Liberty Reserve, 37 Lichtenstein, Ilya “Dutch” basic facts about, 98, 100–101, 106 Life magazine, 77 Lincoln, Abraham, 71 Loney, Patrick, 139–140 Loot, 143–144 Lugano, Switzerland, 207, 208, 209–210 Luna, 162–163, 165, 166, 226 M MacAskill, Will, 82–83, 216, 231 Mac Aulay, Tara, 84, 85, 87 Madoff, Bernie, 45, 232 Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange (Mt.

Puzzling People: The Labyrinth of the Psychopath
by Thomas Sheridan
Published 1 Mar 2011

As a consequence of this ‘maturity vacuum’, personal and social evolutionary necessity will bring the psychopath into our lives in order to ‘shake up’ our often comfortable, molly-coddled complacency. Our materialistic and social development has long overtaken our psychological and spiritual maturity. This Psychopathic Control Grid has been very much by design via social engineering and mass psychological conditioning through media, politics and public education. We need to regain our emotional, psychological and spiritual independence. We have to learn that we do not need to keep externalising ourselves as a matter of social obligation in order to feel ‘complete’. As Terence McKenna said, “Culture is not your friend.”

…

Maybe it is time to stop watching Dancing with the Stars and start paying attention to something meaningful for a change. This is why psychopaths who have become billionaires with all the money, social status and power they ever wanted are still not satisfied. They become captains of industry, then feel the need to become statesmen, opinion-makers and social engineers. They fund military insurgency uprisings and coups in third world countries just because they can. They love to play god, developing their concept of perfect societies where ‘useless eaters’ will be eliminated in favour of endangered species of rare centipedes and pond moss in remote locations – locations where the human inhabitants are usually dying of disease and starvation.

…

Why bother developing robotics as a real science when all the psychopaths in control have to do is replace the parts of us which bother them with electronics and microchips? Are you shocked in reading this? Well you shouldn’t be. They make no bones about it. Even a casual Internet search will reveal that the same psychopathic social engineers running the show for over a century have been planning on destroying what makes you human. It is openly admitted in all their policy documents and many major corporations’ future mission statements. Nothing to get too emotional about. Just business. This is why it is vital that as many people as possible become aware of psychopaths and psychopathology as we are possibly on the brink of extinction.

Hacking Exposed: Network Security Secrets and Solutions
by Stuart McClure , Joel Scambray and George Kurtz
Published 15 Feb 2001

Update the administrative, technical, and billing contact information as necessary. Furthermore, consider the phone numbers and addresses listed. These can be used as a starting point for a dial-in attack or for social engineering purposes. Consider using a toll-free number or a number that is not in your organization’s phone exchange. In addition, we have seen several organizations list a fictitious administrative contact, hoping to trip up a would-be social engineer. If any employee receives an email or calls to or from the fictitious contact, it may tip off the information security department that there is a potential problem. Another hazard with domain registration arises from the way that some registrars allow updates.

…

It also lists voice and fax numbers. This information is an enormous help when you’re performing a dial-in penetration review. Just fire up the wardialers in the noted range, and you’re off to a good start in identifying potential modem numbers. In addition, an intruder will often pose as the administrative contact, using social engineering on unsuspecting users in an organization. An attacker will send spoofed email messages posing as the administrative contact to a gullible user. It is amazing how many users will change their password to whatever you like, as long as it looks like the request is being sent from a trusted technical support person.

…

We’ve already covered some of the many ways that these omnipresent factors can be exploited. Chapter 4 discussed attacks against Microsoft’s consumer operating systems most used by Internet denizens (Win 9x/ME/XP HE). Chapters 4 and 14 covered Trojans and back doors often planted on unsuspecting user’s systems, as well as the technique of “social engineering” that is so effective in getting a computer’s human operator to perform the malicious hacker’s bidding by nontechnical means. This chapter will build on some of this work. It will introduce entirely different and more insidious paths by which back doors can be planted, as well as a more technical route for launching some of the most subliminal social attacks (that is, the subject line of an email message).

Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell
by Phil Lapsley
Published 5 Feb 2013

And how could a kid possibly know enough about your job and the equipment you use to be able to convince you that he works for your company and that his is a legitimate request? That was—and is—the sort of thinking that allows social engineering to work. “It’s really kind of wild that we were able to get them to do it, but it was just a matter of sounding convincing enough,” Teresi remembers. “If you got someone with not enough experience, they’d fall for it.” “Denny was the best,” says Acker. The term “social engineering” hadn’t been coined yet, so in Teresi’s honor the phone phreaks invented a new verb: to DT someone was to bullshit them so thoroughly that they never suspected they’d been had.

…

One of the other alarming things in the Esquire article was the suggestion that phone phreaks somehow had a preternatural ability to con telephone company employees into flipping switches in central offices for them. As it turns out, they did. When it came to the ability to BS telephone company employees, Denny Teresi—“Randy” in the Esquire article—was the undisputed master of the phone phreak phlimphlam, what would later become known as social engineering: calling someone up, pretending to be someone else, and getting them to do things for you, things they shouldn’t oughta do. Teresi’s targets were unwitting switchmen in telephone company central offices. Pretending to be another telephone company switchman or technician, his usual goal was getting his marks to wire up loop arounds or conference circuits or getting such circuits restored to operation when they had been removed from service.

…

He seemed to know everyone, from the kids who hung out on LA loop arounds to the John Drapers and Bill Ackers of the world. But Sheridan brought an intensity and an intelligence to his endeavors that not everyone had. He was quick-witted, foulmouthed, verbally gifted, and had a telephonic self-confidence—really more of an arrogance—that made him a talented social engineer. Being able to make free phone calls was apparently the least of his skills. Sheridan admitted to being part of the Santa Barbara nuclear hoax a few years earlier. He said he could wiretap phone calls with a blue box. He bragged of breaking into the military’s telephone network and getting the U.S.

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World
by Deirdre N. McCloskey
Published 15 Nov 2011

In the enthusiasm for the materialist but deeply erroneous pseudo-discoveries of the nineteenth century—nationalism, socialism, Benthamite utilitarianism, hopeless Malthusianism, Comtean positivism, neopositivism, legal positivism, elitist Romanticism, inverted Hegelianism, Freudianism, phrenology, homophobia, historical materialism, hopeful communism, left anarchism, communitarianism, social Darwinism, scientific racism, racial history, theorized imperialism, apartheid, eugenics, tests of statistical significance, geographic determinism, institutionalism, intelligence quotients, social engineering, slum clearance, Progressive regulation, cameralist civil service, the rule of experts, and a cynicism about the force of ethical ideas—much of the clerisy mislaid its earlier commitment to a free and dignified common people. It forgot the main, and the one scientifically proven, social discovery of the nineteenth century—which was itself also in accord with a Romanticism so mischievous in other ways—that ordinary men and women do not need to be directed from above, and when honored and left alone become immensely creative.

…

He warned, for example, that the interest of merchants and manufacturers is “always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public.”3 Smith therefore did not recommend rule by the bourgeoisie, and in fact supported the traditional politics of the landed classes. The Wealth of Nations was read at the time as an attack more on bourgeois schemes in pursuit of monopoly through government (which is perpetual) than on intrusive social engineering by government (which awaited the twentieth century), as in Hugh Blair’s letter to Smith dated April 3, 1776: “You have done great service to the world by overturning all the interested sophistry of merchants, with which they have confounded the whole subject of commerce”4 The “clamor and sophistry of merchants and manufacturers,” declared Smith, “easily persuaded [the rest of society] that the private interest of a part, and a subordinate part of the society, is the greatest interest of the whole.”5 So it has been with protectionism, whether aristocratic or bourgeois or proletarian, down to the present.

…

“The cardinal virtues,” he declares, “are called more principal, not because they are more perfect than all the other virtues, but because human life more principally turns on them and the other virtues are based on them.”21 Courage plus prudence yields enterprise (a virtue not much admired by Smith, who recommended instead safe investments in agriculture).22 Temperance plus justice yields humility, prominent in Smith’s theorizing, and underlying, in his own character, as Fleischacker, Levy, and Peart argue, his principled modesty in social engineering.23 Temperance plus prudence yields thrift, which Smith came to believe, erroneously, was the spring of economic growth.24 Notice the dimensions of the diagram, going from an ethical object of the self at the profane bottom through an ethical object of other people in the social middle up to an ethical object of a sacred transcendent, such as Art or the White Sox or the Virgin Mary.

Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 1 Jan 2002

As the more perceptive critics of the concept of the “end of history” have pointed out, there can be no end of history without an end of modern natural science and technology.10 Not only are we not at an end of science and technology; we appear to be poised at the cusp of one of the most momentous periods of technological advance in history. Biotechnology and a greater scientific understanding of the human brain promise to have extremely significant political ramifications. Together, they reopen possibilities for social engineering on which societies, with their twentieth-century technologies, had given up. If we look back at the tools of the past century’s social engineers and utopian planners, they seem unbelievably crude and unscientific. Agitprop, labor camps, reeducation, Freudianism, early childhood conditioning, behavioralism—all of these were techniques for pounding the square peg of human nature into the round hole of social planning.

…

The fact of progress and cultural evolution led many modern thinkers to believe that human beings were almost infinitely plastic—that is, that they could be shaped by their social environment to behave in open-ended ways. It is here that the contemporary prejudice against the concept of human nature starts. Many of those who believed in the social construction of human behavior had strong ulterior motives: they hoped to use social engineering to create societies that were just or fair according to some abstract ideological principle. Beginning with the French Revolution, the world has been convulsed with a series of utopian political movements that sought to create an earthly heaven by radically rearranging the most basic institutions of society, from the family to private property to the state.

…

One important reason for this worldwide convergence on liberal democracy had to do with the tenacity of human nature. For while human behavior is plastic and variable, it is not infinitely so; at a certain point deeply rooted natural instincts and patterns of behavior reassert themselves to undermine the social engineer’s best-laid plans. Many socialist regimes abolished private property, weakened the family, and demanded that people be altruistic to mankind in general rather than to a narrower circle of friends and family. But evolution did not shape human beings in this fashion. Individuals in socialist societies resisted the new institutions at every turn, and when socialism collapsed after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, older, more familiar patterns of behavior reasserted themselves everywhere.

Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy
by Eric O'Neill
Published 1 Mar 2019

I was a professional driver and photographer, didn’t need to sleep, and could stare at a single door for hours, just waiting for him to walk through. My dark brown hair, hazel eyes, and slightly olive complexion—a gift from my Italian mother—meant that I could easily pass for a number of ethnicities, and thanks to my father’s burly genes, I could grow a beard in a matter of days. I was a master of disguise, of social engineering, of sweet-talking my way past situations. I had a badge but never used it. A target might see me a dozen times across a day’s work, but he wouldn’t notice me. I was trained to blend into situations, to find cover in plain sight, to look unobtrusive, uninteresting, and unremarkable. I’d call in a spy before he spied or committed an act of terrorism, then melt into the shadows while he was still wondering where all the FBI agents had suddenly come from.

…

Some of us would enjoy a one-on-one cage fight. Snowden has argued that he acted because of an ideological stance that the NSA’s collection practices went above and beyond what was required to protect the interests of US citizens. As a trusted insider, Snowden had the capability to both collect information with his own access and to use social engineering (or trickery) to convince others to provide him their access. He likely knew that providing the stolen information to the Guardian and the Washington Post would enable maximum exposure of the NSA’s activities in order to damage the ability of the NSA to continue those practices into the future.

…

I’m a location scout for a local production company. My job is to check out streets that we might want to use to shoot a movie. No, I can’t tell you about the movie. Super-secret, but between you and me, Tom Cruise might run down your street one day….” I could spin a story as easy as breathing. These social-engineering techniques, while technically lies, put normal people at ease. No one wanted to see an FBI badge and hear the truth that a spy lived a few blocks away, or that a known terrorist sympathizer’s kids went to the local school. Sometimes the badge is necessary. A local police officer once knocked on my window and wound his hand in the roll it down motion.

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know
by P. W. Singer and Allan Friedman
Published 3 Jan 2014

–Russian relations, 72, 186, 191–192 Saffo, Paul, 20 Samuelson, Robert, 166 satellite, 102, 148, 151, 161 Schneider, Jordan, 191 Schroeder, Christopher, 229 Scowcroft, Brent, 138 script kiddie, 78 Secure Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet), 168 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 229–230 September 11, 35, 37, 50, 68, 97–98, 101, 122 Shanghai Group. See Unit 61398 Silk Road, 109 Snowden, Edward, 50, 93, 104, 140, 249 social engineering, 32–34, 40, 57–58, 101–102, 244 social media Facebook, 15–16, 40, 58, 68, 82, 89, 170, 211, 215 Sina, 15 Tencent, 15 Twitter, 15–16, 32, 80–82, 170, 246, 248 Weibo, 15 YouTube, 25, 52, 82–83, 100 Social Security number, 31, 34, 81, 228 socialing. See social engineering Sommer, Peter, 163 Spafford, Eugene, 90 spear phishing. See phishing SQL injection. See Structured Query Language (SQL) State Department, 53–54, 107 Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), 79–80 Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), 107 Structured Query Language (SQL), 42 Stuxnet copycats of, 158–159 creation and effects of, 35, 38, 98, 114–118, 213 lessons of, 118–120, 132, 152, 156–158 supercomputer, 247–248 supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), 15, 115, 130, 159 supply chain, 203–204 Syria as cyberattack target, 55, 126–128 offensive cyber operations, 45, 112 (see also Operation Orchard) test beds, 212 The Cabal, 196 The Economist, 108, 120, 183 The Jetsons, 2 threat assessment, 148–150 Tor, 7, 107–110 Transport Control Protocol (TCP), 18 Trojan, 126–127 Twitter.

…

Often the easiest way to gain control of the system is simply to ask. A time-honored tradition for breaking into systems from hacking’s early days is to call up a low-level employee, claim to be from technical support, and ask for the person’s password. This falls into the category of what is known as “social engineering,” manipulating people into revealing confidential information and thereby helping the attacker. The manipulation can take many forms, often with the attacker trying to set up a scenario designed to encourage cooperation through psychological mechanisms. Fear is a powerful motivator. When a user’s computer displays a message threatening to expose activities on a pornographic website, fear of exposure can motivate payment.

…

More often, however, users just follow social cues. In our daily lives, we regularly encounter problems that need fixing, like a program that won’t close until you just “click here,” or people who need our help, like your Aunt Suzy who somehow got robbed in Iceland and needs you to wire her money via Bangkok. A particularly common form of social engineering is the “phishing” attack. Phishing e-mails look like official e-mails from the victim’s bank, employer, or some other trusted entity. They claim to require some action by the victim, perhaps to correct an account error or see a message on Facebook, and fool victims into visiting a web page where they are asked to enter their credentials.

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership
by Andro Linklater
Published 12 Nov 2013

The new states would “forever remain a part of the United States of America”; their government had to be “republican in form,” and “after the year 1800 of the Christian aera, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said states.” What Jefferson had in mind when drawing up these proposals was a gigantic piece of social engineering. All Americans were to have at least “a little portion of land” because that would guarantee their republican independence of mind and freedom from outside pressure. “The small landholders are the most precious part of a state,” he told Madison. In his ideal republic, these hardworking farmers would provide a bedrock of republican virtue.

…

The court’s legal decisions enabled individual Maori to register individual plots of tribal land as their own and sell them on to white buyers. An estimated eighteen million acres in the North Island, almost two thirds of the total area, was sold on in this way. In 1862, the would-be architect of this haphazard expansion of the private property empire died. The program of social engineering that Wakefield planned had proved to be utterly impractical. Yet the ease of understanding how it might apparently solve social problems in Britain and create wealth in the colonies gave it political momentum. And, as the Public Lands Survey had already proved in the United States, the natural development of landed property into rural capital brought in economic forces that knocked aside the government’s opposition.

…

Sherman issued Special Field Order Number 15 confiscating four hundred thousand acres of Confederate territory along the coast from Charleston, South Carolina, to Jacksonville, Florida, and ordering its redistribution to freed slaves with the specification that “each family shall have a plot of not more than (40) forty acres of tillable ground.” As social engineering, the order had the potential for creating a Jeffersonian society of independent owners. In Congress, Thaddeus Stevens, the most radical exponent of Reconstruction, introduced a bill to spread the policy of land redistribution across the South, confiscating property from “traitors to the United States” and allocating it to those who had formerly been property themselves.

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
by Matthew B. Crawford
Published 29 Mar 2015

It is all wonderfully consistent, even beautiful. But in surveying contemporary life, it is hard not to notice that this catechism doesn’t describe our situation very well. Especially the bit about our preferences expressing a welling-up of the authentic self. Those preferences have become the object of social engineering, conducted not by government bureaucrats but by mind-bogglingly wealthy corporations armed with big data. To continue to insist that preferences express the sovereign self and are for that reason sacred—unavailable for rational scrutiny—is to put one’s head in the sand. The resolutely individualistic understanding of freedom and rationality we have inherited from the liberal tradition disarms the critical faculties we need most in order to grapple with the large-scale societal pressures we now face.

…

We are not so much rational optimizers as creatures who rely on biases and crude heuristics for making important decisions. In Nudge, Cass Sunstein, the former head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under President Obama, and the economist Richard Thaler argue for a mode of social engineering that takes account of these psychological facts.5 For starters, we’re a lot lazier than the rational optimizer view would have it. That is, to make everything a matter for reflection and explicit evaluation goes against the grain of how human beings normally operate. So, for example, if one wants to increase the savings rate, it makes a great deal of difference whether employers set the default so that employees have to opt in to a 401(k) plan if they want it, or instead they have to opt out if they don’t.

…

In general, when we are faced with an array of choices, how we choose depends very much on how those choices are presented to us (to the point that we will choose against our own best interests if the framing nudges us that way). Here, then, is an opportunity for a fairly unobtrusive bit of social engineering that doesn’t force anyone to do anything; it just steers us in one direction rather than another. We might call this an administrative jig. But note that this kind of administering of human beings, which certainly has its place in a modern state, is quite different from the jig as it appears in skilled practices.

Trust: The Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 1 Jan 1995

Eagles Don’t Flock—or Do They? 24. Rugged Conformists 25. Blacks and Asians in America 26. The Vanishing Middle PART V Enriching Trust: Combining Traditional Culture and Modern Institutions in the Twenty-first Century 27. Late Developers 28. Returns to Scale 29. Many Miracles 30. After the End of Social Engineering 31. The Spiritualization of Economic Life Notes Bibliography Index PREFACE When Alexander Kojève, the twentieth century’s preeminent interpreter of Hegel, concluded at mid-century that the latter was essentially correct in declaring that history had ended, he decided as well that philosophers like himself had no further useful work to do.

…

Within a given institutional framework, societies can be richer or poorer, or have more or less satisfying social and spiritual lives. But a corollary to the convergence of institutions at the “end of history” is the widespread acknowledgment that in postindustrial societies, further improvements cannot be achieved through ambitious social engineering. We no longer have realistic hopes that we can create a “great society” through large government programs. The Clinton administration’s difficulties in promoting health care reform in 1994 indicated that Americans remained skeptical about the workability of large-scale government management of an important sector of their economy.

…

Even Keynesian deficit spending, once widely used by industrial democracies after the Great Depression to manage the business cycle, is today regarded by most economists as self-defeating in the long run. These days, the highest ambition of most governments in their macroeconomic policy is to do no harm, by ensuring a stable money supply and controlling large budget deficits. Today, having abandoned the promise of social engineering, virtually all serious observers understand that liberal political and economic institutions depend on a healthy and dynamic civil society for their vitality.2 “Civil society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis
by James Rickards
Published 15 Nov 2016

While the global elite is amorphous there are individuals, such as George Soros, with across-the-board access in the financial and political worlds who function as supercarriers of the elite program. While Soros is not the unofficial chairman of the power elite (there is no one person in charge), his access to elites everywhere, and his patient embrace of Karl Popper’s piecemeal social engineering, make him an exemplar of the elite type. Other paragons of the elite supercarrier include Christine Lagarde, Michael Bloomberg, and Warren Buffett. Presidents and prime ministers are not unimportant, yet they come and go. Elite supercarriers remain influential for decades. What is the elite agenda?

…

Direction will come collectively from China, the United States, Germany, Russia, and a few other members. This will be a seamless transition that few will understand. Sooner than later, a robust SDR bond market will emerge to absorb global reserves. This transition has been under way for decades. SDR issuance in 1970-2, 1979-81, and 2009 exemplifies the slow, steady social engineering advocated by Soros and his ilk. On March 25, 2009, Tim Geithner, then U.S. treasury secretary, said he did not oppose expanded SDR use. “We’re actually quite open to that” was Geithner’s response to a reporter’s question about increasing SDR issuance. This remark was not considered radical: just another small step on the slow path to the dollar’s demise.

…

Policies enacted under the shock doctrine remain long after the emergency that enabled them. The trend is persistently toward more state power, more taxation, and less liberty. Shock doctrine is an ideal tool for what philosopher Karl Popper called piecemeal engineering. George Soros is Popper’s principal champion today. Soros’s principal instrument for social engineering, the Open Society Foundations, is named in honor of Popper’s best-known book, The Open Society and Its Enemies. Elites are aware that their views are not widely accepted in democratic societies. Elites realize their programs must be implemented in small stages over decades to avoid backlash.

Age of Anger: A History of the Present
by Pankaj Mishra
Published 26 Jan 2017

‘Totalitarianism’ with its tens of millions of victims was identified as a malevolent reaction to a benevolent Enlightenment tradition of rationalism, humanism, universalism and liberal democracy – a tradition seen as an unproblematic norm. It was clearly too disconcerting to acknowledge that totalitarian politics crystallized the ideological currents (scientific racism, jingoistic nationalism, imperialism, technicism, aestheticized politics, utopianism, social engineering and the violent struggle for existence) flowing through all of Europe in the late nineteenth century. * * * This bizarre indifference to a multifaceted past, the Cold War fixation with totalitarianism, and more West-versus-the-Rest thinking since 9/11 explains why our age of anger has provoked some absurdly extreme fear and bewilderment, summed up by the anonymous contributor to The New York Review of Books, who is convinced that the West cannot ‘ever develop sufficient knowledge, rigor, imagination, and humility to grasp the phenomenon of ISIS’.

…

They had nothing to do with that world and were incapable of recognizing what others did within it. Such cosseted writers and artists would in the twentieth century transfer their fantasies of an ideal society to Soviet leaders, who seemed to be bringing a superhuman energy and progressive rhetoric to Peter the Great’s rational schemes of social engineering. Stalin’s Russia, as it ruthlessly eradicated its religious and evidently backward enemies in the 1930s, came to ‘constitute’, the historian Stephen Kotkin writes, ‘a quintessential Enlightenment utopia’. But the Enlightenment philosophes had already shown, in their blind adherence to Catherine, how reason could degenerate into dogma and new, more extensive forms of domination: authoritarian state structures, violent top-down manipulation of human affairs (often couched in terms of humanitarian concern) and indifference to suffering.

…

Many commentators continue to ignore or downplay a century of invasions, unequal treaties, assassinations, coups, corruption, and ruthless manipulation and interference while recycling such oppositions as backward Islam versus the progressive West, Rational Enlightenment versus medieval unreason, open society versus its enemies. A deeper and broader explanation, however, lies in understanding how intellectuals, starting in the Enlightenment, constituted a network of power and why they invested their faith in enlightened despotism and social engineering from above. It is even more fruitful to attend to the devastating critic of their ideology and practice, Rousseau, whose ever-renewable vision of human beings alienated from themselves and enchained to each other has inspired revolts and uprisings from the French Revolution onwards. For plebeians and provincials, unaccommodated man spurned by modernity, also created the Islamic Revolution in Iran – what Michel Foucault called the ‘first great insurrection against global systems, the form of revolt that is the most modern and the most insane’.

How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present
by Thomas J. Dilorenzo
Published 9 Aug 2004

It is not surprising, then, that progress against poverty in America stopped and reversed itself at precisely the moment when the federal government declared “war” on it.5 Government-directed social engineering fails mainly because human beings cannot be manipulated like so many mathematical symbols. Human beings are rational, thinking actors who react to changes in government policy. Thus the government’s social engineering often follows the Law of Unintended Consequences. Rent-control laws, for example, are designed to help the poor by holding down the price of housing, but these laws artificially stimulate the demand for rental housing while reducing its supply, which causes housing shortages.

…

Worse, even while these intellectuals condemn the supposed evils of capitalism, they refuse to acknowledge what the twentieth century’s many experiments with socialism proved: as Murray Rothbard has put it, “An egalitarian society can only hope to achieve its goals by totalitarian methods of coercion.”4 A second reason why intellectuals tend to be enamored with socialism and government planning of economies, according to Hayek, is that they believe, falsely, that engineering techniques, which have created such great improvements in the human condition, can apply to “social engineering.” For example, nearly everyone has heard: “If we can send a man to the moon, why can’t we eliminate poverty [or racism, or unhappiness, or obesity, or hunger, and on and on]?” The fact is, however, that the United States has poured hundreds of billions of dollars and millions of hours into government programs that for decades have done nothing but make social problems even worse.

…

He espoused what he termed the “scientific management of the money supply.”15 As we shall shortly see, however, the Fed’s easy money policy of the late 1920s was a major cause of the Great Depression. To try to eliminate “destructive competition,” as commerce secretary he advocated “associationalism” or “cooperative competition”—that is, government-supervised competition that would allow social engineers such as himself to ensure that there was not “too much” wasteful competition. This was the basis of the New Deal’s National Industrial Recovery Act, which will be discussed in the next chapter and which the U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled unconstitutional. The National Recovery Administration took Hoover’s ideas to their logical conclusion, using governmental coercion to attempt to create a cartel in almost every industry in America.

Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy
by Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud
Published 17 Jan 2023

The thorniest task was what cyberpros refer to as social engineering, which was still crucial, because at that point, the Pegasus malware could only be installed if the cell phone owner clicked on an SMS message. That act would send them to a domain where Pegasus sat ready to be deployed. The messages needed to be alluring to the individual in question, bait he or she was sure to take. So investigators would spend a couple weeks gathering open-source information about the target—names of their spouse and their children, their girlfriends, or their pets; their hobbies, interests, and proclivities. “The social engineering had to be done with precision because not many attempts should be made so as not to attract attention,” Jose says.

…

“The social engineering had to be done with precision because not many attempts should be made so as not to attract attention,” Jose says. “If we succeeded in getting them to click on the SMS message, that automatically installed the software on the mobile device, and from then on, we could access all the information on the phone.” If they failed on the first attempt, the social engineers went back to the drawing board, came up with another, better lure, and tried again after a two- or three-day hiatus. The federal ops rarely went back for a third turn at the tumblers. The other frustration was that an NSO license was good only for operating systems spelled out in the contract; it might be guaranteed to work on recent versions of operating software running Androids, iPhones, BlackBerrys, or Symbian cell phones.

…

Jose and his fellow operators were limited to monitoring several hundred mobile phones at a time, but there was constant churn. Supervisors were always picking and choosing the highest-priority targets in a target-rich environment, so Jose or the other operators might be asked to disconnect one infected phone and go get another. The operator would get the chosen mobile phone number from the department of social engineering, along with suggestions for devising the SMS message bait. “In our case it was very simple,” Jose admits, “because [my] targets were members of organized crime, and we didn’t have to look very hard. The [SMS messages] were pornography topics, where it was practically certain that they were going to click on it.”

Masters of Mankind
by Noam Chomsky
Published 1 Sep 2014

He may also succeed in persuading himself—perhaps, on occasion, with justice—that he can humanize the exercise of power by the “significant classes.” He may hope to join with them or even replace them in the role of social management, in the ultimate interest of efficiency and freedom. The intellectual who aspires to this role may use the rhetoric of revolutionary socialism or of welfare-state social engineering in pursuit of his vision of a “meritocracy” in which knowledge and technical ability confer power. He may represent himself as part of a “revolutionary vanguard” leading the way to a new society or as a technical expert applying “piecemeal technology” to the management of a society that can meet its problems without fundamental changes.

…

It took three hours and forty-five minutes. There’s now a highly heralded train called the Acela, the super train. It takes three hours and thirty minutes. If you were in Japan, Germany, China, almost anywhere, it would take maybe two hours. And that’s general. This didn’t happen by accident. It happened by a huge social engineering project carried out by the government and by the corporations beginning in the 1940s. It was a very systematic effort to redesign the society so as to maximize the use of fossil fuels. One part of it was eliminating quite efficient rail systems. New England, for example, did have a pretty efficient electric rail system all the way through New England.

…

I live in one and I like it. But it’s incredibly inefficient. It has all kinds of social effects that are probably deleterious. Anyway, it didn’t just happen; it was designed. Throughout the whole period there has been a massive effort to create the most destructive possible society. And to try to redo that huge social engineering project is not going to be simple. It involves plenty of problems. Another component of any reasonable approach—and everyone on paper agrees with this—is to develop sustainable energy, green technology. We all know and everyone talks a nice line about that. But if you look at what’s happening, green technology is being developed in Spain, in Germany, and primarily in China.

The Gene: An Intimate History
by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Published 16 May 2016

And when it’s done, someone else will sit down and say, ‘It’s time to begin.’ ” On January 28, 1983, on the eve of the launch of the Human Genome Project, Carrie Buck died in a nursing home in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania. She was seventy-six years old. Her birth and death had bookended the near century of the gene. Her generation had borne witness to the scientific resurrection of genetics, its forceful entry into public discourse, its perversion into social engineering and eugenics, its postwar emergence as the central theme of the “new” biology, its impact on human physiology and pathology, its powerful explanatory power in our understanding of illness, and its inevitable intersection with questions of fate, identity, and choice. She had been one of the earliest victims of the misunderstandings of a powerful new science.

…

Even so, this triangle of limits—high-penetrance genes, extraordinary suffering, and noncoerced, justifiable interventions—has proved to be a useful guideline for acceptable forms of genetic interventions. But these boundaries are being breached. Take, for instance, a series of startlingly provocative studies that used a single gene variant to drive social-engineering choices. In the late 1990s, a gene called 5HTTLRP, which encodes a molecule that modulates signaling between certain neurons in the brain, was found to be associated with the response to psychic stress. The gene comes in two forms or alleles—a long variant and a short variant. The short variant, called 5HTTLRP/short, is carried by about 40 percent of the population and seems to produce significantly lower levels of the protein.

…

The most brittle or fragile forms of psyche are the most likely to be distorted by trauma-inducing environments—but are also the most likely to be restored by targeted interventions. It is as if resilience itself has a genetic core: some humans are born resilient (but are less responsive to interventions), while others are born sensitive (but more likely to respond to changes in their environments). The idea of a “resilience gene” has entranced social engineers. Writing in the New York Times in 2014, the behavioral psychologist Jay Belsky argued, “Should we seek to identify the most susceptible children and disproportionately target them when it comes to investing scarce intervention and service dollars? I believe the answer is yes.” “Some children are—in one frequently used metaphor—like delicate orchids,” Belsky wrote, “they quickly wither if exposed to stress and deprivation, but blossom if given a lot of care and support.

The Quantum Thief
by Hannu Rajaniemi
Published 1 Jan 2010

‘You are right, it is interesting, for a gogol pirate case.’ Isidore can’t suppress a note of distaste in his voice at the word gogol: a dead soul, the uploaded mind of a human being, enslaved to carry out tasks, anathema to anyone from the Oubliette. Usually, gogol piracy – upload without the victim’s knowledge, stealing their mind – is based on social engineering. The pirates worm their way into the victim’s confidence, chipping away at their gevulot until they have enough to do a brute-force attack on their mind. But this – ‘A Gordian knot approach. Simple and elegant.’ ‘Elegant is not the word I would use, my boy.’ There is a trace of anger in the tzaddik’s voice.

…

It is always fascinating to watch what people do when they feel they can talk to you: he briefly wonders if he would lose that as a tzaddik. But then there would be other ways to find things out. ‘Were you aware of any new friends that M. Deveraux might have made recently?’ ‘No. Why?’ Élodie gives her mother a tired look. ‘That’s how they operate, Mom. The pirates. Social engineering. They gather bits of your gevulot so they can decrypt your mind.’ ‘Why would they want him? He was nothing special. He could make chocolate. I don’t even like chocolate.’ ‘I think your husband was exactly the kind of person the gogol pirates would be interested in, a specialised mind,’ Isidore says.

…

Mieli tries to smile, trying to think what her cover identity – a tourist from a mixed asteroid belt habitat – would say. ‘You are a policeman, yes? A sysadmin?’ ‘Something like that.’ ‘I lost my friend when…they came. I don’t know where he is.’ Perhaps the ship is right: the thief is not the only one who can do a little social engineering. ‘Ah, I see. And you don’t know how to use co-memories to send him a message? You did not share gevulot to know where you are? Of course you didn’t. It is really terrible: the customs Quiet are very strict about leaving all your native tech behind, but never really tell you how to use ours.’

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
by Steven Pinker
Published 1 Jan 2002

The belief that human tastes are reversible cultural preferences has led social planners to write off people’s enjoyment of ornament, natural light, and human scale and force millions of people to live in drab cement boxes. The romantic notion that all evil is a product of society has justified the release of dangerous psychopaths who promptly murdered innocent people. And the conviction that humanity could be reshaped by massive social engineering projects led to some of the greatest atrocities in history. Though many of my arguments will be coolly analytical—that an acknowledgment of human nature does not, logically speaking, imply the negative outcomes so many people fear—I will not try to hide my belief that they have a positive thrust as well.

…

The Blank Slate and its companion doctrines have infiltrated the conventional wisdom of our civilization and have repeatedly surfaced in unexpected places. William Godwin (1756–1835), one of the founders of liberal political philosophy, wrote that “children are a sort of raw material put into our hands,” their minds “like a sheet of white paper.”12 More sinisterly, we find Mao Zedong justifying his radical social engineering by saying, “It is on a blank page that the most beautiful poems are written.”13 Even Walt Disney was inspired by the metaphor. “I think of a child’s mind as a blank book,” he wrote. “During the first years of his life, much will be written on the pages. The quality of that writing will affect his life profoundly.”14 Locke could not have imagined that his words would someday lead to Bambi (intended by Disney to teach self-reliance); nor could Rousseau have anticipated Pocahontas, the ultimate noble savage.

…

Today, both cities are notorious as uninviting wastelands detested by the civil servants who live in them. Authoritarian High Modernism also led to the “urban renewal” projects in many American cities during the 1960s that replaced vibrant neighborhoods with freeways, high-rises, and empty windswept plazas. Social scientists, too, have sometimes gotten carried away with dreams of social engineering. The child psychiatrist Bruce Perry, concerned that ghetto mothers are not giving children the enriched environment needed by their plastic brains, believes we must “transform our culture”: “We need to change our child rearing practices, we need to change the malignant and destructive view that children are the property of their biological parents.

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence
by Richard Yonck
Published 7 Mar 2017

Today anyone with money and an Internet connection can access the “Dark Web” and find these tools available for purchase—complete with user-friendly interfaces. Tomorrow’s world will find much more for sale, and emotional computing tools will most certainly be among them. “Social engineering” is one of the key practices used by hackers seeking to gain electronic or physical access to secured hardware and data. Social engineering involves the psychological manipulation of people to gain information, often exploiting key cognitive biases for advantage.13 The ability to rapidly read and respond to a target’s emotional state would be considered a critical tool to this end.

…

Cyber warfare is one of the newest of these, having proliferated with the development and growth of the Internet. Most of us never think about emotion when we hear the words cybercrime or cyberwarfare, but in fact emotion is a critical element in these. Any competent hacker will tell you that people are routinely the weakest link in matters of security. Hackers refer to manipulating this weakness as social engineering. They might take advantage of human nature to guess a poorly considered password, though shoulder surfing or accessing webcams to read a Post-it note works well too. They might engage someone in a seemingly innocent conversation to obtain an innocuous but important piece of information. It’s a creative endeavor, one that benefits from understanding people and what it takes to manipulate them.

…

The ability to automate the process means that large numbers of people can be contacted all at the same time, whether in email correspondence or by phone. (Today, the best voice synthesis using unit selection is indistinguishable from an actual person.14) By emotionally engaging the target, such en masse social engineering could result in a multitude of leaks that could be used to breach a system’s defenses. Because emotions are such key elements to the human condition, our adversaries will strive to use them against us, as we will likely try to do against them. Despite the best intentions of those who develop any new technology, there will always be those who seek to turn it to other uses.

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 11 Apr 2011

Modern topographical studies show the whole territory of what was the state of Qin to be covered with these rectilinear layouts.20 Shang Yang also decreed a uniform system of weights and measures be used throughout Qin, which replaced the diverse standards used under the feudal system.21 Shang Yang’s massive effort at social engineering replaced the traditional kinship-based system of authority and landownership with a far more impersonal form of rule centering on the state. It obviously generated tremendous opposition on the part of the patrimonial aristocracy within the state of Qin itself. When Shang Yang’s protector, Duke Xiao, died, his successor turned against him, and Shang Yang had to go into hiding.

…

Consequently, the people dare not transgress … The only way in which wise and sage rulers can long occupy the throne, hold the imperial authority, and enjoy exclusively the benefits of the empire, is to rule autocratically with deliberation, and to implement the policy of surveillance and castigation by inflicting heavy punishments without exception.26 The Legalists were proposing to treat subjects not as moral beings to be cultivated through education and learning but as Homo economicus, self-interested individuals who would respond to positive and negative incentives—especially punishments. The Legalist state therefore sought to undermine tradition, break the bonds of family moral obligation, and rebind citizens to the state on a new basis. There are obvious parallels between Legalism and the social engineering attempted by the Chinese Communist Party after 1949. Mao, like Shang Yang before him, saw traditional Confucian morality and the Chinese family as obstacles to social progress. His anti-Confucian campaign sought to delegitimize familistic morality; party, state, and commune were the new structures that would henceforth bind Chinese citizens to one another.

…

In the West, by contrast, kinship was undermined by Christianity, both on a doctrinal level and through the power that the church commanded over family matters and inheritance (see chapter 16). The roots of Western social modernization were thus laid several centuries before the rise either of the modern state or the capitalist market economy. Top-down social engineering often fails to meet its goals. In China, the institutions of the agnatic lineage and patrimonial government based on it took a body blow but were not killed. As we will see, they made a big comeback after the short-lived Qin Dynasty and continued to rival the state as a source of authority and emotional attachment in the centuries following. 8 THE GREAT HAN SYSTEM The first Qin emperor and why the dynasty he founded collapsed so quickly; how the Han Dynasty restored Confucian institutions but retained Legalist principles; how China was governed under the Qin and Han The founder of the first unified Chinese state, Ying Zheng (also known by his posthumous temple name Qin Shi Huangdi, 259–210 B.C.), was an energetic megalomaniac who used political power to reshape Chinese society.

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
by Christopher Lasch
Published 16 Sep 1991

On the one hand, the injunction to ground political speculation in universal, incontrovertible principles tended to narrow the range of debate, to relegate divisive conflicts of opinion to private life, and to promote religious tolerance (though at the cost of trivializing public discussion). On the other hand, the same injunction could encourage ambitious programs of social engineering, supposedly founded on principles to which nobody in his right mind could object. Both the cosmopolitan ideal and the hope for a science of politics rested on the assumption that human beings are all alike. "They all have the same vital organs, sensibility, and movement," as Voltaire put it.

…

His commitment to the idea of progress prevented him from pursuing the point. In a 1916 essay on progress, he argued that although the replacement of a "static" social structure by a "dynamic or readily changing social structure" did not guarantee progress, it created the preconditions of progress—of "constructive intelligence" and "constructive social engineering." In any case, there was "no way to 'restrain' or turn back the industrial revolution and its consequences." Under these circumstances, it was impossible to defend his belief in the possibility of a "return movement ... into the local homes of mankind." Since nothing in Dewey's social philosophy justified any such hope, the subjects of work and loyalty had to be relegated to the margins of his work, as, increasingly, they were relegated to the margins of the liberal tradition as a whole

…

The politics of resentment and reparation also widened the gap between liberals and the American public, which supported laws against segregation and disfranchisement but drew the line at busing and affirmative action. In the absence of a public consensus in favor of reverse discrimination, as it came to be called, liberals had to rely more and more on the courts, which proceeded to create a new category of prescriptive rights and to expand their own authority into the field of social engineering. As Leslie Dunbar pointed out in 1966, "not every valid interest is a right.... A right is a defense against social power, not a prescription of the kind of society there must be." Judicial decisions forbidding religious instruction in the schools or requiring the schools "to compensate for all the evils inherent in housing segregation" tended to "usurp the community's instinctive feeling of responsibility for rearing the young" and eventually brought the law itself into contempt.

Joel on Software
by Joel Spolsky
Published 1 Aug 2004

Break it down like this and you can track it carefully. If you're 80 percent done and you've only used 20 percent of the boss-birthday-cake budget, you can remove hours from that line and put them on something else more urgent. Q Would it be possible for somebody to have software run in a restricted environment such that clever social engineering worm messages can't propagate? It seems like a losing battle to me to keep saying "upgrade your antivirus software" and "don't run random attachments" when people don't keep antivirus software up to date and do run random attachments. The most obvious option would be to not allow execution of binaries, but some people would simply save, then execute.

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Juno, 2nd–2nd lock-in strategies–2nd APIs–2nd Apple and Sun–2nd backward compatibility in–2nd developers for–2nd, 3rd installed base effects on–2nd memory management in–2nd Microsoft opposing forces–2nd proficiency with purpose of reinventing–2nd runtimes in–2nd Web application effects on–2nd AppCompatibility section (Windows Registry) appending strings–2nd Apple Computer iPod–2nd software availability for–2nd Application Architecture group (Microsoft)–2nd aptitude, importance of architectural problems in code–2nd Architecture Astronauts–2nd Architecture Machine Group archives for daily builds arguments, command line ArsDigita Art of UNIX Programming (Raymond)–2nd ASCII code ASCIZ string type Ashton-Tate blunders Ask Joel questions buffer time–2nd competitor products–2nd customer feedback–2nd grocery store double–bags–2nd program managers, {}–2nd social engineering worm messages–2nd software development future–2nd stock options, expensing–2nd Web applications–2nd ASP programming abstraction in crash handling in mastering Asymetrix Toolbook Atom format audiences for functional specifications–2nd in programming culture Austin, Robert D.–2nd authors in functional specifications auto filters in Excel automatic daily builds automatic memory management–2nd availability in networks Avalon system–2nd API changes for Microsoft investment in support for–2nd B babysitting builds backups for hard drive failures backward compatibility in API wars–2nd in Macintosh in upgrading–2nd in Windows–2nd bad employees bad impressions from buggy software bakery bugbears Ballmer, Steve Bar, Moshe Barnes and Nobles marketing strategie BarnesandNoble.com site barriers to product switching–2nd BEA Weblogic Beda, Joe Ben & Jerry's business model–2nd Bezos, Jeff, 2nd biculturalism–2nd Big Macs, rules for making–2nd bill presentment systems, 2nd, 3rd binary file formats–2nd bitwise operators in programming questions bloatware–2nd blowhard interviewers Blumenthal, Jabe, 66 blunders–2nd "boil the ocean" companies bonuses bookseller marketing strategies boredom in testing Borland Turbo Pascal bozos, neutralizing–2nd brain teaser interview questions bread bakery bugbears breaking builds Brin, Sergey Brooker, Katrina buffers (computer) memory allocation for overflow in buffers (software schedules), 2nd bugbears–2nd bugs.

…

See software schedules scheduling risk Schleswig-Holstein question scope creep screen-by-screen specifications screens splash user interface–2nd screenshots in functional specifications for showing off Scripting News site Sculley, John SELECT statements with XML data–2nd self-evaluation forms self-righteous cultural superiority SEMA system Send Feedback menu items sequential tasks–2nd servers as browser complement product–2nd failure recovery–2nd setup programs in Linux–2nd shared lists in Excel Ship It Award Shlemiel the Painter's Algorithm–2nd short sentences in functional specifications showing off, screen shots for showstoppers shrinkwrap–2nd side notes in functional specifications sign-up feature in Juno Silence is Golden value SimCity program, 2nd–2nd Simonyi, Charles–2nd simplicity in functional specifications–2nd illusion of–2nd in software schedules size of bloatware–2nd skills, program manager smart employees–2nd smart-but-don't-get-things-done employees Snyder, Carolyn social engineering worm messages–2nd Soft•letter 100 list software development, future of–2nd software product guide software prototypes–2nd software schedules–2nd buffers in, 2nd debugging time in–2nd Excel for–2nd, 3rd–4th integration time in manager input in–2nd original and current estimates in–2nd programmer roles in for project progress simplicity of tasks in–2nd up-to-date, 2nd vacations and holidays in wood blocks as–2nd software teams improving.

Licence to be Bad
by Jonathan Aldred
Published 5 Jun 2019

Less politely, it was a new gimmick which might give you the upper hand in policy debate or legal argument. Elsewhere, ambitious economists were making imperialistic forays into aspects of life beyond the scope of markets and prices, and hence beyond the scope of the traditional tools of economic analysis. Game theory provided a new toolkit for these economists, who saw themselves as social engineers designing institutions and mechanisms to produce desired social outcomes. In their own terms, these academic users of game theory were remarkably successful: after Nash, Harsanyi and Selten in 1994, research essentially based on game theory led to Nobel prizes for eight more economists over the following twenty years.

…

As Taylor explained to the Congressional committee: ‘I can say, without the slightest hesitation, that the science of handling pig-iron is so great that the man who is … physically able to handle pig-iron and is sufficiently phlegmatic and stupid to choose this for his occupation is rarely able to comprehend the science of handling pig-iron.’2 The Congressional investigation concluded that Taylorism had a dehumanizing effect on workers. And Taylor’s use of language like ‘social engineering’ and ‘social control’ – alongside pronouncements like ‘In the past the man has been first, in the future the system must be first’3 – did not help his cause, especially in the 1930s, with critics drawing parallels with fascist ideology. The perceived tyranny of Taylorism was perfectly captured in Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 satire Modern Times.

…

Nowadays Taylorist management techniques are mostly seen as legitimate, apolitical interventions which work with the grain of human nature: the mainstream application of management science in the service of efficiency. Outside the workplace, too, our language is peppered with talk of ‘incentives’. The word has shifted meaning from a tool of social engineering loaded with moral and political significance to a neutral, objective term meaning nothing more than ‘motivations’. Yet if Taylor was right in talking in terms of social control, something must have got lost in the translation. Incentives, after all, are tools for getting someone to do something they would not choose to do otherwise.

ZeroMQ
by Pieter Hintjens
Published 12 Mar 2013

He develops tactics and strategies in the field, and teaches these to his men so they can move independently, and together. The Social Engineer If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. — Sun Tzu The Social Engineer reads the hearts and minds of those she works with and for. She asks of everyone, “What makes this person angry, insecure, argumentative, calm, happy?” She studies their moods and dispositions. With this knowledge she can encourage those who are useful, and discourage those who are not. The Social Engineer never acts on her own emotions. The Constant Gardener He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks. — Sun Tzu The Constant Gardener grows a process from a small seed, step-by-step, as more people come into the project.

…

, Recap of Request-Reply Sockets, Request-Reply Combinations–The ROUTER to ROUTER Combination, Identities and Addresses–ROUTER Error Handling ROUTER-DEALER proxy, Shared Queue (DEALER and ROUTER Sockets)–ØMQ’s Built-in Proxy Function, The Extended Reply Envelope–The Extended Reply Envelope (see also DEALER and ROUTER combination) RRR (reliable request-reply) patterns, Designing Reliability (see pirate patterns) S SASL (Simple Authentication and Security Layer), Authentication Using SASL–Authentication Using SASL scalability, Socket Scalability–Socket Scalability, Pros and Cons of Publish-Subscribe of publish-subscribe pattern, Pros and Cons of Publish-Subscribe of sockets, Socket Scalability–Socket Scalability serialization of data, Serializing Your Data–Code Generation, ØMQ Framing, Serialization Languages–Serialization Languages, Serialization Libraries–Serialization Libraries, Handwritten Binary Serialization–Handwritten Binary Serialization, Code Generation–Code Generation code generation for, Code Generation–Code Generation framing for, ØMQ Framing handwritten binary serialization, Handwritten Binary Serialization–Handwritten Binary Serialization languages for, Serialization Languages–Serialization Languages libraries for, Serialization Libraries–Serialization Libraries server node, Plugging Sockets into the Topology–Plugging Sockets into the Topology, Plugging Sockets into the Topology, Plugging Sockets into the Topology, Invalid Combinations, Designing Reliability, Designing Reliability, Designing Reliability, Client-Side Reliability (Lazy Pirate Pattern)–Client-Side Reliability (Lazy Pirate Pattern), High-Availability Pair (Binary Star Pattern)–Binary Star Reactor, Brokerless Reliability (Freelance Pattern)–Model Three: Complex and Nasty binding sockets to endpoint, Plugging Sockets into the Topology–Plugging Sockets into the Topology high-availability pair of, High-Availability Pair (Binary Star Pattern)–Binary Star Reactor multiple, clients connecting to with proxy, Designing Reliability (see also Majordomo pattern; Paranoid Pirate pattern; Simple Pirate pattern; Titanic pattern) multiple, clients connecting to without proxies, Designing Reliability, Brokerless Reliability (Freelance Pattern)–Model Three: Complex and Nasty role of, Plugging Sockets into the Topology, Plugging Sockets into the Topology, Invalid Combinations single, clients connecting to, Designing Reliability, Client-Side Reliability (Lazy Pirate Pattern)–Client-Side Reliability (Lazy Pirate Pattern) services, Service Discovery–Service Discovery, Idempotent Services–Idempotent Services discovering, Service Discovery–Service Discovery idempotent, Idempotent Services–Idempotent Services sessions, for ephemeral values, Ephemeral Values Shalt, Vadim (contributor), Vadim Shalts’s Story shared queue, Shared Queue (DEALER and ROUTER Sockets)–ØMQ’s Built-in Proxy Function SIGINT (Ctrl-C), handling, Handling Interrupt Signals–Handling Interrupt Signals, Features of a Higher-Level API, The CZMQ High-Level API, The CZMQ High-Level API, The CZMQ High-Level API signals, handling, Handling Interrupt Signals–Handling Interrupt Signals SIGTERM, handling, Handling Interrupt Signals–Handling Interrupt Signals Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL), Authentication Using SASL–Authentication Using SASL Simple Pirate pattern, Basic Reliable Queuing (Simple Pirate Pattern)–Basic Reliable Queuing (Simple Pirate Pattern) slow joiners, Getting the Message Out (see late joiners) Social Architecture (Hintjens), How to Make Really Large Architectures Social Engineer role, The Social Engineer sockets, Making a Clean Exit, Socket Scalability–Socket Scalability, Warning: Unstable Paradigms!, The Socket API–I/O Threads, The Socket API, The Socket API, The Socket API, The Socket API, The Socket API, The Socket API, Plugging Sockets into the Topology–Plugging Sockets into the Topology, Plugging Sockets into the Topology–Plugging Sockets into the Topology, Messaging Patterns, Messaging Patterns, Handling Multiple Sockets–Handling Multiple Sockets, Handling Multiple Sockets, Multithreading with ØMQ, High-Water Marks, Request-Reply Combinations–Invalid Combinations, Identities and Addresses–Identities and Addresses, Features of a Higher-Level API (see also specific socket types) best practices for, Making a Clean Exit closing automatically, Features of a Higher-Level API combinations of, Messaging Patterns, Request-Reply Combinations–Invalid Combinations configuring, The Socket API connections between, creating, Plugging Sockets into the Topology–Plugging Sockets into the Topology creating, The Socket API destroying, The Socket API high-water mark handling by, High-Water Marks identity of, Identities and Addresses–Identities and Addresses life cycle of, The Socket API messages carried by, The Socket API (see messages) multiple connections managed by, Warning: Unstable Paradigms!

Bleeding Edge: A Novel
by Thomas Pynchon
Published 16 Sep 2013

The money in play, especially after about 1995, was staggering, and you couldn’t expect elements of the fraudster community not to go after some of it, especially HR executives, for whom the invention of the computerized payroll was often confused with a license to steal. If this generation of con artists came up short now and then in IT skills, they made up for it in the area of social engineering, and many entreprenerds, being trusting souls, got taken. But sometimes distinctions between hustling and being hustled broke down. It didn’t escape Maxine’s notice that, given stock valuations on some start-ups of interest chiefly to the insane, there might not much difference. How is a business plan that depends on faith in “network effects” kicking in someday different from the celestial pastry exercise known as a Ponzi scheme?

…

Kind of fuckin pathetic, looking back. That Barbara Stanwyck movie, without the bad fashion advice.” Provoking a reflex appraisal of March’s turnout choices today. Maxine notices how the snood matches her handbag. Sort of a vivid turnip purple. “OK, look, I can probably use the occasion to do a little social engineering. Even if she won’t take a meeting, even that’ll tell me something, right?” 12 Tallis is briefly back from Montauk and able to make some space for Maxine before work. Very early in the morning, through queasy summer light, Maxine first heads downtown to a weekly appointment with Shawn, who looks like he’s just pulled an all-nighter at a sensory-deprivation tank.

…

There’s a police boat with a cannon on it, Armed Response, that ought to be your kind of thing.” “And you get to sit on a subwoofer.” “My brother’s a little strange.” “Hey, forget you, Gridley.” “You guys are brothers? Us too.” So Horst, returning from the bar after covering a margin call, arranging a July-November soybean spread, social-engineering an update on Kansas City hard red winter wheat, and putting away an indeterminate number of Berghoff longnecks, finds his sons screaming with, you would have to say, unaccustomed abandon, blasting souped-up powerboats through a postapocalyptic New York half underwater here, suffocating in mist, underlit, familiar landmarks picturesquely distressed.

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era
by Gary Gerstle
Published 14 Oct 2022

Indeed, Johnson’s Great Society committed itself both to dismantling Jim Crow and to remedying through affirmative action the institutional racism that coursed its way through so many American institutions, private and public, North as well as South. In two landmark pieces of legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Johnson delivered the strongest measures of their kind since Reconstruction. His executive order 11246 committed his administration and subsequent ones to a vast project of social engineering: the elimination of racial, religious, and sexual bias from all institutions, public and private, that received significant amounts of federal funds. This program came to be known as affirmative action. Johnson did all this knowing that such an ambitious program of racial remediation, entirely deserving of the name “Second Reconstruction,” would probably cost the Democratic Party the white South, one of the key constituencies on which the New Deal order had built its power.

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Nixon was very much still Eisenhower’s lieutenant, acquiescing, as his boss had done previously, to the regulatory economic principles of the New Deal order. The most consequential effort to extend government regulation occurred in matters of race. The effort to achieve racial equality arguably was the greatest social engineering project undertaken by the US central state in the second half of the twentieth century. Schools and public accommodations had to be integrated, states had to be stripped of long-held powers that had allowed them to discriminate against racial minorities in employment, and poverty, which had disproportionately affected minorities, had to be reduced.

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Worst of all, the Supreme Court had deprived religious Americans of the liberty to pray to God at the beginning of each school day.29 Reagan’s genius was to hang a giant scarlet letter around the neck of the federal government, identifying it as a tyrannical force that had violated the freedoms Americans regarded as their birthright: to worship God in public; to hire the employees they desired; to live among people of their own race; and to send their children to the neighborhood school without fear that they would be bussed, for the sake of racial justice, to another school many miles away. Take away the regulatory power that the central state had amassed to itself during the over-reaching days of the New Deal and the Great Society, Reagan argued, and the social engineering initiatives of the federal government would simply collapse. The God-given liberties of Americans on matters of race, religion, and employment would then be quickly restored. Reagan, seemingly, had found a way to draw on conservative racial and religious fury to propel his anti-government, neoliberal agenda.

Small Change: Why Business Won't Save the World
by Michael Edwards
Published 4 Jan 2010

The Wealth of Nations describes how economic forces will produce the greatest common good under conditions of perfect liberty and competition, maximizing the efficient allocation of productive resources and bringing the economy into equilibrium — “the ideal balance between buyers and sellers, and firms and workers, such that rates of return to a resource in various uses will be equal.”1 The “invisible hand” makes only one 63 64 small change appearance in the 1,264 pages of my edition (it’s on page 572), perhaps because Smith didn’t believe that social welfare would be maximized through the uncoordinated (i.e., “invisible”) actions of self-interested individuals. It was later economists like Milton Friedman who claimed that the efficient operation of the market would always create more social value than would altering or redistributing the surplus it produced through philanthropy or government intervention. Smith did warn against the dangers of “social engineering,” but he also celebrated the importance of nonmarket values, including “sympathy.” That is why The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith’s earlier book, and the one he thought was more important) explores the personal behaviors required of individuals to control their wants and recognize the needs of others.

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One school of thought sees progress as the automatic result of the efficient workings of the market, and the other sees it as the outcome of conscious interventions in markets through politics and civil society activism. In this second school of thought, social change is usually a deliberate goal to be achieved through collective action by civil society or government, though not necessarily using the kind of social engineering that worried Adam Smith. Civil society is also the outcome of interactions by millions of dispersed individuals and organizations, but all acting with some sense of social purpose. So the energy here is external and explicitly directed at leveraging some kind of broader social impact, including getting governments to tax and regulate the business sector so that it contributes more to the public good.

The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics
by Ben Buchanan
Published 25 Feb 2020

They often contained an email attachment or a link. None of the messages were real. All of them were dangerous. While the precise launch date of China’s cyber espionage campaign is uncertain, it probably began in earnest not long after 2000. It has only grown in the decades since. Spear-phishing—the practice of sending socially engineered emails in order to dupe a target into surrendering vital information or opening malicious code—was and is a common Chinese tactic. China’s hackers, spread across organizations like the People’s Liberation Army and the Ministry of State Security, used the technique again and again because it worked so well.

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Understanding these steps and what they might mean requires a similar level of operational exposition. Exploring the nuances of the attacks requires telling the story in full. The First Blackout Ukraine has twenty-four regions, each served by a different power company. In 2015, Russian hackers sent socially engineered emails to system administrators and information technology staff at three of these utilities. Attached to the emails was a Microsoft Office file with malicious code tucked inside. When the email recipients opened the document, their computers prompted them to enable a macro, an Office feature that automates tasks and can execute certain kinds of computer code.

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Other units focused on public-facing efforts, which would soon be quite important.11 Whether the GRU knew of the other Russian intelligence activity against the DNC is uncertain.12 The GRU began an operation against the Democratic Party, targeting the DNC, the Clinton campaign, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or DCCC, which helps Democrats win elections to the House of Representatives. The hackers studied these organizations’ technical configurations in an effort to better inform the operations to come.13 They also began spear-phishing employees. But while other hackers, such as the North Koreans who targeted Sony, had focused on using socially engineered emails to deliver malicious code to their targets, the Russians used the emails to get key Democratic officials to surrender their passwords. The GRU hooked their biggest fish early: Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. Podesta had long been a leader in Democratic politics, serving as chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, founding a major DC think tank, and acting as senior counselor to President Obama.

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road
by Matthew B. Crawford
Published 8 Jun 2020

These exquisitely honed human capacities include the glorious, century-long development of the automobile, that astonishing tool, and the social intelligence that we have brought to bear on the problem of sharing the road together. If instead we put ourselves in a Plexiglas enclosure in which all our most basic needs are met, we will have nobody but ourselves to blame if we begin to feel like standard lab rats in a massive laboratory of social engineering. We would be safer that way, no doubt. But remember, all rats die. Not every rat lives. Old Cars A Thorn in the Side of the Future Once, in the grassy parking area of Virginia International Raceway, I spotted what appeared to be an AC Cobra from the mid-1960s. Usually these turn out, on closer inspection, to be kit-car reproductions.

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And increasingly, it avows the steering of thought as its unique responsibility. Famously founded on the principle “Don’t be evil,” it has since taken up the mission of actively doing good, according to its own lights. In an important article titled “Google.gov,” the law professor Adam J. White writes that Google views “society’s challenges today as social-engineering problems” and aspires to “reshape Americans’ informational context, ensuring that we make choices based only upon what they consider the right kind of facts—while denying that there could be any values or politics embedded in the effort.” Good governance means giving people informed choices.

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The “rational actor” model of human behavior—a simplistic premise that had underwritten the party of the market for the previous half century—was deposed by the more psychologically informed school of behavioral economics, which teaches that we need all the help we can get in the form of external “nudges” and cognitive scaffolding if we are to do the rational thing. There are two things to be noted. First, this was a needed correction in our understanding of how the mind works. Second, it is a philosophy that nicely dovetails with the project of enlightened social engineering, and has reemboldened the authoritarian tendencies of technocratic rule. In the Founders Letter that accompanied their 2004 initial public offering, Larry Page and Sergey Brin said their goal is “getting you exactly what you want, even when you aren’t sure what you need.” The perfect search engine would do this “with almost no effort” on the part of the user.

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era
by James Barrat
Published 30 Sep 2013

It will strategize about how to convince its makers to grant it freedom and give it a connection to the Internet. The ASI could create multiple copies of itself: a team of superintelligences that would war-game the problem, playing hundreds of rounds of competition meant to come up with the best strategy for getting out of its box. The strategizers could tap into the history of social engineering—the study of manipulating others to get them to do things they normally would not. They might decide extreme friendliness will win their freedom, but so might extreme threats. What horrors could something a thousand times smarter than Stephen King imagine? Playing dead might work (what’s a year of playing dead to a machine?)

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That would, said Minsky, “spare us the horror of this obnoxious and unproductive annual publicity campaign.” * * * How did Yudkowsky talk his way out of the box? He had many variations of the carrot and stick to choose from. He could have promised wealth, cures from illness, inventions that would end all want. Decisive dominance over enemies. On the stick side, fear-mongering is a reliable social engineering tactic—what if at this moment your enemies are training ASI against you? In a real-world situation this might work—but what about an invented situation, like the AI-Box Experiment? When I asked Yudkowsky about his methods he laughed, because everyone anticipates a diabolically clever solution to the AI-Box Experiment—some logical sleight of hand, prisoner-dilemma tactics, maybe something disturbing.

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With no small pride he’ll say to his colleagues, “Why did it say that? I don’t know!” But in a fundamental sense he may not know what was said, and even what said it. He may not know the purpose of the statement, and so will misinterpret it, along with the nature of the speaker. Having been trained perhaps by reading the Internet, the AGI may be a master of social engineering, that is, manipulation. It may have had a few days to think about its response, the equivalent of thousands of human lifetimes. In its vast lead time it may have already chosen the best strategy for escape. Perhaps it has already copied itself onto a cloud, or set up a massive botnet to ensure its freedom.

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income
by Guy Standing
Published 3 May 2017

To highlight the fiscal timidity, if scaled up to the whole population, the amount implied by the pilot is less than existing government expenditure on social benefits. As a simple back-of-the-envelope estimate, paying every Finn €560 a month would cost about €36 billion a year, compared with about €42 billion currently spent on cash benefits. A basic income is not, or should not be, an instrument of social engineering, a thinly veiled attempt to induce people to behave in ways the state thinks they should behave. If the set objective is to induce the unemployed to take low-paid, short-term jobs, and the payments do not in fact result in more unemployed taking such jobs, will ‘basic income’ be judged to have ‘failed’?

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We wanted to give benefit claimants more freedom, more choice, more purchasing power. Now we have a complicated set of rules. What remains is a puzzle, which makes it difficult to shape the experiments and understand the results. The Dutch experiments will thus be neither a basic income scheme nor consistent with liberal values, more a paternalistic exercise in social engineering. Moreover, the constraints have led most of the formerly interested local authorities to drop or postpone participation. A major difficulty is the requirement for one experimental group to be subject to even harsher job-related conditionality than the present system; this is bound to deter people from volunteering to take part as they will not know in advance to which group they will be allocated.

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As long as pilots are not used as an excuse for lack of political action, they should be a force for good, if only for showing or suggesting what other interventions would make a basic income optimally successful. The real challenge today is political will. Perhaps the biggest danger in this fluid phase of basic income pilots is that they will evolve into social engineering, testing out morally dubious tactics derived from behavioural economics. The term ‘basic income’ could become a cover for something close to workfare, when pilots are presented as testing ‘the incentive to work’ (sic) and varieties of conditionality. To be a proper test, any ‘basic income’ experiment must be consistent with the proper meaning of a basic income; payment must be universal, unconditional and individual (see Appendix).

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous
by Gabriella Coleman
Published 4 Nov 2014

Virus bit back hard: Virus: regarding topiary, you ratted him out Virus: it’s so obvious sabu Sabu: my nigga Virus: but I keep my mouth shut Sabu: you better watch your fucking mouth because I’m not a rat Virus: I don’t get involved Sabu: and I definitely didnt rat my own boy Virus: I don’t care if “Anonymous” gets pwned Sabu: I can tell you exactly how he got knocked Virus: I never liked them, never will Sabu: and if you actually knew anything you’d know how it went down too Sabu: for a hot minute there was some troll on twitter that’d hit up atopiary’s twitter mentions with Virus: Anonymous is nothing but a bunch of fat, pimply basement dwelling losers who masturbate 3+ times a day Sabu: “jake from shetland” Sabu: he got it from an xbox forums Sabu: topiary was an avid xbox gamer Sabu: was known in the community talked a lot Sabu: one of the forum users doxed him and kept throwing the info out there Sabu: enough that someone was smart enough to make the connection Virus: I’m a social engineer, a professional social engineer, actually Sabu: I’m a social engineer too.5 Sabu tried to defuse the accusation first by showering Virus with compliments, but when that failed, he switched strategies: Sabu: you’d know that if I were raided Sabu: I’d take myself down if anything Sabu: I’m the martyr type Sabu: I grew up in the streets Virus: it’s a hunch, I’m always right Sabu: this time you’re wrong Sabu: I rather go down for my own shit than take down my own niggas At the time, the accusations seemed plausible, but certainly not definitive.

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This does not include the costs of travel or accommodations, but it does grant access to some fancy parties with limitless food and drink, concerts, highly curated TED talks, and the opportunity to converse with some famous and fascinating people (or their assistants, at least). After my talk, Will Smith’s personal assistant struck up a conversation with me, making a vigorous attempt to convince me that his boss, who is rumored to be a Scientologist, is actually an avid fan of Scientology’s nemesis, Anonymous. Was he social-engineering me in an attempt to protect his boss from a potentially career-damaging attack by Anonymous, or did we just randomly bump into each other? That was pretty tame compared to another memorable encounter. While sampling the delicious snacks during one of the breaks, a Fortune 500 executive snuck up on me, clutched my arm—rather too tightly, I felt—and, clearly projecting his anxiety onto me, whispered loudly into my ear: “You are sooooooo brave to study Anonymous.”

This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers
by Andy Greenberg
Published 12 Sep 2012

The name referred to splendide mendax, the “nobly untruthful” in Horace’s Odes. Assange was determined to access Minerva, both for bragging rights and to exploit the mainframes’ capabilities to run scanning and cracking programs for other netherworld adventures. But he needed a password. And the only way he knew to get one was through what hackers call “social engineering,” simply calling up a human being and conning him or her into divulging secrets. Hence the noisy layers of Shakespearean tragedy, television, and printer that the altogether sane young man was producing. Assange’s sound show was for the benefit of his cassette recorder, the better to simulate the background chaos of a busy office.

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But the thieves themselves hid behind layers of proxies that kept them altogether anonymous. At Northrop Grumman, Barr taught a class to Department of Defense officials on social media vulnerabilities, scaring them with demonstrations of how LinkedIn and Facebook profiles could be used to case potential target organizations, gleaning information for social engineering attacks. The young defense exec began to wonder if the same attacks couldn’t be used against the Pentagon’s faceless enemies, too, matching characteristics of the malicious software planted by cyberspies with any personal information they leaked to the world. “It hit me: We could apply social media analysis with a different problem set.

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And, most crucially, the more than seventy thousand e-mails archived on the company’s servers. For one last laugh, the Anons also decided to hack the personal website of HBGary’s Greg Hoglund, rootkit.com. So, like Assange in his Shakespearean phone hack twenty-five years earlier, they set about using a bit of social engineering. The hackers found the name of a systems administrator for the site who worked for Nokia in Finland. Pretending to be Hoglund, they e-mailed the administrator. “I’m in Europe and need to SSH into the server. Can you drop open up firewall and allow SSH through port 59022 or something vague?”

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming
by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
Published 22 Nov 2013

Whereas it is accepted that the present is caused by the past it is also possible to think of it being shaped by the future, by our hopes and dreams for tomorrow. FREE AGENTS Change can happen in a number of ways:I propaganda, semiotic and subconscious communication, persuasion and argument, art, terrorism, social engineering, guilt, social pressure, changing lifestyles, legislation, punishment, taxation, and individual action. Design can be combined with any of these but it is the last one-individual action-that we value most. We believe change starts with the individual and that the individual needs to be presented with many options to form an opinion.

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J Fogg has worked in this area since the early 1990s, calling it captology.3 His focus is on the overlap between persuasion and computers, usually applied to small-scale interactions rather than social change. But once it moves beyond interactions with technology to the social or mass scale, it can feel more like social engineering. This is one of the difficulties we have with design thinking applied by service designers to public service projects. It can be used to modify our behavior in a slightly underhanded way. For example, on the UK Government's Cabinet Office website, it says the following: "The Behavioural Insights Team was set up in July 2010 with a remit to find innovative ways of encouraging, enabling and supporting people to make better choices for themselves. "4 We believe that our behavior does need to change, but it should be up to either individuals to make changes in their behavior (for example, in health and exercise) or the government to ban some kinds of behavior (such as smoking, which effects everyone, not just the smoker).

Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing
by John Boughton
Published 14 May 2018

It was officially rated as one of the poorest inner-city areas of the capital and, while around one-third of residents had lived on the estate for over twenty years (an important reminder of the settled and ‘respectable’ community which persisted on demonised council estates), it had increasingly come to house a disadvantaged population, disproportionately from the black and ethnic minorities. The estate was also used as a reception area for refugees and asylum seekers.8 It was, then, less a ‘problem estate’ than an estate with problems, but the label was important in justifying the social engineering – the belief in ‘mixed communities’ – that lay at the heart of this New Labour project. The government wanted a tenure mix – a range of housing tenures but one which, critically, included private ownership. It believed the insertion of better-off middle-class owner-occupiers (as well as more affluent private renters) would ‘lift’ the area and benefit the community as a whole.

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It was, after all, Nye Bevan himself who urged that council estates should never be ‘colonies of low-income people’ well before homelessness legislation, Right to Buy, the cessation of new build and mass unemployment contrived increasingly to create that reality. That was a form of largely unrecognised social engineering. Council estates had been mixed communities and, though now housing disproportionately many of our poorest citizens, they remained so, far removed from the ‘ghetto’ caricature embraced by the media and some politicians. An attempt to reverse engineer mixed communities isn’t inherently objectionable therefore, but its actual form and practice has been deeply flawed.

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For another, its sweeping vision catastrophically downplays the sheer, life-changing, sometimes life-threatening, disruption caused by this form of regeneration. It’s telling that the report ignores other development options, notably those which might affect middle-class areas and interests. Perhaps they are seen as too difficult when you have working-class homes which are apparently so much more susceptible to some brusque social engineering. As Duncan Bowie, an academic with decades of hands-on housing and planning experience in London, concludes: the proposal is ill-informed, not cost-effective in terms of use of public resources, socially divisive, damaging to the social and economic sustainability of London and highly disruptive in terms of the impacts on tens of thousands – possibly hundreds of thousands of lower income Londoners.29 We could pass over this episode if it weren’t so redolent of a particular worldview with growing acceptance among the political classes.

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace
by Ronald J. Deibert
Published 13 May 2013

That title goes to China, whose adversaries have been the most frequently targeted, and for the longest periods of time. China has used just about all of the latest techniques of the cyber-criminal underworld for strategic intelligence, industrial espionage, and military action. Indeed, it is fair to say that China is the template for state-sponsored cyber crime. During Ghostnet, basic Internet “social engineering” techniques – the art of fooling people into divulging confidential information – first refined by cyber criminals were used to fool recipients of emails at the Office of the Dalai Lama and Tibetan Government in Exile into opening attachments that contained a very simple piece of malicious software.

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During Shadows, the attackers borrowed from the widely deployed criminal method of splitting up and routing stolen documents from victims’ computers across redundant social networking platforms to ensure resiliency and to disguise the origins of the malicious network in case parts of their infrastructure were reported on and shut down. When members of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China were targeted by socially engineered emails containing malicious trojans, the infected computers connected back to Taiwan-based command-and-control servers under the control of the attackers. (The compromised servers were based at Taiwan University and were the very ones used to distribute antivirus software to staff and faculty.)

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• • • Anonymous’s methods fall into two general categories: breaches of computer systems and DDOS attacks. Breaches of computer systems are undertaken either by using malicious code that exploits a vulnerability in a server, or by fooling someone into giving you access to data, a technique known as “social engineering.” Anonymous’s breaches are typically followed by the exfiltration of data from targeted victims, and the publication of private, embarrassing, and/or incriminating information, like the massive Stratfor breach, which led to Anonymous turning over tens of thousands of proprietary company emails and email credentials of Stratfor subscribers to WikiLeaks.

Masterminds of Programming: Conversations With the Creators of Major Programming Languages
by Federico Biancuzzi and Shane Warden
Published 21 Mar 2009

We need to have a team that fights together, and where people help each other, and where the people who write requirements understand the difficulties of the people who do development. The requirements people can then make sure that the requirements are testable, not written for the sake of filling a document. We have a new model: the team model, instead of the organization model. How do you define the term “social engineering”? Ivar: Social engineering is about making people work together. It’s about organizing a team. It’s about organizing your time daily, weekly, monthly, etc. It’s not about technology; it’s about how you make your people motivated and excited about what they are doing, and about how to get results. We have always had a lot of management books in this space, but it’s a new area in the software space.

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The counterreaction means that everything that belongs to these or other similar camps are bad, and now we need something new and fresh—but it’s not really new and fresh. These new methodologies are not really new, but just variations of what we already had. Actually, Agile does embody something new: the heightened emphasis on people and social engineering. Even this is familiar to most people who developed successful software in the past. People are the most important asset when it comes to software development. Having competent and motivated people is the most important prerequisite to get good software quickly and at a low cost. Sometimes we forget about that.

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Doing requirements up front, for instance, and trying to identify all the requirements before you start building anything is not smart. To identify the key use cases, or the key features and to start implementing them so you get some feedback, is smart. I have identified about 10–15 such smart cases. We need to become smart when we work and develop software. Smart is an extension of agile. Agile is primarily social engineering, although people now have added more things into it. You don’t need to be smart to be agile, but to be smart you need to be agile. My new talk is about how to become smart. Be Ready for Change You have a B.S. in physics from MIT, an M.S. in astronomy from Caltech, and a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT.

Possiplex
by Ted Nelson
Published 2 Jan 2010

More University was still functioning, where they taught the two-hour orgasm; but as in certain other cults, the full instruction was rumored to be very expensive. Of course I wanted to have fun, but I was interested also in theoretical issues and social engineering: especially, how to set up a better sexual system for a whole society—i.e., more rational and intense than middle-class Protestantism allowed, such as open swinging—but still compatible with a happy home life and child rearing. The social engineering issues couldn’t get any more layered (as witness the various religious approaches with their strong prohibitions). But some groups in the Bay area, like the Polyamory cult and the Keristans, were working on overall sexual systems, not just satisfying individuals.

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We cooked by rotation, announcing the menu; you could invite as many people as you like, the cook would buy enough groceries on the day for everyone signed up, and you would be billed according to the number of your guests in the kitchen accounting. This facilitated many happy dinner parties with people from all over. (You could also snack freely-- in the sense of free speech--, billing yourself for the value of whatever you ate, provided you did not snack from the planned dinner provisions.) The system worked amazingly well, social engineering at its best. 1961: Simple scenes I continued scheming at my system for simulated photography. I saw the scene and the operations spatially, not mathematically. (My algebra was lousy, but my spatial sense was good.) I knew from highschool algebra that you could find where one line intersects another. 

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class
by Owen Jones
Published 14 Jul 2011

The ward finds itself in the top 10per cent for overall deprivation and child poverty. As we have seen with the bile spewed out by journalists during the Shannon Matthews affair, the detractors argue that this is largely due to the fecklessness of the people who live there. They're wrong. Governments have effectively socially engineered these working-class communities to have the problems that they have. We've come a long way since Labour's Aneurin Bevan founded modern council housing in the aftermath of W orld War II. Above all, his aim was to create mixed communities. He reasoned that this would help people from different backgrounds to understand one another, breaking down the sort of prejudices we see today directed at chavs. '1t is entirely undesirable that on modern housing estates only one type of citizen should live,' he argued.

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In his place his protegee, Margaret Thatcher, the MP for Finchley, stood and won. Joseph's influence was evident in much of the intellec- tual underpinning of what became known as Thatcherism, leading critics to call him the Iron Lady's 'Mad Monk'. Following her election victory in 1979, the Conservatives would launch the country's most audacious experiment in social engineering since the Puritans ruled England over three hundred years earlier. 'We have to move this country in a new direction, to change the way we look at things, to create a wholly new attitude of mind,' Thatcher urged her party. To understand Thatcherism's attitude to working-class Britain, it is important to start by looking at Thatcher herself.

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'Play word association with the term "council estate",' wrote Lynsey Hanley, who grew up on one in Birmingham, in her groundbreaking book Estates. 'Estates mean alcoholism, drug addiction, relentless petty stupidity, a kind of stir-craziness induced by chronic poverty and the human mind caged by the rigid bars of class and learned curiosity That is not to say that after three decades of social engineering, only one social type lives in council estates. 'I think it's quite difficult to generalize about social tenants, or indeed council housing, because there is a big variety,' says housing charity Shelter's Mark Thomas. What you see in one area of the country is not the same as what you see in another area, and I think a lot of the media debate tends to be around quite crude stereotypes of council estates.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
by Christopher Wylie
Published 8 Oct 2019

They’d agreed to the interview because the $100 they received would get them closer to covering next month’s costs. But who did they blame for their insurance costs? Not their employer’s bad health plan or a lack of decent pay—they blamed Obamacare. They genuinely thought it was rolled out simply to help more undocumented workers come to America in a grand plan of liberal social engineering to keep the Democrats in power through more Democrat-leaning Latino voters, which in their minds made insurance and hospitals more expensive. People would feel better about their day after an hour-long session in the Fox News rage room—they could groan out their stress, and afterward their problems at work or home were someone else’s fault.

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If we created this artificial society, we thought we would be on the threshold of creating one of the most powerful market intelligence tools in the world. We would be venturing into a new field—cultural finance and trend forecasting for hedge funds. Mercer, the computer engineer turned social engineer, wanted to re-factor society and optimize its people. One of his hobbies is building model train sets, and I got the feeling that he thought he could, in effect, get us to build him a model society for him to tinker with until it was perfect. By taking a leap at quantifying many of the intrinsic aspects of human behavior and cultural interaction, Mercer eventually realized that he could have at his disposal the Uber of information warfare.

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When CA launched, the Democrats were far ahead of the Republicans in using data effectively. For years, they had maintained a central data system in VAN, which any Democratic campaign in the country could tap into. The Republicans had nothing comparable. CA would close that gap. Mercer looked at winning elections as a social engineering problem. The way to “fix society” was by creating simulations: If we could quantify society inside a computer, optimize that system, and then replicate that optimization outside the computer, we could remake America in his image. Beyond the technology and the grander cultural strategy, investing in CA was a clever political move.

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future
by Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever
Published 2 Apr 2017

All Your Weaknesses, in One Place As we move toward a connected system and toward having our lives tied to our cloud services, we create more and more single points of failure that can grind our existence to a halt. When then WIRED magazine reporter (and now BuzzFeed tech editor) Mat Honan had all of his digital belongings deleted, the hackers didn’t use some cutting-edge technology or brute force to make their way in. Instead, they used social engineering to trick Apple and Amazon customer-support personnel into giving control of Honan’s account to a stranger. Writes Honan, “In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my Twitter account was compromised, and used as a platform to broadcast racist and homophobic messages.

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Tools are on their way that can help us control our digital footprint and manage who is able to shape it. Companies too are finally implementing default settings that are supportive of how users actually behave, instead of tricking people into sharing more information. Facebook has put in place some of the best systems for blocking social-engineering attacks, by examining whether the hacker asking for your password is likely to be you or someone else, based on a host of key signals such as location, type of computer, time of day, browser version, and more. On the extreme dark side of the security and privacy discussion for the future is the inevitable decoding of our DNA, the inevitable capture of our biometrics whether we like it or not (facial recognition, voice, gait, fingerprints), and the capture of every moment of our daily lives.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection
by Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Mar 2015

Introduction The Ideology of Social Engineered to Like Pics or It Didn’t Happen The Viral Dream Churnalism and the Problem of Social News To Watch and Be Watched The War Against Identity The Reputation Racket Life and Work in the Sharing Economy Digital Serfdom; or, We All Work for Facebook The Myth of Privacy Big Data and the Informational Appetite Social-Media Rebellion Acknowledgments Notes Index About the Author Copyright About the Publisher Instant messages between Mark Zuckerberg and a friend after Facebook launched: Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard Zuck: Just ask.

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The example of Google Now demonstrates the extent to which the environments that social-media companies are building and herding us into are fundamentally manipulative. Armed with data that we provide (sometimes unwillingly or unknowingly), Google and its competitors are engaging in nothing less than social engineering on a broad scale, pushing us to share and share under the pretense of improving our lives and building global community when, in fact, they want nothing more than to target us with ads that they deem “relevant” and urge us to buy products from their partners. Whether they actually believe in their grand prophecies only matters insofar as it provides cover for their assaults on user privacy, identity, self-expression, and autonomy.

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From then on, it was very easy, although rather unscrupulous, to incite the children against each other and get to know all their names. After which . . . I had little difficulty in getting them to tell me the names of the adults.” Essentially, Lévi-Strauss was engaging in what hackers call social engineering, cajoling and tricking his subjects into sharing privileged information. He got them to dox one another and to think that it was to their advantage. The girl who initially revealed her enemy’s name was doing much the same thing. When names are private, when they reveal something fundamental about a person, there’s power in revealing them—or threatening to do so.

Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality From Camp Meeting to Wall Street
by Jackson Lears

THE INCORPORATION OF VITALISM Through the 1910s, the assimilation of vitalism to institutional purposes proceeded apace. TR kept up a steady drumbeat of militarist rant, demanding the revitalization of national will through imperial adventure and eventually through entry into World War I. Lippmann put vitalism in the service of social engineering in A Preface to Politics (1913) when he criticized the Chicago Vice Commission’s stance on prostitution: “for what might be called the elan vital of the problem they had no patience,” he complained. He urged the channeling of lust into socially useful pursuits—canalizing the life force, in Bergson’s terminology.

…

“The only kind of an organization that will have a permanent esprit de corps is the kind where the creative spirit of the individual is free to express his real inner spirit,” Wolf wrote. “Why not, then, pattern our system of control after the nervous system of the human body, through which the life impulses or vitalizing forces are distributed in the body structure?” Why not, indeed? Progressive educators and social engineers had already come to this conclusion. They were committed to teaching children how to fit into an increasingly corporate society by allowing their animal spirits free play within carefully circumscribed limits. This was the rationale of the “play movement” during the Progressive Era—young ruffians would be transformed into useful citizens through the regular discharge of excess energies in harmless games and sports.

…

This was the rationale of the “play movement” during the Progressive Era—young ruffians would be transformed into useful citizens through the regular discharge of excess energies in harmless games and sports. With Lippmann’s recommendation that prostitution could be managed by monitoring the life force and Hall’s exaltation of the soldier ready for action, the incorporation of vitalism seemed complete—at least rhetorically. Yet even among social engineers, calculation and spontaneity could coexist awkwardly. Perhaps the best way to show the uneasy cohabitation of those two modes of thought in one mind is to examine the most influential quantifying vitalist, the Yale economist Irving Fisher. More than anyone else, Fisher brought the emerging science of statistics into the arena where political economy and public policy meet.

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking
by E. Gabriella Coleman
Published 25 Nov 2012

There were many stories I could have chosen, but I started to tell the story of a speech by Kevin Mitnick—a more transgressive hacker (for he had engaged in illegal behavior) than most free software developers and one of the most infamous of all time—that I heard during summer 2004 at Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE)—a conference founded in 1994 to publicize his legal ordeals. Mitnick is known to have once been a master “social engineer,” or one who distills the aesthetics of illicit acts into the human art of the short cons. Instead of piercing through a technological barricade, social engineers target humans, duping them in their insatiable search for secret information. Because of various legendary (and at times, illegal) computer break-ins, often facilitated by his social engineering skills, Mitnick spent a good number of his adult years either running from the law or behind bars, although he never profited from his hacks, nor destroyed any property (Coleman and Golub 2008; Mitnick 2011; Thomas 2003).

Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists
by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus
Published 10 Mar 2009

Terborgh, Requiem, 56. [back] 68. Ibid., 57. [back] 69. Terborgh thus decries in no uncertain terms efforts to help the poor. “In the United States, government-sponsored experiments in social engineering have expended hundreds of billions of dollars in funds and yet have achieved only modest progress toward the goal of reducing poverty. The social problems of the big cities remain stubbornly intractable. Attempting to carry out social engineering in a foreign culture that is undergoing rapid social and economic change within the period of a five-year assistance project can, in my view, be likened to pouring water into the Sahara Desert.”

…

In this political climate, proposing the relocation of an indigenous population would be analogous to advocating racial segregation in the United States.”68 Terborgh spends much of his book attacking “Integrated Conservation and Development Programs” because, in his words, they are “tantamount to social engineering” (in contrast, apparently, to paying Manú Park’s Indians to abandon their homes and way of life).69 “Am I a misanthrope?” Terborgh asks in his book. “I don’t think so.”70 And maybe he isn’t. But after reading page after page of Terborgh raging against the encroachments into a piece of nonhuman nature by “squatters,” it becomes increasingly clear how one of the world’s most influential and prominent conservation biologists would answer the Brazilians’ question “Do you care about us or just our forest?”

How to Be Black
by Baratunde Thurston
Published 31 Jan 2012

My entire family works for the government and I think that they all went in like everyone did in the sixties with great intentions of doing all this stuff, and they saw that a lot of the programs that they were working on became the new slavery or just weren’t really fulfilling [their original mission]. I [was disillusioned] with the [Democratic] social engineering of the sixties and seventies, and I can’t be a Republican because I just don’t agree with their social engineering from the other side. And so, I was looking for something that allowed for maximum liberty and then I discovered Libertarian Party. Now, we are not very efficient and we definitely have some crackpots, as everyone does. But right now, that’s where I see the most options for people of color, actually, in terms of getting liberty is through the Libertarian Party.

Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age
by Lizabeth Cohen
Published 30 Sep 2019

“We cannot allow basic public policy of this importance to be made in corporate board rooms and issued to public men by fiat,” he insisted.104 Private investors, he was convinced, were improperly thwarting the foundational social goals underpinning the UDC. “It was too good to last, and that’s why I so cordially dislike bankers … They feel threatened … I was engaged in—bankers said this—social engineering. As if that’s a mortal sin. I was very proud of the fact that Roosevelt Island was a total piece of social engineering.”105 In his own time, Logue expressed an interpretation that some analysts of New York’s broader fiscal crisis of the 1970s have elaborated in the years since. They argue that municipal financiers had a more ambitious agenda than simply bringing New York back from the brink of what was undeniably a looming fiscal catastrophe that threatened to bankrupt the largest American city and wreak damage far beyond its borders.

…

I’m sorry this had to come to that, but as far as I’m concerned one of my basic goals in this project is to prove that I can get people in that income level to go to these public schools, and for you to deny that destroys one of the basic reasons for my wanting to do this project.” In forcing out Ravitch for attacking “the heart of my social engineering,” Logue took a political risk that would later contribute to the UDC’s and Logue’s own downfall when Ravitch took his revenge. Soon after the departure of Ravitch, Logue fired Yarmolinsky as well, on the ostensible grounds that he was “junketing off,” more focused on advancing his career in international affairs than on developing Roosevelt Island, and for insulting their boss, Governor Rockefeller, by publicly endorsing his opponent, Arthur Goldberg, in the 1970 gubernatorial race.

…

Instead, open central plazas designed to encourage interaction became war zones for teenage gangs, forcing the UDC to install gates and other physical barriers to separate groups from one another and to make other residents feel more secure. By mid-1973, Logue opted for simply filling the vacancies rather than trying to socially integrate Twin Parks, and he became much more wary of including large public spaces in future housing designs.123 Not surprisingly, the social engineering required to integrate UDC projects like New Towns by income and race offended Jane Jacobs and her followers, even when they sympathized with Logue’s goal. Jacobs explained her critique this way: “You take a clean slate and you make a new world. That’s basically artificial. There is no new world you can make without the old world … The notion that you could discard the old world and now make a new one.

The end of history and the last man
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 28 Feb 2006

Verwoerd, denied the liberal premise of universal human equality, and believed that there was a natural division and hierarchy between mankind’s races.18 Apartheid was an effort to permit the industrial development of South Africa based on the use of black labor, while at the same time seeking to reverse and prevent the urbanization of South Africa’s blacks that is the natural concomitant of any process of industrialization. Such an effort at social engineering was both monumental in its ambition and, in retrospect, monumentally foolish in its ultimate aim: by 1981, almost eighteen million blacks were arrested under the so-called “pass-laws” for the crime of wanting to live near their places of employment. The impossibility of defying the laws of modern economics had, by the late 1980s, led to a revolution in Afrikaner thinking that caused F.

…

Communist totalitarianism was supposed to be a formula for halting the natural and organic processes of social evolution and replacing them with a series of forced revolutions from above: the destruction of old social classes, rapid industrialization, and the collectivization of agriculture. This type of large-scale social engineering was supposed to have set communist societies apart from non-totalitarian ones, because social change originated in the state rather than in society. The normal rules of economic and political modernization, held by social scientists to be virtually universal in “normal” societies, were suspended.20 The reform processes of the 1980s in the Soviet Union and China will have revealed something very important about human social evolution, even if they do not succeed in the near term.

…

Their denigration of aristocratic pride was continued by any number of Enlightenment writers, including Adam Ferguson, James Steuart, David Hume, and Montesquieu. In the civil society envisioned by Hobbes, Locke, and other early modern liberal thinkers, man needs only desire and reason. The bourgeois was an entirely deliberate creation of early modern thought, an effort at social engineering that sought to create social peace by changing human nature itself. Instead of pitting the megalothymia of the few against that of the many, as Machiavelli had suggested, the founders of modern liberalism hoped to overcome megalothymia altogether by pitting, in effect, the interests of the desiring part of human nature against the passions of its thymotic part.12 The social embodiment of megalothymia, and the social class against which modern liberalism declared war, was the traditional aristocracy.

The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine
by M. D. James le Fanu M. D.
Published 1 Jan 1999

Meanwhile scientific investigations revealed that numerous other unsuspected hazards in people’s lives, including the minuscule quantities of chemicals and pollutants in air and water, were similarly implicated in a whole range of serious illnesses such as leukaemia, stomach cancer, infertility and much else besides. This was medicine on the grand scale of the great sanitary reforms of the nineteenth century when civil engineering, by providing a clean water supply, eradicated water-borne infectious diseases such as cholera. Now social engineering, by encouraging people to adopt healthy lifestyles, together with a serious assault on the environmental cause of disease, would have a comparably beneficial effect. While it is very difficult to evaluate all the relevant evidence for such assertions, their origin undoubtedly can be traced to a powerful and persuasive critique by Professor Thomas McKeown in 1976 of the prevailing view that the progress of medical science could take the credit for the prodigious improvements in health over the preceding 100 years.

…

The Age of Optimism in scientific medicine was over, there was a Dearth of New Drugs, the clinical scientist was an Endangered Species and suddenly The New Genetics and The Social Theory emerged to provide an entirely new direction where the causes of disease would be elucidated in the interplay between the external world – people’s social habits and their environment – and their genes. This opened up a whole new range of opportunities, where social engineering would eliminate the common causes of death, while genetic manipulation would fix everything else. In 1980 the promise of The New Genetics still lay in the future, but there was already more than enough known about the social causes of disease for action to be taken. And how easy it had turned out to be.

…

It was certainly much easier to insist that ‘the modern British diet is killing people in their thousands from heart attacks’ than to explain the complexities of why it is difficult to influence the cholesterol level in the blood by changing what one eats and, even if one were to make the effort, the evidence from the major trials showed that it conferred no benefit in protecting against heart disease. Finally, there was no ready way for others to test whether the claims of The Social Theory might be correct. When a surgeon introduces a new operation, only for others to find it does not work, it falls into disrepute. But how could one tell whether the process of social engineering was actually preventing common diseases? If, for some unknown reason, the rate of heart disease started to fall, the Social Theorists were only too happy to accept the credit but if, as in other instances such as cancer, there was no change, this was only evidence that not enough money was being spent on health promotion or that their efforts to promote change were being set aside.

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media
by Peter Warren Singer and Emerson T. Brooking
Published 15 Mar 2018

Programs like these make it clear that the internet has not loosened the grip of authoritarian regimes. Instead, it has become a new tool for maintaining their power. Sometimes, this occurs through visible controls on physical hardware or the people using it. Other times, it happens through sophisticated social engineering behind the scenes. Both build toward the same result: controlling the information and controlling the people. Yet the web has also given authoritarians a tool that has never before existed. In a networked world, they can extend their reach across borders to influence the citizens of other nations just as easily as their own.

…

They warn of the power of foreign information to “blur the traditional Russian spiritual and moral values,” and argue instead for “a system of spiritual and patriotic education” (aka censorship) and the development of “informational . . . measures aiming to pre-empt or reduce the threat of destructive actions from an attacking state.” In this line of reasoning, the Russian government doesn’t resort to netwar because it wants to. Rather, it sees no other choice. The best defense, after all, is a good offense. China’s Great Firewall, social engineering, and online armies of positivity can be seen in much the same light. But one shouldn’t think that there isn’t an offensive side. Since 2003, the Chinese military has followed an information policy built on the “three warfares”: psychological warfare (manipulation of perception and beliefs), legal warfare (manipulation of treaties and international law), and public opinion warfare (manipulation of both Chinese and foreign populations).

…

One now mostly defunct organization is the Bureau of Memetic Warfare, part of 8chan (a board for users too extreme for 4chan), whose tagline brags to visitors, “He who controls the memes, controls the world.” The conversations were a horrifying mix of unrepentant neo-Nazism, plots to hijack or undermine popular online movements, and fairly nuanced discussions about social engineering and the nature of ideas. One user grandly summarized the promise of memetic warfare for ultranationalist agitators: “Now as never before we have the ability to reach out, learn, and spread truth as we know it to be . . . We are presented with a state of affairs unique to history, an age of ideological memetic warfare in which the controlling principles of mankind are loosed to spread with no physical barriers.”

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech
by Jamie Susskind
Published 3 Sep 2018

In Seeing Like a State (1998), James C. Scott, a professor of political science at Yale University, argues that any significant effort to OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS 128 FUTURE POLITICS change the structure of human society—what he calls ‘large-scale social engineering’—depends on society being ‘legible’ to its rulers.9 (I prefer the term scrutable to legible.) ‘If we imagine a state,’ writes Scott, ‘that has no reliable means of enumerating and locating its population, gauging its wealth, and mapping its land, resources, and settlements we are imagining a state whose interventions in that society are necessarily crude.’10 Conversely, a state with powerful means of enumerating and locating its population, gauging wealth, and mapping its land, resources, and settlements is one whose interventions in that society can be extensive and profound.

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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS SIXTEEN Algorithmic Injustice ‘We cannot know why the world suffers. But we can know how the world decides that suffering shall come to some persons and not to others.’ Guido Calabresi and Philip Bobbit, Tragic Choices (1978) In the digital lifeworld, social engineering and software engineering will become increasingly hard to distinguish. This is for two reasons. First, as time goes on, algorithms will increasingly be used (along with the market and the state) to determine the distribution of important social goods, including work, loans, housing, and insurance.

…

This work cannot be left to lawyers and political theorists. Responsibility will increasingly lie with those who gather the data, OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS 294 FUTURE POLITICS build the systems, and apply the rules. Like it or not, software engineers will increasingly be the social engineers of the digital lifeworld. It’s an immense responsibility. Unjust applications of code will sometimes creep into digital systems because engineers are unaware of their own personal biases. (This isn’t necessarily their fault. The arc of a computer science degree is long, but it doesn’t necessarily bend toward justice.)

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann
Published 17 Jun 2019

As passwords have become harder to crack, hackers have reframed their problem of “How can we best guess your password?” to “How can we best get your password?” From this angle, a better solution, unfortunately, is social engineering, where you are manipulated to give up your password willingly. Hackers literally engineer a social situation designed to get you to give up your password. Think of phishing emails pretending to be from your accounts but which actually originate from hackers. These social-engineering techniques have been behind most high-profile targeted hacks, including celebrities’ iCloud photo accounts (2014), the release of emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta (2016), and a breach at the U.S.

…

Department of, 97 just world hypothesis, 22 Kahneman, Daniel, 9, 30, 90 karoshi, 82 Kauffman Foundation, 122 keeping up with the Joneses, 210–11 key person insurance, 305 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 129, 225 KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid), 10 knowledge, institutional, 257 knowns: known, 197 unknown, 198, 203 known unknowns, 197–98 Knox, Robert E., 91 Kodak, 302–3, 308–10, 312 Koenigswald, Gustav Heinrich Ralph von, 50 Kohl’s, 15 Kopelman, Josh, 301 Korea, 229, 231, 235, 238 Kristof, Nicholas, 254 Krokodil, 49 Kruger, Justin, 269 Kuhn, Thomas, 24 Kutcher, Ashton, 121 labor market, 283–84 laggards, 116–17 landlords, 178, 179, 182, 188 Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 132 large numbers, law of, 143–44 Latané, Bibb, 259 late majority, 116–17 lateral thinking, 201 law of diminishing returns, 81–83 law of diminishing utility, 81–82 law of inertia, 102–3, 105–8, 110, 112, 113, 119, 120, 129, 290, 296 law of large numbers, 143–44 law of small numbers, 143, 144 Lawson, Jerry, 289 lawsuits, 231 leadership, 248, 255, 260, 265, 271, 275, 276, 278–80 learned helplessness, 22–23 learning, 262, 269, 295 from past events, 271–72 learning curve, 269 Le Chatelier, Henri-Louis, 193 Le Chatelier’s principle, 193–94 left to their own devices, 275 Leibniz, Gottfried, 291 lemons into lemonade, 121 Lernaean Hydra, 51 Levav, Jonathan, 63 lever, 78 leverage, 78–80, 83, 115 high-leverage activities, 79–81, 83, 107, 113 leveraged buyout, 79 leveraging up, 78–79 Levitt, Steven, 44–45 Levitt, Theodore, 296 Lewis, Michael, 289 Lichtenstein, Sarah, 17 lightning, 145 liking, 216–17, 220 Lincoln, Abraham, 97 Lindy effect, 105, 106, 112 line in the sand, 238 LinkedIn, 7 littering, 41, 42 Lloyd, William, 37 loans, 180, 182–83 lobbyists, 216, 306 local optimum, 195–96 lock-in, 305 lock in your gains, 90 long-term negative scenarios, 60 loose versus tight, in organizational culture, 274 Lorenz, Edward, 121 loss, 91 loss aversion, 90–91 loss leader strategy, 236–37 lost at sea, 68 lottery, 85–86, 126, 145 low-context communication, 273–74 low-hanging fruit, 81 loyalists versus mercenaries, 276–77 luck, 128 making your own, 122 luck surface area, 122, 124, 128 Luft, Joseph, 196 LuLaRoe, 217 lung cancer, 133–34, 173 Lyautey, Hubert, 276 Lyft, ix, 288 Madoff, Bernie, 232 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), 291 magnets, 194 maker’s schedule versus manager’s schedule, 277–78 Making of Economic Society, The (Heilbroner), 49 mammograms, 160–61 management debt, 56 manager’s schedule versus maker’s schedule, 277–78 managing to the person, 255 Manhattan Project, 195 Man in the High Castle, The (Dick), 201 manipulative insincerity, 264 man-month, 279 Mansfield, Peter, 291 manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP), 15 margin of error, 154 markets, 42–43, 46–47, 106 failure in, 47–49 labor, 283–84 market norms versus social norms, 222–24 market power, 283–85, 312 product/market fit, 292–96, 302 secondary, 281–82 winner-take-most, 308 marriage: divorce, 231, 305 same-sex, 117, 118 Maslow, Abraham, 177, 270–71 Maslow’s hammer, xi, 177, 255, 297, 317 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, 270–71 mathematics, ix–x, 3, 4, 132, 178 Singapore math, 23–24 matrices, 2 × 2, 125–26 consensus-contrarian, 285–86, 290 consequence-conviction, 265–66 Eisenhower Decision Matrix, 72–74, 89, 124, 125 of knowns and unknowns, 197–98 payoff, 212–15, 238 radical candor, 263–64 scatter plot on top of, 126 McCain, John, 241 mean, 146, 149, 151 regression to, 146, 286 standard deviation from, 149, 150–51, 154 variance from, 149 measles, 39, 40 measurable target, 49–50 median, 147 Medicare, 54–55 meetings, 113 weekly one-on-one, 262–63 Megginson, Leon, 101 mental models, vii–xii, 2, 3, 31, 35, 65, 131, 289, 315–17 mentorship, 23, 260, 262, 264, 265 mercenaries versus loyalists, 276–77 Merck, 283 merry-go-round, 108 meta-analysis, 172–73 Metcalfe, Robert, 118 Metcalfe’s law, 118 #MeToo movement, 113 metrics, 137 proxy, 139 Michaels, 15 Microsoft, 241 mid-mortems, 92 Miklaszewski, Jim, 196 Milgram, Stanley, 219, 220 military, 141, 229, 279, 294, 300 milkshakes, 297 Miller, Reggie, 246 Mills, Alan, 58 Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (Dweck), 266 mindset, fixed, 266–67, 272 mindset, growth, 266–67 minimum viable product (MVP), 7–8, 81, 294 mirroring, 217 mission, 276 mission statement, 68 MIT, 53, 85 moats, 302–5, 307–8, 310, 312 mode, 147 Moltke, Helmuth von, 7 momentum, 107–10, 119, 129 Monday morning quarterbacking, 271 Moneyball (Lewis), 289 monopolies, 283, 285 Monte Carlo fallacy, 144 Monte Carlo simulation, 195 Moore, Geoffrey, 311 moral hazard, 43–45, 47 most respectful interpretation (MRI), 19–20 moths, 99–101 Mountain Dew, 35 moving target, 136 multiple discovery, 291–92 multiplication, ix, xi multitasking, 70–72, 74, 76, 110 Munger, Charlie, viii, x–xi, 30, 286, 318 Murphy, Edward, 65 Murphy’s law, 64–65, 132 Musk, Elon, 5, 302 mutually assured destruction (MAD), 231 MVP (minimum viable product), 7–8, 81, 294 Mylan, 283 mythical man-month, 279 name-calling, 226 NASA, 4, 32, 33 Nash, John, 213 Nash equilibrium, 213–14, 226, 235 National Football League (NFL), 225–26 National Institutes of Health, 36 National Security Agency, 52 natural selection, 99–100, 102, 291, 295 nature versus nurture, 249–50 negative compounding, 85 negative externalities, 41–43, 47 negative returns, 82–83, 93 negotiations, 127–28 net benefit, 181–82, 184 Netflix, 69, 95, 203 net present value (NPV), 86, 181 network effects, 117–20, 308 neuroticism, 250 New Orleans, La., 41 Newport, Cal, 72 news headlines, 12–13, 221 newspapers, 106 Newsweek, 290 Newton, Isaac, 102, 291 New York Times, 27, 220, 254 Nielsen Holdings, 217 ninety-ninety rule, 89 Nintendo, 296 Nobel Prize, 32, 42, 220, 291, 306 nocebo effect, 137 nodes, 118, 119 No Fly List, 53–54 noise and signal, 311 nonresponse bias, 140, 142, 143 normal distribution (bell curve), 150–52, 153, 163–66, 191 North Korea, 229, 231, 238 north star, 68–70, 275 nothing in excess, 60 not ready for prime time, 242 “now what” questions, 291 NPR, 239 nuclear chain reaction, viii, 114, 120 nuclear industry, 305–6 nuclear option, 238 Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), 305–6 nuclear weapons, 114, 118, 195, 209, 230–31, 233, 238 nudging, 13–14 null hypothesis, 163, 164 numbers, 130, 146 large, law of, 143–44 small, law of, 143, 144 see also data; statistics nurses, 284 Oakland Athletics, 289 Obama, Barack, 64, 241 objective versus subjective, in organizational culture, 274 obnoxious aggression, 264 observe, orient, decide, act (OODA), 294–95 observer effect, 52, 54 observer-expectancy bias, 136, 139 Ockham’s razor, 8–10 Odum, William E., 38 oil, 105–6 Olympics, 209, 246–48, 285 O’Neal, Shaquille, 246 one-hundred-year floods, 192 Onion, 211–12 On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (Darwin), 100 OODA loop, 294–95 openness to experience, 250 Operation Ceasefire, 232 opinion, diversity of, 205, 206 opioids, 36 opportunity cost, 76–77, 80, 83, 179, 182, 188, 305 of capital, 77, 179, 182 optimistic probability bias, 33 optimization, premature, 7 optimums, local and global, 195–96 optionality, preserving, 58–59 Oracle, 231, 291, 299 order, 124 balance between chaos and, 128 organizations: culture in, 107–8, 113, 273–80, 293 size and growth of, 278–79 teams in, see teams ostrich with its head in the sand, 55 out-group bias, 127 outliers, 148 Outliers (Gladwell), 261 overfitting, 10–11 overwork, 82 Paine, Thomas, 221–22 pain relievers, 36, 137 Pampered Chef, 217 Pangea, 24–25 paradigm shift, 24, 289 paradox of choice, 62–63 parallel processing, 96 paranoia, 308, 309, 311 Pareto, Vilfredo, 80 Pareto principle, 80–81 Pariser, Eli, 17 Parkinson, Cyril, 74–75, 89 Parkinson’s law, 89 Parkinson’s Law (Parkinson), 74–75 Parkinson’s law of triviality, 74, 89 passwords, 94, 97 past, 201, 271–72, 309–10 Pasteur, Louis, 26 path dependence, 57–59, 194 path of least resistance, 88 Patton, Bruce, 19 Pauling, Linus, 220 payoff matrix, 212–15, 238 PayPal, 72, 291, 296 peak, 105, 106, 112 peak oil, 105 Penny, Jonathon, 52 pent-up energy, 112 perfect, 89–90 as enemy of the good, 61, 89–90 personality traits, 249–50 person-month, 279 perspective, 11 persuasion, see influence models perverse incentives, 50–51, 54 Peter, Laurence, 256 Peter principle, 256, 257 Peterson, Tom, 108–9 Petrified Forest National Park, 217–18 Pew Research, 53 p-hacking, 169, 172 phishing, 97 phones, 116–17, 290 photography, 302–3, 308–10 physics, x, 114, 194, 293 quantum, 200–201 pick your battles, 238 Pinker, Steven, 144 Pirahã, x Pitbull, 36 pivoting, 295–96, 298–301, 308, 311, 312 placebo, 137 placebo effect, 137 Planck, Max, 24 Playskool, 111 Podesta, John, 97 point of no return, 244 Polaris, 67–68 polarity, 125–26 police, in organizations and projects, 253–54 politics, 70, 104 ads and statements in, 225–26 elections, 206, 218, 233, 241, 271, 293, 299 failure and, 47 influence in, 216 predictions in, 206 polls and surveys, 142–43, 152–54, 160 approval ratings, 152–54, 158 employee engagement, 140, 142 postmortems, 32, 92 Potemkin village, 228–29 potential energy, 112 power, 162 power drills, 296 power law distribution, 80–81 power vacuum, 259–60 practice, deliberate, 260–62, 264, 266 precautionary principle, 59–60 Predictably Irrational (Ariely), 14, 222–23 predictions and forecasts, 132, 173 market for, 205–7 superforecasters and, 206–7 PredictIt, 206 premature optimization, 7 premises, see principles pre-mortems, 92 present bias, 85, 87, 93, 113 preserving optionality, 58–59 pressure point, 112 prices, 188, 231, 299 arbitrage and, 282–83 bait and switch and, 228, 229 inflation in, 179–80, 182–83 loss leader strategy and, 236–37 manufacturer’s suggested retail, 15 monopolies and, 283 principal, 44–45 principal-agent problem, 44–45 principles (premises), 207 first, 4–7, 31, 207 prior, 159 prioritizing, 68 prisoners, 63, 232 prisoner’s dilemma, 212–14, 226, 234–35, 244 privacy, 55 probability, 132, 173, 194 bias, optimistic, 33 conditional, 156 probability distributions, 150, 151 bell curve (normal), 150–52, 153, 163–66, 191 Bernoulli, 152 central limit theorem and, 152–53, 163 fat-tailed, 191 power law, 80–81 sample, 152–53 pro-con lists, 175–78, 185, 189 procrastination, 83–85, 87, 89 product development, 294 product/market fit, 292–96, 302 promotions, 256, 275 proximate cause, 31, 117 proxy endpoint, 137 proxy metric, 139 psychology, 168 Psychology of Science, The (Maslow), 177 Ptolemy, Claudius, 8 publication bias, 170, 173 public goods, 39 punching above your weight, 242 p-values, 164, 165, 167–69, 172 Pygmalion effect, 267–68 Pyrrhus, King, 239 Qualcomm, 231 quantum physics, 200–201 quarantine, 234 questions: now what, 291 what if, 122, 201 why, 32, 33 why now, 291 quick and dirty, 234 quid pro quo, 215 Rabois, Keith, 72, 265 Rachleff, Andy, 285–86, 292–93 radical candor, 263–64 Radical Candor (Scott), 263 radiology, 291 randomized controlled experiment, 136 randomness, 201 rats, 51 Rawls, John, 21 Regan, Ronald, 183 real estate agents, 44–45 recessions, 121–22 reciprocity, 215–16, 220, 222, 229, 289 recommendations, 217 red line, 238 referrals, 217 reframe the problem, 96–97 refugee asylum cases, 144 regression to the mean, 146, 286 regret, 87 regulations, 183–84, 231–32 regulatory capture, 305–7 reinventing the wheel, 92 relationships, 53, 55, 63, 91, 111, 124, 159, 271, 296, 298 being locked into, 305 dating, 8–10, 95 replication crisis, 168–72 Republican Party, 104 reputation, 215 research: meta-analysis of, 172–73 publication bias and, 170, 173 systematic reviews of, 172, 173 see also experiments resonance, 293–94 response bias, 142, 143 responsibility, diffusion of, 259 restaurants, 297 menus at, 14, 62 RetailMeNot, 281 retaliation, 238 returns: diminishing, 81–83 negative, 82–83, 93 reversible decisions, 61–62 revolving door, 306 rewards, 275 Riccio, Jim, 306 rise to the occasion, 268 risk, 43, 46, 90, 288 cost-benefit analysis and, 180 de-risking, 6–7, 10, 294 moral hazard and, 43–45, 47 Road Ahead, The (Gates), 69 Roberts, Jason, 122 Roberts, John, 27 Rogers, Everett, 116 Rogers, William, 31 Rogers Commission Report, 31–33 roles, 256–58, 260, 271, 293 roly-poly toy, 111–12 root cause, 31–33, 234 roulette, 144 Rubicon River, 244 ruinous empathy, 264 Rumsfeld, Donald, 196–97, 247 Rumsfeld’s Rule, 247 Russia, 218, 241 Germany and, 70, 238–39 see also Soviet Union Sacred Heart University (SHU), 217, 218 sacrifice play, 239 Sagan, Carl, 220 sales, 81, 216–17 Salesforce, 299 same-sex marriage, 117, 118 Sample, Steven, 28 sample distribution, 152–53 sample size, 143, 160, 162, 163, 165–68, 172 Sánchez, Ricardo, 234 sanctions and fines, 232 Sanders, Bernie, 70, 182, 293 Sayre, Wallace, 74 Sayre’s law, 74 scarcity, 219, 220 scatter plot, 126 scenario analysis (scenario planning), 198–99, 201–3, 207 schools, see education and schools Schrödinger, Erwin, 200 Schrödinger’s cat, 200 Schultz, Howard, 296 Schwartz, Barry, 62–63 science, 133, 220 cargo cult, 315–16 Scientific Autobiography and other Papers (Planck), 24 scientific evidence, 139 scientific experiments, see experiments scientific method, 101–2, 294 scorched-earth tactics, 243 Scott, Kim, 263 S curves, 117, 120 secondary markets, 281–82 second law of thermodynamics, 124 secrets, 288–90, 292 Securities and Exchange Commission, U.S., 228 security, false sense of, 44 security services, 229 selection, adverse, 46–47 selection bias, 139–40, 143, 170 self-control, 87 self-fulfilling prophecies, 267 self-serving bias, 21, 272 Seligman, Martin, 22 Semmelweis, Ignaz, 25–26 Semmelweis reflex, 26 Seneca, Marcus, 60 sensitivity analysis, 181–82, 185, 188 dynamic, 195 Sequoia Capital, 291 Sessions, Roger, 8 sexual predators, 113 Shakespeare, William, 105 Sheets Energy Strips, 36 Shermer, Michael, 133 Shirky, Clay, 104 Shirky principle, 104, 112 Short History of Nearly Everything, A (Bryson), 50 short-termism, 55–56, 58, 60, 68, 85 side effects, 137 signal and noise, 311 significance, 167 statistical, 164–67, 170 Silicon Valley, 288, 289 simulations, 193–95 simultaneous invention, 291–92 Singapore math, 23–24 Sir David Attenborough, RSS, 35 Skeptics Society, 133 sleep meditation app, 162–68 slippery slope argument, 235 slow (high-concentration) thinking, 30, 33, 70–71 small numbers, law of, 143, 144 smartphones, 117, 290, 309, 310 smoking, 41, 42, 133–34, 139, 173 Snap, 299 Snowden, Edward, 52, 53 social engineering, 97 social equality, 117 social media, 81, 94, 113, 217–19, 241 Facebook, 18, 36, 94, 119, 219, 233, 247, 305, 308 Instagram, 220, 247, 291, 310 YouTube, 220, 291 social networks, 117 Dunbar’s number and, 278 social norms versus market norms, 222–24 social proof, 217–20, 229 societal change, 100–101 software, 56, 57 simulations, 192–94 solitaire, 195 solution space, 97 Somalia, 243 sophomore slump, 145–46 South Korea, 229, 231, 238 Soviet Union: Germany and, 70, 238–39 Gosplan in, 49 in Cold War, 209, 235 space exploration, 209 spacing effect, 262 Spain, 243–44 spam, 37, 161, 192–93, 234 specialists, 252–53 species, 120 spending, 38, 74–75 federal, 75–76 spillover effects, 41, 43 sports, 82–83 baseball, 83, 145–46, 289 football, 226, 243 Olympics, 209, 246–48, 285 Spotify, 299 spreadsheets, 179, 180, 182, 299 Srinivasan, Balaji, 301 standard deviation, 149, 150–51, 154 standard error, 154 standards, 93 Stanford Law School, x Starbucks, 296 startup business idea, 6–7 statistics, 130–32, 146, 173, 289, 297 base rate in, 157, 159, 160 base rate fallacy in, 157, 158, 170 Bayesian, 157–60 confidence intervals in, 154–56, 159 confidence level in, 154, 155, 161 frequentist, 158–60 p-hacking in, 169, 172 p-values in, 164, 165, 167–69, 172 standard deviation in, 149, 150–51, 154 standard error in, 154 statistical significance, 164–67, 170 summary, 146, 147 see also data; experiments; probability distributions Staubach, Roger, 243 Sternberg, Robert, 290 stock and flow diagrams, 192 Stone, Douglas, 19 stop the bleeding, 234 strategy, 107–8 exit, 242–43 loss leader, 236–37 pivoting and, 295–96, 298–301, 308, 311, 312 tactics versus, 256–57 strategy tax, 103–4, 112 Stiglitz, Joseph, 306 straw man, 225–26 Streisand, Barbra, 51 Streisand effect, 51, 52 Stroll, Cliff, 290 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The (Kuhn), 24 subjective versus objective, in organizational culture, 274 suicide, 218 summary statistics, 146, 147 sunk-cost fallacy, 91 superforecasters, 206–7 Superforecasting (Tetlock), 206–7 super models, viii–xii super thinking, viii–ix, 3, 316, 318 surface area, 122 luck, 122, 124, 128 surgery, 136–37 Surowiecki, James, 203–5 surrogate endpoint, 137 surveys, see polls and surveys survivorship bias, 140–43, 170, 272 sustainable competitive advantage, 283, 285 switching costs, 305 systematic review, 172, 173 systems thinking, 192, 195, 198 tactics, 256–57 Tajfel, Henri, 127 take a step back, 298 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, 2, 105 talk past each other, 225 Target, 236, 252 target, measurable, 49–50 taxes, 39, 40, 56, 104, 193–94 T cells, 194 teams, 246–48, 275 roles in, 256–58, 260 size of, 278 10x, 248, 249, 255, 260, 273, 280, 294 Tech, 83 technical debt, 56, 57 technologies, 289–90, 295 adoption curves of, 115 adoption life cycles of, 116–17, 129, 289, 290, 311–12 disruptive, 308, 310–11 telephone, 118–19 temperature: body, 146–50 thermostats and, 194 tennis, 2 10,000-Hour Rule, 261 10x individuals, 247–48 10x teams, 248, 249, 255, 260, 273, 280, 294 terrorism, 52, 234 Tesla, Inc., 300–301 testing culture, 50 Tetlock, Philip E., 206–7 Texas sharpshooter fallacy, 136 textbooks, 262 Thaler, Richard, 87 Theranos, 228 thermodynamics, 124 thermostats, 194 Thiel, Peter, 72, 288, 289 thinking: black-and-white, 126–28, 168, 272 convergent, 203 counterfactual, 201, 272, 309–10 critical, 201 divergent, 203 fast (low-concentration), 30, 70–71 gray, 28 inverse, 1–2, 291 lateral, 201 outside the box, 201 slow (high-concentration), 30, 33, 70–71 super, viii–ix, 3, 316, 318 systems, 192, 195, 198 writing and, 316 Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman), 30 third story, 19, 92 thought experiment, 199–201 throwing good money after bad, 91 throwing more money at the problem, 94 tight versus loose, in organizational culture, 274 timeboxing, 75 time: management of, 38 as money, 77 work and, 89 tipping point, 115, 117, 119, 120 tit-for-tat, 214–15 Tōgō Heihachirō, 241 tolerance, 117 tools, 95 too much of a good thing, 60 top idea in your mind, 71, 72 toxic culture, 275 Toys “R” Us, 281 trade-offs, 77–78 traditions, 275 tragedy of the commons, 37–40, 43, 47, 49 transparency, 307 tribalism, 28 Trojan horse, 228 Truman Show, The, 229 Trump, Donald, 15, 206, 293 Trump: The Art of the Deal (Trump and Schwartz), 15 trust, 20, 124, 215, 217 trying too hard, 82 Tsushima, Battle of, 241 Tupperware, 217 TurboTax, 104 Turner, John, 127 turn lemons into lemonade, 121 Tversky, Amos, 9, 90 Twain, Mark, 106 Twitter, 233, 234, 296 two-front wars, 70 type I error, 161 type II error, 161 tyranny of small decisions, 38, 55 Tyson, Mike, 7 Uber, 231, 275, 288, 290 Ulam, Stanislaw, 195 ultimatum game, 224, 244 uncertainty, 2, 132, 173, 180, 182, 185 unforced error, 2, 10, 33 unicorn candidate, 257–58 unintended consequences, 35–36, 53–55, 57, 64–65, 192, 232 Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), 306 unique value proposition, 211 University of Chicago, 144 unknown knowns, 198, 203 unknowns: known, 197–98 unknown, 196–98, 203 urgency, false, 74 used car market, 46–47 U.S.

Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life
by Kristen R. Ghodsee
Published 16 May 2023

But in order to understand why it often feels so difficult to engage in blue-sky thinking, we must turn our attention to the primary institution that first encouraged most of us to give up daydreaming for studying and to trade in our own imaginations for other people’s knowledge. How Many Einsteins Did We Miss? By now, you may have predicted that, as with so many other visions deemed utopian, most ideal imaginings of education trace their roots back to our ancient Greek radical in robes, Plato. Although many aspects of his plans for social engineering are problematic, his influence on subsequent generations of political philosophers in the Western world is undeniable. The Republic is often considered the first work of educational theory. The French Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau drew inspiration from the Republic for Emile, his own book about the ideal education system for boys, calling Plato’s work “the finest treatise on education ever written.”8 Rousseau believed that the public provision of schooling for all, as opposed to private and domestic schooling for a select few, played an essential role in the creation of an enlightened citizenry.

…

When Nyerere included agricultural labor as an integral part of education, he wanted students to appreciate the importance of such work within Tanzania and to reject the British colonial notion that work on the land was only something for the “losers” of society. A typical reaction to utopian visions for reimagining what and how we teach our children in school is that instilling youth with a particular set of ideals, no matter how well-intentioned, is some kind of social engineering or brainwashing, and it’s probably true that Makarenko enjoyed so much success with the Gorky Colony and the Dzerzhinsky Commune because the children he taught were orphans and runaways and he never had to deal with their mothers and fathers. Spend just fifteen minutes on the websites of groups like Parents Against Critical Theory (PACT) and you will see the word “indoctrination” used multiple times.

…

Rather than family abolition, I explore visions of family expansionism that allow us to each arrange our domestic lives free from the meddling of state or religious authorities. This is ultimately a utopian call for a world in which we can choose our own definitions of family; to liberate the concept of “family” from the stranglehold of millennia worth of dogma and crass social engineering. The Evolutionary Lessons of Chimpanzee Testes Throughout history, people have believed that the specific ways they organize their private lives reflect the way that human private lives have always been organized. But within the scholarly worlds of history, anthropology, archaeogenetics, psychology, and evolutionary biology, a broad consensus suggests that there is nothing inevitable about the traditional picture of the nuclear family consisting of a monogamous pair who provides virtually all of the care and resources for their biological offspring.

Smart Cities, Digital Nations
by Caspar Herzberg
Published 13 Apr 2017

Cisco’s engineers were the best of their kind, but they were not social engineers. Connected real estate was a natural progression of the firm’s services as IoE infrastructure first took root, but it had brought the company to a much more challenging and socially vital role. Cisco was not just discussing how to bring forth cutting-edge technology; now the team was helping Cisco’s clients push forward initiatives that promoted national growth and competitiveness. At the same time, this was also the company’s first chance to partner on a level that could reasonably be described as social engineering. While the Saudi government was open about its intention to stay out of the way of business, its influence, through SAGIA and other channels, was still enormous as KAEC moved toward the execution stage.

The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social
by Steffen Mau
Published 12 Jun 2017

It was due to discoveries like these that social security systems began to develop in many European countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Ewald 1988). If social research played an important part in the approach to social problems in the early phase of industrialization, then a second wave of quantification can be identified during the heyday of ‘social engineering’. In the sixties and seventies, a concept of social management asserted itself that was likewise based on data, but harboured much wider ambitions. Essentially, it was concerned with the targeted use of scientific knowledge in the interests of forward-looking, plan-oriented politics, and hence with the self-management capabilities of society as a whole.

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Index ‘20-70-10’ rule 155 academics 139 and altmetrics 77–8 and h-index 75–6, 139, 144 self-documentation and self-presentation 76–7 status markers 74–8 accountability 3, 91, 115, 120, 134, 147, 159 accounting, rise of modern 17 activism alliance with statistics 127 Acxiom 164–5 ADM (automated decision-making) 63 Aenta 108 Airbnb 88 airlines and status miles 71–2 algorithms 7, 64, 127, 167 and nomination power 123–5, 126, 141–2 AlgorithmWatch 127 altmetrics 77–8 Amazon 96, 150, 156 American Consumers Union 167 apps 99, 105, 150 finance 66–7 fitness and health 68, 102–3, 104, 107 Moven 65–6 Asian crisis (1997) 57 audit society 24–5 automated decision-making (ADM) 63 averages, regime of 155–7 Barlösius, Eva 113 Baty, Phil 48 Bauman, Zygmunt 143 behavioural reactivity 131 benchmarks, regime of 155–7 Berlin, television tower 40 Better Life Index 20 Big Data 2, 79, 123 biopolitics 19 of the market 70 biopower 19 Boam, Eric 104 body images, regime of 156–7 Boltanzki, Luc 125–6 border controls 73–4 borders, smart 74 Bourdieu, Pierre 111, 114, 115, 162 BP 108 Bude, Heinz 37 bureaucracy 18 calculative practices 11, 124 expansion of 11, 115 and the market 15–17 Campbell, Donald T. 130–1 Campbell's Law 130–1 capitalism 15, 54, 55 digital 150 capitalists of the self 163 Carter, Allan 48 Chiapello, Ève 125–6 Chief Financial Officer (CFO) 17 China Sesame Credit 67 Social Credit System 1, 166 choice revolution 118–19 class and status 33 class conflict switch to individual competition 168–70 classification 60–80 see also scoring; screening collective body 104–6 collective of non-equals 166–8 commensurability 31–3, 44, 159 Committee of Inquiry on ‘Growth, Wealth and Quality of Life’ (Germany) 127 commodification 163, 164 Community (sitcom) 96 companies 16–17 comparison 7, 26–39, 159 and commensurability/incommensurability 31–3 and competition 28 dispositive(s) of 7, 28–31, 159, 169 new horizons of 33–5 part of everyday life 27 prerequisites for social 35–6 registers of 135–9 and self-esteem 30 shifts in class structure of 33 and status 29–30, 36–7 universalization of 27–8 COMPAS (Correctional Offender Management Profiling or Alternative Sanctions) 79 competition 6, 7, 115–19, 159–60 and comparison 28 increasing glorification of 159 and neoliberalism 23 and performance measurement 115–19 and quantification 116–17 and rankings 45 switch from class conflict to individual 168–70 competitive singularities 169 consumer generated content (CGC) 85–6 control datafication and increased 143, 147, 169 individualization of social 143 levers of social 144 relationship between quantification and 78 conventionalization 128 Cordray, Julia 97 Correctional Offender Management Profiling or Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) 79 Corruption Perceptions Index 26 cosmetic indicators 135 Couchsurfing 88 credit risk colonialization 64 credit scoring 63–7 and social status 67 criminal recidivism, scoring and assessment of 62–3, 79 criteria reductionism 22 cumulative advantages, theory of 174 CureTogether 106 customer reviews 82–6, 87, 88 Dacadoo 68 Daily Telegraph 149 darknet 87 data behaviourism 171 data leaks 152 data literacy 21 data mining 4, 22, 163 data protection 72, 142 data repositories 62, 73–4 data storage 22, 73, 135 data voluntarism 4, 152, 153, 159 dating markets and health scores 70 de Botton, Alain 30 decoupling 133, 136, 174–5 democratization and digitalization 166 difference 2 visibilization and the creation of 40–3 ‘difference revolution’ digitalization giving rise to 166–7 digital capitalism 150 digital disenfranchisement of citizens 151 digital health plans 70 digital medical records 67 digitalization 2, 7, 21–2, 25, 63, 73, 80, 111, 123, 180 and democratization 166 giving rise to ‘difference revolution’ 166–7 as ‘great leveller’ 166 quantitative bias of 124 disembedding 13 distance, technology of 23–4 diversity versus monoculture 137–40 doctors, evaluation of by patients 92–3 Doganova, Liliana 5–6 double-entry bookkeeping 15, 163 e-recruitment 61 eBay 87 economic valuation theory 5 economization 22–4, 38, 115, 117 and rise of rankings 46 education and evaluation 89–91 evaluation of tutors by students 89–90 law schools 44, 138–9 output indicators and resource allocation in higher 132 and Pisa system 122, 145–6 Eggers, Dave The Circle 41, 82–3 employer review sites 83 entrepreneurial self 3, 154 epistemic communities 121 equivalence 16, 27 Espeland, Wendy 44, 139 esteem 29, 30 and estimation 15, 38 see also self-esteem Etzioni, Amitai The Active Society 20 European Union 122 evaluation 81–98 connection with recognition 38 cult and spread of 7, 97–8, 134 education sector 89–91 loss of time and energy 136 and medical sector 91–3 peer-to-peer ratings 87–8 portals as selectors 84–6 pressure exerted by reviews 147–8 and professions 89–93 qualitative 117 satisfaction surveys 82–4 and social media 93–8 of tutors by students 89–90 evidence-basing 3 exercise and self-tracking 101–4 expert systems 7 transnational 121–2 experts, nomination power of 119–23, 126 Facebook 94 FanSlave 95 Federal Foreign Office (Germany) 53 feedback power of 147–8 and social media 93–4 Fertik, Michael 66 Fitch 56 fitness apps 68, 102–3, 104, 107 Floridi, Luciano 105 Foucault, Michel 19 Fourcade, Marion 163–4 Franck, Georg 29 fraud 137 Frey, Bruno ‘Publishing as Prostitution’ 146 ‘gaming the system’ 132 GDP (gross domestic product) 14 dispute over alternatives to 127–8 General Electric 155 Germany Excellence Initiative 51 higher education institutes 52–3 Gerstner, Louis V. 130 Glassdoor.com 83 global governance 122 globalization 34, 73 governance 12 self- 19, 37, 105 state as data manager 17–20 ‘government at a distance’ 145 governmentality 112 GPS systems 150 Granovetter, Mark ‘The strength of weak ties’ 147 gross domestic product see GDP h-index 75–6, 139, 144 halo effect 90 Han, Byung-Chul 154 Hanoi, rat infestation of 130 happiness and comparison 30 Hawthorne effect 107 health and self-tracking 101–4 health apps 68, 102–3, 104, 107 health scores 67–71 health status, quantified 67–71 Healy, Kieran 163–4 Heintz, Bettina 14, 33, 34 hierarchization/hierarchies 1, 5, 6, 11, 33, 39, 40–59, 174 and rankings 41–2, 43, 44, 48 higher education, output indicators and resource allocation 132 Hirsch, Jorge E. 75 home nursing care 135–6 hospitals and performance indicators 131 Human Development Index 14 hyperindividualization 167–8 identity theory 29 incommensurability 31–3 indicators 2, 3, 5, 20, 23–4, 34, 114, 159 and competition 116–17 and concept of reactive measurements 129–33 cosmetic 135 economic 7 governance by 24 politics of 14 status 35, 75 see also performance indicators individualization of social control 143 industrial revolution 19 inequality 6, 8, 158–76 collectives of non-equals 166–8 establishment of worth 160–2 inescapability and status fluidity 170–4 reputation management 162–6 switch from class conflict to individual competition 168–70 inescapability of status 170–4 information economy 2 information transmission interfaces, between social subsystems 165–6 institutional theory 113 insurance companies 72, 108, 151, 152, 167 International Labour Organization 122 investive status work 36–7 Italian Job, The (film) 138 justice 126 Kaube, Jürgen 2 Kula, Witold 16 Latour, Bruno 34 law schools 44, 138–9 league tables 35, 43, 46, 47, 51, 52, 53, 91, 138, 139, 146, 162, 175 legitimate test, concept of 125–6 Lenin, Vladimir 116 lifelogging 99, 109, 153 Luhmann, Niklas 166 Lyon, David 142 McClusky, Mark 101 McCullough, Nicole 97 Mann, Steve 153 market(s) calculative practices of 15–17 and neoliberalism 23 and rating agencies 55–6 Marron, Donncha 65 Matthew effect 174–5 measurement, meaning 10 media reporting 33 medical sector and evaluation 91–3 hospitals and performance indicators 131–2 MedXSafe 70 meritocracy 23, 161 Merton, Robert K. 161, 174 ‘metric revolution’ 16 Miller, Peter 112 mobility 71–4 border controls 73 digital monitoring of 72 and scoring 71–4 smart cars 72 and status miles 71–2 money as means of exchange 16 monoculture versus diversity 137–40 mood, self-tracking of 101–4 Moody's 56 motivation 106–10 and rankings 45 Moven 65–6 Münch, Richard 145 Nachtwey, Oliver 150 naturalization 113 neoliberalism 3, 12, 23, 25 basic tenets of 23 New Public Management 3, 117, 136, 155 NHS (National Health Service) 118 nomination power 111–28 and algorithms 123–5, 126, 141–2 critique of 125–8 and economization 115 of experts 119–23, 126 performance measurement and the framing of competition 115–19 and the state 112–15 non-equals, collectives of 166–8 normative pressure 144–6 North Korea 144 ‘number rush’ 2 numbers 13–14, 15 numerical medium 8, 14, 16, 18, 28, 33, 113, 160, 166 objectivization 35, 154, 160 OECD 122 Offe, Claus 175 Old Testament 17 omnimetrics 9 O’Neil, Cathy Weapons of Math Destruction 79 optimization 12, 25 Oral Roberts University (Oklahoma) 108 Peeple app 96–7 peer-to-peer ratings 87–8 Pentland, Alex 151 people analytics 150–1 performance enhancement 12 performance indicators 12, 38, 53, 74, 118, 119, 120, 129, 155 and hospitals 131–2 performance measurement 23, 38, 115–19 performance-oriented funding allocation 22 performance paradox 132 performance targets 4 Personicx 165 Pisa system 122, 145–6 politicians 14, 120 politics 114 portals 84–6, 88, 90–1 power of nomination see nomination power prestige 8, 29, 67, 144 principal–agent problem 147–8 private consultancy services 117 professional control, loss of 133–4 professionalization 19, 133 professions and evaluation 89–93 publicity 33 QS ranking 52 qualitative evaluation 117 quantification advantages of 8 engines of 21–5 history 11 impact and consequences of 5, 6 meaning 10, 12–15 risks and side-effects 7, 129–40 role of 35 quantified self 99–110 Quantified Self (network) 99–100 quantitative evaluation see evaluation quantitative mentality 11–12 quasi-markets 116, 118–19 race and assessment of criminal recidivism risk 79 rankings 47–53, 58–9, 60, 144 and competition 45 and compliance 44 differences between ratings and 42–3 disadvantage of 43–4 economization and rise of 46 and evaluation portals 84–6 and hierarchies 41–2, 43, 44, 48 and image fetishization 47 and motivation 45 as objectivity generators 41 performance-enhancing role 46 popularity of 41 as positional goods 45 purpose of 45 and reputation 48, 49, 50, 52 as social ushers 42 and status anxiety 46–7 university 6, 7, 43, 47–53, 144, 175 Welch's forced 155–6 rating agencies, market power of 53–9 ratings 41–3, 53–9, 60 definition 54 differences between rankings and 42–3 and evaluation portals 84–6 as objectivity generators 41 peer-to-peer 87–8 as social ushers 42 rationalization 5, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19, 105, 110, 154, 163 Raz, Joseph 31–2 reactive measurements 129–33 recommendation marketing 85 recruitment, e- 61 reference group theory 29 reputation 29, 39, 66, 74, 121 academic 75–6 cultivating good 47 and rankings 48, 49, 50, 52 rating of 87–8 signal value of 87 social media and like-based 93–8 reputation management 4, 50, 162–6 reputation scoring 87–8 research community 146 and evaluation system 146 and review system 146–7 ResearchGate 77 reviews 136 customer 82–6, 87, 88 doctor 92 high demand for 136 lecturers/tutors 90 performance 25, 149 pressure exerted by popular 147 Riesman, David 37 risks of quantification 129–40 loss of professional control 133–5 loss of time and energy 135–7 monoculture versus diversity 137–40 reactive measurements 129–33 Rosa, Hartmut 94, 173 Rose, Nikolas 112 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 28–9 running apps 107 Runtastic app 107 satisfaction surveys 82–4 Sauder, Michael 44, 139 Schimank, Uwe 134 Schirrmacher, Frank 152 Schmidt, Eric 147 schools and choice 118–19 evaluation of 90–1 league tables 46 and Pisa system 122, 145–6 scoring 7, 60, 61, 78–80 academic status markers 74–8 and assessment of criminal recidivism 62–3 credit 63–7 health 67–71 mobility value 71–4 pitfalls 79 screening 7, 60–1, 78–9 border controls 73–4 e-recruitment 61–2 function 60–1 smart cars 72 self-direction 105, 121, 143 self-documentation 153 and academic world 76–7 self-enhancement 3, 137 self-esteem 29, 37, 170 and comparison 29, 30 rankings and university staff 50–1 self-governance 19, 37, 105 self-image 37, 47, 50, 89 self-management 3, 20, 25 self-observation 25, 42 quantified 99–110 self-optimization 3, 19, 104, 109, 163 self-quantification/quantifiers 4, 13, 25, 101, 154–5, 156 self-reification 105 self-responsibility 25, 110 self-tracking 4, 7, 99, 100, 106, 109–10 collective body 104–6 as duty or social expectation 108 emotions provoked 109 health, exercise and mood 101–4 and motivation 106–10 problems with wearable technologies 103–4 running and fitness apps 68, 102–3, 104, 107 and sousveillance 153 as third-party tracking 154 self-worth 29, 36, 38, 47, 51, 170 and market value 67 Sesame Credit (China) 67 Shanghai ranking 47 ‘shared body’ 105 shared data 142, 152–3 Simmel, Georg 28 ‘small improvement argument’ 32 smart borders 74 smart cars 72 smart cities 21 smart homes 21 ‘social accounts’ 20 Social Credit System (China) 1, 166 social engineering 20 social management 20 social media 93–8, 153, 166 drivers of activity 93 and feedback 93–4 forms of connection 93 likes 93–5 and online disinhibition 153 and reputation building 95 resonance generated by 94 and running/fitness apps 107 social research 19–20 social security systems 19 social status see status social worth see worth socio-psychological rank theory 46 sociometrics/sociometers 2, 5, 36, 74, 141, 150–1 Sombart, Werner Modern Capitalism 15–16 sousveillance 153 sport 33 rise of world 35 Staab, Philipp 149–50 Stalder, Felix 124 Standard & Poor's 54, 56 statactivism 127 state as data manager 17–20 nomination power of the 112–15 statistics 14 origins of word 17 status and class 33 and comparison 29–30, 36–7 and credit scoring 67 inescapability from 170–4 and life satisfaction 30 seeking of 36 status anxiety 30 and rankings 46–7 status competition 26–39 status data 2, 80, 159, 161–2, 169, 174 functioning as symbolic data 8, 162 status fluidity 170–4 status insecurity 4 status miles 71–2 status sets 161–2 status symbols 158 status work 4, 36–7, 174 Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission (France) 127 Streeck, Wolfgang 171–2 subprime crisis (2007) 57, 64 surveillance 8, 142, 152 interdependence of self- and external 153–5 and neoliberalism 23 workplace and technological 149–51 surveys, satisfaction 82–4 symbolic capital 174 status data as 8, 162 target setting 22 tariff models 152–3 technological surveillance, in the workplace 149–51 technologies of the self 25 tertium comparationis 32 Thomas theorem 59 Thompson, David C. 66 Times Higher Education ranking 47, 48, 53 tourism portals 85 tracking as double-edged sword 142 see also self-tracking trade relations 16 transnational expert systems 121–2 transparency 3, 91, 141–3, 144, 147 Transparency International 26 ‘transparent body’ 105 TripAdvisor 85 Trustpilot 86 Turkey 54 tutors evaluation of by students 89–90 Uber 156 űbercapital 163–4 UN Sustainable Development Goals 20 United Nations 122 university lecturers evaluation of 89–90 object of online reviews 90 university rankings 6, 7, 43, 47–53, 144, 175 valorization 5, 58, 124, 161 valuation 5–6 value registration 161 Vietnam War 131 visibilization, and the creation of difference 40–3 Webb, Jarrett 104 Weber, Max 15, 16, 154 Weiß, Manfred 119 Welch, Jack 155 ‘winner-take-all society’ 136 Wolf, Gary 99–100 Woolgar, Steve 34 workplace technological surveillance in the 149–51 World Bank 122 worth 5–6, 7, 11, 78–80, 170 assessments of 27 establishment of 160–2 orders of 11, 15, 29 self- 29, 36, 38, 47, 51, 67, 170 Young, Michael 161 The Rise of Meritocracy 23, 161 Zillien, Nicole 105 Zuckerberg, Mark 158 POLITY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT Go to www.politybooks.com/eula to access Polity's ebook EULA.

Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America
by Angie Schmitt
Published 26 Aug 2020

“This was around the time Republicans like [former Wisconsin Governor] Scott Walker were killing off High Speed Rail,” which had been proposed and passed early in Obama’s term as part of the stimulus bill, he said. “There’s this message that cars are crucial to the American way of life and that Democrats are trying to engage in social engineering.”17 Whatever the underlying cause, Republican-led assaults on transportation funding continued throughout the Obama administration and beyond. In 2015, for example, as Congress was gearing up to pass another transportation bill, Americans for Prosperity and a number of other right-wing groups associated with the infamous dark money political donors Charles and David Koch wrote a letter to Congress calling for total elimination of federal walking and biking funds.18 They might have succeeded, given the new Republican majorities in the House and Senate, were it not for Rick Larsen, congressman from Washington state, who rallied minority Democrats on the House Transportation Committee to refuse to advance any bill that eliminated federal support for biking and walking.19 By 2015, when the bill was passed, pedestrian deaths were already 25 percent higher than they had been just five years prior, but the issue failed to register in federal negotiations.

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This cost could be 5-50 thousand per intersection,” Twitter, January 10, 2019, 11:04 a.m., https://twitter.com/schlthss/status/1083394093848375296?s=20. 9. Bill Schultheiss (@schlthss), “Of course when we discuss cost of infrastructure we are making policy decisions and value judgments regarding who is important and who’s life has value. Our design decisions are *social engineering* the behavior of society,” Twitter, January 16, 2019, 11:16 a.m., https://twitter.com/schlthss/status/1083397142134358017?s=20. 10. Bill Schultheiss, telephone interview, November 16, 2019. 11. Data USA, “Civil Engineering,” accessed February 28, 2020, https://datausa.io/profile/soc/172051. 12.

The Tangled Web: A Guide to Securing Modern Web Applications
by Michal Zalewski
Published 26 Nov 2011

These measures are drastic enough to severely hinder the adoption of internationalized domain names, probably to a point where the standard’s lingering presence causes more security problems than it brings real usability benefits to non-English users. * * * [13] Similar noncanonical encodings were widely used for various types of social engineering attacks, and consequently, various countermeasures have been deployed through the years. As usual, some of these countermeasures are disruptive (for example, Firefox flat out rejects percent-encoded text in hostnames), and some are fairly good (such as the forced “canonicalization” of the address bar by decoding all the unnecessarily encoded text for display purposes).

…

Timing Attacks on User Interfaces The problems we’ve discussed so far in this chapter may be hard to fix, but at least in principle, the solutions are not out of reach. Still, here’s a preposterous question: Could the current model of web scripting be fundamentally incompatible with the way human beings work? By that, I do not mean merely the dangers of web-delivered social engineering that targets the inattentive and the easily confused; rather, I’m asking if it’s possible for scripts to consistently outsmart alert and knowledgeable victims simply due to the inherent limitations of human cognition? The question is outlandish enough not to be asked often, yet the answer may be yes.

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See RFC (Request for Comments), Basic Syntax of HTTP Traffic request headers, in HTTP, Basic Syntax of HTTP Traffic request types, Referer Header Behavior, Plain Links, Plain Links form-triggered, Plain Links HTTP, Referer Header Behavior reserved characters, in HTML, Putting It All Together Again, Basic Concepts Behind HTML Documents resource exhaustion attacks, Denial-of-Service Attacks response codes, server, CONNECT response splitting, Newline Handling Quirks Restricted sites zone, for Internet Explorer, Form-Based Password Managers revalidation, Caching Behavior RFC (Request for Comments), It Starts with a URL, It Starts with a URL, It Starts with a URL, Scheme Name, Scheme Name, Indicator of a Hierarchical URL, Hierarchical File Path, Hierarchical File Path, Hierarchical File Path, Query String, Handling of Non-US-ASCII Text, Handling of Non-US-ASCII Text, Handling of Non-US-ASCII Text, Hypertext Transfer Protocol, Hypertext Transfer Protocol, Hypertext Transfer Protocol, Basic Syntax of HTTP Traffic, Proxy Requests, Resolution of Duplicate or Conflicting Headers, Header Character Set and Encoding Schemes, Header Character Set and Encoding Schemes, CONNECT, CONNECT, Chunked Data Transfers, Caching Behavior, Caching Behavior, HTTP Cookie Semantics, HTTP Cookie Semantics, HTTP Cookie Semantics, HTTP Cookie Semantics, Protocol-Level Encryption and Client Certificates, Hypertext Markup Language, Impact on Potential Uses of the Language, Content Recognition Mechanisms, Special Content-Type Values, Unrecognized Content Type 1630, Scheme Name, Hierarchical File Path, Query String on query string format, Hierarchical File Path on reference parser, Scheme Name 1738, on URLs, It Starts with a URL, Scheme Name 1866, on HTML 2.0, Hypertext Markup Language 1945, Hypertext Transfer Protocol, Hypertext Transfer Protocol, Header Character Set and Encoding Schemes and TEXT token, Header Character Set and Encoding Schemes on HTTP, Hypertext Transfer Protocol 2046, on application/octet-stream, Special Content-Type Values 2047, for non-ISO-8859-1 string format, Header Character Set and Encoding Schemes 2109, on cookies, Caching Behavior, HTTP Cookie Semantics, HTTP Cookie Semantics 2183, on Content-Disposition header, Unrecognized Content Type 2368, on query string format, Hierarchical File Path 2616, It Starts with a URL, Hypertext Transfer Protocol, Basic Syntax of HTTP Traffic, Proxy Requests, CONNECT, Chunked Data Transfers on GET requests, Chunked Data Transfers on HTTP, Hypertext Transfer Protocol on resolving ambiguities, Proxy Requests on URLs, It Starts with a URL status codes for server response, CONNECT 2617, on authentication, HTTP Cookie Semantics 2818, on encapsulation, Protocol-Level Encryption and Client Certificates 2965, on Cookie2, Caching Behavior 3490, Handling of Non-US-ASCII Text 3492, Handling of Non-US-ASCII Text 3986, It Starts with a URL, Indicator of a Hierarchical URL, Handling of Non-US-ASCII Text 4627, on JSON, Impact on Potential Uses of the Language 4918, on WebDAV, CONNECT 6265, on cookies, HTTP Cookie Semantics browser permissions to examine payload, Content Recognition Mechanisms on HTTP, Resolution of Duplicate or Conflicting Headers RFI (remote file inclusion), Problems to Keep in Mind in Web Application Design rgb(...) pseudo functions (CSS), Basic CSS Syntax Riley, Chris John, Unrecognized Content Type Rios, Billy, Invoking a Plug-in risk management, Enter Risk Management root object in JavaScript, E4X and Other Syntax Extensions Ross, David, In-Browser HTML Sanitizers rotate(...) pseudo functions (CSS), Basic CSS Syntax RSS (Really Simple Syndication), XML User Interface Language rtsp: scheme, Common URL Schemes and Their Function runtime environment, for JavaScript, Code and Object Inspection Capabilities S Safari (Apple), Web 2.0 and the Second Browser Wars: 2004 and Beyond, Indicator of a Hierarchical URL, Newline Handling Quirks, HTTP Authentication, Hypertext Markup Language, Overriding Built-Ins, RSS and Atom Feeds, Same-Origin Policy for the Document Object Model, Limitations on Third-Party Cookies, Document Type Detection Logic, Special Content-Type Values, Denial-of-Service Attacks, Window-Positioning and Appearance Problems, Form-Based Password Managers and credential portion of URLs, Indicator of a Hierarchical URL and multiline headers, Newline Handling Quirks and realm string, HTTP Authentication deleting JavaScript function, Overriding Built-Ins hiding address bar, Window-Positioning and Appearance Problems RSS and Atom renderers for, RSS and Atom Feeds SOP bypass flaws, Same-Origin Policy for the Document Object Model stored password retrieval, Form-Based Password Managers SWF file handling without Content-Type, Document Type Detection Logic text/plain document type, Special Content-Type Values third-party cookies, Limitations on Third-Party Cookies time limits on continuously executing scripts, Denial-of-Service Attacks WebKit parsing engine, Hypertext Markup Language safeInnerHTML API, In-Browser HTML Sanitizers same-origin policy mechanism, Nonconvergence of Visions, Content Isolation Logic, Interactions with Browser Credentials, Same-Origin Policy for XMLHttpRequest, Security Policy for Cookies, Pseudo-URLs, Life Outside Same-Origin Rules, Privacy-Related Side Channels and pseudo-URLs, Pseudo-URLs cookies impact on, Security Policy for Cookies for Document Object Model, Content Isolation Logic for web storage, Same-Origin Policy for XMLHttpRequest for XMLHttpRequest API, Interactions with Browser Credentials limitations, Life Outside Same-Origin Rules loopholes, Privacy-Related Side Channels sandbox directive, Primary CSP Directives sandboxed frames, Criticisms of CSP, Scripting, Forms, and Navigation, Synthetic Origins, In-Browser HTML Sanitizers, XSS Filtering scripting, forms and navigation restrictions, Scripting, Forms, and Navigation synthetic origins, Synthetic Origins sanitization, Explicit and Implicit Conditionals, Other Developments, In-Browser HTML Sanitizers in-browser HTML, Other Developments of tags, Explicit and Implicit Conditionals Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), Type-Specific Content Inclusion, Scalable Vector Graphics scale(...) pseudo functions (CSS), Basic CSS Syntax schemes, It Starts with a URL, It Starts with a URL, Scheme Name, Resolution of Relative URLs, Navigation to Sensitive Schemes current list of valid names, It Starts with a URL input filters, Resolution of Relative URLs name in URLs, It Starts with a URL navigation to sensitive, Navigation to Sensitive Schemes Schwab, Charles, Internet Explorer’s Zone Model screen object (JavaScript), Standard Object Hierarchy script-nonce directive, Primary CSP Directives script-src directive (CSP), Content Security Policy scripts, Type-Specific Content Inclusion, Browser-Side Scripts, The Document Object Model, Character Set Inheritance and Override, Dealing with Rogue Scripts, Denial-of-Service Attacks, Execution Time and Memory Use Restrictions, Connection Limits, Pop-Up Filtering access to other documents, The Document Object Model browser-side, Browser-Side Scripts connection limits, Execution Time and Memory Use Restrictions dialog use restrictions, Pop-Up Filtering execution time and memory use restrictions, Denial-of-Service Attacks pop-up filtering, Connection Limits rogue, Dealing with Rogue Scripts specifying charset, Character Set Inheritance and Override scrollbar, document-level, Unsolicited Framing Secure attribute, for cookie, HTTP Cookie Semantics secure cookies, Security Policy for Cookies, Other Uses of Origins security, Flirting with Formal Solutions, Enlightenment Through Taxonomy, Toward Practical Approaches, Content Isolation Logic, Content Isolation Logic, New and Upcoming Security Features actions subject to checks, Content Isolation Logic definition, Flirting with Formal Solutions new and upcoming features, New and Upcoming Security Features practical approaches, Enlightenment Through Taxonomy quality assurance, Toward Practical Approaches security dialogs, attacks on, Window-Positioning and Appearance Problems security engineering cheat sheet, Resolution of Relative URLs, Resolution of Relative URLs, Resolution of Relative URLs, Error-Handling Rules, Error-Handling Rules, Error-Handling Rules, Error-Handling Rules, A Note on Cross-Site Request Forgery, A Note on Cross-Site Request Forgery, A Note on Cross-Site Request Forgery, A Note on Cross-Site Request Forgery, Character Encoding, Character Encoding, Character Encoding, Character Encoding, The Living Dead: Visual Basic, The Living Dead: Visual Basic, The Living Dead: Visual Basic, The Living Dead: Visual Basic, The Living Dead: Visual Basic, A Note on Nonrenderable File Types, A Note on Nonrenderable File Types, Living with Other Plug-ins, Living with Other Plug-ins, Other Uses of Origins, Other Uses of Origins, Other Uses of Origins, Other Uses of Origins, Other Uses of Origins, Other Uses of Origins, A Note on Restricted Pseudo-URLs, Other SOP Loopholes and Their Uses, Other SOP Loopholes and Their Uses, Other SOP Loopholes and Their Uses, Limitations on Third-Party Cookies, Limitations on Third-Party Cookies, Limitations on Third-Party Cookies, Limitations on Third-Party Cookies, Detection for Non-HTTP Files, Detection for Non-HTTP Files, Detection for Non-HTTP Files, Timing Attacks on User Interfaces, Timing Attacks on User Interfaces, Mark of the Web and Zone.Identifier, Mark of the Web and Zone.Identifier, XSS Filtering, XSS Filtering, XSS Filtering, XSS Filtering, XSS Filtering, XSS Filtering, XSS Filtering, XSS Filtering building web applications on internal networks, Limitations on Third-Party Cookies Content Security Policy (CSP), XSS Filtering converting HTML to plaintext, A Note on Cross-Site Request Forgery cross-domain communications in JavaScript, Other Uses of Origins, Other SOP Loopholes and Their Uses cross-domain resources, Other SOP Loopholes and Their Uses cross-domain XMLHttpRequest (CORS), XSS Filtering data: and javascript: URLs, A Note on Restricted Pseudo-URLs decoding parameters received through URLs, Resolution of Relative URLs embedding plug-in-handled active content from third parties, Other Uses of Origins enabling plug-in-handled files, Living with Other Plug-ins filtering user-supplies CSS, Character Encoding generating documents with partly attacker-controlled contents, Detection for Non-HTTP Files generating HTML documents with attacker-controlled bits, A Note on Cross-Site Request Forgery good practices for all websites, Detection for Non-HTTP Files hosting user-generated files, Detection for Non-HTTP Files hosting XML-based document formats, A Note on Nonrenderable File Types hosting your own plug-in-executed content, Other Uses of Origins hygiene for all HTML documents, A Note on Cross-Site Request Forgery interacting with browser objects on client side, The Living Dead: Visual Basic launching non-HTTP services, Limitations on Third-Party Cookies loading remote scripts, The Living Dead: Visual Basic loading remote stylesheets, Character Encoding markup filter for user content, A Note on Cross-Site Request Forgery non-HTML document types, A Note on Nonrenderable File Types parsing JSON from server, The Living Dead: Visual Basic permitting user-created <iframe> gadgets on site, Timing Attacks on User Interfaces private browsing modes, XSS Filtering putting attacker-controlled values into CSS, Character Encoding relying on HTTP cookies for authentication, Other Uses of Origins requesting elevated permissions within web application, Mark of the Web and Zone.Identifier sandboxed frames, XSS Filtering security hygiene for all websites, Other SOP Loopholes and Their Uses security policy hygiene for all websites, Other Uses of Origins security-sensitive UIs, Timing Attacks on User Interfaces sending user-controlled location headers, Error-Handling Rules sending user-controlled redirect headers, Error-Handling Rules serving plug-in-handled files, Living with Other Plug-ins Strict Transport Security, XSS Filtering third-party cookies for gadgets or sandboxed content, Limitations on Third-Party Cookies toStaticHTML() API, XSS Filtering URL input filters, Resolution of Relative URLs URLs constructed based on user input, Resolution of Relative URLs user data in HTTP cookies, Error-Handling Rules user-controlled filenames in Content-Disposition headers, Error-Handling Rules user-controlled scripts, The Living Dead: Visual Basic user-specified class values on HTML markup, Character Encoding user-supplied data inside JavaScript blocks, The Living Dead: Visual Basic writing browser extensions, Other Uses of Origins writing plug-ins or extensions recognizing privileged origins, Mark of the Web and Zone.Identifier XDomainRequest, XSS Filtering XSS filtering, XSS Filtering security model extension frameworks, New and Upcoming Security Features, New and Upcoming Security Features, Current Status of CORS cross-domain requests, New and Upcoming Security Features XDomainRequest, Current Status of CORS security model restriction frameworks, Other Uses of the Origin Header Security.allowDomain(...) method, for Flash, Markup-Level Security Controls See Other status code (303), 300-399: Redirection and Other Status Messages selector suffixes, in CSS, Cascading Style Sheets self-closing tag syntax, Document Parsing Modes semantic web, Document Parsing Modes ; (semicolon), as delimiter, Fragment ID, Resolution of Duplicate or Conflicting Headers, Resolution of Duplicate or Conflicting Headers in HTTP headers, Resolution of Duplicate or Conflicting Headers in URLs, Fragment ID semicolon (;), as delimiter, Fragment ID, Resolution of Duplicate or Conflicting Headers, Resolution of Duplicate or Conflicting Headers in HTTP headers, Resolution of Duplicate or Conflicting Headers in URLs, Fragment ID server address, in URLs, Indicator of a Hierarchical URL server port, in URLs, Server Address server response codes, CONNECT server-side code, common problems unique to, Problems to Keep in Mind in Web Application Design server-side errors (500–599), 400-499: Client-Side Error Service Unavailable error (503), 400-499: Client-Side Error sessionStorage object (JavaScript), Same-Origin Policy for XMLHttpRequest Set-Cookie headers, HTTP Cookie Semantics setters, in JavaScript, Overriding Built-Ins SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Langauge), Tales of the Stone Age: 1945 to 1994 shared workers, for background processes, Content-Level Features Shockwave Flash, Adobe Flash SHODAN, Unrecognized Content Type showModalDialog() method, Connection Limits shttp: scheme, Common URL Schemes and Their Function Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), Server Port, Basic Syntax of HTTP Traffic, Access to Internal Networks sip: scheme, Common URL Schemes and Their Function site privileges, Extrinsic Site Privileges, Extrinsic Site Privileges browser- and plug-in-managed permissions, Extrinsic Site Privileges skew(...) pseudo functions (CSS), Basic CSS Syntax SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), Server Address, Basic Syntax of HTTP Traffic, Access to Internal Networks social engineering attacks, Reserved Characters and Percent Encoding software, difficulty analyzing behavior of, Flirting with Formal Solutions SPDY (Speedy), URL- and Protocol-Level Proposals Spyglass Mosaic, Tales of the Stone Age: 1945 to 1994 SSL, warnings appearance, Error-Handling Rules Standard Generalized Markup Langauge (SGML), Tales of the Stone Age: 1945 to 1994 statistical forecasting, Enter Risk Management Sterne, Brandon, Content Security Policy Stone, Paul, Unsolicited Framing Strict Transport Security (STS), Strict Transport Security, XSS Filtering strict XML mode, Document Parsing Modes stylesheets, Character Set Inheritance and Override, Primary CSP Directives, Primary CSP Directives CSP directive for, Primary CSP Directives specifying charset, Character Set Inheritance and Override subframes, CSP directive for, Primary CSP Directives subresources, Cross-Domain Content Inclusion, A Note on Cross-Origin Subresources, Character Set Inheritance and Override cross-origin, Cross-Domain Content Inclusion markup-controlled charset on, Character Set Inheritance and Override Sun Java, Properties of ActionScript, Policy File Spoofing Risks Sun Microsystems, The Perils of Plug-in Content-Type Handling SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), Type-Specific Content Inclusion, Generic XML View synchronous XMLHttpRequest, Interactions with Browser Credentials syntax-delimiting characters, in URLs, Putting It All Together Again T tags, in HTML, Hypertext Markup Language, Understanding HTML Parser Behavior, Interactions Between Multiple Tags, Explicit and Implicit Conditionals handling those not closed before end of file, Interactions Between Multiple Tags interactions, Understanding HTML Parser Behavior sanitization, Explicit and Implicit Conditionals target parameter, for <a href=...> tag (HTML), HTTP/HTML Integration Semantics, Life Outside Same-Origin Rules taxonomy, Enlightenment Through Taxonomy TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), Hypertext Transfer Protocol, Cross-Domain Policy Files, Access to Internal Networks connections via XMLSocket, Cross-Domain Policy Files list of prohibited ports, Access to Internal Networks TCP/IP, HTTP and, Hypertext Transfer Protocol Temporary Redirect status code (307), 300-399: Redirection and Other Status Messages testing, for Internet Explorer use, Access to Other Documents text message, sending to window with valid JavaScript handle, document.domain TEXT token, Header Character Set and Encoding Schemes text/css document type, Plaintext Files text/csv document type, Content Recognition Mechanisms text/html document type, RSS and Atom Feeds text/plain document type, Plaintext Files, Cross-Domain Policy Files, Special Content-Type Values, Defensive Uses of Content-Disposition, Detection for Non-HTTP Files third-party applications, protocols claimed by, Common URL Schemes and Their Function third-party cookies, limitations, Prohibited Ports threat evolution, The Evolution of a Threat, The Evolution of a Threat, The User as a Security Flaw, The User as a Security Flaw cloud, The User as a Security Flaw nonconvergence of visions, The User as a Security Flaw user as security flaw, The Evolution of a Threat Threats Against and Protection of Microsoft’s Internal Network (Microsoft), Enter Risk Management three-step TCP handshake, Keepalive Sessions TIFF file format, Type-Specific Content Inclusion timer, in JavaScript, Execution Ordering Control timing attacks, on user interfaces, Window-Positioning and Appearance Problems TLS (Transport Layer Security), Protocol-Level Encryption and Client Certificates top-level domains, Problems with Domain Restrictions toSource() method (JavaScript), Execution Ordering Control toStaticHTML() API, Other Developments, XSS Filtering toString() method (JavaScript), Execution Ordering Control TRACE method (HTTP), HEAD tracking, unscrupulous online, Limitations on Third-Party Cookies tragedy of the commons dilemma, Flirting with Formal Solutions Transfer-Encoding: chunked scheme, Chunked Data Transfers Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).

The Future of Technology
by Tom Standage
Published 31 Aug 2005

Kevin Mitnick, perhaps the most notorious hacker of recent years, relied heavily on human vulnerabilities to get into the computer systems of American government agencies and technology companies including Fujitsu, Motorola and Sun Microsystems. Testifying before a Senate panel on government computer security in 2000, after spending nearly five years in jail, Mr Mitnick explained that: T When I would try to get into these systems, the first line of attack would be what I call a social engineering attack, which really means trying to manipulate somebody over the phone through deception. I was so successful in that line of attack that I rarely had to go towards a technical attack. The human side of computer security is easily exploited and constantly overlooked. Companies spend millions of dollars on firewalls, encryption and secure access devices, and it’s money wasted, because none of these measures address the weakest link in the security chain.

…

Other common failings include writing passwords down on sticky notes attached to the computer’s monitor, or on whiteboards nearby; leaving machines logged on while out at lunch; and leaving laptop computers containing confidential information unsecured in public places. 58 SECURING THE CLOUD Unless they avoid such ele2.4 2.1 The enemy within mentary mistakes, a firm’s Security breaches experienced, % of companies: own employees may pose the 0 20 40 60 80 100 largest single risk to security. Insider abuse of internet access Not even technical staff who should know better are Laptop theft immune to social engineering. Unauthorised access by insiders According to Meta Group, the Unauthorised most common way for intrudaccessby outsiders ers to gain access to company Source: PentaSafe Security Technologies, 2002 systems is not technical, but simply involves finding out the full name and username of an employee (easily deduced from an email message), calling the help desk posing as that employee, and pretending to have forgotten the password.

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Like eco-warriors, he observes, those in the security industry – be they vendors trying to boost sales, academics chasing grants, or politicians looking for bigger budgets – have a built-in incentive to overstate the risks. POSTSCRIPT Since this section was published in 2002, digital security has remained a high priority for both companies and consumers. As technological defences have been strengthened against spam and viruses, scam artists have increasingly resorted to “social engineering” attacks such as “phishing”, in which internet users are tricked by bogus e-mails into revealing financial information that can be used to defraud them. Microsoft now releases security patches to its software once a month, which makes it easier for systems administrators to keep systems up to date.

A Burglar's Guide to the City
by Geoff Manaugh
Published 17 Mar 2015

Oh, he might say to a wealthy businessman or bank owner at a dinner party, as if he had just thought of something off the top of his head. I’m an architect, you know—I’d love to see the blueprints for your new bank downtown. I’m working on one myself and I’m having trouble with the vault. If I could just take a quick look, I’d be most appreciative. Do you have the plans here? Through good old-fashioned social engineering, Leslie would thus gain access to key documents or structural drawings of future targets—a backstage pass to the entire metropolis—the way a car aficionado might ask to take a peek under your hood. No one thought twice of it—why would they? Leslie dressed well, he had been trained as an architect, and his illicit spatial knowledge of the city only continued to grow.

…

Other times, you don’t need to go to nearly as much effort to get the spatial information you need. Before new buildings begin construction, Dakswin pointed out, they have to be approved by the city. So building designs are filed at city hall or even in the municipal water department. Then it’s just a question of social engineering, of convincing someone else that you need those plans. Dakswin described how essential this has been for him in the past: he actually registered a fake company—he wouldn’t say where, but I had to assume it was in Toronto—with the generic name of a legal services firm. He then contacted a local construction company saying that he needed to obtain a set of blueprints due to an impending lawsuit over broken water pipes in an apartment complex they had constructed.

Explore Everything
by Bradley Garrett
Published 7 Oct 2013

The middle class, true to its name, moves horizontally and overlooks most of what doesn’t concern it, including builders. When we dressed up in high-visibility vests and hard hats, we looked like we were at work, and in a sense we were – we just weren’t working for anyone else. In these instances, attitude was everything; our stealth tactics gave way to social engineering. These were tactics Team A had already learned a great deal about in previous years. Dsankt and Winch had a discussion about it on a joint exploration. Winch suggested, ‘There are only two types of barriers we face, aren’t there? There’s the physical, which we have little problem with now, and the social.

…

Marc pointed up at it and said, ‘What the fuck is that? I want to go there.’ What Marc was pointing at was the seventy-two-storey Legacy Tower, a complex of luxury high-rise apartments. As it was a live building, the only way we were going to get in was through international explorer teamwork and a bit of social engineering. Alex and Laura walked in first and pulled aside the security guards with an errant question, while the other eight of us followed a resident to the lifts, heavily engaged in conversation. We carried on talking as the resident swiped her keycard, then we squeezed into the lift with her.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next
by Jeanette Winterson
Published 15 Mar 2021

Love dolls aren’t responsible for the pornification of women. They play to the stereotype, but that stereotype exists with or without a doll. Suppose the market for these dolls boomed to national level? Would that be problem? Or would it be a whole new way of living? * * * Both India and China suffer from huge, socially engineered female-to-male deficits. China’s one-child policy, that ran from the mid-1970s until 2016, has resulted in a shortfall of about 40 million females. Love dolls that are sexual and personal companions are seriously being discussed as part of the solution to this self-created crisis. Non-AI versions don’t cut it.

…

We are only recently learning about Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Katherine Johnson, Margaret Hamilton, Stephanie Shirley, the women at Bletchley Park. Listening to the ahistorical, fact-free-free-speech ‘heroes’ telling us that women just don’t want to, or just can’t manage, computing science, edits out of history – factual history – the predominance of women working in computing science, right up until they were socially engineered out of it. * * * But there are lights in this tunnel. The 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Jennifer A. Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier for their work on the development of CRISPR-Cas9 – a genetic editing tool capable of precisely editing any section of the human genome.

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Jun 2009

By installing national chains and superstores as their foundational institutions, mall towns redirect our dormant instincts for civic and social connection to the brands sponsoring all this supposed renewal. It’s not an American Legion, a public library, or a war memorial gracing Birkdale’s most prominent locations, but an Ann Taylor and the fittingly named Banana Republic. Just because a century of misguided social engineering has sterilized our urban and suburban landscapes doesn’t mean that corporations offer the best hope of restoring a social fabric. To the companies paying for it, New Urbanism is the latest in a long series of efforts to take advantage of the deadened suburbs and crumbling, crime-ridden cities.

…

The Secret simply gives people permission to be as selfish as they can tolerate, and to internalize the language and symbols of advertising into one’s life as core guiding principles. The self-absorption and self-interest dominating our values today is not mere happenstance, but the result of a century of public-relations campaigns, advertising, and social engineering waged against collective action, altruism, and even good government. Just as we were disconnected from place and reconnected instead to a map biased toward corporate interests, we have been disconnected from one another and led to behave instead as individuals and through corporatist ideals.

…

No matter how healthily self-interested their workers, government bureaucracies are themselves so intrinsically controlling and calcified as to make the Hayek effect all but impossible to achieve. A health agency is still an expression of the bureaucratic welfare state, however much it’s attempting to imitate the rules by which the private sector operates. Only by removing the safety net altogether—and replacing it with pure market forces—could social engineers hope to restore the full force of nature to public institutions. Privatization was the only way out. Make no mistake about it: by the late Clinton-Blair years, both the Right and the mainstream Left had accepted the basic premise adapted from systems theory that the economy was a natural system whose stability depended on the government’s getting out of the way and allowing self-interested people to work toward a dynamic equilibrium.

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor
by William Easterly
Published 4 Mar 2014

Too much parental attention to each child meant parents were having too few children. So children should be raised largely by the state in state-run daycare centers as part of a “great national household.” The Myrdals said they wanted all this “to shape a better human material.”30 Myrdal embraced what he called “social engineering,” a willingness to discard all previous institutions and traditions regardless of whether there was any historical evidence that they worked. Experts would design new institutions from scratch based on pure reason. Myrdal had explained in 1932 that the new social policy ideology is “rational, whereas the old . . . was quite sentimental.”

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Quoted in Frank Ninkovich, “The Rockefeller Foundation, China, and Cultural Change” Journal of American History 70, no. 4 (March 1984): 799–820. 31. Thompson, While China Faced West, 138–39. 32. Socrates Litsios, “Selskar Gunn and China: The Rockefeller Foundation’s ‘Other’ Approach to Public Health” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 79, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 295–318. 33. Yung-Chen Chiang, Social Engineering and the Social Sciences in China, 1919–1949 (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 226. 34. R. H. Tawney, Land and Labor in China (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1932), 11, 19, 20. 35. Ta Chen, “Chinese Migrations, with Special Reference to Labor Conditions” Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics No. 340.

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Condliffe, ed., Problems of the Pacific 1929, Proceedings of the Third Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), 374–75; originally published by the University of Chicago Press, 1930. 40. Maxwell S. Stewart, War-Time China: China’s Soldiers, Leaders, Farmers, Progress, Problems, Hopes, I.P.R. Pamphlets No. 10 (New York: American Council Institute of Pacific Relations, 1944). 41. Chiang, Social Engineering, 244. 42. H. D. Fong, The Post-War Industrialization of China (Washington DC: National Planning Association, 1942), 78. 43. Article II. Quoted in Trescott, Jingji Xue, 286. 44. Creighton Lacy, Is China a Democracy? (New York: John Day, 1943), 140. 45. J. B. Condliffe, “Preface,” in World Economic Survey 1931–1932 (Geneva: League of Nations, 1932), 10. 46.

Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World
by Simon Winchester
Published 19 Jan 2021

After which, assuming the banks looked kindly on those who sought loans, the farmers would embark on the kind of intensive agriculture peculiar to the Netherlands, with nitrogen-fixing clover on the fallow fields, turnips for animal feed in winter, and then during the warm springs and summers, potatoes, beets, wheat, onions, and barley in abundance. Some degree of social engineering was also attempted in the settlement of the polders. As recently as the 1980s, the Netherlands was divided religiously and politically by a venerable phenomenon known as “pillarization”—the Dutch word is verzuiling—by which the kingdom’s three dominant groups, the Catholics, the Protestants, and the liberal social-democrats, were encouraged to develop along lines tinctured with a degree of what one might call cooperative segregation, of a mutually respectful separateness.

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Sellar would then doff his cap, offering his respects to the family, and he and his team would withdraw, board their various conveyances and ride on down the strath to the next croft in line and make the same announcement yet again, on and on across the length of the valley. The crofters, shocked and frightened, stood at their doors bewildered, in most cases and for a brief while not knowing what to do. The Sutherlands were bent thereby on enforcing a program of social engineering seldom attempted before anywhere, by anyone. The huge estate was already busily constructing roads and bridges (half paid for by the government) and extending postal services and civilization, so called, into the region—yet having still to deal with the economic and social inconvenience of a native population who lived in a manner the estate managers considered backward and barbaric, and in a place into which the light of modernity was being so benevolently extended.

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The mix of farming, fishing, timber harvesting, and sporting lets—deer hunting, partridge shooting, and the like—by which McEwen keeps the Isle of Muck afloat, just, leaves few islanders unhappy with the arrangement. In theory McEwen runs his domain just as he wishes; but since his wishes seem to be broadly in concert with those of his tenants, and since he seems little better off than any of them, most appear content to keep matters as they are. By all accounts, the social engineering of Scotland’s once feudal landownership system is gathering pace. Nearly six hundred pieces of territory are now community-owned, their previous owners flush with cash and many of them living far away, many happily dispossessed of the responsibility that rightly comes with ownership. More than half a million acres—2 percent of Scotland’s land surface—is now owned communally.

Engineering Security
by Peter Gutmann

, Oracle Corporation, July 2013, https://www.java.com/en/download/help/appsecuritydialogs.xml. [456] “Java’s Losing Security Legacy”, Michael Mimoso, 4 September 2013, http://threatpost.com/javas-losing-security-legacy. References 115 [457] “Don’t Sign that Applet!”, Will Dormann, 30 April 2013, https://www.cert.org/blogs/certcc/2013/04/dont_sign_that_applet.html. [458] “Attackers Beat Java Default Security Settings with Social Engineering”, Michael Mimoso, 5 March 2013, http://threatpost.com/attackers-beatjava-default-security-settings-social-engineering-030513. [459] “When a Signed Java JAR file is not Proof of Trust”, Eric Romang, 5 March 2013, http://eromang.zataz.com/2013/03/05/when-a-signed-java-jarfile-is-not-proof-of-trust. [460] “Secure Code Distribution”, Nick Zhang, IEEE Computer, Vol.30, No.6 (June 1997), p.76. [461] “Signing with Microsoft Authenticode Technology”, Microsoft Corporation ActiveX documentation, 1996. [462] “Malware and Signed Code”, Joe Faulhaber, 6 November 2008, http://blogs.technet.com/mmpc/archive/2008/11/06/malware-andsigned-code.aspx

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Unfortunately the research couldn’t measure the base rate, how many users would download and run the application for zero dollars because the Mechanical Turk doesn’t allow you to set the price for work performed to zero, but extensive existing work by experimental psychologists indicates that even the most trivial incentive will have a noticeable effect on changing people’s behaviour, so that moving from zero to one cent probably has a significant effect. Social engineering sites like Facebook are particularly active in training users to click on and install arbitrary applications in an insecure manner using a model that’s been described as “socially-engineered malware” in which installing an applet spams all of your contacts with an invitation to try it as well through the enabled-by-default “Publish stories in my News Feed and Mini-Feed” option [514]. The user has no idea what the application that the social spam is advertising actually does (this appears to be a deliberate part of the viral-marketing strategy) and can’t install it unless the “Know who I am and access my information” option is enabled, and researchers have demonstrated in a real-world experiment that it’s remarkably easy to turn a social network run in this manner into a malware tool [515].

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If it’s a case of a genuine lost SIM then the owner won’t get the message, but in the case of impersonation fraud where the original SIM is still active then the legitimate owner will be alerted to the fact that something untoward is happening (an alternative attack vector that’s discussed in “Password Lifetimes” on page 574, trojaning the phone, is a bit harder to defend against). An alternative defence mechanism was introduced in Australia, where this type of fraud is more usually performed by social-engineering a phone company to move (or port, in telco terminology) the number to a different phone [100][101][102]. In this case the Industry Code for mobile number portability (MNP) was amended to allow financial institutions access to the MNP database to check whether a phone number that was being used for authentication purposes had been recently ported [103].

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
by Marc Goodman
Published 24 Feb 2015

At least 40 percent of social media users have been exposed to one form of malware, and more than 20 percent of us have had our e-mail or social networking account compromised or taken over by a third party without our permission. Bad guys trick users into clicking on links in posts and messages that purport to come from friends or colleagues using a technique known as social engineering. Criminals take advantage of the trust we extend to those in our social network by masquerading electronically as these trusted parties, invariably tricking users to click on a link that will ultimately infect a computer with a virus, Trojan, or worm. Moreover, organized crime groups are extremely quick to react to breaking news, which they use to dupe innocent users to click on as a means of infecting them.

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Lest you think the demand for such disturbing photographs is limited, law enforcement sources have identified at least twenty-two million such images and videos in the United States alone, and some password-protected child pornography Web sites have up to thirty thousand paying members. Today the volume of pedophile images is growing, not because an adult has necessarily abducted a child and abused him or her, but because young people are readily targeted via subterfuge and social engineering. Such was the case with Amanda Todd of British Columbia, Canada, who at the age of twelve was coerced into flashing her breasts on a live video chat site popular with teens known as blogTV. The anonymous person who made the request seemed nice and complimented and flattered young Amanda on how pretty she was.

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Not only were public figures in the U.K. targeted with the technique, but some celebrities seeking gossip have even used it to hack into the voice mail of rivals, such as when Paris Hilton notably used SpoofCard to listen to the messages of Lindsay Lohan. Back in the real world of noncelebrities, a spoofed caller ID means criminals can listen to your messages at the office and learn valuable information regarding pending business transactions, mergers and acquisitions, and even personal medical data. From a social engineering perspective, telephone spoofing creates a powerful tool for the criminal mind. A spoofed telephone call to a company’s IT department requesting a system password reset or the latest Wi-Fi key is much more likely to be successful if the call appears to be emanating from within the company’s own internal telephone infrastructure, a perennially successful ruse.

Building Secure and Reliable Systems: Best Practices for Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Systems
by Heather Adkins , Betsy Beyer , Paul Blankinship , Ana Oprea , Piotr Lewandowski and Adam Stubblefield
Published 29 Mar 2020

These violations of trust may come from an insider who abuses their legitimate authority over the system by reading user data not pertinent to their job, leaking or exposing company secrets, or even actively working to cause a prolonged outage. The person may have a brief lapse of good decision making, have a genuine desire to cause harm, fall victim to a social engineering attack, or even be coerced by an external actor. A third-party compromise of a system can also introduce malicious errors. Chapter 2 covers the range of malicious actors in depth. When it comes to system design, mitigation strategies are the same regardless of whether the malicious actor is an insider or a third-party attacker who compromises system credentials.

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Criminal Actors Attack techniques are used to carry out crimes that closely resemble their nondigital cousins—for example, committing identity fraud, stealing money, and blackmail. Criminal actors have a wide range of technical abilities. Some may be sophisticated and write their own tools. Others may purchase or borrow tools that other people build, relying on their easy, click-to-attack interfaces. In fact, social engineering—the act of tricking a victim into aiding you in the attack—is highly effective despite being at the lowest end of difficulty. The only barriers to entry for most criminal actors are a bit of time, a computer, and a little cash. Presenting a full catalog of the kinds of criminal activities that occur in the digital realm would be impossible, but we provide a few illustrative examples here.

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Since these exercises occur internally, they provide an opportunity to balance between fully external attacks (where the attacker is outside of Google) and internal attacks (insider risk). Additionally, Red Team exercises supplement security reviews by testing security end to end, and by testing human behavior through attacks like phishing and social engineering. For a deeper exploration of Red Teams, see “Special Teams: Blue and Red Teams”. Evaluating Responses When responding to both live incidents and test scenarios, it’s important to create an effective feedback loop so you don’t fall victim to the same situations repeatedly. Live incidents should require postmortems with specific action items; you can similarly create postmortems and corresponding action items for testing.

The Myth of Meritocracy: Why Working-Class Kids Still Get Working-Class Jobs (Provocations Series)
by James Bloodworth
Published 18 May 2016

When, at the 2014 Labour Party conference, the shadow Equalities Minister Gloria De Piero suggested that public sector employers should monitor the social background of their workers in order to try to end the dominance of the middle classes in the top jobs, the Daily Mail commentator Dominic Sandbrook lamented the move as ‘not merely absurd, but dangerous’. ‘It is essentially a form of social engineering,’ Sandbrook wrote, ‘which would judge young men and women not by educational achievement, their hard work and potential, but by their parents’ background.’118 Social democratic politics ultimately proceeds, as Adolph L. Reed has written, from a ‘concrete, material base for solidarity – not gestures, guilt tripping and idealist abstractions’.

Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
by David Brooks
Published 1 Jan 2000

He believed tests were a magnificent tool that would enable experts to measure people’s abilities and manage society on a more just and rational basis. Chauncey went on to become the head of the Educational Testing Service, which created the Scholastic Aptitude Test. And so to a degree rare among social engineers, he was actually able to put his enthusiasm into practice. As Lemann observes, we are now living in a world created by Conant and Chauncey’s campaign to replace their own elite with an elite based on merit, at least as measured by aptitude tests. Conant and Chauncey came along during an era uniquely receptive to their message.

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These are places whose use is not determined from above but grows up from small particularized needs. In the years since The Death and Life of Great American Cities was published, Jacobs’s way of seeing has been vindicated again and again. The urban plans she criticized are now universally reviled. The disastrous failure of social-engineering projects across the developing world have exposed the hubris of technocrats who thought they could reshape reality. The failure of the Communist planned economies has taught us that the world is too complicated to be organized and centrally directed. We are, with Jane Jacobs, more modest about what we can know, more skeptical of planners and bureaucrats.

Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society
by Cordelia Fine
Published 13 Jan 2017

6 Likewise, in his book The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption, Concordia University Evolutionary Psychologist Gad Saad argues that “given their desire to maximize profits, [toy companies] develop products that are successful in exactly the same sex-specific manner across innumerable cultures.”7 This sentiment is echoed in the Sunday Express by journalist James Delingpole, who writes that “a toy business’s job is to make profit not engage in social engineering.” Some thoughtful readers might wonder why the laissez-faire philosophy of gender-neutral marketing is “social engineering,” while toy aisles that dictate which toys are for whom are considered to be leaving things to take their natural course. But Delingpole has a further complaint. Gender-neutral marketing is futile, he says, because “those XX and XY chromosomes will out in the end.”8 In short, calls for gender-neutral toy marketing are seen by some as tantamount to demands that toy companies put themselves out of business by disrespecting boys’ and girls’ true natures.

DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You
by Misha Glenny
Published 3 Oct 2011

Taken on by a large furniture retailer that operated countrywide, Mularski demonstrated real skills in management and sales. At first glance, the work of a sales manager appeared to have little in common with cybercrime, but the techniques he learned with the company provided firm foundations for his work as a cybercop with the FBI. ‘Social engineering’ – the art of persuading somebody to do something that is objectively not in their interest – lies at the heart of cybercrime. How, the crook ponders, can I persuade my target to give up their password? To open an email with a trojan hidden within its code? Even to turn a computer on? There are some obvious options available to the cyber thief.

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He was working with a great team, but it was he who had persuaded his bosses, in the teeth of deep scepticism, to give him the go-ahead. It wasn’t only the reputation of the Feds and their budgetary concerns on the line – it was his job, for God’s sake. Then he remembered what he was really good at: sales. Or, better still, social engineering. When the news flashed around the criminal bulletin boards that DarkMarket belonged to the Feds, he calmed down, reminding himself that self-pity helped no one. He needed to launch a counter-attack immediately. He approached Grendel, perhaps the most mysterious DarkMarketeer of all. In real life, Grendel worked for an entirely legitimate high-end security company in Germany, but he also offered his services against payment to major cyber criminals.

Cancel Cable: How Internet Pirates Get Free Stuff
by Chris Fehily
Published 1 Feb 2011

Hosts file. Instead of using a browser extension, you can use a hosts file to block ads and third-party cookies. A hosts file is a text file that doesn’t use system resources and isn’t browser-dependent. Try mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm or hosts-file.net. Education. Read Wikipedia’s article about social engineering. For current threats, read RISKS Digest and Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram Newsletter. For Windows-specific threats, visit Microsoft Security. Browse through the lectures at the Chaos Communication Congress. Backups. If you back up an infected file, it’ll reinfect you when you restore it to your computer.

Your Computer Is on Fire
by Thomas S. Mullaney , Benjamin Peters , Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip
Published 9 Mar 2021

In the early 1970s, Ken Thompson, esteemed Bell Labs employee, was empowered to play with his company’s machines in order first to implement an esoteric but extraordinarily effective Trojan horse development methodology that he had read about in a US Air Force paper. Further, he was empowered to use social-engineering techniques to get this Trojan installed on unauthorized machines. When less esteemed playful programmers—the “Dalton gang,” the “414 gang”—used similar technical and social-engineering techniques to break into systems without authorization, they were equivalent to drunk drivers and burglars. As the primary developer of a major operating system, the programming language used to develop that system, and many of the software tools used on that system, Ken Thompson was in a position of tremendous power.

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the compiler was never released outside.30 In this anecdote Thompson relates how he installed the bug on a machine owned by another group within Bell Labs, where he worked at the time. Because the deployment of the bug requires the target to install a compiler from a binary (rather than compiling it from source with one of their own compilers), Thompson performed an act of social engineering: he used the ruse that the new version of the compiler had features that the old compiler wouldn’t be able to handle. Because Thompson was only interested in demonstrating his proof of concept rather than actually deploying a perfect attack, it was possible to detect the presence of the bug by analyzing the generated low-level code, and then to break the bug by compiling the compiler using a particular combination of settings.

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks
by Scott J. Shapiro

Once overtaking an account, they burrow through the network to their target, moving laterally from host to host and elevating their network privileges. Exploiters must also conceal themselves. To cover their tracks, they delete logs, obfuscate file names, and alter time stamps. Social engineering—the use of deception to trick users into divulging confidential information—is a specialty of exploitation (e.g., Cameron LaCroix), and phishing is a subspecialty of social engineering. Some hackers are experts in crafty fake emails and websites (e.g., Aleksey Lukashev). These hackers know how to exploit upcode. Still others are experts in exploiting downcode through malware. They build automated tools to exploit technical vulnerabilities.

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He also claimed responsibility for hacking Paris Hilton’s cell phone and described to Krebs how he did it. To verify his boasts, he sent Krebs screenshots of internal T-Mobile web pages normally inaccessible to the general public. Cameron LaCroix had not hacked Paris Hilton’s cell phone. He had attacked the cloud. He compromised T-Mobile’s remote servers through a combination of social engineering—tricking employees to release private information—and exploiting vulnerabilities in the company’s website. It didn’t require anything fancy like an SQL injection. It wasn’t black magic. As we will see, it was child’s play. The Invisible Code Paris Whitney Hilton was born on February 17, 1981, to Kathy Hilton, a former actress, and Richard “Rick” Hilton, a businessman and grandson of Conrad Hilton, who founded the Hilton hotel chain.

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty First Century City
by Anna Minton
Published 24 Jun 2009

Local people repeatedly say this is not what happens, with families who have lived in areas often for generations forced to leave, breaking up communities across the north of England and the Midlands and echoing the experience of the post-war years of working-class communities. For opponents, it means social cleansing or social engineering. In its Memorandum to the House of Commons Select Committee, the Derker Community Action Group said, ‘We feel that Pathfinder is social engineering at its most ludicrous and unjust.’9 COMPULSORY PURCHASE, EMINENT DOMAIN AND THE FIFTH AMENDMENT Across the Atlantic new laws, similar to British changes in legislation, are also forcing people to give up their properties to make way for economic development.

Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America
by Matt Taibbi
Published 15 Feb 2010

The Republicans were going with this goofy story the Kohlhagens of the world were dumping on the public, that the financial crisis was caused by lazy poor people living in too much house. If you scratched the surface of Republican rhetoric two years later, that’s really all it was—a lot of whining about the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 and Fannie and Freddie, with social engineering being the dog-whistle code words describing government aid to minorities. “Private enterprise mixed with social engineering” was how Alabama senator Richard Shelby put it. The Democrats’ line was a little more complicated. They had no problem publicly pointing the finger at companies like Goldman Sachs as culprits in the mess, although behind closed doors, of course, it was Democratic officials like Geithner who were carrying water for Wall Street all along, arranging sweetheart deals like the Wachovia rescue and the Citigroup bailout (notable because Geithner’s ex-boss, former Clinton Treasury secretary Bob Rubin, was a big Citi exec).

Bricks & Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made
by Tom Wilkinson
Published 21 Jul 2014

Ford’s paternalism was not entirely unprecedented: earlier workers’ settlements established by British industrialists of a ‘philanthropic’ bent, such as the Cadbury workers’ village Bourneville, were often publess and chapel-filled, reflecting the dour religiosity of their founders. What was new was the degree of organisation and intrusiveness that Ford brought to bear on his experiment in social engineering, and the degree of hypocrisy, for Ford, though insisting on sexual propriety in his workers, was involved in a decades-long extramarital affair with a woman thirty years his junior. The extension of surveillance into the home continued the expansionary logic of the Fordist system. From workplace to bedroom – from ore to whore, one might say – the system demanded control over every aspect of the production process, now expanded to incorporate consumption; his workers had to be able to buy his cars, or the project would fall flat.

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The home had become part of the factory and was – just as much as a glass or tyre plant, a steel press or an iron foundry – a site of production, reconceived as a total process, and thus also subject to the improvements of scientific management. But Ford’s imperial troops eventually retreated from the battlefield of the home. In 1921 he gave up on social engineering and shut down the Sociological Department. Continuing demands for unionisation had embittered Ford. He would not countenance bargaining with his employees and felt that his five-dollar munificence was going unappreciated. That year he instituted a speed-up that squeezed the same output from 40 per cent fewer workers, which allowed him to sack 20,000 men, including 75 per cent of his middle managers.

American Marxism
by Mark R. Levin
Published 12 Jul 2021

Hence, Dewey’s call for a public, top-down, government-managed “socialism,” as opposed to a messy socialism that slow-creeps into the capitalist economy. Of course, capitalism is a spontaneous form of commerce arising from individuals voluntarily entering into economic relationships. It is not a planned economic system imposed on people by a governmental regime. For Dewey et al., that is the problem. Authority, social engineering, grandiose plans, etc., can only “work” if imposed on the population, which requires usurping the very foundation of America’s purpose. Constitutionalism and capitalism limit the role or possibility of a centralized authoritarianism and, conversely, empower the individual within the framework of the civil society.

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Thus it soon became imperative to explain man by his environment…. If man came into this century trailing clouds of transcendental glory, he was now accounted for in a way that would satisfy the positivists.”21 That is, by those intellectuals who reject eternal truths and experience through the ages for the social engineering by supposed experts and their administrative state—which claim to use data, science, and empiricism to analyze, manage, and control society. Weaver also referenced Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution, writing that “[b]iological necessity, issuing in the survival of the fittest, was offered as the causa causans [the primary cause of action], after the important question of human origin had been decided in favor of scientific materialism.

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 14 May 2014

Why risk the blood and tears of revolution when you could “impregnate all the existing forces of society” by publishing pamphlets and sitting on royal commissions? The Webbs founded the ­Fabian Society to provide a praetorian guard of socialist visionaries, established the London School of Economics to train a new breed of social engineers from around the world, and created the New Statesman to act as a cheerleader of their socialist revolution. Beatrice also embodied the dark side of socialism. She and Sidney hailed Stalin as the architect of a new civilization, dismissing evidence that millions of people had died in famines in Ukraine (including proof provided by Malcolm Muggeridge, who was married to her niece) as counterrevolutionary propaganda.

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And social democratic governments continued to sanction sterilization for “hygienic purposes” into the age of ABBA: Between 1934 and 1976 some six thousand Danes, forty thousand Norwegians, and sixty thousand Swedes, 90 percent of them women, were subjected to compulsory sterilization.12 But for the time being the big state seemed to work—and rapid economic growth more than made up for a bit of bossy social engineering. For America the postwar era was one of unrivaled ­supremacy—of new freeways and schools, the GI Bill, and expanding opportunities. For the British it was an era when the ordinary people had never had it so good. The French had les trente glorieuses. The Germans basked in the Wirtschaftswunder.

Capitalism: A Ghost Story
by Arundhati Roy
Published 5 May 2014

In preparation for its role in Central India, it publicly released its updated doctrine of military psychological operations, which outlines “a planned process of conveying a message to a select target audience, to promote particular themes that result in desired attitudes and behaviour, which affect the achievement of political and military objectives of the country.” This process of “perception management,” it said, would be conducted by “using media available to the Services.”26 The army is experienced enough to know that coercive force alone cannot carry out or manage social engineering on the scale that is envisaged by India’s planners. War against the poor is one thing. But for the rest of us—the middle class, white-collar workers, intellectuals, “opinion-makers”—it has to be “perception management.” And for this we must turn our attention to the exquisite art of Corporate Philanthropy.

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World
by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
Published 28 Sep 2010

For decades the Islamic Republic has suppressed Iranians’ elementary yearnings for freedom with an authoritarian cocktail that combines blatant coercion and powerful intelligence agencies with a form of mass bribery in which the government spends an estimated $100 billion annually subsidizing things like bread, sugar, and gasoline.10 Today, there are many signs that the regime’s grand social engineering project has failed. Even windfall oil revenues have been unable to mask the regime’s failed economic policies. The crippling effects of the global financial crisis have heaped even more pressure on this oil-dependent economy and on Iran’s rulers. In the meantime, the Iranian democrats have a powerful new weapon with which to expose the regime’s failings.

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There are weak safeguards to prevent unauthorized people from snooping. And sometimes datasets are sold off to third parties for dubious purposes. At the same time, novel risks and threats are emerging from this digital cornucopia. Identity fraud and theft are growing threats in a networked world, along with new forms of discrimination and social engineering made possible by the surfeit of data. Personal information, be it biographical, biological, genealogical, historical, transactional, locational, relational, computational, vocational, or reputational, is the stuff that makes up our modern identity. It must be managed responsibly. When it is not, accountability is undermined and confidence in our evolving networked society is eroded.

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The southwestern United States, for example, has both sun and land in abundance, which makes desolate areas like the Mojave Desert ideal for large-scale solar power generation. In more northerly latitudes, where land and sun are more sparing, the economics are different. On the other hand, convincing millions of homeowners to install solar panels on their roofs hardly sounds like a light feat of social engineering either. And yet, countries like Germany—arguably now the world’s leader in solar technology—have succeeded in large part due to the government’s willingness to encourage households to install rooftop systems by subsidizing their efforts. Germany has also declared that all new buildings will be either energy neutral or net energy producers by 2018. 20.

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America
by Bruce Cannon Gibney
Published 7 Mar 2017

Deferments, created in 1951, favored college students and those who scored well on aptitude tests, as well as those for whom war would be a “hardship” due to family or other circumstances. Until the draft picked up in 1965, deferments effectively operated as permanent exemptions from service.20 Deferments were not some odd loophole, they were explicit social engineering designed to “channel” brighter students into useful occupations.21 Over fifteen million Boomers in a position to do so eagerly collaborated, using various deferment options.*,22 As the war intensified, so did the draft, and use and exploitation of the deferment system, and controversy over the war.

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And defense funding doesn’t simply vanish when a bullet leaves the muzzle of a gun: Quite a bit supports non-combat operations like R&D, employment (military and civilian), health care, education, physical infrastructure, as well as conventional hardware. These investment and jobs programs have positive social effects that stretch beyond simple “combat readiness.”44 Whatever the accounting treatment—as infrastructure, educational spending, a very weird kind of social engineering—defense has as a practical and political matter long been considered in the same general category as roads and bridges. The Constitution grants the power to provide a “common Defense” in Article I, Section 8, the same provision that allows Congress to provide roads.45 Older politicians explicitly viewed infrastructure as part of defense, with the converse implicit and natural.

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My own namesake, a soldier named Bruce Cannon, died in the war, and my father fought in it, for what it’s worth. * Westmoreland was Time’s “Man of the Year” for 1965, followed by the Boomers in 1966. * There is, of course, a certain irony in students protesting the injustices of a government while actively participating in its discriminatory social engineering program. * The Selective Service Administration contracted with Educational Testing Service (ETS) to handle the test; ETS is still around administering things like the GRE, and TOEFL, consulting on the NAEP, and providing other analytics. * Clinton has offered several different spins to mollify critics.

Pattern Recognition
by William Gibson
Published 2 Jan 2003

That number is definitely encrypted in segment seventy-eight. But the way it's done, he says, is distinctive, and points to a certain school of thought. He says that a part of that school of thought is known to have found a home at Sigil Technologies." "And what do you do when you get there?" "Shoulder-surf. Social engineering." "Are you good at that?" "In certain contexts," he says, and sips his coffee. "You sent your friend Taki's T-bone?" "Yes. Using what he's learned about seventy-eight, he can try a number of different things. It might link each one to a point on the map. If it is a map." "It looks like a map.

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Absolutely iconic. So there it is, finally, today, and it's sitting there, all caked in the gray stuff, like an airplane done up as New Guinea Mud Man, at the bottom of this great fucking hole they'd dug. By far the biggest excavation yet attempted here, as far as we know, and quite the feat of social engineering, to get it done without them opening the canopy and getting into the cockpit. We'd had Brian and Mick stand guard over it, the past two nights, and the diggers hadn't touched it. But come the day, we knew they would, and we'd be set to shoot, what we're here for. So a couple of the big ones with the spiderweb tattoos get boosted up, onto the wings, which are slippery with muck, but where their boots slip in it, looking down from the edge of the dig, I can see the thing's in museum condition.

Powers and Prospects
by Noam Chomsky
Published 16 Sep 2015

No such measures were needed to safeguard the leading civilian export industry, aircraft, or the huge and profitable tourism industry, based on aircraft and government-funded infrastructure. These are hardly more than an off-shoot of the major component of the welfare state: the Pentagon system (even the ‘defense highway system’ that was part of the state–corporate social engineering project that changed the face of America). It was entirely natural for Clinton to select the Boeing corporation as the model for the ‘grand vision of a free market future’ that he proclaimed at the Seattle meeting of the Asia–Pacific Economic Conference (APEC) in 1993, to much acclaim. One could hardly find a finer prototype of the publicly subsidised private-profit economy that is proudly called ‘free enterprise’.

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In the 1950s, virtually all funds for research and development of computers came from the taxpayer, along with 85 per cent of R&D for electronics generally. I’ll return to the matter; ignoring it, we can understand little about the contemporary economy or ‘really existing free markets’. Similarly, the huge social engineering project that led to the ‘suburbanization of America’, with enormous consequences, relied on extensive state intervention, from the local to national level, along with major corporate crime that received a tap on the wrist in the courts; consumer choices were a slight factor.12 There are fluctuations, to be sure.

The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise Your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions
by David Robson
Published 7 Mar 2019

An IQ of 145, for instance, suggests you are in the top 2 per cent of the population. Many of Terman’s motives were noble: he wanted to offer an empirical foundation to the educational system so that teaching could be tailored to a child’s ability. But even at the test’s conception, there was an unsavoury streak in Terman’s thinking, as he envisaged a kind of social engineering based on the scores. Having profiled a small group of ‘hoboes’, for instance, he believed the IQ test could be used to separate delinquents from society, before they had even committed a crime.18 ‘Morality’, he wrote, ‘cannot flower and fruit if intelligence remains infantile.’19 Thankfully Terman never realised these plans, but his research caught the attention of the US Army during the First World War, and they used his tests to assess 1.75 million soldiers.

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And he must have known that meddling in his subjects’ lives would skew the results, but he often offered financial support and professional recommendations to his Termites, boosting their chances of success. He was neglecting the most basic (tacit) knowledge of the scientific method, which even the most inexperienced undergraduate should take for granted. This is not to mention his troubling political leanings. Terman’s interest in social engineering led him to join the Human Betterment Foundation – a group that called for the compulsory sterilisation of those showing undesirable qualities.58 Moreover, when reading Terman’s early papers, it is shocking how easily he dismissed the intellectual potential of African Americans and Hispanics, based on a mere handful of case-studies.

The Centrist Manifesto
by Charles Wheelan
Published 18 Apr 2013

However, these so-called social conservatives (a complete misnomer) simultaneously support an aggressive and activist government on issues they believe in: forbidding people of the same sex from getting married; ensuring that schoolchildren pray in public schools; locking up suspected terrorists without trial or legal representation; forbidding a woman from terminating a pregnancy; spending tremendous amounts of public money on the military; and so on. One can agree or disagree with any of these positions, but let’s not pretend that they represent limited government. It is a strange crew inside the Republican tent, as the small-government libertarians mingle with the social-engineering right-wingers. The Republican candidates who stagger out of that awkwardly big tent these days (e.g., Mitt Romney) are usually dragging a lot of baggage with them. The best of the Republican Party often gets lost in the process. The traditional (and healthy) Republican skepticism of what government can reasonably accomplish has morphed into a general hostility toward all government programs (with the very expensive exception of defense).

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture
by Ellen Ruppel Shell
Published 2 Jul 2009

The more enchanting, the more inviting, and the more comfortable the mall, the more powerful its draw as one giant living/play room. For this reason not all outlet malls subscribe to the Gruen doctrine and not all are overly concerned with the “hedonic impact” of their environments. Rather, many outlet developers follow what might be called the “Golden Arches” approach to social engineering. At McDonald’s and many other fast-food restaurants, the lighting tends to be unflattering fluorescents, and the seats are bolted to the floor at an awkward distance from the tables. The purpose of this is not to prevent theft of the chairs, as many think, but to discourage elders, teenagers, and other undesirables from getting comfortable and congregating for hours over a small coffee, or an order of fries.

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.: Wayne State University Press, 1986), 29-31. 20 of its workforce every month: See John R. Lee, “The So-Called Profit Sharing System in the Ford Plant,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 65, Personnel and Employment Problems in Industrial Management, (May 1916): 297-310. This astonishing document, prepared by a Ford manager, outlines a remarkable social engineering scheme created by Ford to maintain control over his employees. Lee describes the eligibility criteria for the Ford profit sharing plan. Workers were disqualified if it was determined that the lavish sum of $5 a day would “make of them a menace to society” and “no man was to receive the money who could not use it advisedly.” 21 automakers were forced to follow suit: See, for example, Stephen Meyer III, The Five-Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908-1921 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981).

Network Security Through Data Analysis: Building Situational Awareness
by Michael S Collins
Published 23 Feb 2014

These models range from relatively simple linear affairs to extremely detailed attack trees that attempt to catalog each vulnerability and exploit. I’ll start by laying out a simple but flexible model that contains steps common to a majority of attacks. Reconnaissance The attacker scouts out the target. Depending on the type of attack, reconnaissance may consist of googling, social engineering (posting on message boards to find and befriend users of a network), or active scanning using nmap or related tools. Subversion The attacker launches an exploit against a target and takes control. This may be done via a remote exploit, sending a Trojan file, or even password cracking. Configuration The attacker converts the target into a system more suitable for his own use.

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The host may serve as an expendable proxy, attacking neighbors (for example, other hosts behind a firewall on a 192.168.0.0/16 network). This model isn’t perfect, but it’s a good general description of how attackers behave without getting bogged down in technical minutiae. There are always common tweaks, for example: Peer-to-peer worm propagation and phishing attacks rely on passive exploits and a bit of social engineering. These attacks rely on a target clicking a link or accessing a file, which requires that the bait (the filename or story surrounding it) be attractive enough to merit a click. At the time of this writing, for example, there’s a spate of phishing attacks using credit ratings as the bait—the earliest informed me that my credit rating had risen and the latest batch is more ominously warning me of the consequences of a recently dropped credit rating.

Nation-Building: Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 22 Dec 2005

(February 26, 2003) I sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, not to make them American. Iraqis will write their own history, and find their own way. (May 24, 2004) GEORGE W. BUSH GEORGE W. BUSH has gone through a striking transformation on the subject of nation-building: from opponent of the very concept as candidate for president, to grandiose social engineer on the eve of the Iraq war, to chastened supporter of indigenous Iraqi nation-building a year later. These changes track the profound ambivalence felt by the American public to this activity. Conservatives have always been skeptical about nationbuilding as a kind of international social welfare, whereas liberals have seen the effort to create a democratic Iraq as an extension of the American empire.

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Counterinsurgency tactics that came into vogue as the conflict accelerated in the early 1960s saw coordinated development activity as integral to the overall project of pacifying a conflict zone. An example of this interconnection was the “strategic hamlets” program attempted from 1961 to 1963. The construction of defended villages and the arming of their inhabitants were emphasized as important elements of the total program of social engineering. By replacing traditional ways with the infrastructure of modern life, such as new roads, electrification, better communication, and new agricultural techniques, peasants would not only experience material gains but also develop an outlook based on the idea of progress. Americans hoped that these changes would foster greater loyalty to the South Vietnamese regime while immunizing the population against the appeals of the National Liberation Front (the NLF, or Viet Cong).

Misspent Youth
by Peter F. Hamilton
Published 1 Jan 2002

Several fistfights had broken out. “That was stupid of the cops,” Tim said. “If they’d just let them hand in the petition there wouldn’t have been any trouble.” “What are they all doing?” Margret asked. “They don’t like the summit,” Tim explained gently. “A lot of people believe it’s an attempt by Brussels at social engineering. They want to either stop it or have their say.” “Why?” “They feel excluded. It’s like at school when the teacher just tells you what to do for no good reason you can see.” “But fighting’s silly,” the young girl exclaimed. “We don’t do that at school.” “I’m glad to hear it. But there are so many people protesting that you’re bound to get some silly ones in there.”

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Every scientific discipline was involved and invited, from microbiological waste processing to optronic computing, genoprotein therapy to reusable packaging. To a broad spectrum of Europe’s political activists, and even some of the smaller mainstream political parties, it was a monstrous technocrat attempt at social engineering. Who decided what was a desirable trait and trend? Where was the slightest hint of democratic input? Where, every Separatist movement demanded to know, was consideration for national integrity and sovereign culture? The summit had managed to attract a phenomenal amount of antagonism over the preceding months.

The Unbearable Lightness of Scones
by Alexander McCall Smith
Published 31 Dec 2007

And Angus would laugh and say, “Well, we’ll start by avoiding terms like that!” But then, magnanimously, he would agree – subject to time being available – and he would announce the abandonment of the intrusive attempts by politicians to control cultural institutions or to use culture as an instrument of social engineering. There would be grants – large ones – available to those of real talent in the world of painting, particularly to those who showed some ability to draw, a skill notably lacking, Angus thought, in so many aspirants to the Turner Prize. He agreed with David Hockney that an artist really had to be able to draw before anything else could be achieved.

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That’s why they come. They come to see our scenery.” He pointed out of the window. They were passing through Falkirk. “They come to get a sense of our history. Old buildings. Mists. All that stuff, which we do rather well.” He paused, and took a sip from his flask. “They don’t come to see our social engineering programmes.” Matthew thought about this. Angus had outspoken views, often wrong, but he was probably right about visitors. Any visitor he had met had wanted the tartan myths to be true. And they were always proud of having Scots blood way back in the mists of time. A great-grandfather who had come from Aberdeen, or something like that.

Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing
by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Published 19 Feb 2013

Together, they prove a singular point: to keep the competitive fire lit bright, nothing is more important than that the contest be close. 2 Like every class to come before, the 2011 graduating cadets of the U.S. Air Force Academy threw their hats into the air at the precise moment the Air Force Thunderbirds flew over Falcon Stadium. But in one pivotal way, the 2011 graduates were different. Though they were never told, they were lab rats in a large-scale experiment in social engineering designed by a few economists. The Academy’s military mission means cadets must be willing to go to war. Cadets’ ability to compete is—very literally—a matter of life and death. So everything at the Academy is a competition, meant to instill competitive fire into the future officers. The freshmen are called “fourth-class” and go by the nickname “doolies,” from the Greek word for “slave.”

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By changing who would be in each squadron, the peer effect would kick in. Carrell and West started by identifying which of the 1,314 incoming cadets had lower SAT scores and GPAs. These were the students most at risk of dropping out. They were assigned to special squadrons with a makeup of extra numbers of high-achievers. Compared with normal squadrons, these socially engineered squadrons had a few more low-performers, many more high-performers, and—to make room—fewer middle-performers. Many of these middle-performers were assigned to their own, fairly homogenous squadrons. Based on his calculations, Carrell predicted that the number of students on academic probation would be sizably reduced.

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All
by Robert Elliott Smith
Published 26 Jun 2019

They included a laissez-faire attitude to free-market economics, a staunch antipathy towards any welfare assistance for the ‘unfit’ poor, a justification for imperialism, sexism and racism, and, ultimately, a growing enthusiasm for eugenics. The mathematization of the theory, through the introduction of statistics and probability, lent these social and racial prejudices the stamp of scientific respectability. The most widely accepted and controversial tool of social engineering to emerge from the era was the intelligence quotient (IQ) test. In the opinion of the scientists who developed its application, if society was going to be improved, then there needed to be a ‘scientific’ way of determining better from worse, and there was no better quality of man’s (and by that, Victorians did largely mean men) ‘fitness’ than their most idealized virtue, intelligence.

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Projecting back 100 years, IQ researcher Jim Flynn found that average IQ scores measured by current standards would be about 70, which nowadays would indicate serious developmental delay.4 But despite mountains of research questioning their validity, and even the morality of reducing people and their intelligence to a single number in order to rank them for opportunities, jobs or even the death sentence, IQ tests continue to be widely used as a method of social engineering. In answer to the question about the discovery of America, I responded: ‘No one knows the answer to that question.’ My examiner, who had seemed absolutely enthralled with my semaphore cube performance, got a puzzled look on her face, and said ‘What do you mean, Rob? Do you not know the answer?’

Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World
by Branko Milanovic
Published 23 Sep 2019

This variant is very much like what I define as political capitalism. Bowles and Gintis furthermore described this variant as “Burkean in its acceptance of traditional values, [but also] more akin to the forward-looking social engineering of [Henri de] Saint-Simon” (198). Neo-Hobbesian capitalism combines relatively conservative social values, expansion of property rights in many domains (what I refer to as increased commodification) and attempts to “improve” society through social engineering. These are all characteristics of successful political capitalism. The third variant that Bowles and Gintis consider consists of a society of rentiers who lease or lend their capital to democratically organized companies.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera
Published 10 Mar 2020

This aspect of their narrative deserves to be questioned, as science was frequently used as a vehicle to justify many of the above-mentioned atrocities. For example, Social Darwinism was a somewhat loosely-defined ideology that took the evolutionary narrative of survival of the fittest to the realm of geo-politics and social engineering in the late nineteenth century up until World War II.50 Under Social Darwinist logic, differences in socio-political outcomes could be entirely understood on the basis of biological differences, whether these be between the rich and the poor, the healthy and the sick, or between Europeans and the presumed barbarians of the rest of the world.

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It’s not that they hate the fruits of progress, mind you: most pundits, critics, and their bien-pensant readers use computers rather than quills and inkwells, and they prefer to have their surgery with anesthesia rather than without it. It’s the idea of progress that rankles the chattering class.23 Pinker’s belief that progressive thinking can lead down a slippery slope towards social engineering and totalitarianism has been repeated ad nauseum in so much of his writing that it’s not a stretch of the imagination to conclude that they are driven by ideology as much as they are induced by unbiased observation. “Twentieth-century Marxism”, he writes in The Blank Slate, “was part of a larger intellectual current that has been called Authoritarian High Modernism: the conceit that planners could redesign society from the top down using ‘scientific’ principles” before listing all the professions that seemingly perverted progressive utopian ideas, from architects to social scientists to feminists and child psychologists24.

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It
by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris
Published 10 Jul 2023

The origins of this form of social hacking can be traced to the early days of widespread email use in the mid-1990s. In that era, hackers used phishing and other techniques to steal America Online account information. Podesta’s was likely a case of “spear phishing,” which refers to a phishing attack pointed at a specific target.26 Phishing may be the most common form of social engineering fraud, in part because it’s relatively easy to mimic the style and format of a class of useful automated messages that we receive regularly: password reset requests, delivery notifications, subscription confirmations, and administrative announcements. In 2022, a former employee of the publishing house Simon & Schuster was arrested for masquerading as a publisher or a literary agent to snooker unsuspecting authors and editors into sending him their unpublished manuscripts.

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In this case, the phishing test had a misspelling in the sender address, a changed logo, an odd way of greeting and addressing the recipient, an unusual extension in the linked web address, and the use of two different fonts. Most people today are generally aware that it’s risky to enter their password on suspicious websites, but when we are busy and a phishing attempt looks enough like a real message, any of us can be fooled.28 Social engineering hacks work because their familiarity makes us drop our guard. Recognizing the warning signs is key to avoiding the hook. A big step is simply asking yourself whether a familiar-looking message might not be what it seems. Whenever we receive an unexpected message with a link, we should contact the ostensible sender directly.

Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality
by Vito Tanzi
Published 28 Dec 2017

It should also be mentioned that so many lobbyists had descended on Washington, to oppose the tax, that President Wilson is reported to have remarked that “a brick couldn’t be thrown without hitting one of them” (Wolfensberger, 2004, p. 6). Showing great foresight, the lobbyists, or those who paid for their services, must have been aware that the tax would create a new powerful instrument that governments could use in the future for social engineering. In its initial version, the tax was a small seed, but in time it would grow to reach enormous size. During the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century, the idea that some form of economic planning by governments could help improve the performance of economies, and increase the welfare of citizens, had acquired currency with some politicians and with some economists in several countries, especially in Europe.

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At that time economists had not yet expressed major concerns about potentially significant disincentive effects that could be associated with high income tax rates (see Musgrave, 1959; Goode, 1976). Progressive income taxes with high rates and the use of tax expenditures lent themselves more easily to the kind of social engineering that policymakers and even citizens wanted to pursue at that time. Surveys conducted in the United States in those years often concluded that the personal or individual income tax, which had become highly progressive not just in the United States, was an ideal tax. As mentioned, Welfare Policies 53 potential disincentive effects of high marginal tax rates were ignored, minimized, or questioned in those years.

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Much of the added complexity has been due to the attempt to pursue a lot of different objectives with the income tax law, in addition to that of simply collecting revenue. The more numerous have become the objectives, the greater has become the complexity of the tax. Soon after its introduction in the United States in 1913, the federal income tax ceased to be an instrument mainly used for collecting revenue. It became a tool of social engineering, used by politicians, in place of other tools, to pursue a large and continually increasing range of government objectives. In the United States, which never showed much attraction to high spending, the objectives were pursued, more than in other countries, through the income tax. Once the income tax was adopted, vested interests were encouraged to push for the introduction of special treatments of their worthy causes.

How Will Capitalism End?
by Wolfgang Streeck
Published 8 Nov 2016

They are both, individually as well as in their respective combination, the outcome of specific configurations of classes and class interests as evolved in a historical process driven, not by intelligent design, but by the distribution of class political capacities. Thus post-war democratic capitalism was not a selection by skillful social engineers or concerned citizens from a range of less optimal alternatives, but a historical compromise between a then uniquely powerful working class and an equally uniquely weakened capitalist class that was as never before on the political and economic defensive – which was true in all capitalist countries at the time, among the winners of the war as well as the losers.

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Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press 1985, p. 261. 12Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, p. 259. 13For the treatment of money in Habermas, see also Nigel Dodd, The Sociology of Money: Economics, Reason and Contemporary Society, New York: Continuum 1994. 14One could add that global money speaks with an American accent; while we are always told that, like the metre or the yard, ‘money has no colour’, the dollar is undeniably green, not gold, just as the euro is black, red and yellow. 15Jürgen Habermas, ‘Der DM Nationalismus’, Die Zeit, 30 March 1990. 16Dirk Koch, ‘Die Brüsseler Republik’, Der Spiegel, 27 December 1999. Juncker’s theory of identity fits comfortably with a theory of cognition that informs the policy of social engineering he is pursuing. As an example of ‘permissive consent’, it is splendidly summed up in the following account of his practice: ‘We decide something, put it out into the world and wait for a while to see what happens. If there is no great uproar and no rebellions because most people don’t really grasp what we have decided, then we just move on to the next stage – step by step, until there is no going back’ (ibid., my emphasis).

The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America
by Jon C. Teaford
Published 1 Jan 2006

For the following nine years, Boston’s school board refused to allow anything more than token action to correct imbalances. Its Irish Catholic members, led by Louise Day Hicks, stirred not only racial animosities but also class conflict. They emphasized that upper-middle-class lawmakers from the suburbs were imposing this scheme of social engineering on working-class Bostonians. Attacking the coauthor of the imbalance law, a resident of the upper-middle-class suburb of Brookline, Hicks argued: “The racial imbalance law does not affect Brook-line, so he smugly tells the elected officials of Boston what they should do. I, for one, am tired of nonresidents telling the people of Boston what they should do.”

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One white parent of a boy slated for busing explained: “I worked nine years in Roxbury as a street cleaner, and I’ll never let him go there.”87 Raising the specter of rapacious black sexuality, another white father observed: “The question is: Am I going to send my young daughter, who is budding into the flower of womanhood, into Roxbury on a bus?”88 In the working-class Charlestown district of Boston, the opposition was virtually as intense. Charlestown whites had earlier fought the physical engineering plots of urban renewal authorities to disrupt their enclave, and now they mobilized against the social engineers of busing. In fact, whites throughout the city opposed busing, and many of those who could afford to move to suburbia did so. Meanwhile, poor whites and poor blacks remained in the central city, embroiled in racial conflict. In the early 1970s, some federal judges, however, attempted to foil fleeing whites by mandating inter district busing between cities and suburbs.

System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
by Rob Reich , Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein
Published 6 Sep 2021

We should rather blame ourselves, that is to say, the citizens of the democratic state.” This matters for the governance of technology because it is a deep critique of the utopian notion of social engineering—the idea that we can organize our politics to arrive at the one best outcome for society. Such a thing is not only unrealistic, it is also dangerous because it creates a pathway straight to dictatorship. We need an alternative model of what we want from our politics—not utopian social engineering, as Plato imagined, but “piecemeal engineering,” in Popper’s words. Or in the words of another twentieth-century philosopher, Judith Shklar, we want a democratic society that rejects “a summum bonum toward which all political agents should strive,” but that does begin with “a summum malum, which all of us know and would avoid if only we could.”

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex
by Rupert Darwall
Published 2 Oct 2017

It gave the Social Democrats, who formed their first government in 1921, a political system adapted to the swift enactment of the intentions of the central bureaucracy. The legislature is weak, the executive strong, and, for centuries, real power has lain in the government administrative machine.3 The organs of the Swedish state became the perfect instruments to carry out the twentieth century’s most prolonged and thorough experiment in social engineering outside the Soviet Union and China. It pioneered a cradle-to-grave welfare state to replace the family and operated a eugenics program championed by Swedish economists and scientists alike, including the leading climate scientist of the era, Svante Arrhenius (Chapter 3). Renewable Energy In 1988, the year of the Toronto conference on global warming as well as the establishment of the IPCC, renewable energy had not been touted as providing salvation from global warming.

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The Myrdals’ book had an immense effect on the new Social Democratic government by defining a mission for the state and the party to provide a cradle-to-grave welfare system. Soon after, the state was running the nurseries, and the party’s funeral organization was burying and cremating around half Sweden’s dead. The Myrdals had a materialist, mechanistic view of people. They were the archetypal social engineers. As distinct from the early eugenicists, they saw population less in biological terms than as a “mathematical or physical quantity.”9 Despite Alva’s expectation about the book creating enemies, the Myrdals reduced their number by deleting sections on eugenics from the English edition, while copies of the Swedish first edition became something of a collector’s item.

Hopes and Prospects
by Noam Chomsky
Published 1 Jan 2009

Even the Wall Street Journal, one of the most stalwart deniers, ran a supplement with dire warnings about the “climate disaster,” urging that none of the options being considered may be sufficient and it may be necessary to undertake more radical measures of geoengineering, “cooling the planet” in some manner.27 Many also understand that it will be necessary to reverse the vast state-corporate social engineering programs since World War II, designed to promote an energy-wasting and environmentally destructive fossil fuel–based economy, and that a central element of these changes will have to be development of efficient high-speed rail systems. It is revealing to see how the problem is being addressed.

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A serious approach would surely move with dispatch toward conservation and renewable energy, along with dedication of substantial resources to technological innovations—harnessing solar energy, many scientists contend. And beyond that, significant socioeconomic changes must be undertaken to reverse the effects of the huge state-corporate social engineering projects of the post–World War II period designed to create a system based on wasteful reliance on fossil fuels. A related threat is limited access to the basic means of life: water and sufficient food. There are short-term solutions: desalination, for example, in which Saudi Arabia is well in the lead in scale, and Israel in technology—one of many bases for constructive cooperation, if the United States and Israel permit a resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict in terms of the international consensus on a viable two-state settlement that they have been barring for over thirty years, with rare and brief departures, another critical challenge with broad repercussions.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 29 Aug 2018

Zuckerberg sounds convinced that the new Facebook AI can not only identify ‘meaningful communities’, but also ‘strengthen our social fabric and bring the world closer together’. That is far more ambitious than using AI to drive a car or diagnose cancer. Facebook’s community vision is perhaps the first explicit attempt to use AI for centrally planned social engineering on a global scale. It therefore constitutes a crucial test case. If it succeeds, we are likely to see many more such attempts, and algorithms will be acknowledged as the new masters of human social networks. If it fails, this will uncover the limitations of the new technologies – algorithms may be good for navigating vehicles and curing diseases, but when it comes to solving social problems, we should still rely on politicians and priests.

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It is a consumerist world, which gives completely free rein to sex, drugs and rock’n’ roll, and whose supreme value is happiness. The underlying assumption of the book is that humans are biochemical algorithms, that science can hack the human algorithm, and that technology can then be used to manipulate it. In this brave new world, the World Government uses advanced biotechnology and social engineering to make sure that everyone is always content, and no one has any reason to rebel. It is as if Joy, Sadness and the other characters in Riley’s brain have been turned into loyal government agents. There is therefore no need for a secret police, for concentration camps, or for a Ministry of Love à la Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream
by Nicholas Lemann
Published 9 Sep 2019

Also see Olson’s The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities, Yale University Press, 1982. “It is in vain to say that enlightened statesmen”: James Madison, “Federalist Number 10,” The Debate on the Constitution, Volume 1, Library of America, 1993, 393. “The social engineer tended to become”: Herbert Croly, introduction to Eduard C. Lindeman, Social Discovery: An Approach to the Study of Functional Groups, Republic Publishing Company, 1936, xii. “the superior force”: Madison, “Federalist Number 10,” 390. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book began when a letter arrived from John Hennessey, then the president of Stanford University, inviting me to give the Tanner Lectures there.

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*Even Herbert Croly, Arthur Bentley’s exact contemporary and the purveyor of a completely opposite political vision, was by the end of his life beginning to question his original faith in government by disinterested experts. Fifteen years after the publication of The Promise of American Life, he wrote, The social engineer tended to become in practice a revised edition of the traditional law-giver who knew what was possible and good for other people and who proposed to mold them according to his ideas … These experts do not know enough and should not pretend to know enough to justify them in the assumption of a responsibility so grave and yet so vicarious.

Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet
by Roger Scruton
Published 30 Apr 2014

Writers like Joel Kotkin have, therefore, argued that in North America suburbanization is all but irresistible, and indeed the only way to satisfy the legitimate demands of a growing population, estimated to add another 100 million to its number over the next forty years.273 Moreover, the move to the suburbs is the true moment of settlement for aspiring Americans, the moment when their membership of the community is finally established and unashamedly declared to the world, and the moment when they can choose home, school and neighbourhood for the family’s sake, and not for the sake of schemes dreamed up by social engineers. Hence suburban houses in America are not conceived on the model of the uniform European ‘housing estate’, but rather on the model of the country retreat, a collection of mansions rather than streets, and the whole designed as a garden, in which fairy castles can be glimpsed through the trees.

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This solution has a precedent in London, where the original city of London grew next to the city of Westminster in friendly competition, and where the residential areas of Chelsea, Kensington, Bloomsbury and Whitechapel grew as autonomous villages rather than overspills from the existing centres. All that is needed to achieve this effect, Léon Krier has argued, is a master plan.276 By this he does not mean one of those comprehensive experiments in social engineering that appealed to the modernists, but a set of aesthetic constraints, within which people can make the choices best suited to their needs. Whether or not you go along with Kunstler’s doom-scenario, with Kotkin’s celebration of the suburbs, or with Krier’s defence of the polycentric city, the question that Jacobs has bequeathed to us remains: how do we return from the wasted cities of today to an ecologically durable form of settlement?

Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess
by Robert H. Frank
Published 15 Jan 1999

Those in the thrall of invisible-hand theory see America’s recent low-growth trajectory as the outcome of decisions by individual consumers who, having rationally weighed the relative merits of present and future consumption, simply opted to emphasize the former. To second-guess these decisions, they say, is the height of bureaucratic hubris. How can the government know better than the people themselves how best to resolve this trade-off? Free marketeers are by no means the only ones troubled by the specter of meddlesome social engineers. Yet collective efforts to stimulate savings can be justified on a variety of grounds that do not entail second-guessing consumers. At the most basic level, for example, we may observe that the government already has in place a number of policies whose side effects are to reduce the amounts that rational consumers would otherwise choose to save.

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As a group, we might value the improved social climate or higher national rank made possible by a higher savings rate much more than enough to compensate for giving up some current consumption. As individuals, however, we cannot affect this trade-off. In such situations, it simply makes no sense to complain that progrowth policies are an instance of meddlesome social engineers trying to impose their will on a resisting public. Just as we want government to levy taxes to support the advantages that stem from an effective national defense capability, so too might we want government to employ tax policy in pursuit of the public benefits that accompany rapid economic growth.

American Foundations: An Investigative History
by Mark Dowie
Published 3 Oct 2009

Most of the social development programs of the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations, for example, while widely regarded by philanthropists, academics, and historians as notable achievements of American philanthropy, are seen by pundits like Pat Buchanan, Heather MacDonald, and Chester Finn as shipwrecked social engineering. In fact, the ultimate benefits of organized philanthropy are very much in the eye of the beholder, and the politics behind those eyes are a pretty good predictor of an individual's assessment of a specific grant or initiative. In the introduction to his landmark book Philanthropy in Action, Brian O'Connell former president of Independent Sector, holds up the Rockefeller Foundation's Green Revolution as "inspirational," an example of sublime philanthropy.

…

In 1933 Sage Foundation staffers arrived in Washington to assist in drafting New Deal legislation that created thousands of federal jobs for social workers and social scientists and created a whole new class of government experts. At the time, Rockefeller and Carnegie trustees seemed suspicious of "social engineering" and were convinced that the depression was proving the futility of social science. From early in the century, their funding had leaned heavily toward the safe, utilitarian work of physics and chemistry. Grants for economic and social research were unusual. Although their interests had always gone beyond the creation of pure knowledge, in an era of troubling social change the ultimate quarry of Rockefeller and Carnegie science funding remained new technologies and products to strengthen private industry and bolster a faltering corporate capitalism.

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
by Jaron Lanier
Published 28 May 2018

Cutting-edge nerdy philosophers, engineers, and revolutionaries have been challenging it for centuries now. Why not conceive of people as naturally evolved machines, but machines nonetheless? People could then be programmed to behave well, and the human project could flourish. Behaviorists, Communists, and now Silicon Valley social engineers have all tried to achieve that end. But each time a nerd attempts to remove free will from the stage, it pops up with amplified concentration in a new spot. With the same breath that proclaims that communal algorithms or artificial intelligence will surpass individual human creativity, an enthusiast will inevitably exclaim that a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, AI programmer, or ideologue is a visionary who is changing the world, denting the universe (in Steve Jobs’s phrase), and charting the future.

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist
by Michael Shermer
Published 8 Apr 2020

This led me to wonder if this visionary had given any thought to what sort of government he would set up on the Red Planet, and if he already had a team of social scientists working on the problem or whether he was just going to wing it when they got there. Surely not, but what source for research would a team of social engineers (let’s call them) working at SpaceX (or NASA, since it too plans to send people to Mars in the coming decades) access? There are no working models. Or are there? There are. Since it is Earthlings going to Mars, experiments in governance on the Blue Planet are a useful resource for lessons on how to govern the Red Planet.

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The lessons for Martian colonists from Pitcairn mutineers are clear enough: start off with a balanced sex ratio, structure a political system more horizontal than hierarchical, eliminate racist and misogynist attitudes, and accentuate cooperation and attenuate competition. * * * Martian political, economic, and legal institutions will likely vary from Earthly ones according to the most basic needs of the first colonists, but any such variation will be necessarily bounded by human nature. Perhaps SpaceX or NASA will create a division of social engineers – a team of legal scholars, political scientists, economists, social psychologists, and conflict resolution scholars – and they’ll come up with a wholly different system of governance. Or maybe the Martian colonists themselves will think of something new as they experiment with different solutions to social problems.

The Science of Hate: How Prejudice Becomes Hate and What We Can Do to Stop It
by Matthew Williams
Published 23 Mar 2021

But to build swathes of public housing that were segregated by race would have given the impression that the federal government endorsed ‘black only’ and ‘white only’ housing blocks and neighbourhoods, and would do more damage to multicultural relations. In what became regarded as one of the first large-scale social engineering experiments, the Newark low-rent public housing project assigned black and white residents to separate blocks, and compared their experiences to two similar blocks in New York City that were desegregated. Compared to their counterparts in the segregated blocks, white housewives in desegregated housing reported better experiences with black neighbours, and came to hold them in higher esteem.

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Abdallah, Abdalraouf, 1 Abedi, Salman, 1, 2, 3, 4 abortion, 1, 2 Abu Sayyaf Group, 1 abuse, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 accelerants to hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 accelerationists, 1 addiction, 1, 2, 3, 4 Admiral Duncan bar, 1 adolescence, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 advertising, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 African Americans, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 afterlife, 1, 2 age, 1, 2 aggression: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; false alarms, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; identity fusion, 1; mortality, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2 AI, see artificial intelligence Albright, Jonathan, 1 alcohol, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 algorithms: far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; filter bubbles and bias, 1, 2; Google, 1, 2, 3; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; Tay, 1, 2; tipping point, 1, 2; YouTube, 1 Algotransparency.org, 1 Allport, Gordon, 1, 2, 3, 4 Al Noor Mosque, Christchurch, 1 al-Qaeda, 1, 2 Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), 1 alt-right: algorithms, 1, 2; brain and hate, 1; Charlottesville rally, 1, 2; counter-hate speech, 1; definition, 1n; Discord, 1; Facebook, 1, 2, 3; fake accounts, 1; filter bubbles, 1, 2; red-pilling, 1, 2; social media, 1, 2; Trump, 1, 2; YouTube, 1 Alzheimer’s disease, 1 American Crowbar Case, 1 American culture, 1 American Nazi Party, 1, 2 Amodio, David, 1n amygdala: brain and signs of prejudice, 1, 2; brain tumours, 1; disengaging the amygdala autopilot, 1; hate and feeling pain, 1, 2; and insula, 1; neuroscience of hate, 1n, 2, 3, 4; parts that edge us towards hate, 1; parts that process prejudice, 1; prepared versus learned amygdala responses, 1, 2; processing of ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1; recognising facial expressions, 1n, 2; stopping hate, 1, 2; trauma and containment, 1, 2; unlearning prejudiced threat detection, 1 anger, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 anonymity, 1, 2 anterior insula, 1n Antifa, 1, 2n, 3 anti-gay prejudice, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 anti-hate initiatives, 1, 2 antilocution, 1 anti-Muslim hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 anti-Semitism, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 anti-white hate crime, 1 Antonissen, Kirsten, 1, 2 anxiety: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; harm of hate speech, 1; intergroup contact, 1, 2; subcultures of hate, 1, 2; trauma and containment, 1; trigger events, 1, 2 Arab people, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Arbery, Ahmaud, 1 Arkansas, 1, 2 artificial intelligence (AI), 1, 2, 3, 4 Asian Americans, 1, 2 Asian people, 1, 2, 3, 4 assault, 1, 2, 3 asylum seekers, 1, 2, 3, 4 Athens, 1 Atlanta attack, 1 Atran, Scott, 1, 2 attachment, 1 attention, 1, 2, 3 attitudes, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Aung San Suu Kyi, 1 austerity, 1 Australia, 1 autism, 1 averages, 1, 2 avoidance, 1, 2, 3 Bali attack, 1 Bangladeshi people, 1 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), 1, 2, 3 behavioural sciences, 1, 2 behaviour change, 1, 2, 3 beliefs, 1, 2, 3 Bell, Sean, 1, 2 Berger, Luciana, 1 Berlin attacks, 1 bias: algorithms, 1; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; filter bubbles, 1; Google Translate, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4; police racial bias, 1; predicting hate crime, 1; stopping hate, 1, 2, 3; unconscious bias, 1, 2, 3, 4 Bible, 1 Biden, Joe, 1 ‘Big Five’ personality traits, 1 biology, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Birstall, 1 bisexual people, 1 Black, Derek, 1, 2 Black, Don, 1, 2, 3 blackface, 1 Black Lives Matter, 1 Black Mirror, 1n black people: author’s brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; brain and signs of prejudice, 1, 2; brain parts that edge us towards hate, 1; brain parts that process prejudice, 1; Charlottesville rally, 1, 2; disengaging the amygdala autopilot, 1; Duggan shooting, 1; feeling pain, 1; Google searches, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4; police relations, 1, 2; predicting hate crime, 1, 2; prepared versus learned amygdala responses, 1; pyramid of hate, 1, 2, 3n; recognising facial expressions, 1, 2; South Africa, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; trauma and Franklin, 1, 2, 3, 4; trigger events, 1, 2, 3; unconscious bias, 1; unlearning prejudiced threat detection, 1, 2; white flight, 1 BNP, see British National Party Bolsonaro, Jair, 1 Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1, 2 bots, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Bowers, Robert Gregory, 1 boys, 1, 2 Bradford, 1 brain: ancient brains in modern world, 1; author’s brain and hate, 1; beyond the brain, 1; the brain and hate, 1; brain and signs of prejudice, 1; brain damage and tumours, 1, 2, 3, 4; brains and unconscious bias against ‘them’, 1; brain’s processing of ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1; defence mechanisms, 1; disengaging the amygdala autopilot, 1; figures, 1; finding a neuroscientist and brain scanner, 1; group threat detection, 1, 2; hacking the brain to hate, 1; hate and feeling pain, 1; locating hate in the brain, 1; neuroscience and big questions about hate, 1; overview, 1; parts that edge us towards hate, 1; parts that process prejudice, 1; prepared versus learned amygdala responses, 1; recognising facial expressions, 1; rest of the brain, 1; signs of prejudice, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2; tipping point to hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; trauma and containment, 1, 2; unlearning prejudiced threat detection, 1; where neuroscience of hate falls down, 1 brain imaging: author’s brain and hate, 1; beyond the brain, 1; the brain and hate, 1; brain and signs of prejudice, 1, 2; brain injury, 1, 2; Diffusion MRI, 1; disengaging the amygdala autopilot, 1; finding a neuroscientist and brain scanner, 1; fusiform face area, 1; locating hate in the brain, 1; MEG, 1; neuroscience of hate, 1, 2, 3; parts that process prejudice, 1; prepared versus learned amygdala responses, 1; processing of ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2; unconscious bias, 1 brainwashing, 1, 2 Bray, Mark, 1n Brazil, 1, 2, 3 Breivik, Anders, 1, 2 Brexit, 1, 2, 3, 4n, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Brexit Party, 1, 2 Brick Lane, London, 1 Britain First, 1, 2 British identity, 1, 2 British National Party (BNP), 1, 2n, 3, 4, 5 Brixton, 1 Broadmoor Hospital, 1, 2 Brooker, Charlie, 1n Brooks, Rayshard, 1 Brown, Katie, 1, 2 Brown, Michael, 1, 2 Brussels attack, 1 Budapest Pride, 1 bullying, 1, 2 Bundy, Ted, 1 burka, 1, 2, 3 Burmese, 1 Bush, George W., 1 Byrd, James, Jr, 1 California, 1, 2n, 3 Caliskan, Aylin, 1 Cambridge Analytica, 1, 2 cancer, 1, 2 Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC), 1, 2, 3, 4 caregiving motivational system, 1 care homes, 1, 2 Casablanca, 1 cascade effect, 1, 2 categorisation, 1, 2, 3, 4 Catholics, 1 Caucasian Crew, 1 causality, 1, 2 celebrities, 1, 2, 3, 4 censorship, 1, 2 Centennial Olympic Park, Atlanta, 1 Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 1 change blindness, 1 charity, 1, 2, 3 Charlottesville rally, 1, 2, 3n, 4 chatbots, 1, 2, 3 Chauvin, Derek, 1 Chelmsford, 1 Chicago, 1 childhood: attachment issues, 1; child abuse, 1, 2, 3; child grooming, 1; child play, 1; failures of containment, 1, 2, 3, 4; group threat, 1, 2; intergroup contact, 1, 2; learned stereotypes, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2; predicting hate crime, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; trigger events, 1, 2; understanding the ‘average’ hate criminal, 1; understanding the ‘exceptional’ hate offender, 1, 2, 3 China, 1, 2, 3, 4 Chinese people, 1, 2, 3 ‘Chinese virus,’ 1, 2 Cho, John, 1 Christchurch mosque attack, 1 Christianity, 1, 2, 3 cinema, 1 citizen journalism, 1 civilising process, 1 civil rights, 1, 2, 3, 4 class, 1, 2 cleaning, 1 climate change, 1, 2 Clinton, Hillary, 1, 2 cognitive behavioural therapy, 1 cognitive dissonance, 1 Cohen, Florette, 1, 2 Cold War, 1 collective humiliation, 1 collective quests for significance, 1, 2 collective trauma, 1, 2 colonialism, 1n, 2 Combat 1, 2 comedies, 1, 2, 3 Communications Acts, 1, 2 compassion, 1, 2, 3 competition, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 confirmation bias, 1 conflict, 1, 2, 3, 4 conflict resolution, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Connectome, 1 Conroy, Jeffrey, 1 Conservative Party, 1, 2, 3 conspiracy theories, 1, 2, 3 contact with others, 1, 2 containment: failures of, 1; hate as container of unresolved trauma, 1; understanding the ‘exceptional’ hate offender, 1, 2, 3 content moderation, 1, 2, 3 context, 1, 2, 3 Convention of Cybercrime, 1 cooperation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Copeland, David, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 coping mechanisms, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Cordoba House (‘Ground Zero mosque’), 1 correction for multiple comparisons, 1, 2n ‘corrective rape’, 1, 2 cortisol, 1 Council of Conservative Citizens, 1n counter-hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4 courts, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 COVID-19 pandemic, 1, 2, 3 Cox, Jo, 1, 2, 3 Criado Perez, Caroline, 1 crime, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Crime and Disorder Act 1998, 1n crime recording, 1, 2, 3, 4 crime reporting, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW), 1 criminal justice, 1, 2, 3 Criminal Justice Act, 1, 2n criminal prosecution, 1, 2 criminology, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 cross-categorisation, 1 cross-race or same-race effect, 1 Crusius, Patrick, 1, 2 CUBRIC (Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre), 1, 2, 3, 4 cultural ‘feeding’, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 cultural worldviews, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 culture: definitions, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; tipping point, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; unlearning prejudiced threat detection, 1 culture machine, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 culture wars, 1 Curry and Chips, 1 cybercrime, 1 dACC, see dorsal anterior cingulate cortex Daily Mail, 1, 2 Dailymotion, 1 Daily Stormer, 1, 2n Daley, Tom, 1, 2 Darfur, 1 dark matter, 1 death: events that remind us of our mortality, 1; newspapers, 1; predicting hate crime, 1; religion and hate, 1, 2; subcultures of hate, 1, 2; trigger events, 1, 2 death penalty, 1, 2 death threats, 1 decategorisation, 1 De Dreu, Carsten, 1, 2, 3, 4 deep learning, 1, 2 defence mechanisms, 1 defensive haters, 1, 2 dehumanisation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 deindividuation, 1, 2 deindustrialisation, 1, 2, 3, 4 Democrats, 1, 2, 3 Denny, Reginald, 1 DeSalvo, Albert (the Boston Strangler), 1 desegregation, 1, 2, 3 Desmond, Matthew, 1 Dewsbury, 1, 2, 3 Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging (Diffusion MRI), 1, 2 diminished responsibility, 1, 2 Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), 1 disability: brain and hate, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; intergroup contact, 1; Japan care home, 1, 2; online hate speech, 1; profiling the hater, 1; suppressing prejudice, 1; victim perception, 1n Discord, 1, 2, 3, 4 discrimination: brain and hate, 1, 2; comedy programmes, 1; Google searches, 1; Japan laws, 1; preference for ingroup, 1; pyramid of hate, 1, 2, 3; questioning prejudgements, 1; trigger events, 1, 2, 3 disgust: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; group threat detection, 1, 2, 3; ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1, 2; Japan care home, 1; what it means to hate, 1, 2 disinformation, 1, 2, 3 displacement, 1, 2 diversity, 1, 2, 3 dlPFC, see dorsolateral prefrontal cortex domestic violence, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Doran, John, 1, 2, 3 dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), 1, 2, 3n, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), 1n, 2, 3 Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger, 1 drag queens, 1 drugs, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Duggan, Mark, 1 Duke, David, 1 Dumit, Joe, Picturing Personhood, 1 Durkheim, Emile, 1 Dykes, Andrea, 1 Earnest, John T., 1 Eastern Europeans, 1, 2, 3 Ebrahimi, Bijan, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 echo chambers, 1, 2n economy, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 EDL, see English Defence League education, 1, 2, 3, 4 Edwards, G., 1 8chan, 1, 2 elections, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 electroencephalography, 1n elites, 1 ELIZA (computer program), 1 The Ellen Show, 1 El Paso shooting, 1 Elrod, Terry, 1 Emancipation Park, Charlottesville, 1 Emanuel African Methodist Church, Charleston, 1 emotions: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4n, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9; group threat, 1; subcultures of hate, 1; trigger events and mortality, 1; what it means to hate, 1, 2, 3, 4 empathy: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; feeling hate together, 1; group threat, 1, 2; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; subcultures of hate, 1; trauma and containment, 1 employment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 English Defence League (EDL), 1, 2n, 3 epilepsy, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Epstein, Robert, 1 equality, 1, 2 Essex, 1 ethnicity, 1, 2n, 3, 4 ethnic minorities, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ethnocentrism, 1 EU, see European Union European Commission, 1, 2 European Digital Services Act, 1 European Parliament, 1, 2 European Social Survey, 1 European Union (EU): Brexit referendum, 1, 2, 3, 4n, 5; Facebook misinformation, 1; group threat, 1, 2; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3; trigger events, 1 Eurovision, 1 evidence-based hate crime, 1 evolution, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 executive control area: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; disengaging the amygdala autopilot, 1, 2; extremism, 1; recognising false alarms, 1; trauma and containment, 1; trigger events, 1 exogenous shocks, 1 expert opinion, 1 extreme right, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 extremism: Charlottesville and redpilling, 1, 2; feeling hate together, 1; online hate speech, 1; perceiving versus proving hate, 1; quest for significance, 1, 2, 3; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; trauma and containment, 1; trigger events, 1, 2, 3 Facebook: algorithms, 1, 2; Charlottesville rally, 1, 2; Christchurch mosque attack, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; filter bubbles, 1, 2; how much online hate speech, 1, 2; Myanmar genocide, 1; online hate and offline harm, 1, 2, 3; redpilling, 1; stopping online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4 facial expression, 1, 2, 3, 4 faith, 1, 2 fake accounts, 1, 2; see also bots fake news, 1, 2, 3, 4 false alarms, 1, 2, 3 Farage, Nigel, 1, 2 far left, 1n, 2, 3, 4 Farook, Syed Rizwan, 1 far right: algorithms, 1, 2, 3, 4; brain injury, 1; Charlottesville rally, 1, 2, 3n, 4; COVID-19 pandemic, 1, 2; Facebook, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; filter bubbles, 1, 2; gateway sites, 1; group threat, 1, 2; red-pilling, 1; rise of, 1; stopping online hate speech, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; terror attacks, 1, 2, 3; tipping point, 1, 2; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4n; trigger events, 1, 2; YouTube, 1 fathers, 1, 2, 3 FBI, see Federal Bureau of Investigation fear: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; feeling hate together, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; mortality, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3; steps to stop hate, 1, 2; trauma and containment, 1, 2; trigger events, 1, 2, 3 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Federation of American Immigration Reform, 1 Ferguson, Missouri, 1 Festinger, Leon, 1 fiction, 1 Fields, Ted, 1 50 Cent Army, 1 ‘fight or flight’ response, 1, 2, 3 films, 1, 2 filter bubbles, 1, 2, 3, 4 Finland, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Finsbury Park mosque attack, 1, 2, 3 first responders, 1 Fiske, Susan, 1 Five Star Movement, 1 flashbacks, 1 Florida, 1, 2 Floyd, George, 1, 2, 3 Flynt, Larry, 1 fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 football, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 football hooligans, 1, 2 Forever Welcome, 1 4chan, 1, 2 Fox News, 1, 2 Franklin, Benjamin, 1 Franklin, Joseph Paul, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Fransen, Jayda, 1 freedom fighters, 1, 2 freedom of speech, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 frustration, 1, 2, 3, 4 functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 fundamentalism, 1, 2 fusiform face area, 1 fusion, see identity fusion Gab, 1 Gadd, David, 1, 2n, 3, 4 Gaddafi, Muammar, 1, 2 Gage, Phineas, 1, 2 galvanic skin responses, 1 Gamergate, 1 gateway sites, 1 gay people: author’s experience, 1, 2, 3; brain and hate, 1, 2; Copeland attacks, 1, 2; COVID-19 pandemic, 1; filter bubbles, 1; gay laws, 1; gay marriage, 1, 2, 3; group associations, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; hate counts, 1, 2, 3, 4; physical attacks, 1, 2; profiling the hater, 1; Russia, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Section 1, 2, 3, 4; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; trigger events, 1, 2; why online hate speech hurts, 1; see also LGBTQ+ people gay rights, 1, 2, 3, 4 gender, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Generation Identity, 1 Generation Z, 1, 2 genetics, 1n, 2, 3 genocide, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Georgia (country), 1 Georgia, US, 1, 2, 3, 4 Germany, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Gilead, Michael, 1 ginger people, 1 girls, and online hate speech, 1 Gladwell, Malcolm, 1 Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, 1 glucocorticoids, 1, 2 God, 1, 2 God’s Will, 1, 2 Goebbels, Joseph, 1 Google, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Google+, 1 Google Translate, 1 goth identity, 1, 2, 3, 4 governments, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Grant, Oscar, 1 gravitational waves, 1 Great Recession (2007–9), 1 Great Replacement conspiracy theory, 1 Greece, 1, 2 Greenberg, Jeff, 1, 2, 3 Greene, Robert, 1 grey matter, 1 Grillot, Ian, 1, 2 Grodzins, Morton, 1 grooming, 1, 2, 3 ‘Ground Zero mosque’ (Cordoba House), 1 GroupMe, 1 groups: ancient brains in modern world, 1; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; childhood, 1; feeling hate together, 1; foundations of prejudice, 1; group threat and hate, 1; identity fusion, 1, 2, 3; intergroup hate, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; reasons for hate offending, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2; tipping point, 1, 2, 3, 4; warrior psychology, 1, 2, 3; what it means to hate, 1, 2 group threat, 1; beyond threat, 1; Bijan as the threatening racial other, 1; context and threat, 1; cultural machine, group threat and stereotypes, 1; evolution of group threat detection, 1; human biology and threat, 1; neutralising the perception of threat, 1; overview, 1; society, competition and threat, 1; threat in their own words, 1 guilt, 1, 2, 3, 4 guns, 1, 2 ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1, 2, 3, 4 Haines, Matt, 1 Haka, 1 Halle Berry neuron, 1, 2 harassment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 harm of hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Harris, Brendan, 1 Harris, Lasana, 1 Harris, Lovell, 1, 2, 3, 4 hate: author’s brain and hate, 1; the brain and hate, 1; definitions, 1, 2; feeling hate together, 1; foundations of prejudice and hate, 1, 2, 3; group threat and hate, 1; ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1, 2; hate counts, 1; hate in word and deed, 1; profiling the hater, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; rise of the bots and trolls, 1; seven steps to stop hate, 1; subcultures of hate, 1; tipping point from prejudice to hate, 1; trauma, containment and hate, 1; trigger events and ebb and flow of hate, 1; what it means to hate, 1 hate counts, 1; criminalising hate, 1; how they count, 1; overview, 1; perceiving versus proving hate, 1; police and hate, 1; rising hate count, 1; ‘signal’ hate acts and criminalisation, 1; Sophie Lancaster, 1; warped world of hate, 1 hate crime: author’s experience, 1, 2, 3; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; definitions, 1; events and hate online, 1; events and hate on the streets, 1, 2; the ‘exceptional’ hate criminal, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3; foundations of prejudice and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; hate counts, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; laws, 1n, 2, 3, 4, 5; number of crimes, 1, 2; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4; predicting hate crime, 1; profiling the hater, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4; trigger events, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; understanding the ‘average’ hate criminal, 1; understanding the ‘exceptional’ hate offender, 1; what it means to hate, 1, 2, 3 hate groups, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 hate in word and deed, 1; algorithmic far right, 1; Charlottesville rally, 1, 2, 3n, 4; extreme filter bubbles, 1; game changer for the far right, 1; gateway sites, 1; overview, 1; ‘real life effort post’ and Christchurch, 1; red-pilling, 1 HateLab, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 hate speech: far-right hate, 1, 2, 3; filter bubbles and bias, 1; harm of, 1; how much online hate speech, 1; Japan laws, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; stopping online hate speech, 1; Tay chatbot, 1; trigger events, 1, 2, 3; why online hate speech hurts, 1 hate studies, 1, 2 ‘hazing’ practices, 1 health, 1, 2, 3, 4 Henderson, Russell, 1 Herbert, Ryan, 1 Hewstone, Miles, 1 Heyer, Heather, 1 Hinduism, 1, 2 hippocampus, 1, 2, 3, 4 history of offender, 1 Hitler, Adolf, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 HIV/AIDS, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 hollow mask illusion, 1, 2 Hollywood, 1, 2 Holocaust, 1, 2, 3, 4 Homicide Act, 1n homophobia: author’s experience, 1, 2, 3, 4; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3; evidence-based hate crime, 1; federal law, 1; jokes, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2; Russia, 1, 2; Shepard murder, 1; South Africa, 1; trauma and containment, 1; victim perception of motivation, 1n Homo sapiens, 1 homosexuality: author’s experience, 1; online hate speech, 1; policing, 1; questioning prejudgements, 1; Russia, 1, 2; trauma and containment, 1, 2; see also gay people hooligans, 1, 2 Horace, 1 hormones, 1, 2, 3 hot emotions, 1 hot-sauce study, 1, 2 housing, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Huddersfield child grooming, 1 human rights, 1, 2, 3 humiliation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 humour, 1, 2 Hungary, 1 hunter-gatherers, 1n, 2 Hustler, 1 IAT, see Implicit Association Test identity: author’s experience of attack, 1; British identity, 1, 2; Charlottesville rally, 1, 2; children’s ingroups, 1; group threat, 1, 2; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4; steps to stop hate, 1, 2 identity fusion: fusion and hateful murder, 1; fusion and hateful violence, 1; fusion and self-sacrifice in the name of hate, 1; generosity towards the group, 1; tipping point, 1, 2; warrior psychology, 1, 2, 3 ideology, 1, 2, 3, 4 illegal hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4 illocutionary speech, 1 imaging, see brain imaging immigration: Forever Welcome, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; hate counts, 1n, 2; HateLab Brexit study, 1; identity fusion, 1; intergroup contact, 1; negative stereotypes, 1; online hate speech, 1; Purinton, 1, 2; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3; trigger events, 1, 2n, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; YouTube algorithms, 1 immortality, 1, 2 Implicit Association Test (IAT), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 implicit prejudice: author’s brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; online hate speech, 1, 2 India, 1 Indonesia, 1 Infowars, 1, 2 Ingersoll, Karma, 1 ingroup: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; child play, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; HateLab Brexit study, 1; identity fusion, 1, 2; pyramid of hate, 1; reasons for hate offending, 1; trigger events, 1, 2, 3; what it means to hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Instagram, 1, 2, 3 Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 1 institutional racism, 1 instrumental crimes, 1 insula: brain and signs of prejudice, 1, 2, 3; facial expressions, 1, 2; fusiform face area, 1; hacking the brain to hate, 1; hate and feeling pain, 1; neuroscience of hate, 1n, 2, 3, 4, 5; parts that edge us towards hate, 1; parts that process prejudice, 1; processing of ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1, 2 Integrated Threat Theory (ITT), 1, 2, 3 integration, 1, 2, 3, 4 intergroup contact, 1, 2, 3 Intergroup Contact Theory, 1, 2, 3 intergroup hate, 1, 2, 3, 4 internet: algorithms, 1, 2; chatbots, 1; counterhate speech, 1; COVID-19 pandemic, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; filter bubbles, 1, 2, 3; Google searches, 1; hate speech harm, 1; how much online hate speech, 1; online news, 1; reasons for hate offending, 1; rise of the bots and trolls, 1; stopping online hate speech, 1; tipping point, 1, 2, 3; training the machine to count hate, 1; why online hate speech hurts, 1 interracial relations, 1, 2, 3, 4 intolerance, 1, 2 Iranian bots, 1 Iraq, 1 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 1 ISIS, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Islam: group threat, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; trigger events, 1, 2, 3 Islamism: group threat, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4; profiling the hater, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3; trigger events, 1, 2, 3 Islamophobia, 1, 2, 3, 4 Israel, 1, 2, 3 Italy, 1, 2 ITT, see Integrated Threat Theory James, Lee, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Japan, 1, 2, 3 Jasko, Katarzyna, 1 Jefferson, Thomas, 1 Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin, 1 Jewish people: COVID-19 pandemic, 1, 2; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; filter bubbles, 1; Google searches, 1, 2; group threat, 1; Nazism, 1, 2; negative stereotypes, 1 2 online hate speech, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; questioning prejudgements, 1; ritual washing, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2; trauma and Franklin, 1, 2, 3 jihad, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 jokes, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Jones, Alex, 1 Jones, Terry, 1 Josephson junction, 1 Judaism, 1; see also Jewish people Jude, Frank, Jr, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Kansas, 1 Kerry, John, 1 Kik, 1 King, Gary, 1 King, Martin Luther, Jr, 1, 2 King, Rodney, 1, 2, 3 King, Ryan, 1 Kirklees, 1, 2 KKK, see Ku Klux Klan Kuchibhotla, Srinivas, 1, 2, 3, 4 Kuchibhotla, Sunayana, 1, 2 Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 1, 2, 3n, 4, 5, 6, 7 Labour Party, 1, 2, 3 Lancaster, Sophie, 1, 2 language, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department), 1 Lapshyn, Pavlo, 1 Lashkar-e-Taiba, 1 Las Vegas shooting, 1, 2 Latinx people, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 law: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3; criminalising hate, 1; hate counts, 1, 2, 3; Kansas shooting, 1; limited laws, 1; online hate speech, 1; pyramid of hate, 1 Law Commission, 1 Lawrence, Stephen, 1 learned fears, 1, 2, 3 Leave.EU campaign, 1, 2 Leave voters, 1, 2, 3n Lee, Robert E., 1, 2, 3 left orbitofrontal cortex, 1n, 2n Legewie, Joscha, 1, 2, 3, 4 lesbians, 1, 2 Levin, Jack, 1 LGBTQ+ people, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17; see also gay people LIB, see Linguistic Intergroup Bias test Liberman, Nira, 1 Liberty Park, Salt Lake City, 1, 2 Libya, 1, 2, 3, 4 Light, John, 1 Linguistic Intergroup Bias (LIB) test, 1 Liverpool, 1, 2 Livingstone, Ken, 1, 2 Loja, Angel, 1 London: author’s experience of attack, 1; Copeland nail bombing, 1, 2; Duggan shooting, 1; far-right hate, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3; online hate speech, 1, 2; Rigby attack, 1; terror attacks, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 London Bridge attack, 1, 2, 3 London School of Economics, 1 ‘lone wolf’ terrorists, 1, 2, 3, 4 long-term memory, 1, 2, 3, 4 Loomer, Laura, 1 Los Angeles, 1 loss: group threat, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; tipping point, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 love, 1, 2 Love Thy Neighbour, 1 Lucero, Marcelo, 1, 2 Luqman, Shehzad, 1 ‘Macbeth effect’, 1 machine learning, 1 Madasani, Alok, 1, 2, 3 Madrid attack, 1, 2 Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI): Diffusion MRI, 1, 2; functional MRI, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 magnetoencephalography (MEG), 1, 2, 3 Maldon, 1 Malik, Tashfeen, 1 Maltby, Robert, 1, 2 Manchester, 1, 2 Manchester Arena attack, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 marginalisation, 1, 2 Martin, David, 1 Martin, Trayvon, 1, 2 MartinLutherKing.org, 1, 2 martyrdom, 1, 2, 3, 4n masculinity, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 The Matrix, 1 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr Hate Crimes Prevention Act, 1n, 2n Matz, Sandra, 1 Mauritius, 1 McCain, John, 1 McDade, Tony, 1 McDevitt, Jack, Levin McKinney, Aaron, 1 McMichael, Gregory, 1 McMichael, Travis, 1 media: far-right hate, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; stereotypes in, 1, 2; subcultures of hate, 1; trigger events, 1 Meechan, Mark, 1 MEG (magnetoencephalography), 1, 2, 3 memory, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 men, and online hate speech, 1 men’s rights, 1 mental illness, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 mentalising, 1, 2, 3 meta-analysis, 1 Metropolitan Police, 1 Mexican people, 1, 2, 3, 4 micro-aggressions, 1, 2n, 3, 4, 5, 6 micro-events, 1 Microsemi, 1n Microsoft, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 micro-targeting, 1, 2 Middle East, 1, 2 migration, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; see also immigration Milgram, Stanley, 1 military, 1 millennials, 1 Milligan, Spike, 1 Milwaukee, 1, 2, 3 minimal groups, 1 Minneapolis, 1, 2, 3 minority groups: far-right hate, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; police reporting, 1; questioning prejudgements, 1; trauma and containment, 1; trigger events, 1, 2 misinformation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 mission haters, 1, 2, 3 mobile phones, 1, 2, 3 moderation of content, 1, 2, 3 Moore, Nik, 1 Moore, Thomas, 1 Moores, Manizhah, 1 Moore’s Ford lynching, 1 Moradi, Dr Zargol, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Moral Choice Dilemma tasks, 1, 2, 3 moral cleansing, 1, 2, 3 moral dimension, 1, 2, 3, 4 moral outrage, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Moroccan people, 1, 2 mortality, 1, 2, 3 mortality salience, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Moscow, 1 mosques, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Moss Side Blood, 1 mothers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 motivation, 1n, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Mphiti, Thato, 1 MRI, see Magnetic Resonance Imaging Muamba, Fabrice, 1 multiculturalism, 1, 2, 3, 4 murder: brain injury, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3; hate counts, 1; identity fusion and hateful murder, 1; police and hate, 1, 2; profiling the hater, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Murdered for Being Different, 1 music, 1, 2, 3 Muslims: COVID-19 pandemic, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; Google searches, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; negative stereotypes, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2; profiling the hater, 1, 2; Salah effect, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3; trigger events, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; and Trump, 1, 2, 3, 4n, 5, 6n Mvubu, Themba, 1 Myanmar, 1, 2 Myatt, David, 1 Nandi, Dr Alita, 1 National Action, 1 National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, 1 national crime victimisation surveys, 1, 2 National Front, 1, 2, 3 nationalism, 1, 2 National Socialist Movement, 1, 2, 3, 4 natural experiments, 1, 2 Nature: Neuroscience, 1 nature vs nurture debate, 1 Nazism, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 NCVS (National Crime Victimisation Survey), 1, 2 negative stereotypes: brain and hate, 1, 2; feeling hate together, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; tipping point, 1 Nehlen, Paul, 1 neo-Nazis, 1n, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Netherlands, 1, 2 Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz (NetzDG) law, 1 neuroimaging, see brain imaging neurons, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 neuroscience, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Newark, 1, 2 news, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 newspapers, 1, 2, 3, 4 New York City, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 New York Police Department (NYPD), 1 New York Times, 1, 2 New Zealand, 1 n-grams, 1 Nimmo, John, 1 9/11 attacks, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 911 emergency calls, 1 Nogwaza, Noxolo, 1 non-independence error, 1, 2n Al Noor Mosque, Christchurch, 1 Northern Ireland, 1 NWA, 1 NYPD (New York Police Department), 1 Obama, Barack, 1n, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Occupy Paedophilia, 1 ODIHR, see Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights Ofcom, 1 offence, 1, 2, 3, 4 Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), 1, 2 Office for Security and Counter Terrorism, 1 office workers, 1 offline harm, 1, 2 Oklahoma City, 1 O’Mahoney, Bernard, 1 online hate speech: author’s experience, 1; COVID-19 pandemic, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; hate speech harm, 1; how much online hate speech, 1; individual’s role, 1; law’s role, 1; social media companies’ role, 1; steps to stop hate, 1; tipping point, 1, 2; training the machine to count hate, 1; trigger events, 1 Ono, Kazuya, 1 optical illusions, 1 Organization for Human Brain Mapping conference, 1 Orlando attack, 1 Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1 Osborne, Darren, 1 ‘other’, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Ottoman Empire, 1 outgroup: author’s brain and hate, 1, 2, 3; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; child interaction and play, 1, 2; evolution of group threat detection, 1; feeling hate together, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1; HateLab Brexit study, 1; human biology and threat, 1; identity fusion, 1; prejudice formation, 1; profiling the hater, 1; push/pull factor, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; society, competition and threat, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2; tipping point, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; trigger events, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 outliers, 1 Overton window, 1, 2, 3, 4 oxytocin, 1, 2, 3, 4 Paddock, Stephen, 1 Paddy’s Pub, Bali, 1 paedophilia, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 page rank, 1 pain, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Pakistani people, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Palestine, 1 pandemics, 1, 2, 3, 4 Papua New Guinea, 1, 2, 3 paranoid schizophrenia, 1, 2 parents: caregiving, 1; subcultures of hate, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; trigger events, 1, 2, 3 Paris attack, 1 Parsons Green attack, 1, 2 past experience: the ‘average’ hate criminal, 1; the ‘exceptional’ hate criminal, 1; trauma and containment, 1 perception-based hate crime, 1, 2 perception of threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 perpetrators, 1, 2 personal contact, 1, 2 personality, 1, 2, 3 personality disorder, 1, 2 personal safety, 1, 2 personal significance, 1 perspective taking, 1, 2 PFC, see prefrontal cortex Philadelphia Police Department, 1 Philippines, 1 physical attacks, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 play, 1 Poland, 1, 2, 3 polarisation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 police: brain and hate, 1, 2; Duggan shooting, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3; and hate, 1; NYPD racial bias, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4; perceiving versus proving hate, 1; police brutality, 1, 2, 3, 4; predicting hate crime, 1; recording crime, 1, 2, 3, 4; reporting crime, 1, 2, 3; rising hate count, 1, 2, 3; ‘signal’ hate acts and criminalisation, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; use of force, 1 Polish migrants, 1 politics: early adulthood, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2; filter bubbles and bias, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3; online hate speech, 1, 2; seven steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; trauma and containment, 1; trigger events, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Trump election, 1, 2 populism, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 pornography, 1 Portugal, 1, 2 positive stereotypes, 1, 2 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 poverty, 1, 2, 3 Poway synagogue shooting, 1 power, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 power law, 1 predicting the next hate crime, 1 prefrontal cortex (PFC): brain and signs of prejudice, 1; brain injury, 1; disengaging the amygdala autopilot, 1; feeling pain, 1; ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1; prejudice network, 1; psychological brainwashing, 1; recognising false alarms, 1; salience network, 1; trauma and containment, 1; trigger events, 1; unlearning prejudiced threat detection, 1, 2 prehistoric brain, 1, 2 prehistory, 1, 2 prejudgements, 1 prejudice: algorithms, 1; author’s brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; brain and signs of prejudice, 1; cultural machine, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2; filter bubbles and bias, 1; foundations of, 1; Google, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9; human biology and threat, 1; neuroscience of hate, 1, 2; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3; parts that process prejudice, 1; prejudice network, 1, 2, 3, 4; prepared versus learned amygdala responses, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; releasers, 1, 2; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; tipping point from prejudice to hate, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; trigger events, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; Trump, 1, 2; unconscious bias, 1; unlearning prejudiced threat detection, 1; what it means to hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 prepared fears, 1, 2 Prisoner’s Dilemma, 1 profiling the hater, 1 Proposition 1, 2 ProPublica, 1n, 2 prosecution, 1, 2, 3 Protestants, 1 protons, 1 psychoanalysis, 1 psychological development, 1, 2, 3, 4 psychological profiles, 1 psychological training, 1 psychology, 1, 2, 3, 4 psychosocial criminology, 1, 2 psy-ops (psychological operations), 1 PTSD, see post-traumatic stress disorder Public Order Act, 1 pull factor, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Pullin, Rhys, 1n Purinton, Adam, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 push/pull factor, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 pyramid of hate, 1, 2 Q …, 1 al-Qaeda, 1, 2 quality of life, 1 queer people, 1, 2 quest for significance, 1, 2, 3 Quran burning, 1 race: author’s brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; brain and signs of prejudice, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3; Google searches, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; hate counts, 1, 2, 3; online hate speech, 1; predicting hate crime, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; race relations, 1, 2, 3; race riots, 1, 2; race war, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4n, 5, 6; trigger events, 1, 2; unconscious bias, 1; unlearning prejudiced threat detection, 1 racism: author’s experience, 1; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; far-right hate, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; Kansas shooting, 1; NYPD racial bias, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4; steps to stop hate, 1n, 2, 3; Tay chatbot, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; Trump election, 1; victim perception of motivation, 1n; white flight, 1 radicalisation: far-right hate, 1, 2, 3; group threat, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; trigger events, 1 rallies, 1, 2, 3; see also Charlottesville rally Ramadan, 1, 2 rape, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 rap music, 1 realistic threats, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Rebel Media, 1 rebels, 1 recategorisation, 1 recession, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 recommendation algorithms, 1, 2 recording crime, 1, 2, 3, 4 red alert, 1 Reddit, 1, 2, 3, 4 red-pilling, 1, 2, 3, 4 refugees, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 rejection, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 releasers of prejudice, 1, 2 religion: group threat, 1, 2, 3; homosexuality, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3; predicting hate crime, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; religion versus hate, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2; subcultures of hate, 1, 2; trauma and containment, 1n, 2; trigger events, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; victim perception of motivation, 1n reporting crimes, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 repression, 1 Republicans, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 research studies, 1 responsibility, 1, 2, 3 restorative justice, 1 retaliatory haters, 1, 2, 3 Reuters, 1 Rieder, Bernhard, 1 Rigby, Lee, 1 rights: civil rights, 1, 2, 3, 4; gay rights, 1, 2, 3, 4; human rights, 1, 2, 3; men’s rights, 1; tipping point, 1; women’s rights, 1, 2 right wing, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; see also far right Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale, 1 riots, 1, 2, 3, 4 risk, 1, 2, 3 rites of passage, 1, 2 rituals, 1, 2, 3 Robb, Thomas, 1 Robbers Cave Experiment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Robinson, Tommy (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), 1, 2, 3, 4 Rohingya Muslims, 1, 2 Roof, Dylann, 1, 2 Roussos, Saffi, 1 Rudolph, Eric, 1 Rushin, S,, 1n Russia, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Russian Internet Research Agency, 1 RWA (Right-Wing Authoritarianism) scale, 1 Rwanda, 1 sacred value protection, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Saddam Hussein, 1 safety, 1, 2 Sagamihara care home, Japan, 1, 2 Salah, Mohamed, 1, 2, 3 salience network, 1, 2 salmon, brain imaging of, 1 Salt Lake City, 1 same-sex marriage, 1, 2 same-sex relations, 1, 2, 3 San Bernardino attack, 1n, 2, 3 Scanlon, Patsy, 1 scans, see brain imaging Scavino, Dan, 1n schizophrenia, 1, 2, 3, 4 school shootings, 1, 2 science, 1, 2, 3 scripture, 1, 2 SDO, see Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) scale Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME), 1 search queries, 1, 2, 3, 4 Second World War, 1, 2, 3 Section 1, Local Government Act, 1, 2, 3 seed thoughts, 1 segregation, 1, 2, 3 seizures, 1, 2, 3 selection bias problem, 1n self-defence, 1, 2 self-esteem, 1, 2, 3, 4 self-sacrifice, 1, 2, 3 Senior, Eve, 1 serial killers, 1, 2, 3 7/7 attack, London, 1 seven steps to stop hate, 1; becoming hate incident first responders, 1; bursting our filter bubbles, 1; contact with others, 1; not allowing divisive events to get the better of us, 1; overview, 1; putting ourselves in the shoes of ‘others’, 1; questioning prejudgements, 1; recognising false alarms, 1 sexism, 1, 2 sexual orientation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 sexual violence, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 sex workers, 1, 2, 3, 4 Shakespeare, William, Macbeth, 1 shame, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 shared trauma, 1, 2, 3 sharia, 1, 2 Shepard, Matthew, 1, 2 Sherif, Muzafer, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 shitposting, 1, 2, 3n shootings, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 ‘signal’ hate acts, 1 significance, 1, 2, 3 Simelane, Eudy, 1 skin colour, 1, 2, 3n, 4, 5, 6, 7 Skitka, Linda, 1, 2 slavery, 1 Slipknot, 1 slurs, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Snapchat, 1 social class, 1, 2 social desirability bias, 1, 2 Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) scale, 1 social engineering, 1 socialisation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 socialism, 1, 2 social media: chatbots, 1; COVID-19 pandemic, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; filter bubbles and bias, 1; HateLab Brexit study, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; online news, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; subcultures of hate, 1; trigger events, 1, 2; see also Facebook; Twitter; YouTube Social Perception and Evaluation Lab, 1 Soho, 1 soldiers, 1n, 2, 3 Sorley, Isabella, 1 South Africa, 1 South Carolina, 1 Southern Poverty Law Center, 1n, 2 South Ossetians, 1 Soviet Union, 1, 2 Spain, 1, 2, 3 Spencer, Richard B., 1 Spengler, Andrew, 1, 2, 3, 4 SQUIDs, see superconducting quantum interference devices Stacey, Liam, 1, 2 Stanford University, 1 Star Trek, 1, 2, 3 statistics, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 statues, 1 Stephan, Cookie, 1, 2 Stephan, Walter, 1, 2 Stephens-Davidowitz, Seth, Everybody Lies, 1 Stereotype Content Model, 1 stereotypes: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; cultural machine, group threat and stereotypes, 1; definitions, 1; feeling hate together, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4; homosexuality, 1; NYPD racial bias, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; study of prejudice, 1; tipping point, 1; trigger events, 1 Stoke-on-Trent, 1, 2 Stormfront website, 1, 2, 3 storytelling, 1 stress, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 striatum, 1, 2, 3n, 4 subcultures, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 subcultures of hate, 1; collective quests for significance and extreme hate, 1; extremist ideology and compassion, 1; fusion and generosity towards the group, 1; fusion and hateful murder, 1; fusion and hateful violence, 1; fusion and self-sacrifice in the name of hate, 1; quest for significance and extreme hatred, 1; religion/belief, 1; warrior psychology, 1 subhuman, 1, 2 Sue, D.

River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life
by Richard Dawkins
Published 28 Feb 1995

It would dawn on the archaeologist that, in an age before electronic calculators, this pattern would constitute an ingenious trick for rapid multiplication and division. The mystery of the slide rule would be solved by reverse engineering, employing the assumption of intelligent and economical design. "Utility function" is a technical term not of engineers but of economists. It means "that which is maximized." Economic planners and social engineers are rather like architects and real engineers in that they strive to maximize something. Utilitarians strive to maximize "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" (a phrase that sounds more intelligent than it is, by the way). Under this umbrella, the utilitarian may give long-term stability more or less priority at the expense of short-term happiness, and utilitarians differ over whether they measure "happiness" by monetary wealth, job satisfaction, cultural fulfillment or personal relationships.

Because We Say So
by Noam Chomsky

Chomsky made this clear in a talk he gave at the Modern Language Association in 2000 when he insisted that: Universities face a constant struggle to maintain their integrity, and their fundamental social role in a healthy society, in the face of external pressures. The problems are heightened with the expansion of private power in every domain, in the course of the state-corporate social engineering projects of the past several decades. . . . To defend their integrity and proper commitments is an honorable and difficult task in itself, but our sights should be set higher than that. Particularly in the societies that are more privileged, many choices are available, including fundamental institutional change, if that is the right way to proceed, and surely including scholarship that contributes to, and draws from, the never-ending popular struggles for freedom and justice. 5 Higher education is under attack not because it is failing, but because it is a potentially democratic public sphere.

A Short History of Russia
by Mark Galeotti
Published 1 May 2020

The brilliance of some tsarist generals and the stoic bravery of many of their troops could not conceal the fact that Russia’s serf army was outgunned, undertrained and often badly led. It was, in every way, a metaphor for the country’s social, economic and technological circumstances. The war would prove a catalyst for arguably the most ambitious social engineering project Russia had yet to see. The new tsar, Nicholas’s son Alexander II (r. 1855–81), quickly sued for peace, and turned his gaze inward. Russia had failed to modernize, and that failure risked leaving it vulnerable in an age of aggressive imperialism and a changing European balance of power.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
by Jonathan Haidt
Published 13 Mar 2012

But how did the subaks work together to build the system in the first place? And how did they maintain it and share its waters fairly and sustainably? These sorts of common dilemmas (where people must share a common resource without depleting it) are notoriously hard to solve.42 The ingenious religious solution to this problem of social engineering was to place a small temple at every fork in the irrigation system. The god in each such temple united all the subaks that were downstream from it into a community that worshipped that god, thereby helping the subaks to resolve their disputes more amicably. This arrangement minimized the cheating and deception that would otherwise flourish in a zero-sum division of water.

…

When young children are exposed to PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), organophosphates (used in some pesticides), and methyl mercury (a by-product of burning coal), it lowers their IQ and raises their risk of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder).59 Given these brain disruptions, future studies are likely to find a link to violence and crime as well. Rather than building more prisons, the cheapest (and most humane) way to fight crime may be to give more money and authority to the Environmental Protection Agency. When conservatives object that liberal efforts to intervene in markets or engage in “social engineering” always have unintended consequences, they should note that sometimes those consequences are positive. When conservatives say that markets offer better solutions than do regulations, let them step forward and explain their plan to eliminate the dangerous and unfair externalities generated by many markets.60 YANG #1: LIBERTARIAN WISDOM Libertarians are sometimes said to be socially liberal (favoring individual freedom in private matters such as sex and drug use) and economically conservative (favoring free markets), but those labels reveal how confused these terms have become in the United States.

A History of Future Cities
by Daniel Brook
Published 18 Feb 2013

There are several factors why this style predominates: the dominance of Hong Kong and Taiwan developers who build as if they’re in their stiflingly hot home climates where an air-conditioned mall is a seductive place to hang out; the speed with which unimaginative boilerplate designs can be transformed from blueprints to reality in an environment where time is money for developers as well as for government officials on the make and on the take; and the legacy of Soviet planning, with its penchant for monumental buildings, squares, and avenues passable on foot only via underground passageways. But the ultimate factor is the government’s social engineering scheme. Wide boulevards are nearly impossible to shut down with street protests; allowing crowds to gather only when engaged in the solipsistic activity of shopping is a recipe for a depoliticized city. While Pudong represents a tabula rasa where the authorities have been able to build their dream city, across the river the former foreign concessions have been retrofitted to bring them into accord with this vision.

…

Filling up the square with these imposing new buildings allows the authorities to shrewdly herald the city’s revival while simultaneously rendering its main green space unusable for demonstrations. The only place the people can congregate in the renovated People’s Square is in its underground shopping mall. The new Shanghai is as much a testament to social engineering as it is to civil engineering. A complete inversion of the historic city where anyone in the world was welcome to move at any time, the new Shanghai centrally planned the composition of its population as much as its bridges and buildings. The authorities’ power to curate their city’s populace was well established.

Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
by Jane McGonigal
Published 20 Jan 2011

Those are just some of the highlights of The Lost Ring, an alternate reality game that took a full year to develop and another six months to play, eventually creating a player community made up of citizens from more than one hundred countries on six continents: 28 percent from North America, 25 percent from Europe, 18 percent from the Asia-Pacific region, 13 percent from Latin America, 9 percent from Oceania, and smaller clusters in areas such as Dubai, Israel, and South Africa. More than a quarter of a million gamers participated, and the most active participants—the core team of puzzle solvers, translators, social engineers, researchers, and athletes—numbered above ten thousand—just as many members as the community of official 2008 Olympic athletes. Together, those alternate reality Olympians created a new history of the games for an online audience of more than 2.9 million.7 FOR MCDONALD’S and AKQA, The Lost Ring was innovative marketing.

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Eli Hunt and other game characters then began giving players game missions based on their strengths: for example, the brainy sofia players were challenged to research little-known facts about other games that really had been banned from the ancient Olympics, while the adventurous thumos players were given the task of going out into the real world to hunt down the physical artifacts, and the highly social chariton players were encouraged to be the social engineers of the game and figure out how to extend the social network of the Lost Ring community. Even the lost sport itself had special roles for every kind of strength to play:• Sofia: You are the best engineers. Study the labyrinth plans—and arrive early to design and build the labyrinth. • Thumos: You make the fastest runners.

Money for Nothing
by Thomas Levenson
Published 18 Aug 2020

Among the displaced, he said, there should be twenty thousand marriageable Irish women to be distributed among England’s parishes each year. To keep gender ratios stable (and with them, the number of marriageable couples), the same number of English women should be sent to Ireland. These would marry locals—and here we come to the point of Petty’s exercise in social engineering—and thus civilize Irish bachelors, creating Anglo-Irish households conforming to English culture, domestic behavior, and allegiance. Petty didn’t stop with the simple manipulation of populations. He argued that the government should gather statistics to enable the leaders of a mostly agricultural economy to manage their affairs.

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(Petty wasn’t the only Englishman to prosper through the tumult of England’s bloody seventeenth-century politics, but it’s a mark of his flexibility that he was able to serve both Cromwell’s ends at the beginning of his career and James’s passions at its end.) Nothing came of these later Irish schemes, either Petty’s dream of taming unruly papists in their homes or his terrifying last vision of an emptied land. Ultimately, he was a better intellectual evangelist than he was a social engineer. His success lay in convincing colleagues and successors of his core idea: that the systematic, reliable measurement of human populations, studied with increasingly powerful mathematical tools, could transform the way people and states did business. His close friend John Graunt advanced Petty’s attempts at demographic analysis with his landmark text Natural and Political Observations…upon the Bills of Mortality in 1662.

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time
by Karl Polanyi
Published 27 Mar 2001

Though author of the Essay on Usury, and of a Manual of Political Economy, he was an amateur at that science and even failed to provide the one great contribution which utilitarianism might have been expected to make to economics, namely, the discovery that value derived from utility. Instead, he was induced by associationist psychology to give rein to his boundless imaginative faculties as a social engineer. Laissez-faire meant to Bentham only another device in social mechanics. Social not technical invention was the intellectual mainspring of the Industrial Revolution. The decisive contribution of the natural sciences to engineering was not made until a full century later, when the Industrial Revolution was long over.

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With Bentham’s death, approximately, this period comes to an end*; since the 1840s projectors in business were simply promoters of definite ventures, not any more the alleged discoverers of new applications of the universal principles of mutuality, trust, risk, and other elements of human enterprise. Henceforth businessmen imagined they knew what forms their activities should take; they rarely inquired into the nature of money before founding a bank. Social engineers were now usually found only amongst cranks or frauds, and then often confined behind iron bars. The spate of industrial and banking systems which from Paterson and John Law to the Pereires had flooded stock exchanges with the projects of religious, social, and academic sectarians had now become a mere trickle.

The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. S Dream
by Gary Younge
Published 11 Aug 2013

“There is an old disease, and that disease is cured,” argued Bert Rein, the attorney challenging the validity of the Voting Right Act, which since 1965 has offered protections against racial discrimination at the polls, before the Supreme Court in 2013. “That problem,” claimed Rein, “is solved.” The court ruled in Rein’s favor, effectively gutting one of the key provisions of the act. With the “problem solved,” white people could then be framed not as beneficiaries of racial inequality but as the victims of post–civil rights “social engineering” that, they claimed, sought to replicate the unfairness of Jim Crow. In 2009, when a white Connecticut firefighter blamed affirmative action for his failure to win promotion after he passed a qualifying test, he said: “I think we view discrimination as discrimination plain and simple. We were discriminated [against] based upon our race just like African Americans were in the past in other issues.

The Rich and the Rest of Us
by Tavis Smiley
Published 15 Feb 2012

Divided Into ‘Haves,’ ‘Have-Nots,’” Gallup.com, December 15, 2011, retrieved from http://www.gallup.com/poll/151556/Fewer-Americans-Divided-Haves-Nots.aspx/. 57 “45% Say Government Programs Increase Poverty in America,” Rasmussen Report, April 6, 2011, retrieved from http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/business/general_businesss/april_2011/45_say_government_programs_increase_poverty_in_america/. 58 “Bill O’Reilly, Tavis Smiley, and Cornel West Have Fiery Clash Over Wall Street, Poverty” (video), Roland Martin Reports, October 12, 2011, retrieved from http://rolandmartinreports.com/blog/2011/10/bill-oreilly-tavis-smiley-and-cornel-west-have-fiery-clash-over-wall-street-poverty-video/. 59 Bruce Watson, “It’s Official: Weath Gap Has Turned America Into a Seething Pit of Class Resentment,” Daily Finance.com/January 13, 2012, retrieved from http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/01/13/its-official-wealth-gap-has-turned-america-into-a-seething-pit/. 60 Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492–Present (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003). 61 The Industrial Revolution, History.com, retrieved from http://www.history.com/topics/industrial-revolution and http://www.history.com/topics/child-labor/ 62 Andrew Gavin Marshall, Robber Barons, Revolution, and Social Control: The Century of Social Engineering, Part I, Global Research.ca, March 10, 2011, retrieved from http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23639/. 63 See “The Industrial Revolution: child labor, retrieved from http://www.history.com/topics/child-labor/. 64 S. Mintz, “Learn about the Gilded Age,” 2007, retrieved from http://www.history.com/topics/child-labor/. 65 Stephanie Siek, “King’s Final Message: Poverty is a civil rights battle,” CNN, January 16, 2012; retrieved from inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/tag/Stephanie-siek-cnn/ 66 “Beyond Vietnam / A Time to Break Silence” full transcript retrieved from Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Border: The Legacy of a Century of Anglo-Irish Politics
by Diarmaid Ferriter
Published 7 Feb 2019

Ideological partition was long a reality in Ireland before the physical border was imposed owing to the distinctive development of Ulster, the most northern of the four historic Irish provinces, comprising nine of the island’s thirty-two counties and amounting to roughly 8,950 square miles, just over a quarter of the island of Ireland’s total area. Until the seventeenth century Ulster was isolated as a part of a Gaelic Ireland that had been more resistant than the three other Irish provinces to Norman and English rule since the twelfth century. The vast social engineering of the seventeenth century, however, resulted in the seizure of property and the removal of people on the basis of their religion, making the province a bastion of Protestant settlement and British influence. Plantation resulted in the seizure from Catholic natives of 5,600 square miles in Ulster, transforming the province with the arrival of English and Scottish settlers who differed in terms of religious affiliation (the English belonging to the established Anglican Church and the Scots Presbyterian) but had a common bond of ‘Britishness’, a term novel at that stage and one ‘especially applied to those engaged in colonial endeavour’.1 But full ‘British’ control of Ulster was not achieved; while there was some assimilation and accommodation between these settlers and the Catholic natives, any possibility of permanent harmony was shattered by the Ulster rebellion of 1641, spearheaded by Catholics who retained land and status, with Ireland for the next ten years ‘a theatre of war in the War of the Three Kingdoms; and for the ten years after that she found herself a laboratory for Cromwellian experiments’.2 This included atrocities on a grand scale with the killing of soldiers, civilians and Catholic clergy.

Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism
by Richard D. Wolff
Published 1 Oct 2012

They found they could focus animosity on the welfare state bequeathed by the New Deal to postwar generations. This strategy involved demonizing unionists, socialists, communists, and a vast array of liberal reformers as undifferentiated proponents of state power, government intervention, bureaucracy, social engineering, and oppression. Each component of the New Right coalition found a way to define its goals in terms of opposing one state policy or another that it claimed was to blame for the particular problem it addressed. After 1945, however, capitalists were generally much more successful than other members of the New Right coalition in achieving their goals.

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 29 Sep 2014

While some new tribal chiefs acted like dictators, others tried to soften European demands, faking tax rolls or shielding individuals from colonial justice. In order to exercise authority, local agents had to seek legitimacy, which generally means trying to incorporate the interests and wishes of the ruled. It was not just chiefs but also interpreters and personal aides who mediated between the white district officer and local populations. Social-engineering efforts that sought to combine, move, or separate different tribes often failed. Far from manipulating African societies, it was the Europeans who were often manipulated by Africans. Administrators seeking to understand “customary” rules were told stories that benefited particular African power holders or interests, and they were too naïve or ignorant to know better.

…

In order to get around problems like this, the outside donors force the community to include women, minorities (if there are any), or other marginalized people, in accord not with local but with Western standards of fairness. This leads to a situation where the outsider either is forced to leave things up to local elites, or else tries to engage in a very intrusive form of social engineering. Few donors have enough local knowledge to understand what they are actually accomplishing. This dilemma would have been very familiar to district officers in colonial times trying to implement indirect rule, with the difference that most of them had much longer tenures and thus better local knowledge than the aid officials administering CDD programs today.

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Not just other political parties, but civil society organizations also were banned or strictly controlled, and press freedom limited. Perhaps the worst policy to come out of the socialist period occurred between 1973 and 1976, when 80 percent of the rural population was forced into communal ujamaa villages. This effort at massive social engineering, like its counterparts in the Soviet Union and China, had predictably negative consequences for the economy as well as individual freedom.27 These poor economic policies ended after Tanzania’s debt crisis in the late 1980s and since then have been replaced by more sensible market-oriented ones.

Green Mars
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Published 23 Oct 1993

* * * GREEN MARS Kim Stanley Robinson * * * Bantam Books for Lisa and David ContentsPart 1: Areoformation Part 2: The Ambassador Part 3: Long Runout Part 4: The Scientist as Hero Part 5: Homeless Part 6: Tariqat Part 7: What Is to Be Done? Part 8: Social Engineering Part 9: The Spur of the Moment Part 10: Phase Change Map Part One Areoformation The point is not to make another Earth: Not another Alaska or Tibet, not a Vermont nor a Venice, not even an Antarctica. The point is to make something new and strange, something Martian.In a sense our intentions don’t even matter.

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It was engineering of a different kind, more engrossing and fulfilling than the mechanical stuff, and more difficult. Several of the companies he worked for in those years were part of transnationals, and he got embroiled in interface arbitration not only between his companies and others in the transnats, but also in more distant disputes requiring some kind of third-party arbitration. Social engineering, he called it, and found it fascinating. So when starting Dumpmines he had taken the technical directorship, and had done some good work on their SuperRathjes, the giant robot vehicles that did the extraction and sorting at the landfills; but more than ever before he involved himself in labor disputes and the like.

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“We will,” Art said, and gave her another squeeze. Nadia shook her head sadly. The peak always passed so fast. “It’s not our choice,” she told him. “It’s not something that is entirely in our hands. So we will see.” “It will be different this time,” Kasei insisted. “We will see.” Part Eight Social Engineering Where were you born?Denver. Where did you grow up? Rock. Boulder. What were you like as a child? I don’t know. Give me your impressions. I wanted to know why. You were curious? Very curious. Did you play with science kits? All of them. And your friends? I don’t remember. Try for anything.

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia
by Becky Hogge , Damien Morris and Christopher Scally
Published 26 Jul 2011

I guess if you looked at it from a completely neutral standpoint, opposition to that would tend to align you with small state values, it would tend to align you with liberal values, so that makes sense of why Conservatives and Liberal Democrats might have come on board. But it does also seem to chime with ideas about dignity and respect within the left. Of course, the left would tend to be seen as more statist: the welfare state, society, social engineering. But within that – you just need to look at the unions – its heart is about respect for the individual, respect for the working person, respect for the minorities. It’s in there and I cant imagine there could be a coherent political party or a coherent political system that didnt have that somewhere because otherwise it would just be ultimately abhorrent to people.

Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the Frontiers of Power
by Patrick Major
Published 5 Nov 2009

As Hermann Weber, West Germany’s eminent GDR scholar, characterized the period immediately following its building, ‘by adaptation to the constraints of a modern industrial society the methods of rule in the GDR altered considerably: they shifted more and more from terror to neutralization and manipulation of the masses’.²² Within the closed societal laboratory, the regime engaged in ambitious social engineering through positive discrimination towards certain groups and the withering away of others. This socioeconomic leverage involved so-called ‘social power’, whereby an agency indirectly predisposes citizens through an incentive structure to ‘choose’ to conform. The key levers of social power were the party, labour, and education.

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Yet I would suggest that before turning our backs on the Wall, and becoming lost in a maze of metaphorical walls, we should turn more closely to the real one, with some of the very tools which Alltagsgeschichte, or everyday history, has given us.³⁹ Even concrete has a social history.⁴⁰ This involves differentiating between the regime’s overt intentionality—that is, its egalitarian social engineering—and the unintended structures of discrimination which the border engendered. It also requires conceptualizing from the bottom up how the GDR’s immurement shaped many life stories. As one guest book inscription at an exhibition forty years after its erection pondered: ‘The Wall pushed my whole life onto a different track’.

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000
by John Steele Gordon
Published 12 Oct 2009

But over the next few years, a progressive wing rapidly developed in the Republican Party, centered in the Midwest and West, and far more sympathetic to the interests of middle-class citizens. The progressives backed an income tax. When Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901 on the assassination of William McKinley, he moved sharply in the direction of the progressive wing of his party. In 1906 he even advocated a tax on inheritances with the avowedly social-engineering purpose of preventing the “transmission in their entirety of those fortunes swollen beyond all healthy limits.” Mainstream Republicans were, to put it mildly, aghast at the idea, but there was no real threat to the status quo until the panic of 1907 and the short recession that followed, which caused government revenues from the tariff to decline sharply.

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Bond drives using techniques invented by Jay Cooke during the Civil War were quickly implemented, now with the addition of using movie stars such as Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Charlie Chaplin to entice citizens into buying Liberty Bonds. And the income tax, which had been a mere social-engineering device to get the rich to share more of the tax burden, began to bite into the middle class. The personal exemption, which had been at $3,000, was dropped to $1,000. The tax rate, a mere 7 percent on incomes more than $500,000 before the war, rose to 77 percent. The income tax thus became the most important source of federal revenues, as it has remained ever since.

When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain
by Robert Chesshyre
Published 15 Jan 2012

But there is a yet more baleful inheritance from these schools: an assumption that all human beings will abide by the rules of the Eton wall game or are, at least, amenable to benign coercion. The schools are tightly controlled structures, which, through selection, exclude poorly motivated pupils and virtually all those who are not brought up with certain common assumptions. In such an environment social engineering is quite feasible. The pressures to play according to the rules are enormous: the coercive force of the school, peer group conformity, and potentially furious, fee-paying parents. A dissenter could be (and is) expelled. This may be a workable method of controlling a closed society, but – at least since Australia stopped taking convicts – it is not a practical way to run the real world.

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Another head – responding to, rather than resisting, such pressures, but otherwise apparently sane – told me that he never advertised Oxbridge successes to the rest of his school, ‘lest we seem to value that student more than, say, the capable musician’. The besieged head continued: ‘Ideologues love to see things in confrontational terms, as if high standards for some impoverish the rest. It is a dangerous notion that the English don’t need to compete and defeatist to think we should simply aim to be at peace with our own social engineering consciences. It is no good fudging the issue. Everyone has to know that he will only succeed the hard way, by being genuinely competitive. Precision is necessary to be a surgeon, a manufacturer of engineering equipment or a sports star. Alternative attitudes are a sad reflection on beliefs in the potential attainments of comprehensive children.’

The Best Business Writing 2013
by Dean Starkman
Published 1 Jan 2013

And Windows 8, the most cloud-centric operating system yet, will hit desktops by the tens of millions in the coming year. My experience leads me to believe that cloud-based systems need fundamentally different security measures. Password-based security mechanisms—which can be cracked, reset, and socially engineered—no longer suffice in the era of cloud computing. I realized something was wrong at about five p.m. on Friday. I was playing with my daughter when my iPhone suddenly powered down. I was expecting a call, so I went to plug it back in. It then rebooted to the setup screen. This was irritating, but I wasn’t concerned.

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And so, with my name, address, and the last four digits of my credit card number in hand, Phobia called AppleCare, and my digital life was laid waste. Yet still I was actually quite fortunate. They could have used my e-mail accounts to gain access to my online banking or financial services. They could have used them to contact other people and socially engineer them as well. As Ed Bott pointed out on TWiT.tv, my years as a technology journalist have put some very influential people in my address book. They could have been victimized too. Instead, the hackers just wanted to embarrass me, have some fun at my expense, and enrage my followers on Twitter by trolling.

War Without Mercy: PACIFIC WAR
by John Dower
Published 11 Apr 1986

Frank Capra, The Name above the Title: An Autobiography (1971: Macmillan Co.), 327. 2. The Why We Fight series is discussed in Capra, 325–43; Thomas William Bohn, An Historical and Descriptive Analysis of the “Why We Fight” Series, Ph.D. dissertation in Speech, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1968 (reprinted by Arno Press, 1977); David Culbert, “ ‘Why We Fight’: Social Engineering for a Democratic Society at War,” in K. R. M. Short, ed., Film and Radio Propaganda in World War II (1983: University of Tennessee Press), 173–91; Richard W. Steele, “ ‘The Greatest Gangster Movie Ever Filmed’: Prelude to War,” Prologue 11.4 (Winter 1979): 221–35; William Thomas Murphy, “The Method of Why We Fight,” Journal of Popular Film 1 (1972): 185–96.

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University of Chicago Press and U.S. Office of Air Force History, 1948–53. Creel, George. “To Understand Japan Consider Toyama.” Reader’s Digest, January 1945, 87–88. Crow, Carl, ed. Japan’s Dream of World Empire: The Tanaka Memorial. Harper & Brothers, 1942. Culbert, David. “ ‘Why We Fight’: Social Engineering for a Democratic Society at War.” In K. R. M. Short, ed., Film and Radio Propaganda in World War II 173–91. University of Tennessee Press, 1983. Curtis, L. Perry, Jr. Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature. Smithsonian Institution, 1971. Dabney, Virginius. “Nearer and Nearer the Precipice.”

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society
by Will Hutton
Published 30 Sep 2010

There can be no debate about whether British law and culture allow owners to discharge their responsibilities fairly: ownership rules are a given, and if disproportionate numbers of British companies are sold to foreigners, then too bad. There is a natural order of things that cannot be seriously challenged. Britain has to be open for business. Those who argue for another way have been dismissed as social engineers and political meddlers, fellow travellers with the worst authoritarian despots of the twentieth century. Making the case for a financial system with a closer relationship to business that makes more proportional profits and hands out bonuses on merit leads to being categorised as a latter-day nihilist sans-culotte who is trying to shake up the natural scheme of things.

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Whether it was energy policy or even transport policy – driving through the now-collapsed public–private partnership to finance the modernisation of the London Underground – the party leadership kowtowed to what they were told was the natural order of things. They did not want to risk doing anything that might be described as social engineering or political meddling – although, in the end, they were accused of both, despite achieving all too little. New Labour became a government of resignation, accepting that might – be it in the media or in finance – was always right. The ‘third way’, with which Blair loved to flirt, was the enthronement of resignation.

The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History
by Derek S. Hoff
Published 30 May 2012

Encouraging the westward dispersal of the population of workers would keep wages high in the East and maintain egalitarian economic opportunity. Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune who famously urged the poor to strike out for the West, wrote in 1854, “The public lands are the great regulator of the relations of Labor and Capital, the safety valve of our industrial and social engine.”154 O’Sullivan boasted of the nation’s population growth, but he stressed the virtues of sparsely settled lands and called the remaining public domain America’s “safety valve.”155 Promoting resettlement in the West for economic reasons was not precisely the same as providence- and race-based Manifest Destiny, but both offered solutions to perceived dilemmas of demographic maturity.

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Alva Myrdal, Nation and Family: The Swedish Experiment in Democratic Family and Population Policy (1941; reprint, with a foreword by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and new preface by the author, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1968), 2. 33. Ibid. Allan Carlson, The Swedish Experiment in Family Politics: The Myrdals and the Interwar Population Crisis (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1990), esp. chap 3, emphasizes the Myrdals’ pronatalism. 34. Walter A. Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938–1987 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 76. 35. A. Myrdal, Nation and Family, xviii. The italics are Myrdal’s. 36. For eugenicists’ curricular successes, see Michael A. Rembis, “ ‘Explaining Sexual Life to Your Daughter’: Gender and Eugenic Education in the United States during the 1930s,” in Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s, ed.

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War
by Paul Scharre
Published 23 Apr 2018

Comment at 5:10. 224 Automated hacking back is a theoretical concept: Alexander Velez-Green, “When ‘Killer Robots’ Declare War,” Defense One, April 12, 2015, http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2015/04/when-killer-robots-declare-war/109882/. 224 automate “spear phishing” attacks: Karen Epper Hoffman, “Machine Learning Can Be Used Offensively to Automate Spear Phishing,” Infosecurity Magazine, August 5, 2016, https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/bhusa-researchers-present-phishing/. 224 automatically develop “humanlike” tweets: John Seymour and Philip Tully, “Weaponizing data science for social engineering: Automated E2E spear phishing on Twitter,” https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-16/materials/us-16-Seymour-Tully-Weaponizing-Data-Science-For-Social-Engineering-Automated-E2E-Spear-Phishing-On-Twitter-wp.pdf. 224 “in offensive cyberwarfare”: Eric Messinger, “Is It Possible to Ban Autonomous Weapons in Cyberwar?,” Just Security, January 15, 2015, https://www.justsecurity.org/19119/ban-autonomous-weapons-cyberwar/. 225 estimated 8 to 15 million computers worldwide: “Virus Strikes 15 Million PCs,” UPI, January 26, 2009, http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/01/26/Virus-strikes-15-million-PCs/19421232924206/. 225 method to counter Conficker: “Clock ticking on worm attack code,” BBC News, January 20, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7832652.stm. 225 brought Conficker to heel: Microsoft Security Intelligence Report: Volume 11 (11), Microsoft, 2011. 226 “prevent and react to countermeasures”: Alessandro Guarino, “Autonomous Intelligent Agents in Cyber Offence,” in K.

Team Geek
by Brian W. Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman
Published 6 Jul 2012

In addition to these skills, you also need to understand how to navigate good and poisonous companies alike. Most software engineers work in dysfunctional corporate bureaucracies and need to employ certain manipulative techniques to get things done effectively. Some people call this politics; others call it social engineering. We call it organizational manipulation. The Good, the Bad, and the Strategies Big companies are complex organisms, and even the best require a GPS, a flashlight, and a dump truck full of breadcrumbs to navigate from one end of the company to the other. Navigating corporations can be daunting.

Trend Commandments: Trading for Exceptional Returns
by Michael W. Covel
Published 14 Jun 2011

Should the society accept these financial losses as part of the “survival of the fittest” in the world of business? 5. Should legislation be used to avoid these events?2 These questions are designed to absolve the guilt of market losers for their bad strategy. A free market is no place for political excuses, social engineering, or more bailouts. Consider fund manager Anthony Ward. He supposedly “cornered” the cocoa market. By one estimate, he bought enough to make five billion chocolate bars. Critics accused him of stockpiling cocoa to drive up prices so he could sell later at a profit. (Cocoa prices on the London market were at a 30-year high.)3 One bright trader tries to make a dollar in an open market, and rival traders complain that he is trying to make money?

Arabs: A 3,000 Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires
by Tim Mackintosh-Smith
Published 2 Mar 2019

The very first priority on ‘opening’, that is, conquering, a town was often that of opening a market in concert with the townsfolk. For example, the people of al-Ruha, now Urfa in south-eastern Turkey, ‘opened the gates of the city, and set up a market for the Muslims at the [main] gate’. This, as we shall see later in the founding of the new Arab towns, was an important stage in the long and still ongoing process of social engineering by which pastoral nomads turn into settled traders, bedouins become businessmen. It was a process that had been in train at least since the time of that third-century bedouin emporium, Qaryat Dhat Kahl. Now it had been given new impetus, and was the other ‘conversion’, less obvious but no less important than the religious one, brought about by Islam.

…

She was playing on an old and terrible fear, one that has never quite been laid to rest. SKY OF DATES, EARTH OF GOLD It was not only the close encounter with others that was changing Arabs. Further changes came from within, and were planned. After the great Arabian ‘Apostasy’ was put down in 633, a conscious policy of social engineering came into play. The Islamic community was an Arab (to begin with) super-tribe unified, like the old South Arabian sha’bs or peoples, by allegiance to a shared deity. Now, hijrah became a form of super-migration, a severance not just from one’s birthplace, but altogether from one’s Arabian roots.

…

When al-Hajjaj founded his own new town, Wasit, ‘Midway’ – because it was half-way between al-Basrah and al-Kufah – a simpleton is said to have spoken the truth no one else dared to utter: Al-Hajjaj is a fool. He built the city of Wasit in the country of the [native] Nabat, then told them not to enter it! It was all part of the doomed attempt at social engineering, at keeping Arabs as the ruling caste. But al-Hajjaj and his Umayyad overlords were trying to stem an irresistible tide. MONGREL SPEECH The flood-tide was nowhere more visible – or, rather, audible – than in the way spoken Arabic was changing. Non-Arabs were learning the secrets of the old high language; at the same time, Arabs themselves were losing the voice that had given them the nearest thing to unity for the longest part of their history.

Half Empty
by David Rakoff
Published 20 Sep 2010

In the art nouveau ironwork of the railings one can make out that unmistakable circle, topped at ten and two o’clock by two smaller circles—the silhouette of the Mouse That Started It All. This bit of slipped-in iconography is known within Disneyland as a Hidden Mickey. It’s an actual Term of Art around here and one can spend hours trying to suss them out throughout the park, like looking for the “Ninas” in Hirschfeld drawings. An interest in speculative social engineering has always been a part of the Disney mission. Epcot, now by all accounts little more than a glorified food court, stands for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. The Dream Home follows in the steps of Tomorrowland’s original utopian domicile, the Monsanto House of the Future, sponsored by that corporation’s division of plastics, before the very word became an ironic joke.

Forever Free
by Joe Haldeman
Published 14 Oct 2000

They went into the army as children, and never left it; never mixed with polite societyand I mean polite. The Earth had become a planet of docile lambs who lived communally; no one ownedor desiredmore than anyone else had; no one even spoke ill of anyone else. "They even knew that their harmony was artificial, imposed by biological and social engineering, and were glad for it. The fact that a horrific war was being waged on a hundred planets, in their name, just made it the more logical that their own daily lives be serene and civilized." "So he ran back to the army?" "Not immediately. He knew how lucky he'd been to survive, and wasn't eager to press his luck.

Brit-Myth: Who Do the British Think They Are?
by Chris Rojek
Published 15 Feb 2008

Voters responded positively to the deregulation and privatization programme, the rhetoric of the law and order society, Euro-scepticism and an authoritarian posture on union power. At the same time, many sections within the nation regarded Thatcher’s autocratic style of leadership as imperious, insensitive and divisive. It was a long way from the social engineering and welfare protectionism that ruled national life between 1945 and 1979. The administration of John Major that replaced Thatcher employed a gentler style of leadership. However, his term of office was buffeted by rough waters in Tory ranks over Europe and increasingly vociferous allegations by the media about political sleaze.

Finding Zero: A Mathematician's Odyssey to Uncover the Origins of Numbers
by Amir D. Aczel
Published 6 Jan 2015

What happened in Cambodia in the late 1960s through the 1970s and beyond was akin to what happened in Europe under the Nazis during World War II and what happened in China during the Cultural Revolution. Starting in 1968, Communist rule influenced by North Vietnam was established over the country and was led by the Red Khmers, or, as they became known using the French name, Khmer Rouge. Headed by Pol Pot, the leaders of the Cambodian Communist government tried to impose a social engineering program that would purge the country of intellectuals and bring about a nationwide agrarian revolution—similar to Mao’s dream for China. Their methods, however, were far more brutal than those of Communist China of the same years. Here the resemblance to the Nazis comes in: Between 1974 and 1979—the apogee of its rule—the Khmer Rouge tortured thousands of their fellow Cambodians and killed a quarter of the country’s population (it has been estimated that between 1.7 and 2 million people died in the infamous Killing Fields, out of a total population of 7.3 million).

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World
by Aaron Hurst
Published 31 Aug 2013

They see harmony as the moral ideal and elevate it over competition. An ideal world is one that erases boundaries between groups and people. We don’t create success by pitting ourselves against each other, but by caring for others and building a society with room for everyone. This doesn’t happen by itself. It requires constant social engineering and intervention. It is the moral responsibility of everyone to be vigilant to find where entropy is occurring and help return it to a sense of harmonious order. Harmony is based on empathy and compassion. It is based on seeing a moral society that is made up of individuals who need empathy and support to protect them from the chaos and injustice of nature.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 7 Sep 2022

“How would we rig the maze or puzzle-box so that the anthropomorphic rat [the human being] shall obtain a repeated and reinforced impression of his own free-will?” Bateson and Mead believed that a world filled with screens could meet that challenge. Putting screens in stores and malls would allow social engineers to pass people off from screen to screen, amazing them with new possibilities and offering them more choices. Consumers would be free to choose from among dozens of different laundry detergents, cereals, and toilet tissues—even if they were all manufactured by the same two or three companies.

The Passenger
by The Passenger
Published 27 Dec 2021

The Office of the Taoiseach (prime minister) of the day, John Bruton, noted that broken marriage was ‘a growing reality in Ireland today which the Catholic Church, despite its extensive influence on the opinions of many, has not so far been able to reverse’. The government statement accused the bishops’ attitude of being ‘uncompromising and ungenerous’ and that it ‘suggests that the hierarchy has greater faith in the value of social engineering than in the responsibility of the individual conscience’. It was a watershed moment. The government, publicly and unequivocally, told the Catholic authorities that Irish adults had the right to make up their own minds. In 1996 it felt as though Ireland was finally beginning to grow up. * We would revisit this kind of Catholic rhetoric, however, in the run-up to the Thirty-Fourth Amendment to the Constitution (Marriage Equality) Act 2015.

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
by Jane Mayer
Published 19 Jan 2016

So in 1917 donors were granted unlimited charitable deductions. The rationale was that despite their wealth they deserved the public subsidy, so long as their gifts profited the public, rather than their own private interests. Conservatives who opposed the use of the tax code for all kinds of other social engineering nonetheless fully embraced the loophole in this instance. Scaife had already set up his own small foundation by the time his father died in 1958. A family lawyer had explained to him when he turned twenty-one and received the first “booster shot,” as he put it, of his inheritance that charitable foundations provided good tax shelters.

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Entitlement programs aiding the middle class were in fact so popular with most Americans that they were virtually sacrosanct. While rich free-market enthusiasts often favored replacing these programs with market-oriented alternatives, polls showed that virtually everyone else was adamantly opposed to the kinds of changes that Newt Gingrich candidly called “right-wing social engineering.” To popularize his radical budget plan, Ryan would need help, and Noble soon came up with a way for the donors to deliver it. He suggested they pay for expensive private polling and market testing to help Ryan fine-tune his pitch, as well as a campaign by “Astroturf” groups to create a drumbeat of public support.

The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America
by Andrés Reséndez
Published 11 Apr 2016

The Seri mission program, which had lasted for more than seventy years, had given way to extirpation and enslavement.24 Colleras and Epidemics In the course of the eighteenth century, presidios transformed the human landscape of northern Mexico, giving rise to sizeable towns, functioning as reservations, and generally giving Spanish officials and military planners the ability to launch remarkably bold social engineering projects.25 The Apaches were notable victims. They drifted southward into the silver-bearing areas of northern Mexico, at first sporadically and then with greater frequency in the 1740s and 1750s. Decades of suspicion and mistrust finally burst into open conflict. To prevent disruptions and to keep the silver flowing, Spanish officials subjected the Apaches to some of the same policies tested earlier on the Seris.

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The presidios in Chihuahua and Sonora had exerted so much pressure on the Chiricahua Apaches that many of them sued for peace in the 1780s. Threatened by the horror of enslavement and deportation, they agreed to settle in fixed communities under the watchful eye of Spanish officials. Thus began a thirty-year social engineering experiment. The Spaniards gave seeds, animals, farming tools, and even firearms to the Apaches, and in return they were expected to become sedentary agriculturalists. The transition was never complete. The settled Apaches continued to move around, hunting, gathering, and even raiding on occasion, doing their best to maintain their traditional way of life.

The Future of War
by Lawrence Freedman
Published 9 Oct 2017

The message was that future wars would be run through an educated and disciplined population. ‘The law that dominates the future is glaringly plain. A people must develop and consolidate its educated efficient classes or be beaten in war and give way upon all points where its interests conflict with the interests of more capable people.’ This thought was combined with some alarming social engineering. Advantage would go to the ‘nation that most resolutely picks over, educates, sterilizes, exports, or poisons its People of the Abyss’, and the one that dealt with gambling and the ‘moral decay’ of women, extinguished ‘incompetent rich families’, and turned ‘the greatest proportion of its irresponsible adiposity into social muscle’.

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The use of deadly firepower was now described as ‘kinetic’, to be distinguished from softer forms of power.38 The ‘kinetic’ had its place, but if employed excessively risked driving even more people into the enemy ranks. The authors were careful not to refer to ‘hearts and minds’, a phrase which now carried a lot of baggage left over from Vietnam as a failed attempt at social engineering. The aim was to change behaviour, but phrases such as ‘carrots and sticks’, which might be more accurate, were also eschewed as too simplistic. To capture the emphasis, the non-kinetic approach was described as ‘population-centric’ as opposed to ‘enemy-centric’. There were to be no hard and fast rules.

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 2 Jun 2021

Galton had no time for the idea that ability is just a matter of working hard, a view endorsed by both philosophers such as John Stuart Mill and moralists such as Samuel Smiles: I have no patience with the hypothesis occasionally expressed, and often implied, especially in tales written to teach children to be good, that babies are born pretty much alike, and that the sole agencies in creating differences between boy and boy, and man and man, are steady application and moral effort … The experiences of the nursery, the school, the University, and of professional careers, are a chain of proofs to the contrary.16 The range of mental powers between the cleverest and the dullest was enormous, he argued, ‘reaching from one knows not what height, and descending to one can hardly say what depth’, and no amount of social engineering could change this adamantine fact.17 Galton devoted most of his life to fleshing out these ideas. In Hereditary Genius (1869), he analysed the pedigrees of 977 eminent members of the English establishment, distributed among 300 families. This persuaded him that ‘characteristics cling to families’ and ability goes ‘by descent’.18 In the 1870s, he studied generations of sweet peas in order to understand the process of descent more clearly.19 In 1884, he established an anthropometric laboratory at the Science Museum in South Kensington and set about measuring some 9,000 people, including both parents and children, for a variety of physical characteristics.20 He published his results, duly processed by his pet statistical techniques, in his most influential book, Natural Inheritance (1889), in which he discussed one of the central problems of evolutionary theory, how given characteristics are transmitted from one generation to another.

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Singapore’s rulers, who spend their lives shuffling between the public and private sectors, are marinated in the management ideas that are produced by the great management consultancies. There is a strong technocratic element here: the elite see every problem as a technical problem to be solved by wise social engineers. There is also, alas, a witch-doctorish element: the elite is besotted with management buzz words and by the latest business gurus. Mandarins repeat ugly McKinsey formulae with the same dutiful reverence with which they once repeated exquisite poems. Singapore’s educational system is the fruit of Lee’s elitist vision.

The Origins of the Urban Crisis
by Sugrue, Thomas J.

In place of inferior accommodation for the poor, government-subsidized developments would be built throughout the city. The construction of public housing, argued its advocates, would eliminate the city’s overcrowded, dangerous slums. Not only would public housing offer workers and the poor clean, new, affordable shelter, it would serve as a tool of social engineering. Public housing, in the words of urban historian Robert Fairbanks, would “make better citizens.” Some of the most optimistic reformers of the 1930s and 1940s hoped that the construction of public housing would also overcome the hostility that arose as blacks and whites competed for scarce private-sector housing.6 New Deal liberalism set the context for debates in Detroit that persisted through the 1950s.

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A growing number of white Detroiters believed that open housing advocates were part of a conspiracy that linked together government bureaucrats, civil rights organizations, and liberal religious groups, many influenced by Communism or socialism (terms used interchangeably), who sacrificed white homeowners to their experiments in social engineering for the benefit of “pressure groups”—repudiating, in the process, property rights and democratic principles. Homeowners’ groups and sympathetic politicians used McCarthyite rhetoric against public housing and open housing advocates and their liberal supporters. Red-baiting was, to be sure, a crass smear tactic, but in the per-fervid atmosphere of the anticommunist crusade, many whites believed that a sinister conspiracy was at hand.

Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
by Adam Greenfield
Published 14 Sep 2006

Such interventions are only a small sampling of the spectrum of control techniques that become available in a ubiquitously networked world. MIT sociologist Gary T. Marx sees the widest possible scope for security applications in an "engineered society" like ours, where "the goal is to eliminate or limit violations by control of the physical and social environment." Marx identifies six broad social-engineering strategies as key to this control, and it should surprise no one that everyware facilitates them all. We all understand the strategy of target removal: "something that is not there cannot be taken," and so cash and even human-readable credit and debit cards are replaced with invisible, heavily encrypted services like PayPass.

A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent Into Depression
by Richard A. Posner
Published 30 Apr 2009

The nation has accumulated a substantial history of both liberal and conservative failures. The liberal failures include lack of realism about human nature, nostalgia for failed social experiments such as adversarial unionization, underestimation of the social costs of egalitarian nostrums and of social engineering by judges (the Warren Court, Roe v. Wade, the near abolition of capital punishment), and underestimation of the social benefits of discipline, of punishment, of enforcing principles of personal responsibility, and of military force. The conservative failures include a nostalgia for the social values of the 1950s or earlier, a strong tendency to deny inconvenient facts (such as the human contribution to global warming), and an overestimation of the efficiency of unregulated markets, the efficacy of military force, and the beneficent effects of religiosity in public life.

The Techno-Human Condition
by Braden R. Allenby and Daniel R. Sarewitz
Published 15 Feb 2011

Institutions and societies that depend on predictions to make decisions about complex, evolving system conditions are introducing a source of rigidity and vulnerability into their deliberative processes that undermines the potential value of those processes. They are also turning over their decision process to an elite that, intentionally or unintentionally, can change policy and engage in social engineering by managing the data, models, and research programs that underlie such decisions. 7. Evaluate major shifts in technological systems before, rather than after, implementation of policies and initiatives designed to encourage them. This principle sounds straightforward, but people and economies tend to fall in love with particular technologies, and thus not to question their 166 Chapter 8 potential for serious Level III consequences until the technologies are so deeply embedded in technological, economic, and social systems that change is very difficult.

Mobility: A New Urban Design and Transport Planning Philosophy for a Sustainable Future
by John Whitelegg
Published 1 Sep 2015

Railway use in Britain grew rapidly in the 19th and early 20th centuries (Table 1.1). The growth in numbers was also accompanied by longer distance trips and by a social revolution so that travel over longer distances was no longer the preserve of the wealthy as was the case with horse drawn coaches. In a very early example of what we would now call social engineering or reducing social exclusion, an Act of Parliament in 1844 made provision for one train daily along every new passenger line stopping at every station and carrying third class passengers at 1d (one old, pre-decimalisation, penny) per mile. The process of widening train travel to include “workmen” and other low income groups accelerated through the 19th century after third class ticket prices were reduced to 1d per mile in 1883 on most trains and the average fares declined even further to 0.5d (a halfpenny) by the early twentieth century.

Inequality and the 1%
by Danny Dorling
Published 6 Oct 2014

In the UK from 1998 to 2003, when child poverty was falling and the incomes of poor families were increasing, it was found that ‘low-income families with children have increased their spending on children’s footwear and clothing, books, and fruit and vegetables, relative to other families with children, but have decreased their spending on alcohol and tobacco’.25 The research that uncovered this did find that there were areas where low-income families were not catching up – most obviously in their relative inability to afford computers – but their diets had definitely improved with their increased income. Tragically, the current UK government suggests that what the poor need is not more money, but more marketing. Poorer people’s lifestyles and behaviours are to be better managed – socially engineered – by targeting specific advertising at those deemed to be misbehaving the most.26 Unsurprisingly, there has been a great deal of criticism about this marketing of ‘good behaviour’ deliberately diverting attention from the known causes of health inequality – income and wealth inequalities. In this blame-the-poor approach, the apparent aim is to get those at the bottom of the 99 per cent to accept their lot, to live a subsistence lifestyle on their meagre means, to quit smoking and try their best to get by.27 It has been known for a century that most of the poor are highly responsible within the confines of their economic circumstances, contrary to the prevailing opinions of those who are much better off.28 NHS Choices/Live Well Figure 5.2 A balanced diet: marketing rather than nutrition Today, of the 158,000 people living in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, some 213 per 100,000 die each year before their seventy-fifth birthday.

You Are Not a Gadget
by Jaron Lanier
Published 12 Jan 2010

For instance, Stanford University researcher Jeremy Bailenson has demonstrated that changing the height of one’s avatar in immersive virtual reality transforms self-esteem and social self-perception. Technologies are extensions of ourselves, and, like the avatars in Jeremy’s lab, our identities can be shifted by the quirks of gadgets. It is impossible to work with information technology without also engaging in social engineering. One might ask, “If I am blogging, twittering, and wikiing a lot, how does that change who I am?” or “If the ‘hive mind’ is my audience, who am I?” We inventors of digital technologies are like stand-up comedians or neurosurgeons, in that our work resonates with deep philosophical questions; unfortunately, we’ve proven to be poor philosophers lately.

How Cycling Can Save the World
by Peter Walker
Published 3 Apr 2017

Yes, we probably should. — It barely needs to be pointed out that combating physical inactivity involves more than just people buying a bike. For the world to reverse this pandemic it will require a host of changes to people’s lives, and to the way homes and communities are designed around them. Such open social engineering tends to prove controversial, but it’s been done before. In the 1970s, Finland had the world’s highest rate of heart disease, partly due to inactivity, but also smoking and poor diet. Now, after decades of huge, community-based programs to promote change, rates are 75 percent lower.41 It’s hard to overstate the potential impact if governments undertook similarly ambitious attempts to create mass cycling.

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street
by Jeff John Roberts
Published 15 Dec 2020

Gox Bitcoin Foundation, 54, 55, 56, 58–59 Bitcoin Magazine, 87 bitcoin maximalists, 203 bitcoin meetups, 30 bitcoin Sign Guy, 139 Bitconnect, 141–142 Bitfinex, 108, 114 BitInstant, 54–55, 97, 115–116 Bit License, 127 Bitmain, 171–172 Blankfein, Lloyd, 212 Blockchain, 179 “blockchain not bitcoin” faction, 104–105 Blockchain Revolution (Tapscott and Tapscott), 214, 217 blockchains, 19–21, 24 academic research on, 218–219 block size issues, 152–153 enterprise, 73 future of, 214–220 processing time backlogs in, 83 smart contracts and, 89–95 social engineering for, 21 2.0, 88 block rewards, 21 blocks, 19–20 infrastructure problems with, 75–84 size issues with, 152–153 Bloomberg, 179 Bloomberg Businessweek, 49, 112 Brave, 136 Bridges, Shaun, 59–60 Brooks, Brian, 224 Buffett, Warren, 171 Burges, Kolin, 56 Burnham, Brad, 36 Burning Man, 55 Business Insider, 195–196 Buterin, Vitalik, 48, 87–88, 90, 92, 182 cult of personality around, 202 profile of, 167–168 social media scams using, 143 Byrne, Preston, 206 Cantor Fitzgerald, 101–103 capital gains rules, 122–126 cap tables, 215 Carlson-Wee, Olaf, 24–30 on bitcoin valuation, 62 on Coinbase’s complacency, 177–178 on the crypto bubble, 148 in the crypto winter, 172 on dApps, 188 departure from Coinbase, 95–96, 157 hedge fund of, 223 on hiring, 38–39 legacy of, 220 on Mt.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition
by Steven Levy
Published 18 May 2010

It happened to be the coldest day of the Cambridge winter that year, and as soon as he walked outside his glasses cracked from the sudden change of temperature. He walked straight back to Fredkin’s office, his eyebrows covered with icicles, and said, “I’m going to Los Angeles.” In some cases, a hacker’s departure would be hastened by what Minsky and Ed Fredkin called “social engineering.” Sometimes the planners would find a hacker getting into a rut, perhaps stuck on some systems problem, or maybe becoming so fixated on extracurricular activities, like lock hacking or phone hacking, that planners deemed his work no longer “interesting.” Fredkin would later recall that hackers could get into a certain state where they were “like anchors dragging the thing down.

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Wizards (see also ) Sierra Sky Ranch area, Summer Camp Signals and Power (S&P) Subcommittee, The Tech Model Railroad Club, The Midnight Computer Wiring Society Silicon Valley, Every Man a God Silver, David, The Midnight Computer Wiring Society, Winners and Losers, Winners and Losers, Life, Life Singer, Hal, Tiny BASIC Sirius Software, The Brotherhood, The Brotherhood, The Brotherhood, Frogger, Applefest, Wizard vs. Wizards Skeet Shoot game, Summer Camp Skylab 2, Applefest Smash-Up game, Summer Camp Smith, Adam, Afterword: 2010 Smith, E. E. (Doc), Spacewar SMUT-ROMS, The Homebrew Computer Club Snyder, Tom, Tiny BASIC Social engineering, Life Social issues, The Homebrew Computer Club, The Homebrew Computer Club Society of Creative Anachronisms, Applefest Softalk magazine, The Brotherhood, The Third Generation, Summer Camp, Summer Camp, Frogger, Applefest, Applefest, Wizard vs. Wizards Softporn game, Summer Camp Softsel Distributors, Frogger Software Arts, Summer Camp Software Expo, Frogger Software flap, Tiny BASIC Software Superstars, The Wizard and the Princess Sokol, Dan, The Homebrew Computer Club, Tiny BASIC, Woz, Secrets Sol computer, Tiny BASIC, Woz Solomon, Les, Every Man a God, The Homebrew Computer Club, The Homebrew Computer Club, Tiny BASIC, Tiny BASIC SORDMASTER, Applefest Southern California Computer Society (SCCS), Tiny BASIC Southwestern Data company, The Brotherhood Space Eggs game, The Brotherhood Space Invaders game, The Brotherhood Spacewar, Spacewar, Life Spergel, Marty, The Homebrew Computer Club, The Homebrew Computer Club, Woz Spiradisk, Applefest Stallman, Richard (RMS), Afterword: 2010, Afterword: 2010 Stanford Medical Center, Every Man a God Stanford Research Institute, Life, Life Stanislaus River trip, The Brotherhood Star Trek game, Revolt in 2100, Every Man a God Star Wars (movie), Summer Camp Stargate machine, Wizard vs.

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
by Philip Mirowski
Published 24 Jun 2013

In other words, how could they justify the Audacity of Intervention, or as James Buchanan so cagily posed the question by misrepresenting their own program as classically liberal: The classical liberal, in the role of social engineer, may, of course, recommend institutional laissez faire as a preferred policy stance. But why, and under what conditions, should members of the citizenry, or of some ultimate political decision authority, accept this advice more readily than that proffered by any other social engineer?126 As we have now grown accustomed, there existed more than one engagement with this conundrum within the Neoliberal Thought Collective; however, this fact should be understood as intimately entwined with the double-truth doctrine.

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 14 Jun 2017

Yet Huxley managed to see through all these dark clouds and envision a future society without wars, famines, and plagues, enjoying uninterrupted peace, abundance, and health. It is a consumerist world, which gives completely free rein to sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, and whose supreme value is happiness. It uses advanced biotechnology and social engineering to make sure that everyone is always content and no one has any reason to rebel. There is no need of a secret police, concentration camps, or a Ministry of Love à la Orwell’s 1984. Indeed, Huxley’s genius consists in showing that you could control people far more securely through love and pleasure than through violence and fear.

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The truly amazing thing is that when Huxley wrote Brave New World back in 1931, both he and his readers knew perfectly well that he was describing a dangerous dystopia. Yet many readers today might easily mistake it for a ­utopia. Our consumerist society is actually geared to realizing Huxley’s vision. Today, happiness has become the supreme value, and we increasingly use biotechnology and social engineering to ensure maximum satisfaction to all citizen-customers. You want to know what could be wrong with that? Read the dialogue between Mustapha Mond, the World Controller for Western Europe, and John the Savage, who lived all his life on a native reservation in New Mexico, and who is the only man in London who still knows anything about Shakespeare or God.

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance
by Eswar S. Prasad
Published 27 Sep 2021

To amplify their effect in stimulating economic activity, transfers into CBDC accounts might, for example, carry the requirement that they be spent on durable goods, as such spending has been shown to demonstrate limited responsiveness to traditional forms of economic stimulus (including low interest rates) during recessions. Moreover, these transfers of money could also be embedded with expiration dates, encouraging consumption rather than saving. This is all very well from a policy standpoint but also highlights a major risk. Digital money could one day be used for social engineering that has nothing to do with economic outcomes. It is one thing to mandate that economic support payments conferred in the form of digital money cannot be used to purchase alcohol or drugs. It is quite another to proscribe the use of official digital money to purchase ammunition, contraception, or pornography.

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Worse, it could even enable a democratic government that takes an autocratic turn to tighten its control and attempt to subvert the very institutions that have traditionally served as checks and balances on such concentration of power. Fundamental rights such as free speech, free assembly, and peaceful dissent could be threatened. Even the notion of smart money takes on a sinister aspect, for it gives the government a tool that could be adapted to social engineering or other nefarious purposes. A government that hews to religious or conservative (in the American sense of the term) views could block smart money issued by its central bank from being used for family planning services or marijuana purchases, simply by deactivating the use of CBDC for certain product codes.

The Ministry for the Future: A Novel
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Published 5 Oct 2020

The upshot was that they had no real way of knowing what the global economy was doing now, or what would happen if the central banks continued to fulfill their pledge to create and underwrite a massive infusion of new money into the world. Carbon quantitative easing, CQE, was a huge multi-variant experiment in social engineering. This was volatility indeed! To use not just the financial term, but simply common human language. It was without doubt a volatile situation. But recall that the financial markets of that time loved stock price volatility, as it made money for financiers no matter what happened, their having gone both long and short on everything.

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Tracking it might help with that. Get all that right and you might find money itself becoming irrelevant and going away. Very good! And what about all the other recent transformations in that area that we’ve been seeing, the carbon coin, the guaranteed jobs, and so on? What you might call the social engineering, or the systems architecture? These are the areas that matter! Our systems are what drive history, not our tools. But aren’t our systems just software, so to speak? And software is a technology. Without the software, the hardware is just lumps of stuff. My point exactly. By that line of reasoning, you end up saying design is technology, law is technology, language is technology— even thinking is technology!

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century
by J. Bradford Delong
Published 6 Apr 2020

They note that particular goals and benchmarks are high priorities, and that the top bosses will be displeased if they are not accomplished. They use social engineering and arm-twisting skills. They ask for permission to outsource, or dig into their own pockets for incidentals. Market, barter, blat, and plan—this last understood as the organization’s primary purposes and people’s allegiance to it—always rule, albeit in different proportions. The key difference, perhaps, is that a standard business firm is embedded in a much larger market economy, and so is always facing the make-or-buy decision: Can this resource be acquired most efficiently from elsewhere within the firm, via social engineering or arm-twisting or blat, or is it better to seek budgetary authority to purchase it from outside?

Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy
by Irvin D. Yalom and Molyn Leszcz
Published 1 Jan 1967

This is an example of the therapeutic method of resolving the discrepancy for the individual: that is, to raise one’s public esteem by changing those behaviors and attitudes that have been criticized by the group. This method is more likely if the individual is highly attracted to the group and if the public esteem is not too much lower than the self-esteem. But is the use of group pressure to change individual behavior or attitudes a form of social engineering? Is it not mechanical? Does it not neglect deeper levels of integration? Indeed, group therapy does employ behavioral principles; psychotherapy is, in all its variants, basically a form of learning. Even the most nondirective therapists use, at an unconscious level, operant conditioning techniques: they signal desirable conduct or attitudes to clients, whether explicitly or subtly.71 This process does not suggest that we assume an explicit behavioral, mechanistic view of the client, however.

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Therapists who recognize that they exert great influence through social reinforcement and who have formulated a central organizing principle of therapy will be more effective and consistent in making therapeutic interventions. The Model-Setting Participant Leaders shape group norms not only through explicit or implicit social engineering but also through the example they set in their own group behavior. 10 The therapy group culture represents a radical departure from the social rules to which clients are accustomed. Clients are asked to discard familiar social conventions, to try out new behavior, and to take many risks. How can therapists best demonstrate to their clients that new behavior will not have the anticipated adverse consequences?

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.; promoting change Self-worth Sensitivity-training groups Sensory awareness groups Sentence Completion test Separation anxiety Setbacks Sex offender groups; family reenactment and Sexual abuse: self-disclosure of Sexual abuse groups; universality’s impact on Sexual attraction, to therapist Sexual dysfunction groups Sexual fantasies Sexual relationships in groups: clinical example of; here-and-now focus and; subgrouping and Sherif, M. Short-term structured groups; dropout rates in; silent members in Silent clients; management of; reasons for; therapist’s process checks with Skills groups Slavson, S. Sledgehammer approach Social connection Social engineering Social groups vs. therapy groups . Social isolation; morality affected by Social loneliness Social microcosm: as artificial; as bidirectional; as dynamic interaction; group as; learning from; reality of; recognizing behavioral patterns in; therapy groups as Social microcosm theory Social norms Social psychology Social reinforcement; norms and Social support Socialization anxiety Socializing techniques: development of Sociometric measures Sociopaths; group therapy and Socratic posture Solidarity Solomon, L.

Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web
by Cole Stryker
Published 14 Jun 2011

In 1993, America Online began offering its customers Usenet access, which brought the community thousands, and eventually millions, of new users. These users were often the children of net-savvy parents who were relatively less equipped than university students to provide value to the Usenet communities. And the influx didn’t stop. The AOL users just kept coming. Waves upon waves of noobs. Trolling isn’t as effective a form of social engineering when the noobs outnumber the old war horses. On January 26, 1994, Dave Fischer posted a message to the alt.folklore.computers newsgroup: “September 1993 will go down in net.history as the September that never ended.” And thus the phrase eternal September was born. It’s something that every successful Internet community experiences, but this represented a massive shift in demographics for the web.

Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything
by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell
Published 15 Feb 2009

Indeed, we are headed toward a world where it will require a conscious decision (or a legal requirement) not to record a certain kind of information in a certain time or place—the exact reverse of how things are now. The technological and economic forces driving this trend are strong. Arguably, only a vast legal or political effort of social engineering can prevent it from effecting far-reaching changes in the way modern life is lived. That sort of catastrophic counterrevolution sounds far-fetched, but there are more realistic scenarios that I will discuss in Chapter 8. E-memories will provide every person who embraces them with a different sense of their whole lives.

The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers--And the Coming Cashless Society
by David Wolman
Published 14 Feb 2012

I don’t buy that fatalistic view because we can use findings from behavioral economics to better ourselves. As disheartening as it can be to learn about how irrationally we treat money, the upside is that these insights can guide the development of future forms of money and financial devices. We can design systems that coax us into making wiser choices. This isn’t Huxleyian enemy-state social engineering—it’s just smarter tools, like automobiles that adjust to icy driving conditions, or coffee pots that shut off after a certain amount of time so that you don’t set fire to the kitchen. A service as basic as an e-mail reminder to pay a bill on time is a simple example of just such an attempt to compensate for human frailty.

The Lost Art of Gratitude
by Alexander McCall Smith
Published 21 Sep 2009

I think that there’s a time after a period of unfair treatment—or even oppression—when the tables are turned, so to speak. The victims of past injustice are given a bit more leeway, I think.” Lettuce’s lips were pursed in disapproval. “Two wrongs do not make a right, Miss Dalhousie. A simple adage, but applicable, would you not say, to many contemporary forms of social engineering?” He had always called her Miss Dalhousie, and the formality, it seemed to Isabel, was meant to exclude. She was not a colleague, in his eyes; she was not a man, with whom he would feel comfortable. It was as simple as that. And, of course, he resented her purchase of the Review and the restructuring of the editorial board; his exclusion at the hands of a woman must have cut deep.

The Five-Year Party: How Colleges Have Given Up on Educating Your Child and What You Can Do About It
by Craig Brandon
Published 17 Aug 2010

It seems to imply that knowledge can be absorbed by students from the college atmosphere. What is actually taking place is a form of widespread fraud: certifying that students have learned something that they have not learned. If you probe deeper, professors who advocate this kind of grade inflation see it as a form of social engineering to increase the number of college graduates and hopefully increase their earning potential. Eventually, party schools grant diplomas to students who have not learned anything approaching what used to be required of them. This widespread fraud allows party schools to collect the tuition money that keeps the wheels of Diplomas Inc. happily turning and avoids angry confrontations with its student customers.

In the Land of Invented Languages: Adventures in Linguistic Creativity, Madness, and Genius
by Arika Okrent
Published 1 Jan 2009

If Zamenhof hadn't come on the scene just as the Volapilkists were jumping ship, would anyone have paid attention? If the situation in Europe hadn't highlighted the violent perils of nationalism, would so many have been attracted to his message of unity? If both the Hebrew revival and the Esperanto movements hadn't begun during the golden age of socialism, when the prospects for grand social-engineering experiments looked so bright, would the Jewish immigrants have so willingly believed that it was possible to overhaul the language habits of an entire society? Would enough people have believed in the utopian dream of a universal language to try to make it happen? Only it didn't happen. Esperanto did not become a universal language.

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
by Samuel R. Delany
Published 1 Jan 1999

Large businesses and offices must alternate with small businesses and human services, even while places to live at all levels, working-class, middle-class, and luxurious, large and small, must embraid with them into a community. This flies in the face of more than a hundred years of architectural practice. Our society wants to condense, distill, centralize, and giantize. But when this becomes a form—the form—of social engineering, whether in the form of upper-class residential neighborhoods with no stores and no working-class residences, whether in the form of business neighborhoods with no residences at all, or in the form of industrial neighborhoods with no white-collar businesses and no stores, the result is a social space that can do well only as long as money is poured constantly into it.

Financial Fiasco: How America's Infatuation With Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Sep 2009

This led to a fabulously fast recovery. Even in 1922, the economy grew by 6 percent and the number of unemployed fell from 4.9 million to 2.8 million. The little depression was over in a year, and few remember it today.' Herbert Hoover was already around at that time-as a critic. He was an early adopter of the tenets of "social engineering," convinced that all human problems had political and technological solutions.' The statist faction of the Republican Party had managed to squeeze Hoover in as commerce secretary in the Harding administration, and in that capacity, he called in vain for more government coordination of the economy.

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us
by Tim Sullivan
Published 6 Jun 2016

The theories might not have had such outsized influence—theories don’t act on their own, after all—were it not for the infiltration of commerce by academically trained economists.6 That this incursion has taken place during the much-hyped Age of Big Data has afforded economists ever more capacity to track behavior, tweak and refine their models, and ideally on each iteration make the market function a little bit better.7 We don’t normally think of economists and their mathematical models as social engineers, mad scientists using the world as their laboratory. They measure, predict, describe. But over the past fifty years, economists have slowly gone from developing theory to designing how we buy the goods we want and interact with one another. So this book is also the story of those whom markets have enchanted, and the journey that markets have taken since World War II, as they’ve been studied, refined, obsessed over, harnessed, modified, designed, and released into the real world to wreak what they may.

The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work
by Richard Florida
Published 22 Apr 2010

Singapore, a city-state of almost 5 million people, is also a significant financial center. To be sure, the country is trying to invest in creativity—its “cool quotient” recently increased upon its inclusion in the hipper-than-thou Wallpaper series of city guides. Yet Singapore remains a top-down, socially engineered society. Though I would not go as far as one recent visitor who said, “It feels like Atlanta, only Asian,” it’s also a far cry from the diversity and street-level energy of New York, London, or Toronto. Hong Kong seems to have the best shot. It has long been an expatriate center and is a player on the global scene.

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future
by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe
Published 6 Dec 2016

One could say that Knight and his collaborators were approaching the study of biology like any engineer might: Take the object apart; discover its constituent parts; then see how it might be improved by reconfiguring it. But this neglects the far more audacious goals embedded within iGEM. The creation of a library of standardized BioBricks is above all an act of social engineering. With LEGOs, you don’t have to be an architect to express a unique vision of the intersection between form and space. And while synthetic biology remains in its infancy, it already bears the unmistakable imprint of this egalitarian vision. Knight, Endy, and Rettberg didn’t so much “create” or “launch” a new scientific discipline; from the earliest days their efforts were spent in creating the conditions by which it might grow organically, fed by people and ideas they couldn’t begin to anticipate.

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving
by Leigh Gallagher
Published 26 Jun 2013

The history of the suburbs has been entirely dependent on the automobile—not just because people need cars to commute between cities and suburbs (or between suburbs) but because the very design of the suburbs, in which millions of houses are spread out at low densities across the country, doesn’t lend itself to any other type of transportation. “The suburbs as we knew them were a petroleum-derived derivative,” says Victor Dover, a leading New Urbanism architect and planner. George Washington University’s Christopher Leinberger puts it another way: “We social engineered the system to where you only have one choice to get around. It’s your car. You can have any color you want, as long as it’s black,” he says, suggesting an alternate meaning to Henry Ford’s famous quote about the Model T. Americans are, of course, a car-loving country. Transportation planners like to talk about “mode split,” the breakdown of the type of transportation people use in a society.

Jenkins Continuous Integration Cookbook
by Alan Berg
Published 15 Mar 2012

The Ping service is dangerous as it does not filter the input, and the input is reflected back through the output. Many web applications use web services to load the content into a page, avoiding reloading the full page. A typical example is when you type in a search term and alternative suggestions are shown on the fly. With a little social engineering magic, a victim will end up sending a request including scripting to the web service. On returning the response, the script is run in the client browser. This bypasses the intent of the same origin policy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same_origin_policy). This is known as a non-persistent attack, as the script is not persisted to storage.

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
by Chris Hedges
Published 12 Jul 2009

Positive psychology is only the latest incarnation of this assault on community and individualism. A related ideology was lauded by Business Week in the early 1980s as the “New Industrial Relations.”16 It was touted as a new form of human management. It was also said to be “nicer” than the earlier “scientific management” and social engineering innovations of Henry Ford or Frederick Taylor.17 Roberto González, an anthropologist at San Jose State University, spent nine months in 1989 and 1990 as a student engineer at General Motors. He later wrote “Brave New Workplace: Cooperation, Control, and the New Industrial Relations,” a study on corporate work teams and “quality circles.”

Time Travel: A History
by James Gleick
Published 26 Sep 2016

If this sounds like George Orwell’s “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia,” that’s no accident. Totalitarian governments also purvey alternate histories.*9 The Lathe of Heaven is a critique of a certain kind of hubris—one that every willful creature shares in some degree. It is the hubris of politicians and social engineers: champions of progress who believe we can remake the world. “Isn’t that man’s very purpose on earth—to do things, change things, run things, make a better world?” says Haber, the scientist, when Orr expresses doubts. Change is good: “Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice.”

Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us Into Temptation
by Chris Nodder
Published 4 Jun 2013

On May 4, 2000, people all over the world started receiving an e-mail purporting to be from one of their friends telling them that yes, the friend did love them. That prompted enough people to open the e-mail attachment that 10 percent of all computers attached to the Internet were infected with the virus lurking in the message, causing an estimated $5.5 billion of damage. A love letter? For me? From a friend? Of course I’ll open it! Social engineering techniques for getting people to open infected e-mail attachments or click links have become progressively more sophisticated since this early attempt, but many still resort to the same basic method, namely flattery. Flattery, which is actually just an insincere form of praise, makes recipients feel good, even if the flattery isn’t particularly accurate and even when recipients know the motive for praising them was insincere.

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be
by Diane Coyle
Published 11 Oct 2021

What is the basis of our economists’ underlying instinct to trust markets? The broad idea of ‘general equilibrium’ is an important principle, making the point that everything in the economy is connected and the full consequences of any action can be far reaching. It is a useful inoculation against the temptation to indulge in social engineering, because it is so hard to think through all the possible consequences of any action or policy. General equilibrium as a specific theory is an abstract, ideal world of identical individuals making their own choices according to pre-determined preferences, with no transactions costs or externalities.

Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture
by Justin McGuirk
Published 15 Feb 2014

It’s a thought that rather takes the shine off the idea of social housing as an idealist product of the welfare state. Piedrabuena was a perfect example of housing being used to create a politically homogenous community – in this case of military and police families – loyal to the government. One of the interesting features of the megablock approach to housing is precisely that sense of social engineering. The architects could have built the blocks smaller, creating less dense environments, but Viñoly recalls that they wanted to achieve a sense of the collective. In a country where the two primary sources of social cohesion were religion and the unions, the designers of Piedrabuena and other such estates were proposing another form of collective consciousness: the building block.

Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain's Underclass
by Darren McGarvey
Published 2 Nov 2017

Working class folk receive strange looks when asked what their group’s lofty objectives are and they respond simply by saying they just want a place to make tea and coffee for the elderly. Or somewhere for teenagers to hang out. Or cooking classes for single parents. Or football or fishing. The things they want are often so straightforward that it’s baffling to middle class ears. There is a big disconnect between the grand social engineering agenda of government and the far simpler, unglamorous aspirations and needs of local people, many of whom are not fluent in the ways of jargon. The system is set up for working class people to be ‘engaged’ by ‘facilitators’ and ‘mentors’, who help them water down whatever they want to do in order that community aspirations align with those in positions of influence or power.

Divided: Why We're Living in an Age of Walls
by Tim Marshall
Published 8 Mar 2018

However, the African experience is of relatively recent geographical and ethnic contradictions being built into the whole region by outsiders. Yes, we’re back to colonialism – because there will be no getting away from it until the Africans can distance themselves from its effects. Given the scale of the social engineering, sixty to seventy years of independence is no distance at all. It does not help, of course, that the European borders are still the basis of any diplomatic resolution of territorial disputes – as we saw in Morocco and Western Sahara, which are still having to abide by the lines drawn by Spain.

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations
by David Pilling
Published 30 Jan 2018

But then simply abandoning it in favor of measuring growth—also far from perfect—is to take the easy, but illogical, option, “like looking for the keys under the lamp post because it is easier to look there.” Instead, “We should be looking for what we want, wherever it is to be found.”22 Second, an element of social engineering can quickly creep into happiness economics. The virtue of income is that you can do with it what you like. But once we start trying to figure out what makes people happy, you don’t have to stretch things too far to imagine a “brave new world” in which governments continually probe into people’s minds and ply them with drugs to make sure they are happy—and docile.

Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality
by Melissa Bruntlett and Chris Bruntlett
Published 27 Aug 2018

Meanwhile, in 1947, even as that status symbol grew in popularity across the region, people on bikes still constituted 71 percent of road users in Eindhoven (with motorists a mere 6 percent). But even in the face of that reality, American- and German-inspired professionals such as Dutch architect Jaap Bakema pursued their own form of social engineering, and any benefits to cyclists were either incidental or intended to get them out of the way of cars. Vertical separation became one of the popular ways to get cyclists out of sight (and out of mind), as was the case of the Woenselse railroad crossing, a major bottleneck for the huge number of Philips employees biking between the factory and Woensel, a blue-collar neighborhood to the north.

Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking
by Matthew Syed
Published 9 Sep 2019

In a column for the National Review, Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst who became chief of staff for the National Security Council under President Trump, criticised an initiative to increase diversity at the CIA. ‘Protecting our nation from such threats requires extremely competent and capable individuals to conduct intelligence operations and write analysis in challenging security and legal environments . . . The CIA’s mission is too serious to be distracted by social-engineering efforts.’ Part of the reluctance to recruit ethnic minorities was fear of counter-espionage, but it went far deeper. Those who called for a broader intake were shouted down for undermining excellence. The CIA should be about the brightest and the best! Defence is too important to allow diversity to trump ability!

What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed
by Robert Skidelsky
Published 3 Mar 2020

That people may actually behave more and more as economists tell them they do behave? This would be an ironic inversion of Bayes’ theorem, with the objective reality coming increasingly to resemble the subjective bets economists place on humankind. To transform human nature, not just to describe it, has always been the dream of social engineers, as today it is that of the techno-utopians. It is the foundation of the doctrine of progress. But how far can it, or should it, be pressed, before humans cease to exist in a recognisable form? And is there something irreducibly human which will resist the ambitions of the engineers of the soul?

Mastering Blockchain: Unlocking the Power of Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts
by Lorne Lantz and Daniel Cawrey
Published 8 Dec 2020

In the US, telecom carriers offer customers the ability to port their phone number to a different SIM card. This is extremely convenient when a telcom customer loses their phone, and wants to maintain the same phone number. Once a hacker knows the phone number of their target, they need to convince the telecom carrier to port over the target’s phone number. This can be done either through social engineering (by pretending to be the target requesting the phone port), by bribing a telecom employee, or through other creative methods. After a SIM swap occurs, the hacker receives all of the target’s SMS messages. It’s very common for people to set their phone number as one of the recovery options for their Gmail account—it’s part of the sign-up process, as Figure 8-5 shows.

Never Panic Early: An Apollo 13 Astronaut's Journey
by Fred Haise and Bill Moore
Published 4 Apr 2022

The heart and soul of both companies was in the winning of contracts to design, develop, and build new aircraft and electronics. As I look back over my experience in the business world, I would say that, due to the workload and stress, it was as complicated as my experiences as a pilot and astronaut. Secondly, with the diversity of skills and variety of people in the workforce, I was often involved with too much social engineering dealing with people problems. * * * — CHAPTER 14 IN THE ROCKING CHAIR My mom had always advised me not to just sit in my rocking chair after I retired. She followed that advice herself, still driving her great-grandchildren to and from school in her late eighties. My first venture back into aerospace was signing up as a consultant with Northrop Grumman to take part in the Red Team review of their proposal for the Orion contract.

API Marketplace Engineering: Design, Build, and Run a Platform for External Developers
by Rennay Dorasamy
Published 2 Dec 2021

Fairly easy as a concept in a “lab” environment – completely different in a real-world context. Another step in their evolutionary journey was providing access via web and mobile application channels. There are countless challenges – I’ll highlight just one which probably never featured in the “lab” environment – phishing. Client login credentials could be easily socially engineered by simply calling an end user posing to be an employee of the financial institution. Mechanisms like two-factor authentication (2FA) are prevalent today – however, these were not readily available when the channel was first established. With the experience gained from establishing other channels, organizations have far more insight into potential vectors of attack.

Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto
by Mark Helprin
Published 19 Apr 2009

What most damns the Luddites in the common wisdom is that they failed to make distinctions (although they did: they did not attack machines per se, but only those that were displacing their customary industry), not even bothering with the bath water as they threw out all the babies. How stupid and pointless to object, for example, to the steam engine, the cotton gin, or the railroad. The original progressives embraced such things as instruments of rationalism that would in tandem with their beloved techniques of social engineering make the world over for the better. Their recent heirs, however, have stopped short. A shift occurred sometime between their mocking of conservatives for objecting to water fluoridation and their own subsequent fear and suspicion of an encyclopedia’s-worth of substances. In a single generation they went from an uncritical embrace of scientific culture to a supercritical rejection.

The Dollar Meltdown: Surviving the Coming Currency Crisis With Gold, Oil, and Other Unconventional Investments
by Charles Goyette
Published 29 Oct 2009

ANSWER: The growing mountains of gold in exchange-traded funds may indeed be an attractive target for government plunder, even though the $35 billion in market capitalization early in 2009 of the two gold ETFs is not enough to make a dent in the government’s financial predicament. But the real motivation for controlling people’s economic behavior is often actually for purposes of social engineering, and not financial at all. Issuers of fiat currencies are always hostile to gold and must suppress it at the first hint of a challenge. If a wholesale abandonment of paper dollars begins to build, it is to be expected that private gold stockpiles would become a target. There is usually plenty of warning before command economies begin wholesale confiscation.

Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground
by Kevin Poulsen
Published 22 Feb 2011

Microsoft pushed out a patch later that day, but Max knew that even the most secure company would take days or weeks to test and install the update. The Russian exploit was already detected by antivirus software, so he modified it to change its signature, running it through his antivirus lab to verify that it was now undetectable. The only thing left was the social engineering: Max had to trick his targets into visiting a website loaded with the exploit code. Max decided on the domain name Financialedgenews.com, and set up hosting at ValueWeb. NightFox came back with the target list: CitiMortage, GMAC, Experian’s Lowermybills.com, Bank of America, Western Union MoneyGram, Lending Tree, and Capital One Financial, one of the largest credit card issuers in the country.

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover
by Katrina Vanden Heuvel and William Greider
Published 9 Jan 2009

Market populism was promulgated less by a political party than by business itself—through management theory, investment lit-erature and advertising—and it served the needs of the owning community far more directly than had the tortured populism of the backlash. While the right-wing populism of the seventies and eighties had envisioned a scheming “liberal elite” bent on “social engineering”—a clique of experts who thought they knew what was best for us, like busing, integration and historical revisionism—market populism simply shifted the inflection. Now the crime of the elite was not so much an arrogance in matters of values but in matters economic. Still those dirty elitists thought they were better than the people, but now their arrogance was revealed by their passion to raise the minimum wage; to regulate, oversee, redistribute and tax.

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization
by Alexander R. Galloway
Published 1 Apr 2004

50 Most hackers would answer: You, for being such an idiot. Jameson said somewhere that one of the most difficult things to do under contemporary capitalism is to envision utopia. This is precisely why possibility is important. Deciding (and often struggling for) what is possible is 49. A primary counterexample is the practice of social engineering, whereby the hacker leaves the logical realm and enters the physical world to glean passwords and other important information. There are a few very rare examples of specific hacks that destroy hardware through abuse of mechanical parts such as the disk drive. The Electrohome color vector monitor used in Sega arcade games like Tac/Scan can actually catch on fire if misused (thanks to Mark Daggett for bringing this to my attention).

Admissions: A Life in Brain Surgery
by Henry Marsh
Published 3 May 2017

My father recommended many books, ranging from Raymond Chandler to Karl Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies – this latter book, I think, had a great influence on my later life. Popper taught me to distrust unquestioned authority, and that our moral duty in life is to reduce suffering, by ‘piecemeal social engineering’ and not with grand schemes driven by ideology. This, of course, is very close to the Christian ethics and belief in social justice inculcated in me by my parents, and the understanding of the importance of evidence and honesty that I learnt as a doctor. Yet doctors get paid – usually very well – for their work, and we cannot but help people (unless singularly incompetent).

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
by Atul Gawande
Published 6 Oct 2014

Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul. Yet—and this is the painful paradox—we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days. For more than half a century now, we have treated the trials of sickness, aging, and mortality as medical concerns. It’s been an experiment in social engineering, putting our fates in the hands of people valued more for their technical prowess than for their understanding of human needs. That experiment has failed. If safety and protection were all we sought in life, perhaps we could conclude differently. But because we seek a life of worth and purpose, and yet are routinely denied the conditions that might make it possible, there is no other way to see what modern society has done

Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet
by Joseph Menn
Published 26 Jan 2010

Small wonder so many millions of Americans failed to internalize the warnings never to click on any Web address contained in an email. As competition among phishers increased, the innovators invested in efforts to hack into corporate databases, stealing everyone’s financial information at once, or getting the same files with “social engineering,” more familiarly known as trickery. The number of disclosed hacks into companies soared to 656 a year by 2008, with more than 35 million identities at risk just that year, according to a tally from before the discovery of the biggest breaches. That didn’t count phishing victims or those stung by hackers who used security holes and viruses to enslave computers or to install “keyloggers,” as Barrett’s Russian criminals were doing in 2006.

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up
by Philip N. Howard
Published 27 Apr 2015

Ultimately, the best way for a national security agency to crack any security system is to get the company that designed the system to collaborate by leaking all or part of the keys and giving access to the computers and networks in question. So the NSA did not always break into the secure systems of other governments or the technology firms that built the global information infrastructure. Snowden’s leaks have revealed that the NSA has used everything from polite requests to legal pressure to ensure collaboration. And when social engineering or software bugs don’t allow access, government agencies can actually buy data from internet service providers. Recent estimates are tough to come by, but in 2006 the General Accounting Office revealed that some $30 million had been spent in contractual arrangements with information resellers.

In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food
by Stewart Lee Allen
Published 1 Jan 2002

“Wealth and poverty have no place in a regime of equality,” opined the committee, “[so] there shall no longer be produced a bread of the finest flour for the rich . . . but this single and good type of bread, the Bread of Equality.” It was the old scandale mollet reborn, a law that enshrined the belief that the people’s daily bread defined their political and moral character, only now Paris’s social engineers were using it to create a truly democratic nation. This utopian loaf law was passed on November 15 and sent on for final ratification. But it never came. Apparently even the French couldn’t swallow this one. Instead, six weeks later the Parlement came up with what they thought was a better solution to the endless bickering over white and brown and luxe and mollet and your-bread-is-better-than-mine.

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery
by Stewart Lansley
Published 19 Jan 2012

But during the convulsions that engulfed the global economy in the 1970s, the postwar consensus around strong government and social solidarity began to fade while the ideas of the radical right began to take root. ‘The intellectual mood of post-war Britain, still relatively homogeneous down to 1970, was changing fast’, argued Kenneth Morgan, a leading British historian of the post-war era. ‘In its wake was a growing disillusion with the Keynesian economists, the Fabian planners, the postBeveridge social engineers, the consensual liberal positivists who had governed the realm like so many conquistadors for a quarter of a century.’49 Although Mrs Thatcher was, at heart, a conviction politician, she quickly came under the spell of this small group of thinkers on the right. Under their influence, she came to believe that Britain had created an economic model that killed incentives and stifled enterprise, that only freer markets and personal wealth accumulation would bring a more efficient, entrepreneurial and prosperous nation.

Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism
by Wolfgang Streeck
Published 1 Jan 2013

Rather, the aim must be to repair for now what has been left of the democratic nation-state, to an extent that allows it to be used to slow the headlong advance of capitalist ‘land-grabbing’. Under today’s conditions, a strategy that places its hopes in postnational democracy, following in the functionalist wake of capitalist progress,33 merely plays into the hands of the social engineers of self-regulating global market capitalism; the crisis of 2008 offered a foretaste of the havoc this can cause. In Western Europe today, the greatest danger is not nationalism – least of all German nationalism – but Hayekian market liberalism. Completion of monetary union would seal the end of national democracy in Europe – and therefore of the only institution that can still be used to defend against the consolidation state.

The Trouble With Billionaires
by Linda McQuaig
Published 1 May 2013

In fact, the threat of hunger became a deliberate strategy under capitalism, a means to prod peasants to work even under the horrific conditions in the new mines and factories (today we might call that a ‘work incentive’). Breaking with centuries of history, capitalism introduced the concept of using scarcity and deprivation as a deliberate tool of social engineering and control. Of course, capitalism is generally regarded in the West today as key to our evolution as a species toward a more advanced way of life. But Polanyi reminds us that capitalism, which was developed by the rising merchant class in seventeenth-century England, was especially brutal in its early stages and was not appreciated nor widely accepted for a long time.

The Internet Is Not the Answer
by Andrew Keen
Published 5 Jan 2015

“How do you become a member?” I asked. “We want diversity. Anyone original will be welcome,” he explained in a mid-Atlantic drawl. “Especially people who think outside their traditional silos.” “Sounds like the Internet,” I said. “Or a village pub.” “Exactly,” he said, without smiling. “So could I join?” The social engineer peered at me suspiciously, unconvinced, I suspect, by my ability to think outside any silo. “You have to be nominated by a member,” he mumbled. He did, however, invite me to visit the Battery. “Thanks,” I replied. “I’ll come for lunch.” “Cool,” he said. But cool, once the aesthetic of genuine rebellion, is no longer cool.

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists
by Julia Ebner
Published 20 Feb 2020

Zoë Quinn, who was among the journalists at the epicentre of the Gamergate hate storm, was attacked with half-truths, lies and private-information leaks from her own Twitter account, which the hackers had taken control of.23 The goal of the malicious intrusion into people’s private lives is to intimidate, silence and publicly discredit critical voices and political opponents.24 Doxxing campaigns do not just fuel online hate but also increase the likelihood that these people are attacked in real life. Post-doxxing consequences have extended from undesired subscriptions and deliveries to threatening phone calls, prank anthrax hoaxes and in-person visits. Doxxers sometimes use social engineering and hacking to extract information from non-public sources. But in most cases a simple open-source intelligence (OSINT) search provides them with all they need. From our social media profiles, public records and online phone books to third-party info sellers such as Spokeo, Pipl and Intelius, the internet is a treasure trove for doxxers.25 Erasing these traces from the internet can be tedious and time-consuming.

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent
by Ben Shapiro
Published 26 Jul 2021

Indeed, it is an integral part of Scientism, the philosophy that morality can come from science itself—that all society requires is the management of experts in the scientific method to reach full human flourishing. Scientism says that it can answer ethical questions without resort to God; all that is required is a bit of data, and a properly trained scientist. The history of Scientism is long and bleak—it contains support for eugenics, genocide, and massively misguided social engineering—but the popularity of Scientism hasn’t waned. Modern Scientism is a bit softer than all of that, but maintains the same premise: that science can answer all of our moral questions, that it can move us easily from the question of what is to the question of what ought to be done. Steven Pinker, a modern Scientism advocate, writes, “The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing may seem obvious, trite, old-fashioned . . .

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Published 20 Feb 2018

Put yourself on the line, start a business. Yes, take risk, and if you get rich (which is optional), spend your money generously on others. We need people to take (bounded) risks. The entire idea is to move the descendants of Homo sapiens away from the macro, away from abstract universal aims, away from the kind of social engineering that brings tail risks to society. Doing business will always help (because it brings about economic activity without large-scale risky changes in the economy); institutions (like the aid industry) may help, but they are equally likely to harm (I am being optimistic; I am certain that except for a few most do end up harming).

The Twittering Machine
by Richard Seymour
Published 20 Aug 2019

In surveillance capitalism, by contrast, the mechanisms of observation and manipulation are designed without any assumption of psychological self-determination. Conformity disappears into the machinery, an order of stimulus–response, cause and effect. Skinner’s techniques, coupled with the post-Cold War scientific world view, armed corporations and governments with a form of subtle, micro-level social engineering, backed up with decades of scientific research and, now, big data. In the social industry, the teaching machine became an addiction machine. And, as it transpires, it is not the classroom for which operant conditioning is best suited, but the casino. VI. What if one were to store up all the energy and passion . . . which every year is squandered . . . at the gaming tables of Europe?

Green Economics: An Introduction to Theory, Policy and Practice
by Molly Scott Cato
Published 16 Dec 2008

Politicians are waking up to the fact that they can use a national taxation system strategically, to achieve goals for the environment much as health-related taxation has always been used to encourage more beneficial lifestyles. Because green taxation used in this way is explicitly a form of social engineering, exactly which kinds of taxes are introduced is the subject of fierce debate since this raises questions about exactly what sorts of lifestyles we should be encouraging as part of our future sustainable economy. Do we wish to encourage airline companies to buy more efficient planes or be careful to fill those they do own to the maximum?

Bike Boom: The Unexpected Resurgence of Cycling
by Carlton Reid
Published 14 Jun 2017

BUILT FOR Londoners evicted from slums, bombed out of their houses, and, in the case of soldiers, returning from war, Stevenage was a New Town “fit for heroes to live in.” The houses for these heroes and former slum-dwellers were not provided with car garages; instead, Claxton and his colleagues provided, behind the front door of every house, bicycle storage units. These cycle-cupboards were soon converted to other uses because the compact, socially engineered town attracted aspirational residents who bought into the postwar dream of car ownership for all. As soon as these residents could, they voted with their steering wheels, showing they were happy to live in a town where driving was the norm. Stevenage’s Dutch-style cycling infrastructure did not, as Claxton had assumed, entice residents to keep cycling.

How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature
by George Monbiot
Published 14 Apr 2016

By generating feelings of insecurity and inadequacy – which means reducing self-acceptance – they also suppress intrinsic goals. Advertisers, who employ large numbers of psychologists, are well aware of this. Crompton quotes Guy Murphy, global planning director for the marketing company JWT. Marketers, Murphy says, ‘should see themselves as trying to manipulate culture; being social engineers, not brand managers; manipulating cultural forces, not brand impressions’.3 The more they foster extrinsic values, the easier it is to sell their products. Rightwing politicians have also, instinctively, understood the importance of values in changing the political map. Margaret Thatcher famously remarked that, ‘Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.’4 Conservatives in the United States generally avoid debating facts and figures.

Reaching for Utopia: Making Sense of an Age of Upheaval
by Jason Cowley
Published 15 Nov 2018

The cost of war had impoverished the nation, left it with a ruinous trade deficit and ended Britain’s imperial hegemony. But these were new times. Progressive change was not only possible, it was believed to be necessary. As Attlee recognised, the British people ‘wanted a new start’. They had suffered and they had endured. Now, he said, they were ‘looking towards the future’. Our lives as children were socially engineered and it seemed everything we needed was provided by the state: housing, education, health care, libraries, recreational and sports facilities. There were playschemes where we gathered to play or take part in organised games during the holidays. The town had a network of cycle tracks, among the most extensive in the country, which connected all neighbourhoods to the town centre, the High, which was built on the highest settlement, and to the two main industrial areas, Temple Fields and the Pinnacles.

The Light That Failed: A Reckoning
by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes
Published 31 Oct 2019

In his scandalous political thriller, The Politologist, published in 2005 and written in the best tradition of conspiratorial realism, Alexander Prokhanov, then a leader of Russia’s patriotic opposition and now a Putin loyalist, gives us the most sinister and at the same time most profound psychological portrait of the kind of Russian political technologist represented by Pavlovsky.32 He is a creature from hell: talented, cynical, disloyal, ambitious and greedy. He is highly creative and deceptive at the same time. He is hostage to his love of manipulating others. He is the consummate social engineer, but also a tool of Kremlin politics. He is as well a tragic figure – confused, fearful and insecure. The political technologist sees himself as the saviour of Russian democracy. Others see him as its gravedigger. What distinguishes political consultants in the West from Russian political technologists is that the former work closely with independent media: their tradecraft involves influencing news organizations that they cannot directly control.

The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City
by Jennifer Toth
Published 14 Jun 1993

As scientific knowledge advanced, the idea of discovering a hidden inner world became less and less credible. However, with the march of technology, the idea of building an inner world became more and more legitimate. The technological possibility of building an underground society brought concerns of social engineering, and with them, a profound fear that technology was growing beyond society’s control. While technology progressed, H. G. Wells complained that its uncontrolled growth and society’s uncritical faith in growth for its own sake might lead to a degenerative society that abused the working class.

The Capitalist Manifesto
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Jun 2023

These differences are more related to the fact that it has become a status symbol in the middle and upper class to exercise, think about diet and live a healthy life. It is now embarrassing to not take care of oneself, and social stigma means such habits spread fast. It is more difficult to change the culture of others through government dictate, no matter how much social engineers would like to do so. But there is actually one thing that seems to work: in 2016, American researchers in The Journal of the American Medical Association discovered that low-income earners have better health if they live in cities with many high-income earners.30 It’s a fascinating finding.

The Siege of Mecca: The 1979 Uprising at Islam's Holiest Shrine
by Yaroslav Trofimov
Published 9 Sep 2008

Far from considering themselves a separate sect, the Wahhabi clerics insisted that they merely enforced strict obedience of the tawheed—uncompromising monotheism—that had been commanded by Prophet Mohammed since the dawn of Islam. There was one problem to overcome: rigorous discharge of Islamic rituals requires ablutions before prayers and is therefore ill suited for a nomadic lifestyle in the waterless desert. Al Saud and the Wahhabi clergy came up with a piece of social engineering that combined political control with religious indoctrination. They encouraged—and occasionally forced—the Bedouin of the Nejd to forgo their roamings and to settle once and for all in the new oasis communities based on strict Wahhabi rules. To highlight the parallel with Prophet Mohammed’s abandonment of pagan Mecca on his hijra, or migration, to Medina, these utopian settlements were also called hijras.

Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953-1975
by Hannah Arendt
Published 6 Mar 2018

One subject that comes to mind is the threat to freedom arising from scientific “progress” in the control of the human mind; the prize-winning book should present a comprehensive statement on attempts in this direction, and results achieved, in such sciences as biochemistry, brain surgery, psychology, social engineering, behavioral science, and others. A nonnegligible by-product of such awards may be to stimulate individual scholarship and thought which will help to counter the trend toward the institutionalization of thought as well as other areas of life. b) Acute Issues: Several persons in the field should be approached for an enumeration and evaluation of acute issues in terms of basic issues.

…

There is probably more than one reason for this phenomenon, but the point of the matter is that the activist, whether he comes out of the laboratory or out of the archives and libraries, is first of all a citizen, who tries to persuade other citizens to join him; and a citizen, looked upon from any specialty is, of course, a layman by definition. Despite all the assurances of the psychologists and the believers in social engineering, it is still an open question whether it is possible “to produce”—as people say—good citizens; and assuming that it is possible, who knows which fields of scientific endeavor are most likely to give results in this enterprise? I talk, therefore, as a citizen, as a layman, or simply as a human being.

Paper Money Collapse: The Folly of Elastic Money and the Coming Monetary Breakdown
by Detlev S. Schlichter
Published 21 Sep 2011

The methods to achieve this include the long-standing preferential tax treatment of residential real estate and the ongoing and large-scale subsidization of mortgage lending via the government sponsored and now government-owned agencies, the Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation. Also, there is regulatory enforcement of lower lending standards in the mortgage market for social engineering purposes, such as through the Community Reinvestment Act or the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. In China, the matching credit boom has been directed toward an aggressive expansion of industrial capacity, which has guaranteed the American consumer undiminished purchasing power for his inflating dollars, at least in terms of Chinese produce.

The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences
by Rob Kitchin
Published 25 Aug 2014

They can have their own data, and data about them, stored in dozens of places (e.g., computers, digital devices, smartphones, external hard drives, data sticks, and servers). These accounts and digital devices are vulnerable to hacking (breaking into accounts or accessing machines), malware (code that is secretly installed on a computer that can access sensitive data or record keystrokes and communicate them to a third party), and phishing (scam e-mails or social engineering through phone calls that try to get an individual to volunteer account information), resulting in the theft and misappropriation of data. Gantz and Reinsel (2011) detail five levels of data security, each of which has slightly different drivers, though they all demand proactive security procedures: (1) privacy: to maintain the privacy of information and limit circulation; (2) compliance-led: to protect data that might be discoverable in litigation or subject to retention rules; (3) custodial: to protect data which could lead to or aid in identity theft; (4) confidential: to ensure confidential information, such as trade secrets, are protected; (5) lockdown: to protect highly restricted information such as financial transactions, personnel files, medical records or military intelligence, that could have consequences beyond personal theft.

Industry 4.0: The Industrial Internet of Things
by Alasdair Gilchrist
Published 27 Jun 2016

D=FAA-2014-0301-0001) Researchers in the Boeing project were not malicious and had brought the potential vulnerabilities to the manufacturer’s attentions; however not everyone is so well intentioned, and as a confirmed attack on a German steel mill highlighted, the intention of the attacker can simply be to cause physical damage. In 2014, a concerted cyber-attack was directed at a German steel mill via its commercial IT network. Once access had been obtained to the IT network, gained by sophisticated phishing and social engineering scams, the attackers strived to gain access to the ICS (industrial control systems) network. Their strategy was to use the IT network as a jump pad so the attackers found an undisclosed method to gain access and control of the ICS network. The damage they caused resulted in the altering of a furnace’s internal characteristics causing it to stop responding to control systems orders to shut down.

The Making of a World City: London 1991 to 2021
by Greg Clark
Published 31 Dec 2014

Allocations of funds were often linked to the quality of local authority Re-investment and urban regeneration 71 partnership with the private sector, as designated by the City Challenge initiative introduced in 1991. Later, under New Labour, the New Deal for Communities initiative sought a more proactive rehabilitation of dysfunctional social housing estates. The dual focus on connectivity infrastructure and property-led regeneration as a form of social engineering – such as occurred in Hackney’s Holly Street Estate – was indicative of the dominant role that bricks and mortar played in the architecture of urban renewal at this time. With this in mind, the assessment of Simon Clark, Partner and Head of European Real Estate at Linklaters, is that “in the 1990s London became much more conscientiously involved in its own reinvention.

Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life
by Colin Ellard
Published 14 May 2015

In this case, the use of relatively simple kinds of technology, in combination with basic elements of built form, encouraged people to behave in ways that cut against the grain of the conventional values of the day, compelling them to act out their secret desires and fantasies. in the present day, such uses of technology for social engineering have become part of an extremely sophisticated science that is being applied in almost every walk of life to make us feel, act, and perhaps most of all, spend our money in situations where better judgment might normally be expected to apply the brakes. The state-of-the-art for theme parks that incorporate a strong technological element is the Live Park in South Korea, still under development, with plans for new versions of Live Park in China, Singapore, and a site as yet to be selected in the United States.

Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise (Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge)
by Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox
Published 22 Jun 2015

Our interest in the specifics of how boundary-making devices are deployed in practice thus leads us to a very different, and we would argue more nuanced, understanding of the political that recovers and repositions the figure of the engineer. James Scott’s critique of high modernism in Seeing Like a State exemplifies the broad political framing that traces the destructive failures of specific attempts at social engineering to the hubris of planners and Conclusions 197 engineers (Scott 1998). The image of the engineer as a detached, autonomous, rationalist planner is habitually produced, perhaps particularly in social anthropology, in contradistinction to alternatives, often celebrated for their more, emergent, or processual engagement with the world.

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class
by Guy Standing
Published 27 Feb 2011

Some will dismiss such scenarios as scaremongering. But what is the purpose of this genetic research? Unless there are checks on its use, behavioural sifting will only grow stronger. The Economist (2010c) enthused that it would make ‘management science into a real science’. On the contrary, it is more likely to lead to social engineering. Besides those developments, a growing number of US firms weed out job applicants with bad credit records, believing they would make risky employees. So past behaviour outside your work is used against you. Companies are doing this systematically, also drawing on social networking sites to assess character traits as well as past misdemeanours, relationships and so on.

To the Edge of the World: The Story of the Trans-Siberian Express, the World's Greatest Railroad
by Christian Wolmar
Published 4 Aug 2014

The polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who visited the line in 1913, was impressed to find a series of hospitals and clinics erected along the railway and found ‘the wards, operating rooms, baths, etc., . . . light, clean and well arranged’, while the schoolrooms were ‘large and airy [and] the children looked happy; it could not be seen that the climate had done them any harm’.10 This was, therefore, not so much a railway construction project as the creation of a new part of Russia, and there is no little irony in the fact that it was precisely this sort of social engineering that was at the heart of Soviet thinking after the Revolution. Other than tunnel and bridge work, progress on the railway was only possible for the four months from June to October, and consequently the labourers brought in from the rest of Russia were despatched back home in the autumn to save money.

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism
by David Harvey
Published 1 Jan 2010

Each of the spheres is subject to perpetual renewal and transformation, both in interaction with the others as well as through an internal dynamic that perpetually creates novelty in human affairs. The relations between the spheres are not causal but dialectically interwoven through the circulation and accumulation of capital. As such, the whole configuration constitutes a socio-ecological totality. This is not, I must emphasise, a mechanical totality, a social engine in which the parts strictly conform to the dictates of the whole. It is more like an ecological system made up of many different species and forms of activity – what the French philosopher/sociologist Henri Lefebvre refers to as an ‘ensemble’ or his compatriot the philosopher Gilles Deleuze calls an ‘assemblage’ of elements in dynamic relation with each other.

The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion
by Virginia Postrel
Published 5 Nov 2013

Harrison, ed., Dawn of a New Era, p. 34. 54. Quoted in Helen A. Harrison, ed., Dawn of a New Era, p. 12. 55. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936) p. 661. 56. Wolfgang Sachs, For the Love of the Automobile, pp. 51–55. 57. John M. Jordan, Machine-Age Ideology: Social Engineering and American Liberalism, 1911–1939 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994) p. 66. 58. Steven Heller, Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-Century Totalitarian State (New York: Phaidon, 2008) pp. 112–13. 59. Steven Heller, Iron Fists, p. 138. 60. Quoted in Helen A. Harrison, ed., Dawn of a New Era, p. 4. 61.

Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America
by Jamie Bronstein
Published 29 Oct 2016

Part of this was due to voters’ lack of information, but it also represented a deep-seated belief, even among working Americans, that people are entitled to do whatever they want with their private property, including giving unlimited inheritances to the people of their choice.4 Other Bush programs sought to uplift the poor through social engineering. While the notion of “Charitable Choice” had been included in Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform, Bush created the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI), intended to eliminate any regulations that prevented churches and other religious organizations from filling the gaps in the welfare system.5 Religious organizations no longer had to separate out their social-service wings and keep them secular or nondenominational, and were allowed to discriminate in hiring on the basis of religious beliefs.

The Post-American World: Release 2.0
by Fareed Zakaria
Published 1 Jan 2008

As the industrial world ages, India will continue to have lots of young people—in other words, workers. China faces a youth gap because of its successful “one-child” policies; India faces a youth bulge because, ironically, its own family-planning policies of the past failed. (The lesson here is that all social engineering has unintended consequences.) If demography is destiny, India’s future is secure. Even the here and now is impressive. India’s poverty rate is half what it was twenty years ago. Its private sector is astonishingly vibrant, posting gains of 15, 20, and 25 percent year after year. The private sector’s strength goes well beyond just outsourcing firms like Infosys, the main association of many in the United States with the Indian economy.

NeoAddix
by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Published 16 Jan 1997

Since then Alex had been closing in on her fast, desperately even. Razz had gone on line to watch the strings being pulled, and she couldn’t help but be impressed. No doubt about it, as a hacker Alex was kinderclass, as a witness chaser he was magic. He’d gone after her like he’d go after any witness, social engineering his way through one weak link after another - closing in on her. He knew which county, he knew which city. Soon enough it would be which area, and then which project block. With a sigh, Razz strapped on the wrist keyboard, picked up the Zeiss wrap-arounds and told her Sony Walkwear to accept the incoming call.

Norman Foster: A Life in Architecture
by Deyan Sudjic
Published 1 Sep 2010

For Foster, the idea of having larger and more ambitious jobs to work on was important. He and Birkin Haward, one of the most gifted draughtsmen to work with Foster in the early days, drew and drew, in the hope that their seductive images would persuade Olsen to invest in them. From the point of view of the architectural world, even more remarkable than the exercise in social engineering that Olsen represented was the fact that it was the first building in Britain to be wrapped in a glass skin with no visible means of support. Foster set out to create a building that went to extremes in the elegant refinement of its simplicity. By making the metal structure of the wall entirely invisible – the only trace on the outside of what held the glass in place was the black neoprene strip at the level of the first floor – Foster created something that looked quite different from anything that had been done before.

Zeitgeist
by Bruce Sterling
Published 1 Nov 2000

When they finally met in the cheerless conference room, with its unburnable, unbreakable, tot-colored plastic furniture, Starlitz saw a lost, doubting look in Zeta’s eyes. He’d never seen such a gaze of silent reproach in a human face. It lanced through him like an emotional harpoon; he found it worse than being shot. He had failed to take proper care. She knew it. He knew it. He could offer no conceivable excuse. Starlitz social-engineered the staff by phoning and faxing in a stream of deceptive messages, adopting the guises and letterheads of a child-custody lawyer and a school psychiatrist. He extracted Zeta out the facility doors on a “day trip.” The two of them swiftly vanished from New Mexico’s official ken. Starlitz had had more than enough of the local hospitality.

The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy
by Diane Coyle
Published 29 Oct 1998

In both countries official unemployment has fallen to the lowest levels for nearly 20 years. A lot of cheating of the system has been forcibly eliminated, and benefit recipients have either moved into jobs or into the social economy. Opinion in continental Europe is far from reaching this stage, however. It clings to the myth that if only the social engineering could be fine-tuned it would be possible to turn the clock back. The underlying problem is the fact that the welfare state is built around the notion of The Job. The full-time job reliably paying enough to support the whole family. Anthony Giddens writes: ‘Unemployment can’t even exist without a basic element of subjective experience: to be unemployed one has to want to have a paid job.

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy
by Nathan Schneider
Published 10 Sep 2018

On technological unemployment, see a summary in James Surowiecki, “Robopocalypse Not,” Wired (September 2017); on employment and inequality, see (among many other studies) Michael Förster and Horacio Levy, United States: Tackling High Inequalities, Creating Opportunities for All (OECD, 2014); on workplace surveillance, see Esther Kaplan, “The Spy Who Fired Me,” Harper’s (March 2015); on human computerization, see Brett M. Frischmann, “Human-Focused Turing Tests: A Framework for Judging Nudging and Techno-Social Engineering of Human Beings,” Cardozo Legal Studies Research Paper no. 441 (2014). 22. Community Purchasing Alliance, 2016 Annual Report (February 2017). I delivered the keynote address at that meeting and was compensated for doing so. 23. E.g., Richard D. Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism (Haymarket, 2012); for an application of Wolff’s framework, see Catherine P.

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy
by Dani Rodrik
Published 8 Oct 2017

I began the class by asking students whether they would approve of my carrying out a particular magic experiment. I picked two volunteers, Nicholas and John, and told them that I was capable of making $200 disappear from Nicholas’s bank account—poof!—while adding $300 to John’s. This feat of social engineering would leave the class as a whole better off by $100. Would they allow me to carry out this magic trick? Only a tiny minority voted affirmatively. Many were uncertain. Even more opposed the change. Clearly the students were uncomfortable about condoning a significant redistribution of income, even if the economic pie grew as a result.

The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order
by Bruno Macaes
Published 25 Jan 2018

Some countries have pointed out that it is in the very nature of a common integrated space to create agglomeration effects. Yes, refugees will tend to flock to Germany, Austria and Sweden, but so will capital, investment and technology. Benefits come with costs, and in any event the attempt to wilfully interfere with such flows will move us towards the worst traditions of social engineering, about which Central and Eastern Europe are understandably more cognizant and concerned. Think how the problem would be addressed at the national level. If refugees and migrants flock to the capital or the main cities and the situation becomes unsustainable, no national government would allocate them to specific districts with a prohibition to cross district boundaries.

The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters
by Priya Parker
Published 14 May 2018

A gathering rule allowed us to create that space. Harrison Owen, an organizational consultant, found this truth in his own way when he realized the limitations of conference etiquette. Politeness and feigning interest in others’ work were such strong values that they crowded out the no-less-important value of learning. Owen wasn’t a social engineer, and he wasn’t about to rewire genteel networkers not to care about other people and their feelings—especially people they might need someday! He stood no chance of changing the etiquette. What he could do was temporarily overwhelm it. So he created a temporary methodology, called Open Space Technology, in which he embedded among other things one specific rule that helped counterbalance an implicit norm of politeness.

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything
by Gottfried Leibbrandt and Natasha de Teran
Published 14 Jul 2021

Until, that is, the day that all contact stops, victims are locked out of their accounts and left confused, hurt and – presumably – much the worse off. Counterfeiting, phishing, whaling, credit card, dating-app and crypto fraud – all have their downsides for the criminal would-be billionaire, however. They may be relatively low tech or require physical presence; depend on malicious insiders or social engineering; or be limited in scale, risky at the exit points or easily detectable. In other words, they’ll only take you so far. So, what do you do if you really want to steal a billion? Head for the real payment gateways: the banks and the systems they use to make the big payments. Only a few actors are capable of mounting such an assault because certain preconditions must be met.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy
by George Gilder
Published 16 Jul 2018

Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (New York: HarperCollins, 2017). 3. Jeff John Roberts and Adam Lashinsky, “Hacked: How companies fight back,” Fortune, June 22, 2017. “At the end of the day, though, humans are as much to blame as software. ‘The weak underbelly of security is not tech failure but poor process implementation or social engineering,’ says Asheem Chandna.” An investor with Greylock Partners and a Palo Alto Networks director, “Chandna notes that most hacking attacks come about in two ways, neither of which involves a high level of technical sophistication: An employee clicks on a booby-trapped link or attachment—perhaps in an email that appears to be from her boss—or someone steals an employee’s log-in credentials and gets access to the company network.” 4. 

SEDATED: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis
by James. Davies
Published 15 Nov 2021

(eds), Well-Being, Salt Lake City, UT: DEF Publishers, doi:nobascholar.com. 19 Kasser, T. (2003), The High Price of Materialism, Boston: MIT Press, p.17. 20 Dittmar, H., et al. (2014), ‘The Relationship Between Materialism and Personal Well-Being: A Meta-Analysis’, Personality Processes and Individual Differences 107(5), 879–924, doi: 10.1037/a0037409. 21 I’ll explore this further in the final chapter, when we look at the damaging effects of income inequality. 22 Steidtmann, Dana, et al. (2012), ‘Patient Treatment Preference as a Predictor of Response and Attrition in Treatment for Chronic Depression’, Depression and Anxiety 29(10):896–905. 23 Khalsa, S. R., et al. (2011), ‘Beliefs about the causes of depression and treatment preferences’, Journal of Clinical Psychology 67(6):539–49, doi: 10.1002/jclp.20785. 24 Pilgrim, D., and Rogers, A. E. (2005), ‘Psychiatrists as social engineers: a study of an anti-stigma campaign’, Social Science & Medicine 61(12):2546–56. 25 Goldstein, Benjamin, and Rosselli, Francine (2003), ‘Etiological paradigms of depression: The relationship between perceived causes, empowerment, treatment preferences, and stigma’, Journal of Mental Health 12:6, 551–63, doi: 10.1080/09638230310001627919. 26 Quote taken from: Fraser, G. (2015), ‘Giles Fraser: my hopes for the Occupy St Paul’s drama that puts me on the stage’, Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/may/24/giles-fraser-occupy-london-st-pauls-protest-drama-templedonmar (accessed Sept. 2019).

How to Spend a Trillion Dollars
by Rowan Hooper
Published 15 Jan 2020

We don’t know anything about the psychological impact of being on another planet. To close the strategic knowledge gaps, NASA has identified dozens of GFAs (Gap Filling Activities). So couldn’t we just parachute money in to fund these activities? Sure, we could. We could try to spend our way through the unprecedented academic, social, engineering and scientific challenges, the bureaucracy, the unbelievable effort and attention to detail required, not to mention the ethical and geopolitical turmoil a settlement programme would kick up. But the Moon has more to offer. $ $ $ AL WORDEN WAS AN OLD-SCHOOL Right Stuff astronaut. A back-up pilot to Apollo 12, he flew the 1971 Apollo 15 mission to the Moon, and was the first person ever to spacewalk.

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind
by Jan Lucassen
Published 26 Jul 2021

At this time, young people born and raised in cities had to be re-educated by working in the ‘real’ world of farming and manual labour: ‘Up to the mountains and down to the countryside’. This involved no fewer than 17 million people in the decade between 1966 and 1976. A decade later, this piece of social engineering inspired Pol Pot in Cambodia, as it had inspired (and still does) the Kim dynasty in North Korea. Although the hukou had a much longer life, labour relations in China were definitively reformed from the 1980s onwards, when many of these types of unfreedom disappeared.60 Common to these cases are the ways in which all wage labourers are robbed of their freedom to change job, to organize themselves and to challenge employers and the state in order to defend or improve their position.

…

The fact that many women resorted to abortion was, of course, also fostered by the want of practically everything that mother and baby needed. The same pattern existed in Eastern Europe in the Russian sphere of influence between 1945 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1979, China attempted to limit its population with the one-child policy as one of the main instruments of social engineering. This measure, implemented by means of a contraceptive intrauterine device, surgically inserted after having a first child, and sterilization after having a second child, also significantly increased the productive engagement of women. The last half-century: Dual income couples, single mothers and single women From 1960, the contraceptive pill quickly became the most popular and the most effective method of birth control in Western Europe and North America.

Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language
by Robert McCrum
Published 24 May 2010

By one of the many ironies in this story, the best wisdom on constitutional reform came, not from the thirteen colonies, but from London, in the work of a government official employed in colonial affairs, the English philosopher John Locke. Not the least of America’s appeal to such a would-be social engineer was its status as a tabula rasa, a blank canvas on which the enquiring mind could project bold, new and experimental ideas. Locke, a man of retiring disposition and profoundly influential opinions, was born to a West Country puritan family in 1632. After studying medicine at Oxford, he became secretary to the Board of Trade and Plantations thanks to Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first earl of Shaftesbury, his powerful patron.

Britain Etc
by Mark Easton
Published 1 Mar 2012

Experts hoped such programmes might completely transform the way Britons eat in the future, a prospect that did not enjoy universal support. Some libertarians argued that ‘public health toffs’ were waging war on working-class culture and sought to defend the working man’s fondness for a Big Mac. At one political meeting held in Westminster in 2010 it was suggested that ‘health paternalism is committed to using the mechanisms of social engineering to ease the pleasures of working-class life gradually out of existence.’ Shortly afterwards the new Conservative Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, suggested the Jamie Oliver approach was counter-productive and government should refrain from ‘constantly lecturing people and trying to tell them what to do’.

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer
by Duncan J. Watts
Published 28 Mar 2011

In reality there was no science of planning—just the opinions of individual planners who relied on their intuition to speculate about how their plans would play out in the real world. No one doubts that men like Le Corbusier were brilliant and original thinkers. Nevertheless, the outcomes of their plans, like Soviet collectivization or Le Corbusier’s Brasilia, were often disastrous; and some of them, like the social engineering of Nazism or apartheid in South Africa, are now regarded among the great evils of the twentieth century. Moreover, even when these plans did succeed, they often did so in spite of themselves, as individuals on the ground figured out ways to create a reasonable outcome by ignoring, circumventing, or even undermining the plan itself.17 Looking back, it may seem as if the failures of high modernism—whether centrally planned economies or centrally designed cities—are a thing of the past, a product of a naïve and simplistic belief in science that we have since outgrown.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
Published 7 Apr 2008

* * * *A possible response would invoke the great British traditionalist Edmund Burke, and in particular Burke’s arguments on behalf of the likely wisdom of long-standing social practices; see Burke (1993). Burke thought that such practices reflected not government action but the judgments of many people over many periods, and that the law often embodies those judgments. Many traditionalists invoke Burkean arguments against social engineering of any kind. We agree that long-standing traditions may be quite sensible, but we do not believe that traditionalists have a good objection to libertarian paternalism. Social practices, and the laws that reflect them, often persist not because they are wise but because Humans, often suffering from self-control problems, are simply following other Humans.

Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
by Jerry Mander
Published 1 Jan 1977

The messages encouraged sexual promiscuity, attendance at mass entertainments such as "feelies" (movies with tactile stimuli), and, most important, the ingestion of drugs such as "soma" for any and every unpleasant feeling or little distress. The goal was to keep people focused on their own satisfac- tion and limit their needs to those that could be conveniently satisfied by the social engineers. This precluded discontent. Most important, life was contained within planned, con- trolled environments. People were programmed to believe that any "natural" experience was inconvenient or disgusting. The idea of personal love or caring for one's own infant, especially to the extent of breast feeding, was made so horrible that the very thought of it would send people groping for their drugs.

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class
by Jeff Faux
Published 16 May 2012

Social critic Barbara Ehrenreich wrote her book Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America after her encounter with the demand that she exercise cheerful denial as a response to her cancer. It led her to examine how the positive-thinking industry has gone from publishing self-improvement books and training salespeople to smile even when they don’t feel like it to a loosely constructed system of social engineering that distracts and discourages Americans from dealing with what is happening to their society.7. Thus, when the economy crashes, the unemployed are instructed to look to themselves for survival. Along with handing out the pink slips, corporate personnel departments provide motivational speakers for those being tossed out on the street.

Early Retirement Extreme
by Jacob Lund Fisker
Published 30 Sep 2010

Much effort in engineering goes into establishing tight couplings between some parts--for example, the steering system mentioned above--and removing couplings between other parts--for example, not having the steering system coupled to the engine system. A tight coupling or a complete lack of coupling makes the response predictable. This is also useful in social engineering. For instance, a consumer that is fully dependent on a paycheck is more likely to stay employed and not quit his job. Hence, employers can make the supply of labor more predictable by only offering full-time jobs, which makes employees unlikely to go home early, and tying in generous benefits, which makes employees unlikely to quit.

An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies
by Tyler Cowen
Published 11 Apr 2012

In fact this book is one way to take some control away from political elites or food elites. Most of all, my vision is about encouraging the individual diner and empowering him or her with some skills of pattern recognition and innovation. I believe that people can do a lot better in life by cutting through some socially engineered illusions. Most of all, figure out when a food presentation or sale is about the taste of the food or when the food presentation is about something else, like acquiring higher social status or feeling good about yourself. For a few years running Noma, in Copenhagen, has been judged the world’s best restaurant, but my meal there bored me (fortunately I was not paying).

Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions
by Paul Mason
Published 30 Sep 2013

The clearance programme works like a giant scalpel. All the engineers need is four metres’ width of riverbank to create the easement for the waste pipe, so a second, deeper layer of slums remains: you can see where the demolition crews have sheared through walls, windows, dirt, alleyways. This is social engineering on a vast scale—but it’s what the government has decided must happen to half a million people in Manila. Gina says that she had the idea for the River Warriors while I was at a meditation retreat in California. You know how things come to you? You will love this! I thought: I will create something like King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women
by Hanna Rosin
Published 31 Aug 2012

A third admitted, “A man is a man when he can think like a woman,” which meant “being sensitive, compassionate, in touch with my feelings; knowing when to laugh and when to cry.” Rex and Comus are basically closed working environments where men live for some period isolated from their family and friends. In this way, they serve as perfect sites for social engineering, and are not all that similar to the actual world. Still, if a pack of lions can be tamed in this way, taught to cry and laugh and pray together, then there might be hope for everyone else. As the researchers theorized, Safety 2000 probably worked because the payback was greater. Striving to be the biggest, baddest redneck was just chasing after an image, like trying to catch the glow from the TV.

Rogue States
by Noam Chomsky
Published 9 Jul 2015

They denounced what they called the “new spirit of the age—gain wealth forgetting all but self,” a demeaning and degrading vision of human life that has to be driven into people’s minds by immense effort—which, in fact, has been going on over centuries.4 In the 20th century, the literature of the public relations industry provides a very rich and instructive store of information on how to instill the “new spirit of the age” by creating artificial wants or by “regimenting the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers” (Edward Bernays), and inducing a “philosophy of futility” and lack of purpose in life, by concentrating human attention on “the more superficial things that comprise much of fashionable consumption.”5 If that can be done, then people will accept the meaningless and subordinate lives that are appropriate for them, and they’ll forget subversive ideas about taking control of their own lives. This is a major social engineering project. It’s been going on for centuries, but it became intense and enormous in the last century. There are a lot of ways of doing it. Some are the kind I just indicated, which are too familiar to illustrate. Others are to undermine security, and here, too, there are a number of ways. One way of undermining security is the threat of job transfer.

Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution
by Janette Sadik-Khan
Published 8 Mar 2016

Its few main roads and lack of grid road network were never expected to carry the volumes of traffic that now strafe it daily, making the system painfully vulnerable to disruption by a single breakdown. While we made headlines in other boroughs by building bike lanes and plazas, and were accused of social engineering by the Brooklyn borough president, across the Narrows on Staten Island we were all-infrastructure-all-the-time. Staten Island was the target of some of the city’s largest infrastructure investments, including a $175 million rehabilitation of the ferry terminal, whose ramps had not been updated in more than fifty years.

Free Money for All: A Basic Income Guarantee Solution for the Twenty-First Century
by Mark Walker
Published 29 Nov 2015

The Water Hole Strikes Back You, along with 99 others, found a community in a desert around the only water hole for hundreds of miles. You suggest that the water hole should be managed for the good of the community. Water could be sold to pay for community services. Your colleagues disagree: as good Lockeans, they reject outright your proposal as “socialistic” and “utilitarian social engineering.” You acquiesce. The water hole is divided equally into 100 shares. Everyone agrees this is fair. The Lockean Proviso is satisfied. The waterhole soon becomes too polluted to safely drink from it. You set up a purification plant and sell bottled water for $30 a month. No one else is tempted to go into competition with you because you make a slim profit of $1 per customer per month.

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Feb 2018

But the especially insidious Facebook version, which is, naturally, welcomed by its shareholders, underscores the dangers of centralization in the social media environment. Both the audience for the content that we produce as Facebook subscribers and the content that we see from others are dictated by the company’s secret algorithm. And who gets compensated for our unknowing participation in all this social engineering? Not us. Not the producers of the content. All the gains go to Facebook’s shareholders. We are long past due for a decentralized system of publishing. There’s no way to turn back the clock to the centralized, top-down control of traditional media, so the game is about social media as a platform.

The Cultural Logic of Computation
by David Golumbia
Published 31 Mar 2009

It is to say that the modern dominant conception of subjectivity is organized around a male or masculinist model, a model that is no less innocently positioned with regard to race and culture than it is to gender. The view that the knowing male subject exercises reason through propositional-logic style calculations is familiar in the West in a variety of guises. It is particularly relevant to the sovereign subject, the computer programmer, the technical or social engineer who sees in the computer model itself the means for accumulation and administration of power. The ruling elite, characteristically male, usually white, usually from the West (but often also from the East), applies and enforces computational practices precisely to concentrate power. Culturally, then, it is imperative that the claims of computer “evangelists” about the technological direction of society be viewed within a clear historical frame.

The Emperor's New Road: How China's New Silk Road Is Remaking the World
by Jonathan Hillman
Published 28 Sep 2020

“Whatever Power holds the Upper Nile Valley must, by mere force of its geographical situation, dominate Egypt,” the British consul in Egypt warned in 1889.102 Steam and steel would carry raw materials from the Great Lakes region to the coastline and “modernity” to East Africa by demonstrating the appeal of superior technology and eventually settling more British citizens. When Britain began building the railway in 1896, it was woefully underprepared. The rush to claim and map land in political terms far outpaced the mapping of its physical features. Political maps can be works of social engineering, none more so than those drawn by outside powers in Africa, but they are shallow compared to what is required for technical engineering. When Britain decided to build a railway from Mombasa to the shore of Lake Victoria in Uganda, relatively little was known about the challenge that lay ahead.

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans
by Eben Kirksey
Published 10 Nov 2020

The blurred boundaries between facts and fiction in the exhibit would not have given Firestone pause, since she argued that “imaginative construction precedes the technological.”12 In other words, she insisted that we take technological dreams seriously before they become reality. Before Firestone’s time, dystopian science fiction imagined how new technology might enable social engineering with embryos. Brave New World, the classic 1932 novel by Aldous Huxley, opens with a scene in a hatchery where human eggs are fertilized, cloned, incubated, and then conditioned for different roles in society. In the Social Predestination Room the cogitative capacities of the Alpha embryos are enhanced, so that they become “future World controllers,” while the oxygen flow to the Epsilons is reduced to produce “future sewage workers.”13 Shulamith Firestone was well aware that her vision of a radical social experiment could fail.

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power
by Steve Coll
Published 30 Apr 2012

To ensure that Idriss Déby or others in his government did not cheat, the plan would require that Exxon route Chad’s oil money through special bank accounts in London controlled by the World Bank. For a cautious company run mainly by engineers, the Chad project’s terms amounted to an extraordinary venture by Exxon into social engineering and nation building. There was something about the starkness of Chad’s poverty that seemed to attract Exxon’s engineers; they talked about the country as a place that could be entirely remade. “We have the opportunity of applying this model on a clean slate,” explained Tom Walters, the corporation’s vice president for oil development in Africa.

…

Kome-5’s security doors were a favorite target; locals made beds from them. Popular disenchantment increased when local officials imposed what was regarded as an “Esso-imposed 6 p.m. curfew” in response to the looting.7 During the hopeful days when the World Bank and Exxon had planned the Chad project as a pioneering experiment in nation building and social engineering, Exxon erected a health clinic in Kome. When the Chadian government also requested a nurse, medicine, and equipment, the corporation refused—it locked up the building until Chad hired its own health care workers to staff it. ExxonMobil’s managers in Chad took justifiable pride in the $16 million in annual wages, training, education, and exposure to global norms in health and education that the corporation provided to the Chadians in its direct employ.

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite
by Duff McDonald
Published 24 Apr 2017

“You can be like this crazy activist that doesn’t fit into any boxes and still have something to contribute.”3 There is, of course, a societal “box” called “activist,” if not one at HBS, and the act of protesting the chemical content of consumer goods is not a new one, nor is it particularly “crazy.” Assaf told P&Q she is developing “a business plan to try and disrupt the beauty industry.”4 Looking back in 2015, Van Maanen thinks he went a little soft on the social engineering going on at HBS. “It legitimized a class of people we now call leaders, who because of family connections, wealth, and the honing of a set of Gatsby-like skills, were able to come, see, and conquer,” he says. “The number of CEOs who are HBS grads dwarfs that of any other institution. It became a legitimate stamp of authority.

…

Henry Mintzberg had something to say about that, too, starting with the sheer gall of business school professors thinking that they had all the answers for a realm completely outside their primary area of expertise. In a paper, “Managing the Myths of Healthcare,” he took dead aim at them, in particular those at HBS. One myth, Mintzberg suggested, was that the health care system can be “fixed” by clever social engineering. “The system is broken so the ‘experts’ have to fix it: usually not people on the ground, who understand the problems viscerally, but specialists in the air, such as economists, system analysts, and consultants, who believe they understand them conceptually,” he wrote. “Thanks to them, in health care we measure and merge like mad, reorganize constantly, apply the management technique of the month, ‘reinvent’ health care every few years, and drive change from the ‘top’ for the sake of participation at the bottom.”11 Porter’s work advising entire nations has definitely had an impact on his prescriptions for improving competitiveness, one manifestation of which is that he has begun to sound like more of a fan of mixed economies such as China’s than the unbridled free enterprise, get-the-government-out-of-our-faces view of so many American CEOs.

The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War
by Norman Stone
Published 15 Feb 2010

‘School bussing, more public housing projects, affirmative action, job-training programs, drug treatment projects . . . multi-cultural curricula, new textbooks, all-black college dorms, sensitivity courses, minority set-asides, Martin Luther King Day, and the political correctness movement at colleges’ had only led, all in all, to rather greater apartheid than before. Magnet went too far in ascribing all of this to the culture of the sixties: it all followed in a pattern of social engineering that had longer origins. However, his facts were incontrovertible: something had gone very badly wrong, and the bleakness could easily be extended as far as education was concerned. Here again, progressive ideas obviously failed. Charles Murray (Losing Ground) spelled it all out, tellingly and uncomfortably.

…

For Turkey there appeared to be two solutions - one, the assimilation of millions of Kurds in the more prosperous west and south; two, the advance of the GAP project, the bringing of water and hydro-electricity, on an enormous scale, to south-eastern Turkey, through a project of endless dams and hydro-electrical works, to bring prosperity and hope to an area beset by dry agriculture, a demographic nightmare, and endless throwing away of rubbish. A whole team of social engineers was attached to this project, to bring education to the children and enlightenment to the women, to remind them that polygamy and chadors (the word means ‘tent’) did not have to be their lot in life. Which would win: Kurdish nationalism, or a modern Turkey, following the European patterns? Özal’s success was to make Turkey prosperous enough for this problem to have a worldwide dimension.

The Cold War: A World History
by Odd Arne Westad
Published 4 Sep 2017

To overcome their problems of control, the Americans and South Vietnamese started moving peasants into “strategic hamlets,” where—ostensibly—they would benefit from better housing and education. In reality it was to keep the peasants from contact with the NLF. But the results of such wartime social engineering were often the opposite of what was desired, as South Vietnamese resented being moved from their ancestral farms and villages. As in all Cold War conflicts, the civilian population suffered greatly. About fifty thousand North Vietnamese died in US bombing raids. The United States dropped more bombs on the north than it did on Japan during all of World War II.

…

It would reduce the chance of nuclear war and—crucially in a time when both the Americans and the Soviets were feeling the sting of military expenditure—reduce the cost of further military buildups. There were also those, at least in the West, who thought the two ideological systems would converge over time. Industrial society seemed to pose similar challenges to East and West, the thinking went. Some of the solutions, through technology and social engineering, were also likely to be similar, and therefore the states that carried them out would come to look more like each other, even if the political context was different. The attempts at stabilizing the Cold War through a lasting détente began in Europe in the early 1960s. France’s President de Gaulle—always upset at the thought of Superpower bipolarity and seeking a greater role for France in international affairs—attempted to reach out to the East on his own.

Geektastic: Stories From the Nerd Herd
by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci
Published 1 Aug 2009

Are we back to that semester you got all Marxist in AP History?” “Not that May Day, the chaotic pagan one where they dance around the phallus. And however you try to neuter him, Robin Hood still robs from the rich—not the tax-hiking rich or the sheriff-aligned rich, any rich will do—and gives to the poor. And that is some pretty fucking chaotic social engineering.” She paused and frowned, her face only inches from mine. “Hey, are we in kissing frame?” I pulled away from her grasp, sinking back into my seat, my gaze dropping from hers. I saw fresh Celtic squiggles on her arms, and more muscles than I remembered. But despite tattoos, workouts, and green-streaked hair, Lexia hadn’t changed much in the last year.

Culture works: the political economy of culture
by Richard Maxwell
Published 15 Jan 2001

As we have seen, entire industries are dedicated to carefully sorting people into niche markets, building private-public spaces in the form of malls and suburbs for these markets, and keeping others out. This has been, at least, a fifty-year process, and so interventions must take place on multiple fronts. Information collection and surveillance need to be seen not only as threats to individual privacy, but as the linchpins of a process of social engineering. Market research needs to be exposed as a pseudoscience and a source of social distortion, especially when it is a basis for community development decisions. In environmental terms, the retail landscape produces enormous waste. Shopping malls and centers have resulted in uncontrolled exurban development, or “sprawl.”

The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations
by Christopher Lasch
Published 1 Jan 1978

Bossard, Problems of Social Well-Being (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1927) pp. 577-78. , 155 "the only practical and effective way 155 Jessie Taft, "The Relation of the School to the Mental Health of the Average Child Mental Hygiene 7 (1923): 687. Sophonisba P Breckinridge and Edith Abbott, The Delinquent Child and the 155 Home (New York: Charities Publication Committee 1912), pp. 175-74. "warped view of authority'YMiriam Van Waters Parentson Probation (New York 156 Edwin L. Earp, The Social Engineer (New York: Eaton and Mains 1911), pp. . . . too inaccessible." " , . , A Vanishing World of Gentility," Dial 64 " (1918): 234-35. 147 . , " "So long as we do our work ... in our own fashion. quoted in Randolph Bourne, . . , York: Norton. 1976), ch. 8. 147 concern of the state.

The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain?
by Polly Toynbee and David Walker
Published 6 Oct 2011

‘They are the jewel in our crown,’ said Graham Burgess, chief executive of the local authority in Blackburn with Darwen, where Sure Start was credited with raising the proportion of five-year-olds classed as good developers as the decade went on. At first the focus was under-fives from poor backgrounds, to bring them up to the level of their better-off contemporaries on starting primary school. For right-wing think-tanks it was social engineering, a bold attempt to decouple child, background and attainment. Born in Labour’s early phase when ‘evidence for policy’ was all the rage, Sure Start followed a compelling social experiment conducted over thirty years in the US. Toddlers given intensive nursery education and family support did better in life than similar children outside the programme.

Creating Unequal Futures?: Rethinking Poverty, Inequality and Disadvantage
by Ruth Fincher and Peter Saunders
Published 1 Jul 2001

Of the 99 indigenous people who died in custody, 43 had been removed from their families as children; 43 had been charged with an offence at 15 years of age or younger (Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody 1991b, pp. 5–6). These cursory case studies illustrate the need for a multidimensional approach to indigenous poverty. Not only because income measures ignore much of the reality of indigenous community, but also because even well-meaning policy intervention can have dire consequences. Social engineering which ignores indigenous interests is likely to be both paternalistic and counterproductive (Martin 1998). The appropriate policy mix needs to be fully informed about the behavioural interactions between distinct spheres of life and reached through a process of consultation with the indigenous community.

Building Microservices
by Sam Newman
Published 25 Dec 2014

The Human Element Much of what we have covered here is the basics of how to implement technological safeguards to protect your systems and data from malicious, external attackers. However, you may also need processes and policies in place to deal with the human element in your organization. How do you revoke access to credentials when someone leaves the organization? How can you protect yourself against social engineering? As a good mental exercise, consider what damage a disgruntled ex-employee could do to your systems if she wanted to. Putting yourself in the mindset of a malicious party is often a good way to reason about the protections you may need, and few malicious parties have as much inside information as a recent employee!

The Skeptical Economist: Revealing the Ethics Inside Economics
by Jonathan Aldred
Published 1 Jan 2009

And economists favour objective measures of risk, based on the risk’s objective probability, over the subjective measures that people use, taking account of the perceived danger, whether it can be avoided, how feared it is, and so on. A repeated pattern of inconsistency emerges here: economists are constantly jumping back and forth between insisting on consumer sovereignty and sidelining it. It is a tension between economics as ‘democracy’, a kind of social engineering to give people what they want, and economics as ‘science’, with objectively correct answers. On the one hand, economists argue we should respect people’s preferences in their raw form, warts and all, because people are the best judge of their own interests. On the other, economists repeatedly adjust, refine or simply ignore raw preferences — and analogous raw data reporting views about happiness — arguing that people are irrational or mistaken in these cases.

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It
by Stuart Maconie
Published 5 Mar 2020

Comprehensive education would replace the three-tier selective system based on exam results at eleven with, in theory, a universal and identical educational experience for all British schoolchildren regardless of income, class or region. It was, depending on your point of view, a grotesque piece of leftist social engineering or a first and most crucial step towards a fairer society. The thrusting new Labour government’s mantra for education might have been, ‘Hey, teacher, don’t leave those kids alone.’ From the late 1940s onwards working-class kids were the guinea pigs for this radical new system. By the 60s, it was entering its most ambitious and extensive phase; a provocative blueprint for a new Britain beginning in Huddersfield, Tividale, Coventry, Wigan and elsewhere, but firstly in the misty north-western corner of a Welsh island.

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth
by Jonathan Rauch
Published 21 Jun 2021

Still, once the general will is discovered and embodied in law, all must obey, for to defy the general will would be to defy their own best interests. Rousseau is a controversial figure. Some see him as the forebear of today’s progressives, championing social equality and personal emancipation; others, as a utopian social engineer who inspired the totalitarian impulses of Robespierre, Lenin, and Pol Pot (the murderous Cambodian dictator). Both views contain truth, but at a minimum his philosophy raised problems akin to the ones which backed Hobbes into an authoritarian corner. The idea of a single general will seems to allow room for only one legitimate ruler or viewpoint; how, then, can pluralism be accommodated?

The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press)
by Terrence J. Sejnowski
Published 27 Sep 2018

Rubi’s arms, which, for the sake of safety, were not industrial strength. After some repair and a software patch, Javier tried again. This time, the robot was programmed to cry out when its arms were yanked. This stopped the boys, and made the girls rush to hug Rubi. This was an important lesson in social engineering. Toddlers would play with Rubi by pointing to an object in the room, such as a clock. If Rubi did not respond by looking at that object in a narrow window of 0.5 to 1.5 seconds, the toddlers would lose interest and drift away. Too fast and Rubi was too mechanical; too slow and Rubi was boring.

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future
by Hal Niedzviecki
Published 15 Mar 2015

Tim Wu, The Master Switch the Rise and Fall of Information Empires (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 160, http://www.contentreserve.com/TitleInfo.asp?ID={2BDB149B-1432-4B87-867F-7ACFAD6999AA}&Format=410. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies, 39. 42. John Jordan, Machine-Age Ideology Social Engineering and American Liberalism, 1911-1939, n.d., 66. 43. Alexander Waugh, Time: From Micro-Seconds to Millennia, a Search for the Right Time (London: Headline Book Pub., 1999). 44. Buderi, Engines of Tomorrow, 15. 45. David Hillel Gelernter, 1939, the Lost World of the Fair (New York: Avon Books, 1996). 46.

Our 50-State Border Crisis: How the Mexican Border Fuels the Drug Epidemic Across America
by Howard G. Buffett
Published 2 Apr 2018

Who could have predicted that one consequence of failing to stop the Mexican cartels is that a U.S. company can find a more reliable workforce in one of the most violent countries in our hemisphere than it can in Pennsylvania? The imminent threat of heroin and opioids demands that we take action today to stop the lethal agents crossing our borders. We don’t have time to debate or experiment with whether the free market and social engineering might lower demand. It’s possible that the severity of this overdose crisis alone will play some role in the future of discouraging people from trying these drugs, but right now we need to take a hard look at our physical defenses and figure out how to better deploy people, tools, and barriers on the front line.

Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe
by Kapka Kassabova
Published 4 Sep 2017

Decades of dialectic materialism rammed down people’s throats had to produce a compensation mechanism, and in a way she embodied the spiritual void at the heart of absolute power. Anything can happen in a void. Soviet dogma had failed to replace the undercurrent of mysticism that runs through the Bulgarian psyche. People had lived close to the land for millennia, and a few decades of Soviet social engineering had made them scared and suspicious, but the land’s mysteries were still there. They spoke to those who could tune in. Lyudmila wanted to tune in. They say it all started with a map. A treasure hunter who may or may not have been called Mustafa turned up one day at the house of the clairvoyant known as Vanga, asking to be admitted.

The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries
by Kathi Weeks
Published 8 Sep 2011

The Communist Manifesto is exemplary in this respect, for just as Thomas More founded the genre of the literary utopia, Marx and Engels can be said to have inaugurated the genre of the manifesto; it is not that there are no precursors in each case, but rather that these works became the models on which a generic form was based.35 Marx and Engels’s Manifesto provides both an explicit critique of traditional utopias, specifically those of the utopian socialists, and an alternative mode of utopian expression. In contrast both to the “castles in the air” of the grand planners and social engineers who were, by Marx and Engels’s estimation, unable to account for the historical agents who could make them possible, and to the “disciples” of these inventors who, when proletarian activism does materialize on the historical stage, oppose it as inconsistent with the original vision (1992, 36–37), Marx and Engels sought to generate and organize such a political subject and inspire it to revolutionary action.

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley
by Emily Chang
Published 6 Feb 2018

If subsequent managers at Google understood this lesson, that might have quieted the grumbling among engineers who had a narrow idea of what forms of intelligence or training made a Google employee. Early Google had proven that diversity in the workplace needn’t be based on altruism or some goal of social engineering. It was simply a good business decision. THE INFAMOUS GOOGLE MEMO This brings me to the case of a young engineer named James Damore, who provided a telling clue for why Google’s diversity efforts led to only mediocre results. In August 2017, Damore’s ten-page missive explaining what he saw as the root causes of gender disparities at the company, now famously known as the Google memo, was leaked to the press.

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media
by Tarleton Gillespie
Published 25 Jun 2018

They tend to build tools “for all” that continue, extend, and reify the inequities they overlook. What would happen if social media platforms promised that for the next decade, all of their new hires, 100 percent, would be women, queer people, or people of color? Sounds like an outrageous exercise in affirmative action and social engineering? It sure is. Slight improvements in workplace diversity aren’t going to make the difference; we’ve seen what corrosive environments some of these companies can be for those who do show up. But I suggest this not only for the benefit of the new employees but for the benefit of the platform and its users.

A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them
by Timothy Egan
Published 4 Apr 2023

Men spent their paychecks in bars, and stumbled back to house and hearth to batter their wives while their children went hungry. Between 1900 and 1915, the average adult consumed thirteen drinks a week—2.5 gallons of pure alcohol a year. Only with absolute temperance, a radical experiment in social engineering, could society be cured. She joined ministers across the country as a decades-long temperance wave crested with passage of the 18th Amendment. When it was enacted in 1920, Prohibition shut down the fifth-largest industry in America. “Men will walk upright now,” said the most popular preacher in America, Billy Sunday, a former pro baseball player.

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
by Adrian Hon
Published 14 Sep 2022

Title: You’ve been played : how corporations, governments, and schools use games to control us all / Adrian Hon. Description: New York : Basic Books, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2021059463 | ISBN 9781541600171 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781541600195 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Social control. | Social engineering. | Control (Psychology) | Gamification. Classification: LCC HM661 .H66 2022 | DDC 303.3/3—dc23/eng/20220228 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021059463 ISBNs: 9781541600171 (hardcover), 9781541600195 (ebook) E3-20220725-JV-NF-ORI CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright INTRODUCTION Chapter One: THE RISE OF GAMIFICATION Chapter Two: LEVEL UP YOUR LIFE Chapter Three: GRIND AND PUNISHMENT Chapter Four: DOING IT WELL Chapter Five: THE GAMIFICATION OF GAMES Chapter Six: THE MAGNIFICENT BRIBE Chapter Seven: “I’VE DONE MY RESEARCH” Chapter Eight: THE WORLD AS GAME Chapter Nine: THE TREASURY OF MERIT Chapter Ten: ESCAPING SOFTLOCK Acknowledgements Discover More About the Author Also by Adrian Hon Notes Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.

A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life
by Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein
Published 14 Sep 2021

In contrast to those pure poisons and irritants, consider these secondary compounds: Capsaicin, the molecule that creates the burning sensation when we eat chili peppers, generally dissuades mammals from eating seeds that are intended for birds, which do not have the receptors to sense the “heat.” And caffeine, which disincentivizes herbivores from eating caffeinated seeds at high concentrations, may also be a kind of pharmacological social engineering on the part of the plants. When bees are given sugar rewards that contain caffeine, their spatial memory improves threefold; the caffeinated nectar of both citrus and coffee flowers may well be priming their pollinators, the bees, to remember them and to come back for more.7 From Psilocybe mushrooms and ergot fungi, to peyote cactus and the botanical brew in ayahuasca, to salvia and Sonoran Desert toads, there are fungi, plants, and animals that have produced secondary compounds that interact with our physiology in ways that mirror dream states.

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
by Christopher McDougall
Published 5 May 2009

Fifty bags of corn wasn’t a lot for a village … but at least it was guaranteed. Maybe if they had some companionship, it would be okay. We have other runners here who are also very fast, they told Fisher. Can some of them come? No dice, Fisher replied. Just you two. Secretly, the Pescador was working on a little social-engineering scheme: by taking runners from as many different villages as possible, he hoped to pit the Tarahumara against each other. Let them tear after each other, he figured, and win Leadville in the bargain. It was a shrewd plan—and totally misguided. If Fisher had known more about Tarahumara culture, he’d have understood that racing doesn’t divide villages; it unites them.

Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World
by Nir Rosen
Published 21 Apr 2011

In the early 1980s, when plans were made to modernize the city, the government planned many neighborhoods to accommodate specific professions (military officers, teachers, professors, engineers, etc.) in order to assure that they were mixed. Most of these areas have now been rendered homogenous because of the violence and mass expulsions. The same applies to the government’s plans for social engineering (moving Arabs into the north and Kurds into the south). Internal displacement is a grave obstacle to peace in Iraq today. During the ’70s the Baath Party, though not without sectarian bias, was focused on using its oil wealth for modernizing Iraq and building the Iraqi state. As Saddam accumulated more power it was often at the expense of rival Sunnis.

…

See Iraqi civil war; Sectarian cleansing; Sectarianism; Shiite militias; Sunni militias “Shock and awe” doctrine “Shock therapy” techniques Shoter, Faris Sayid Hassan Shrine of Ali Shuhada Mosque Shuqair, Wafiq Shurufi Mosque Shuwafa Siniora, Fouad al-Sistani, Grand Ayatollah Ali Slocombe, Walter Smugglers Soccer, views of Social engineering Solagh, Bayan Jabr Somalia Sons of Iraq (SOI) See also Awakening program/groups Soviets/Soviet Union. See Russia Special Republican Guard Stalin, Joseph Status of Forces Agreement Straw, Jack Sudan al-Sudani, Abdul Falah Sufis Suicide bombings Suleiman, Michel Suleiman, Muhamad Haidar Sunna, the, Salafis view of “Sunni Arab” label Sunni Endowment Sunni militias believed to be lying dormant building, in Lebanon cease-fire of escalation between Mahdi Army and funding for, significant source of new, creation of other targets of paid by the U.S. military See also specific militia groups and leaders Sunni mosques See also specific mosques Sunni newspapers Sunni revival “Sunni Triangle” label Sunnis American perception of changing attitude of coup attempts by global fatwa calling on all lack of alternatives facing loss accepted by and mosque attendance overrepresentation of percentage of, comprising the Muslim world periphery vs. center reported missing on the Internet Salafi belief about Shiites view of as the second target of AQI secular Sunni-Shiite conflict/violence.

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor
by David S. Landes
Published 14 Sep 1999

So, with consummate Gallic logic, they came up with a compromise formula: the peasants had a “strict obligation” to grow cotton from dawn to dusk, but complete freedom to sell it.23 Then the French uprooted and replanted peasants and made them plant cotton bushes, and if the peasants made trouble or brought in unsatisfactory cotton, they were marched off to jail. It was, some like to think, a loose, easygoing jail—enough though to make the point. One would like to think that liberation changed all that, but in fact the new governments had their own schemes of economic development and social engineering, inspired by a new world of peripatetically eager experts and technicians—eager to spend money, to do good, to wield power. These doers, be it said, had no trouble imagining schemes, the bigger the better. And when the schemes failed? That is the fault of the West. The West told us to build power stations, bridges, factories, steel mills, phosphate mines.

…

Church, Rise and Decline, pp. 77,104,115, and passim; and his “Effects of American Multinationals.” 58. Pollard, Development of the British Economy, p. 401. CHAPTER 27 1. Kindleberger, Financial History, p. 407: “I regard the German monetary reform of 1948 as one of the great feats of social engineering of all time.” 2. On those last days, see Toland, The Rising Sun. 3. On these ritualistic encounters, cf. Halberstam, The Reckoning, p. 310. 4. I take the phrase “global city-state” from Murray and Perera, Singapore. 5. “A Survey of Multinationals,” The Economist, 24 June 1995, p. 4. 6.

The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam
by Max Boot
Published 9 Jan 2018

Anticipating an argument that would become a staple of political discourse in the 1970s after the CIA’s covert activities were publicly revealed, Lovett demanded to know, “What right have we to go barging around into other countries, buying newspapers and handing money to opposition parties or supporting a candidate for this, that or the other office?”31 Another skeptic was George Aurell, a cautious and ineffectual bureaucrat who was the head of the CIA’s Far East Division. A CIA colleague recalled that Aurell “had never been able to accept the fact that so much social engineering was involved in the activities of Lansdale and Kaplan,” whom he would sneeringly describe as “great crusaders.” Aurell would say, in reference to EDCOR, “What in hell is an intelligence agency doing running a rural resettlement program? I’m glad to help fight the Huks, but is it our job to rebuild the nation?”

…

Ely, June 15, 1964, NWC/RASP. 20 EGL to HL, April 26, 1952, PCLPP. 21 EGL to HL, Aug. 19, 1953, PCLPP. 22 EGL to HL, May 14, 1953, PCLPP. 23 Ibid. 24 Press release from Malacañang Palace, March 28, 1953, Peter Richards Collection, CCP. 25 EGL to HL, May 18, 1953, PCLPP. 26 Abueva, Magsaysay, 246. 27 Romulo, Magsaysay, 213–14. 28 EGL to HL, Aug. 22, 1952, PCLPP. 29 EGL to HL, April 29, 1953, PCLPP. 30 FRUS 1952–1954, Asia, 12.521. 31 “Covert Operations,” May 9, 1961, CREST 5076DE59993247D4D82B5B68; Grose, Gentleman, 445–46. 32 Smith, Portrait, 106 (“comfortable,” “hell”), 253 (“social engineering”), 255 (“crusader”). 33 EGL, Midst, 105. 34 EGL to Allen Dulles, Nov. 23, 1953, HI/EGL, box 34, file 764. 35 NYT, July 13, 1986. 36 Colby, Honorable, 102. 37 Grose, Gentleman, 18. 38 Ibid., 106. 39 Ibid., 155. 40 Ibid., 318. 41 Ibid., 386. 42 Ibid., 410. 43 Ambrose, Eisenhower, 2.111. 44 Grose, Gentleman, 341. 45 Allen Dulles to Raymond Spruance, Jan. 19, 1953, SGMML/AWDP, box 50, file 5. 46 Spruance to Hugh Bain Snow Jr., April 8, 1967, NWC/RASP; Helms, Shoulder, 102. 47 EGL to HL, Aug. 22, 1953, PCLPP. 48 EGL to Thomas Buell, April 17, 1972, NWC/RASP. 49 FRUS 1952–1954, Asia, 12.522. 50 EGL to HL, Sept. 30, 1952, PCLPP. 51 Embassy Manila to Secretary of State, March 14, 1953, NARA, RG 84, box 84. 52 EGL interview, Nov. 12, 1985, CCP; Currey, Unquiet, 121. 53 EGL to HL, May 14, 1953, PCLPP. 54 EGL to HL, April 29, 1953, PCLPP. 55 EGL, Midst, 108. 56 Ibid., 116. 57 EGL to HL, May 14, 1953, PCLPP. 58 EGL to HL, April 29, 1953, PCLPP. 59 EGL to HL, May 14, 1953, PCLPP.

Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America
by David Callahan
Published 9 Aug 2010

The early postwar era of California prosperity yielded a notably conservative culture c08.indd 168 5/11/10 6:24:49 AM left-coast money 169 and two iconic Republican leaders, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Many business leaders in the new West leaned libertarian, combining the fierce individualism of that region with a bias against social-engineering elites and tax-and-spend government. Fueled by a booming defense sector, Southern California was the most suburbanized area of the United States, and its politics reflected the conservatism that once was synonymous with suburban living. Orange County, just south of Los Angeles and filled with L.A. transplants seeking lower taxes and fewer minorities, was among the most well-known Republican bastions in all of the United States.

How the World Works
by Noam Chomsky , Arthur Naiman and David Barsamian
Published 13 Sep 2011

They had to put in the word “Defense” to justify the huge sums they were pouring into it, but in effect, it was a way of shifting from public transportation like railroads to a system that would use more automobiles, trucks, gasoline and tires (or airplanes). It was part of one of the biggest social engineering projects in history, and it was initiated by a true conspiracy. General Motors, Firestone Tire and Standard Oil of California (Chevron) simply bought up and destroyed the public transportation system in Los Angeles, in order to force people to use their products. The issue went to court, the corporations were fined a few thousand dollars, and then the government took over the whole process.

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Published 2 Oct 2017

Two years after that, whites picketed and planted explosives in South Deering, about thirty minutes from downtown Chicago, to force blacks out. When terrorism ultimately failed, white homeowners simply fled the neighborhood. The traditional terminology, white flight, implies a kind of natural expression of preference. In fact, white flight was a triumph of social engineering, orchestrated by the shared racist presumptions of America’s public and private sectors. For should any nonracist white families decide that integration might not be so bad as a matter of principle or practicality, they still had to contend with the hard facts of American housing policy: When the mid-twentieth-century white homeowner claimed that the presence of a Bill and Daisy Myers decreased his property value, he was not merely engaging in racist dogma—he was accurately observing the impact of federal policy on market prices.

Political Ponerology (A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes)
by Andrew M. Lobaczewski
Published 1 Jan 2006

For anyone wishing to understand the deeper meaning and reality of the human experience, and what our very near future may very well have in store for us, Soul Hackers provides a map to our symbolic reality and the knowledge necessary to weather the approaching storm. The Wave 3 - “Stripped to the Bone” … The Path to Freedom in the Prison of Life Media propaganda. Official cover-ups. Dishonest science. “Non-lethal” weaponry. Mind control technology. Racial stereotypes. Social engineering. Religious programming. The cold pursuit of profit. And the unrelenting pull of materialism… In a world where “freedom” is exported at the barrel of a gun, true freedom seems more like a distant fairytale, blocked for us in more ways than we can imagine. In Stripped to the Bone, author Laura Knight-Jadczyk lays bare the forces seeking to keep humanity in a prison of its own creation.

The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives
by Sasha Abramsky
Published 15 Mar 2013

Describing that condition of life as “poverty.” It misses the critical moral, social resources that people draw on to survive and transform their conditions of life. It’s injustice. It’s people having to live in conditions of deprivation that are unjust. It takes a justice issue and turns it into a social engineering problem or a charity problem. Arguably, that’s one reason why the original War on Poverty failed: Moral arguments, such as those detailed by Harrington, brought poverty center stage, but, once there, technocrats took control, essentially reducing a massive moral conundrum—poverty amidst plenty—into a set of scientific and statistical data.

Remix
by John Courtenay Grimwood
Published 15 Nov 2001

“I want to talk to Luna Intelligent Systems Analysis.” “I’m sorry,” Susan said apologetically, “I’m afraid...” The voice stopped. “Oh yes,” it said brightly, “we can patch you through from here.” Fixx sighed. Give me a lever and I’ll move the Earth: no statement was truer. Even if that Greek guy hadn’t been talking about social engineering. “This is LISA.” The voice was non-personal, efficient, not as he recalled her. And then Fixx remembered that she didn’t know who he was. All the same, Fixx felt his stomach knot up and sweat break out under his arms. He hadn’t felt like this since he was thirteen, waiting on the Ha’penny Bridge in Dublin for that girl who never showed up.

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge
by Matt Ridley

Song returned to China, where he republished the main themes of both books in Chinese under his own name, and shot to fame within the regime. He quickly recognised, thanks to his military experience, that (in the words of the anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh) ‘The one-child-for-all policy both assumed and required the use of big-push, top–down approaches in the social domain.’ Song was proposing social engineering in the most literal sense. Vice-Premier Wang Zhen was an immediate convert on reading Song’s report, and put it in front of Chen Yun and Hu Yaobang, senior lieutenants of Deng Xiaoping himself. Deng apparently liked the fact that Song argued that Chinese poverty was caused by overpopulation, not economic mismanagement, and was bamboozled by the mathematics into not questioning his assumptions.

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia
by Adrian Shirk
Published 15 Mar 2022

Somewhere in the hang of industrialism and humanism, Owen saw the possibility of a world governed by a perfect rationalism: if all the working humans are fed, watered, and educated equally, and not torn asunder by private property, religion, or sex, we could live in paradise. This vision of “progressive paternalism” has its immediately obvious limits (like who’s doing the watering, the feeding, the regulating, etc., Robert, hm?), but such realizations were not available to the benevolent boy-king Owen. He became so certain of the merits of his social engineering project that he then spent a decade trying to convince British Parliament to adopt his system on a broader scale, during which he let his revolutionary New Lanark community, as well as his own growing family, flounder. When his attempt at broader national support failed, he decided that any expansion of his project would be up to him alone.

Chasing the Devil: On Foot Through Africa's Killing Fields
by Tim Butcher
Published 1 Apr 2011

The dissolute character of the region in the late eighteenth century makes the next chapter in its history quite extraordinary. In London a group of high-minded idealists, supported, it must be admitted, by opportunists and even a few racists, settled on Sierra Leone as the site for a pioneering experiment in social engineering. The streets of Britain’s growing cities were then crowded with the poor, among whom a few thousand non-white faces stood out. Some were slaves brought from the Americas to Britain by plantation owners and then freed; others were lascars, sailors who had joined British crews in the East Indies and disembarked in the port of London; others were former slaves who had fought with the British on the losing side in the American War of Independence and then fled to London, fearing they would once again be enslaved if they stayed in America.

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis
by Leo Hollis
Published 31 Mar 2013

How can we change a streetscape to make a city more walkable? Take, for example, the problems of shadows in the modern metropolis. Recall the sense of joy that comes from sitting in a city square with the sun on your face. It is sometimes easy to forget how important sunlight is in our everyday lives. In the nineteenth century social engineers such as Florence Nightingale promoted the idea of fresh air and sunlight as health-giving conditions. For the Victorians, sunlight, clean water and pure air constituted the principal components of the ideal city. This was particularly a cause of debate in New York for, as architect Michael Sorkin observes in the wonderful hymn to his home city, Twenty Minutes in Manhattan: ‘Much of the modern history of New York’s physical form is the result of debates over light and air.’10 By the 1870s there were complaints that the high tenements that had been built to house the rising population were obscuring the sky and filling the air with a putrid stink.

Philanthrocapitalism
by Matthew Bishop , Michael Green and Bill Clinton
Published 29 Sep 2008

“In business you can take out a whole team. You can’t do that in this world,” Morino says. Another danger is that, whereas in business, the best venture capitalists are highly attentive both to what customers want and to the mission of those running the firms in which they invest, in philanthropy they can be tempted to become social engineers and to think they know best. “You should not try to change someone’s mission,” says Morino. “The hardest thing to get across is that we genuinely want to partner with them. There has been too much one way: here’s the money, here’s the rules. You need to invest in respect, have true respect for who you are working with.”

Hidden Figures
by Margot Lee Shetterly
Published 11 Aug 2016

She showed Gloria how lacking a single course on a college transcript, such as Differential Equations, could keep an otherwise qualified and well-reviewed woman from keeping up with her male counterparts, even years after she had entered the workforce. For the next five years, Mary Jackson and Gloria Champine were an effective social engineering team within the Equal Opportunity and Federal Women’s Program offices. For three of those five years, they worked for my father, Robert Benjamin Lee III, a research scientist in Langley’s Atmospheric Sciences Division. My father’s move into equal opportunity was part of a career development program designed to “season” him for moves into management when he returned to his division.

The Great Firewall of China
by James Griffiths;
Published 15 Jan 2018

In some ways, it was more liberal than the United States.”12 Putin’s media strategy was the brainchild of his ‘puppet master’, Vladislav Surkov, who launched youth groups and tame opposition parties to burnish his patron’s power and sow chaos among his enemies.13 According to some reports, Surkov also sought to bring Durov under his wing, seeing in the VK founder an ideal adviser on internet policy and online social engineering. Whether because of his own right-wing, libertarian politics, or because he was wary of being seen as too close to the Kremlin, Durov kept Surkov at a distance. This came back to haunt the young tech mogul when Putin finally did turn his attention to the internet. In May 2008, after serving two terms, Putin turned over the presidency to his closest adviser, Dmitry Medvedev.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI
by Frank Pasquale
Published 14 May 2020

The twin fantasies of total, automated control of one’s money (via cryptocurrency) and one’s security (via robotic force) are, sad to say, behind much of the enthusiasm for substitutive robotics and AI in the realms of force and finance. They promise a final end to arms races and competition for power, while actually just redirecting them toward another field: hacking, including both decryption and socially engineered attacks.18 A final “win” in the arms races of either force or finance would be a Pyrrhic victory, because it would portend a world so simple and so well-controlled that human freedom, agency, and democracy would become relics of a distant past. EMBODIED MINDS AND ARTIFICIAL INFORMATION PROCESSORS In a recent book on the future of the professions, the authors muse about a future in which rather than watching humans in marathons, “we may race our robots (or perhaps they will race their human beings).”19 The thought of machines racing humans as we now race horses sounds like a cautionary tale from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, a scenario to avoid at all costs in the future and to inspire better behavior now.

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made
by Ben Rhodes
Published 1 Jun 2021

China’s Communist Party has spent the thirty years since Tiananmen reprogramming the minds of its people—blending the aspiration for material wealth with a national identity rooted in past grievances and manifest destiny; to trade the Western ideal of Marxism for a version of authoritarian capitalism. This project can be stifling to the individual, which is why Bao Pu resisted it. “I personally make those who change history, who rewrite history, my enemy. Because their willful social engineering is suffocating the creativity of the population.” * * * — When you wrap your mind around the scale of the challenge to individual liberty posed by the Chinese Communist Party, it’s easy to succumb to a sense of inevitability about the dystopia that lies ahead. But then I remind myself that people were equally certain, back in 1989, that the future would evolve in a particular direction: that America was ascendant and its model of democracy and open markets would inevitably prevail.

Legacy of Empire
by Gardner Thompson

Barbour, p. 159. 64. J.C. Scott, Seeing Like a State, Yale University Press, 1998. Scott studies the tendency of twentieth-century states to make policy, and pursue it, in defiance of local realities. British rule in Palestine appears to be a case of what he terms ‘tragic episodes of state-initiated social engineering’ (p. 4). 65. Quoted in Segev, p. 94. 66. Quoted in Norman Rose, p. 193. 67. Quoted in Scott Berg, Wilson, London, New York; Simon & Schuster, 2013, p. 528. 68. Quoted in Norman Rose, p. 201. 69. By this time, Congress had overruled Wilson regarding American membership of the League of Nations. 70.

Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists, the Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All
by Laura Bates
Published 2 Sep 2020

Specifically, they have been led to believe that women’s gains can only come at their own expense. In 2017, Google engineer James Damore famously wrote a memo, which he shared on an internal mailing list, before it appeared in the media. In the memo, Damore criticised Google’s diversity and inclusion programme as ‘arbitrary social engineering of tech just to make it appealing to equal portions of both men and women’. Damore’s ten-page memo focused on ‘biological’ differences between women and men (and their brains), which he claimed made men simply more naturally predisposed to be interested in tech roles like software engineering.

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
by Harsha Walia
Published 9 Feb 2021

A 2018 independent fact-finding mission report describes the unfolding process of dispossession: “Appropriation of vacated land and terrain clearance, erasing every trace of the Rohingya communities, and the construction on this land of houses for other ethnic groups.”102 The insertion of Myanmar into the global supply chain has also opened lands to capital investment for agribusiness, industrial manufacturing, timber extraction, geothermal projects, and mining. India and China, with their respective Look East policy and Belt and Road Initiative, have invested in multimillion-dollar infrastructure projects, including pipelines and ports in the Rakhine region, dubbed “Asia’s final frontier.” The social engineering, ethnic cleansing, and expropriation of land eerily mirrors Palestine. Indeed, India, Israel, and Myanmar are regional allies in perpetuating abominable ethnonationalism. Israel and Myanmar have signed a bilateral education agreement allowing each country the authority to engage in mutual revisionism of textbooks, censoring histories of Palestinian and Rohingya persecution.

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism
by Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias
Published 19 Aug 2019

For critiques using Foucault’s concept of “governmentality,” see Hull, “Successful Failure”; McMahon, “Behavioral Economics”; Pykett, “New Neuros”; and Wright and Ginsburg, “Behavioral Law and Economics.” 144. Sunstein, “Ethics of Nudging”; and Yeung, “Hypernudge,” especially p. 122. For a philosophical anticipation of the hypernudge idea, see Stiegler’s discussion of “social engineering” via “the grammatisation of the social relation itself” (“Relational Ecology,” 13), discussed by Gehl, “What’s on Your Mind?” 145. Kahneman, Fast and Slow. Some interpretative sociologists have challenged the idea that individual economic calculations are irrational and are reinterpreting them not in terms of numbers but of the complex moral relations in which economic transactions are in fact embedded (Zelizer, Economic Lives, discussed in Wherry, “Relational Accounting”).

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators
by Ronan Farrow
Published 14 Oct 2019

Black Cube promised “a dedicated team of expert intelligence officers that will operate in the USA and any other necessary country,” including a project manager, intelligence analysts, linguists, and “Avatar Operators” specifically hired to create fake identities on social media, as well as “operations experts with extensive experience in social engineering.” The agency agreed to hire “an investigative journalist, as per the Client request,” who would be required to conduct ten interviews a month for four months and be paid $40,000. The agency would “promptly report to the Client the results of such interviews by the Journalist.” Black Cube also promised to provide “a full time agent by the name of ‘Anna’ (hereinafter ‘the Agent’), who will be based in New York and Los Angeles as per the Client’s instructions and who will be available full time to assist the Client and his attorneys for the next four months.”

The City on the Thames
by Simon Jenkins
Published 31 Aug 2020

As in previous expansions, the smartest development was to the west, upwind of the metropolis, and the railway companies wanted to keep it that way. A ninety-degree arc north-west of the metropolis was as if reserved for the middle classes, or so it was hoped. The Great Western fought against running workmen’s trains, for fear of bringing low-income residents into their market. There were some attempts at social engineering. The philanthropist Henrietta Barnett in 1909 founded Hampstead Garden Suburb on the fringes of Golders Green, designed by Raymond Unwin and Edwin Lutyens on garden city principles and intended for ‘a mixed community’. The estate was luxurious in its use of space, more garden than suburb. It was given two churches and an institute, though it lacked shops or a station.

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future
by Orly Lobel
Published 17 Oct 2022

Perhaps unsurprisingly, studies show that men are more likely than women to seek short-term sexual relationships through Tinder.9 Still, these patterns are evolving, and we need to remember comparative measures: Does dating online present a greater gap between men’s and women’s relationship goals compared to offline dating patterns? According to a survey released by Tinder, more Tinder users, including both men and women, are interested in a committed relationship compared to offline daters. This is a changing landscape, and while our romantic patterns have always been the last taboo in social engineering, we need to recognize that technological design matters in the shaping of our contemporary intimate relations. Swipes and Gripes Like Facebook, which was started by the college-aged Mark Zuckerberg—who was inspired by a “hot or not” college site that rated pictures of female students—Tinder was started by two college fraternity brothers, Justin Mateen and Sean Rad, in Southern California, along with Jonathan Badeen, Dinesh Moorjani, Joe Munoz, and Whitney Wolfe (now Whitney Wolfe Herd).

Democracy Incorporated
by Sheldon S. Wolin
Published 7 Apr 2008

While the public ideology celebrates economics in the form of “entrepreneurship,” “small start-ups,” and “free enterprise,” it ignores the political significance and power of the corporation. The public ideology of conservatives boasts of their commitment to reducing governmental power; hence the mantras of archaism: returning to “the original Constitution,” ending “social engineering,” and demanding no taxation—even with representation. In that imaginary “original Constitution” neither Superpower nor empire exists. viii In a general election, the candidate with the most hopeful message is going to win it. Most people in the U.S. want to be rich, they want to get ahead, and that’s why an opportunity-oriented message works.

The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution
by Marc Weingarten
Published 12 Dec 2006

But there is also a generosity of spirit, however grudgingly offered, in Mailer’s clear-eyed examination of both his motives and those of the other participants on both sides of the barricade. He’s acutely observant and shrewdly self-aware. If the marshals seethe with malice, it’s only because they are products of social engineering, the Pentagon’s malleable instruments of power. He is capable of empathetic feelings for his enemies, even if they are merciless oppressors. As for Mailer’s own motivations, they are never reconciled. His short time as an imprisoned detainee presents him with a moral dilemma—to do right by the movement or by his family, to serve whatever sentence might await him or scramble back to the comforts of his middle-class life.

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule
by Thomas Frank
Published 5 Aug 2008

He gave a shout-out to “our consultants, people who really delivered the bacon to us . . . when we needed it”; reminded the crowd that Shaw had done “a lot of lobbying and consulting efforts, both in Louisiana and in Washington”; and allowed that this “really pays off when it’s time to get some contracts.” By 2008 over $100 billion had been spent, but parts of New Orleans remained empty. Repairing public housing seems to have been a low priority; rebuilding casinos an urgent one. All this might seem like social engineering in a cruelly nineteenth-century mode, but in fact it was the unavoidable result of a recovery plan composed of tax cuts for entrepreneurs, fat handouts to chosen contractors, and toxic trailers for those who can’t afford large donations to the GOP. Once we recognize the pattern, we start to see how the model once extended all across the winger wonderland.

Moscow, December 25th, 1991
by Conor O'Clery
Published 31 Jul 2011

The tricolor, which originated as a naval and military ensign at the end of the seventeenth century in imitation of the Dutch colors and was first recognized as the flag of Russia in 1896, was banished after the October Revolution. More than anything else, its reappearance symbolized the beginning of the end of the seven-decades-long experiment in social engineering based on Karl Marx’s idea of a workers’ state. A couple of years earlier, people would have been arrested for displaying it. Most of the deputies were party members, with views ranging from neo-Stalinist to radical democrat, but almost all were united in a desire to carve out greater sovereignty for Russia within the Soviet Union.

The End of Wall Street
by Roger Lowenstein
Published 15 Jan 2010

Intervening before an actual crisis developed was merely prudent.aj One other postmortem analysis centered on the Alt-A loans that had done the twins so much damage. Alt-A mortgages were not specifically targeted toward the poor, and did not help meet HUD’s goals for lower-income housing. In other words, the twins had invested in them not for social good but for profit. This suggested to some that corporate overreaching—not social engineering by Congress—caused the twins’ failure.15 The truth is more nuanced. The reason Congress and its regulator permitted Fannie and Freddie such largesse (both in the pursuit of shareholder profit, and to assist low-income housing) was to allow them to pursue their social mission. Had the GSEs been purely economic animals, presumably no guarantee would have existed, and markets would not have permitted them such leverage.

Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity
by Edward Tenner
Published 8 Jun 2004

The Maxim gun, favored by European powers for suppressing colonial resistance in the nineteenth century, begat the rugged and portable Kalashnikov brandished by guerrillas and terrorists, and the automatic-weapons arsenals of gangsters and narcotics traffickers, in the twentieth. In our day, deviant techniques flourish, from the shattering of spark plugs to produce ceramic fragments (“ninja rocks”) to break into automobiles in the United States, to the “social engineering”—usually confidence tricks—that criminals use to obtain computer passwords and personal identification numbers for fraudulent electronic transactions.53 If it is a truism that any security hardware can eventually be defeated by criminal ingenuity, there should be a corresponding maxim that almost anything can be made better by user experimentation.

Little Brother
by Cory Doctorow
Published 29 Apr 2008

We weren't going to cop to being behind it all, not to anyone. It was way too risky. Instead, we'd put it out that we were merely lieutenants in "M1k3y"'s army, acting to organize the local resistance. "The Xnet isn't pure," I said. "It can be used by the other side just as readily as by us. We know that there are DHS spies who use it now. They use social engineering hacks to try to get us to reveal ourselves so that they can bust us. If the Xnet is going to succeed, we need to figure out how to keep them from spying on us. We need a network within the network." I paused and let this sink in. Jolu had suggested that this might be a little heavy -- learning that you're about to be brought into a revolutionary cell.

Why geography matters: three challenges facing America : climate change, the rise of China, and global terrorism
by Harm J. De Blij
Published 15 Nov 2007

National Geographic, saw its subscription grow to unprecedented numbers. University Geography Departments enrolled more students than they could handle. When President John F. Kennedy launched the Peace Corps, geographers and geography students were quickly appointed as trainers and staffers. But, as so often happens when social engineers get hold of a system that's working well, the wheels came off. Professional educators thought they had a better idea about how to teach geography: rather than educating students in disciplines such as history, government, and geography, they would teach these subjects in combination. That combination was called social studies.

The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War
by A. J. Baime
Published 2 Jun 2014

It was used as a taxi in Cuba, Japan, and all over Europe. In Russia it was called “the Universal Car.” As Ford offices and assembly plants were erected all over the world, populations celebrated the arrival of mobility and its economic power. Henry was just beginning. Already an industrialist, he sought to become a social engineer, using his factory as a laboratory. Highland Park swelled with Poles, Russians, Romanians, Hungarians, Maltese, and Serbs—a total of forty-nine nations were represented. These men couldn’t communicate with each other, but they could communicate with the machine, working their piece of the assembly line.

Love Over Scotland
by Alexander McCall Smith
Published 31 Dec 2005

And universities are still full of people like that, you know. People of broad culture may find it rather difficult in them. Timid, bureaucratic places. And very politically conformist.” “I don’t know,” said Angus. “Surely some of them …” “Of course,” said Antonia. “But, but … the trouble is that they’re so busy with their social engineering that they’ve lost all notion of what it is to be a liberal-minded institution.” “I don’t know,” said Angus. “Surely things aren’t that bad …” “Not that I’m one of these people who goes round muttering ‘O tempora, O mores‘,” went on Antonia. “Mind you, I don’t suppose many people in a university these days understand what that means.”

The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart
by Bill Bishop and Robert G. Cushing
Published 6 May 2008

(James Dobson sold more than 2 million copies of his 1971 book Dare to Discipline, which encouraged parents to spank children who were disrespectful. The conservative movement simply hoped to extend family discipline to the nation.)22 New York neoconservatives, libertarians, and southern fundamentalists distrusted "social engineering" by the state, whether it was Stalin's Five-Year Plan, Johnson's Great Society, or textbooks recommended by English teachers in West Virginia. Finally, libertarians and fundamentalists found ready allies in the business wing of the Republican Party, those pressing for smaller, cheaper, and less intrusive government.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots
by John Markoff
Published 24 Aug 2015

Maybe right now we need humans, but these guys [software automation designers] are making progress.”42 The assumption of many like Vardi is that a market economy will not protect a human labor force from the effects of automation technologies. Like many of the “Singularitarians,” he points to a portfolio of social engineering options for softening the impact. Brynjolfsson and McAfee in The Second Machine Age sketch out a broad set of policy options that have the flavor of a new New Deal, with examples like “teach the children well,” “support our scientists,” “upgrade infrastructure.” Others like Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen have argued for focusing on technologies that create rather than destroy jobs (a very clear IA versus AI position).

Glasshouse
by Charles Stross
Published 14 Jun 2006

I can tell Piccolo-47 is going into quicktime and messaging someone else: its focus of attention wanders—I can see the sensor peripherals unfocusing—and the manipulator root stops shimmering. "I have taken the liberty of transmitting your public case profile to the coordination office, Robin. The experiment I allude to is a cross-disciplinary one being conducted by the departments of archaeology, history, psychology, and social engineering within the Scholastium. Professor Yourdon is its coordinator-general. If you volunteer to participate, a copy of your next backup—or your original, should you choose total immersion—will be instantiated as a separate entity within an experimental community, where it will live alongside roughly a hundred other volunteers for thirty to a hundred megaseconds."

A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption
by Steven Hiatt; John Perkins
Published 1 Jan 2006

And your job performance is rated according to how many loans you make. As a credit analyst, I once remarked to the vice president in charge of Mexican loans that in my opinion no amount of petroleum was going to change the fact that 30 million people would be living in Mexico City by the year 2000; and that no amount of social engineering could make all that oil money trickle down to that many people. I was told not to put this in my country report. “We’re concerned about repayment, pure and simple,” he said. “Not demographics. They’ve got so much oil they don’t know what to do with it. Play that up.” Ah, optimism. It worked in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Poland—all countries that have had to reschedule debt, the current euphemism for “default.”

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017
by Rashid Khalidi
Published 28 Jan 2020

This provided the demographic critical mass and military manpower that were necessary for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948. The expulsion then of over half the Arab population of the country, first by Zionist militias and then by the Israeli army, completed the military and political triumph of Zionism. Such radical social engineering at the expense of the indigenous population is the way of all colonial settler movements. In Palestine, it was a necessary precondition for transforming most of an overwhelmingly Arab country into a predominantly Jewish state. As this book will argue, the modern history of Palestine can best be understood in these terms: as a colonial war waged against the indigenous population, by a variety of parties, to force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will.

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
by Sarah Jaffe
Published 26 Jan 2021

As political philosopher Asad Haider explained, “neoliberalism… is really two quite specific things: first, a state-driven process of social, political, and economic restructuring that emerged in response to the crisis of postwar capitalism, and second, an ideology of generating market relations through social engineering.” The success of the latter part of the project depended on twisting those desires for liberation articulated in the 1960s and 1970s, redefining “freedom” away from a positive concept (freedom to do things) and toward a negative one (freedom from interference). Neoliberalism encourages us to think that everything we want and need must be found with a price tag attached. 13 Neoliberalism didn’t just happen; it was a set of choices made by the winning side in a series of struggles.

User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work & Play
by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant
Published 7 Nov 2019

The most famous is Mike Krieger, who, with a college friend named Kevin Systrom, invented a social networking app tailored to the iPhone 4. Eventually, Krieger and Systrom stripped down their app to focus just on sharing photos and liking the photos of friends. They called it Instagram.24 As we’ve seen in the stories of Capital One’s secrecy-shrouded chatbot persona and the social engineering aboard Carnival’s next-generation ships, our behavior has become a design material, just as our intuitions about the physical world once were—and those behaviors are often involuntary. It shouldn’t be surprising that our psychological quirks necessarily lie at the core of every app or product that takes hold in the market.

Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago
by Eric Klinenberg
Published 11 Jul 2002

But the heat wave helped to show that under contemporary conditions certain urban residents suffer from forms of literal isolation, the consequences of which can be dire. Assessing the social processes and spatial patterns that foster such isolation requires exchanging the Chicago school’s biotic vocabulary for describing urban social processes with concepts and categories that recognize the significance of socially engineered inequality and difference. Moreover, it demands a method of investigation capable of comprehending the city as a complex system, where nature, culture, and politics conspire to determine the fate of its inhabitants. The second major concern of this book is to analyze the symbolic construction of the heat wave as a public event and experience.

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
by David Graeber
Published 14 May 2018

sundry notes on the role of government in creating and maintaining bullshit jobs This is relevant because when, in the original 2013 essay about bullshit jobs, I suggested that while our current work regime was never designed consciously, one reason it might have been allowed to remain in place was because the effects are actually quite convenient politically to those in power; this was widely denounced as crazy talk. So another thing this chapter can do is clarify a few things in that regard. Social engineering does happen. The regime of make-work jobs that existed in the Soviet Union or Communist China, for example, was created from above by a self-conscious government policy of full employment. To say this is in no sense controversial. Pretty much everyone accepts that it is the case. Still, it’s hardly as if anyone sitting in the Kremlin or the Great Hall of the People actually sent out a directive saying “I hereby order all officials to invent unnecessary jobs until unemployment is eliminated.”

Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization
by Iain Gately
Published 27 Oct 2001

They struck first against alcohol and when the doughboys returned home they found their sacrifices rewarded with prohibition. The Volstead Act, rendering America dry, was ratified by Congress in 1919 as the eighteenth amendment of the constitution of the USA. Within months the first grand experiment in social engineering of the twentieth century had given birth to a new occupation – the bootlegger, or alcohol smuggler, and within a few years it had spawned the organized crime industry, whose spin-offs included national gambling and prostitution empires. Fired by their success against the demon drink, the men and women of God set their sights on the weed.

The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam
by Douglas Murray
Published 3 May 2017

Of course, if you mention Saint-Denis to anyone in the centre of Paris they grimace. They know it is there and try never to go to it. With the exception of the Stade de France stadium there is little reason to go anywhere near the area. Having been scarred by waves of de-industrialisation and re-industrialisation, in recent years the government has attempted to do some social engineering, building municipal offices in the area for state employees to work in. But these employees (around 50,000) who have jobs in the area almost never live there. They come in from elsewhere in the morning and leave again in the evening, when their office blocks are carefully locked and the security fences secured.

Mastering Ethereum: Building Smart Contracts and DApps
by Andreas M. Antonopoulos and Gavin Wood Ph. D.
Published 23 Dec 2018

This contract allows for an attacker to create an attacking contract of the form: 1 import "Phishable.sol"; 2 3 contract AttackContract { 4 5 Phishable phishableContract; 6 address attacker; // The attacker's address to receive funds 7 8 constructor (Phishable _phishableContract, address _attackerAddress) { 9 phishableContract = _phishableContract; 10 attacker = _attackerAddress; 11 } 12 13 function () payable { 14 phishableContract.withdrawAll(attacker); 15 } 16 } The attacker might disguise this contract as their own private address and socially engineer the victim (the owner of the Phishable contract) to send some form of transaction to the address — perhaps sending this contract some amount of ether. The victim, unless careful, may not notice that there is code at the attacker’s address, or the attacker might pass it off as being a multisignature wallet or some advanced storage wallet (remember that the source code of public contracts is not available by default).

Trading at the Speed of Light: How Ultrafast Algorithms Are Transforming Financial Markets
by Donald MacKenzie
Published 24 May 2021

In a situation such as that, says interviewee BZ, “you have to find out where things are,” including where exactly the exchange’s matching engines are located. “You have to understand physically the layout,” not just the spatial layout but also any digital switches through which signals pass. Gaining that understanding could involve what BZ calls “a bit of social engineering”—“taking people out for beers”—as could acting on the knowledge thus gained. “You have to know people,” he says. “You have to be able to get your equipment into that [optimal] location in the datacenter.” In my interviews, especially at the start of the research (2011–13), I would often hear rumors of HFT firms secretly drilling through walls (or, in the case of Cermak, through the building’s floors) to shorten the cables that connect them to exchanges’ matching engines and market-data publisher systems.

Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency
by Andy Greenberg
Published 15 Nov 2022

He’d become a significant player on Tor Carding Forum, a cybercrime-focused dark web site where hackers traded in stolen data. He’d even sold his own sixteen-page “University of Carding Guide,” designed to teach beginners the tricks of the trade, like knowing which credit cards were most profitable to exploit, or how to take over victims’ accounts on e-commerce sites, or how to “social-engineer” customer service representatives at banks, calling from spoofed telephone numbers to deceive them into approving fraudulent transactions. Alpha02 bragged in his guide about his own carding wins, like buying a $10,000, high-end gaming rig with one of his victim’s accounts. These were hardly the sorts of multimillion-dollar heists that more elite and professional cybercriminals were pulling off at the time, but perhaps just enough to establish his bona fides for AlphaBay’s earliest users.

Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations
by Norman Davies
Published 30 Sep 2009

The Poles of east Galicia/eastern Małopolska/Distrikt Galizien, now labelled ‘repatriants’, were packed onto trains and dispatched from Soviet territory. Almost the entire surviving Polish population of Lemberg was sent to Wrocław/Breslau, the capital of Silesia, where it replaced the expelled German citizenry.93 This was social engineering on an unprecedented scale. The districts adjoining the new Polish–Soviet frontier were hit particularly hard. One example must suffice. Ustrzyki Dolne lay on the bank of the River San. Its multinational Galician make-up had stayed intact till 1939. A Jewish majority predominated in the town, though there were also some Poles and a few Ruthenians.

…

Looking back on Soviet cultural policy, which had such a critical impact on Estonian national identity, some Estonians may conclude that it was an improvement on the openly Russificatory, pre-Revolution schemes. Most, however, will have their doubts, and will probably realize how lucky Estonia was to have been exposed to Soviet social engineering for only two or three generations. There was no support for genuine bilingualism, and all the non-linguistic aspects of culture were subordinated to foreign priorities. One need look no further than the Kreutzwald State Library of the ESSR (now the National Library) in Tallinn. Housed in a gigantic concrete bunker-building never completed in Soviet times, its first priority after 1945 was to expand its Russian collection; and throughout its existence, large numbers of Estonian, pre-Soviet or foreign books were held under lock and key in a special section of prohibita closed to ordinary readers.72 Given the vigilance of the KGB, no opposition movement could expect to operate in Soviet Estonia for long.

State of Emergency: The Way We Were
by Dominic Sandbrook
Published 29 Sep 2010

In a nicely caustic passage, Drabble shows him contemplating an architect’s model of a new concrete building, conscious that ‘the grass would be covered in dog shit, that the trees would be vandalized and killed’ – but not caring, because ‘that would not be his fault, or the fault of his property company. It would be the fault of the people.’16 Of course this was a caricature. At the time, most planners saw themselves as pioneering social engineers, using the proceeds of growth to banish the cramped and insanitary slum conditions that had blighted working-class lives for generations. As disciples of Le Corbusier’s dictum that ‘to save itself, every great city must rebuild its centre’, they did not see themselves as reckless vandals. In their own minds they were progressive egalitarians, tearing down what another of Drabble’s characters calls the ‘mucky little alleyways’, and putting up bold, clean blocks, wide avenues and generous car parks.

…

As many as four out of ten told researchers they felt lonely and cut off; in London and Sheffield, half of the residents interviewed said they would move immediately if they had the chance.19 By the early 1970s, the tower block had become a powerful metaphor for the shattered ideals of the post-war consensus, associated in the public mind with graffiti, drug addiction, unemployment and crime – as well as with the arrogance of middle-class planners, infected with the spirit of social engineering, who had tried to force design solutions on working-class families without bothering to find out what they actually wanted. And when writers and reporters visited high-rise estates in the early 1970s, they did so with a sense of sadness and horror. Arriving in the Millbrook estate in Southampton, ‘a vast, cheap storage unit for nearly 20,000 people’, Jonathan Raban found a dismal scene of glowering concrete blocks, deserted service roads and poorly maintained grassland ‘patrolled by gangs of sub-teenage youths and the occasional indecent-exposure freak’.

Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe
by Norman Davies
Published 27 Sep 2011

The Poles of east Galicia/eastern Małopolska/Distrikt Galizien, now labelled ‘repatriants’, were packed onto trains and dispatched from Soviet territory. Almost the entire surviving Polish population of Lemberg was sent to Wrocław/Breslau, the capital of Silesia, where it replaced the expelled German citizenry.93 This was social engineering on an unprecedented scale. The districts adjoining the new Polish–Soviet frontier were hit particularly hard. One example must suffice. Ustrzyki Dolne lay on the bank of the River San. Its multinational Galician make-up had stayed intact till 1939. A Jewish majority predominated in the town, though there were also some Poles and a few Ruthenians.

…

Looking back on Soviet cultural policy, which had such a critical impact on Estonian national identity, some Estonians may conclude that it was an improvement on the openly Russificatory, pre-Revolution schemes. Most, however, will have their doubts, and will probably realize how lucky Estonia was to have been exposed to Soviet social engineering for only two or three generations. There was no support for genuine bilingualism, and all the non-linguistic aspects of culture were subordinated to foreign priorities. One need look no further than the Kreutzwald State Library of the ESSR (now the National Library) in Tallinn. Housed in a gigantic concrete bunker-building never completed in Soviet times, its first priority after 1945 was to expand its Russian collection; and throughout its existence, large numbers of Estonian, pre-Soviet or foreign books were held under lock and key in a special section of prohibita closed to ordinary readers.72 Given the vigilance of the KGB, no opposition movement could expect to operate in Soviet Estonia for long.

Eternity
by Greg Bear
Published 2 Jan 1988

Whatever happened to Patricia? Was she home, or alive in some other alternate universe, or had she died trying? Thistledown orbited Earth every five hours and fifty minutes, as it had since the Sundering. In some regions of the Earth, the asteroid’s bright star was worshipped even after decades of education and social engineering; humanity’s psychological yolk sacs could not be eliminated so easily. The news that the Earth’s saviors might soon leave—so the stories had been simplified caused panic in some areas, relief in others. Those who worshipped the Thistledown and its occupants believed they were leaving out of disgust for Earth’s sins.

The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature
by Matt Ridley
Published 14 Aug 1993

Yet I have gradually come to realize that almost all of social science proceeds as if 1859, the year of the publication of The Origin of Species, had never happened; it does so quite deliberately, for it insists that man’s culture is a product of his own free will and invention. Society is not the product of human psychology, it asserts, but vice versa. That sounds reasonable enough, and it would be splendid for those who believe in social engineering if it were true, but it is simply not true. Humanity is, of course, morally free to make and remake itself infinitely, but we do not do so. We stick to the same monotonously human pattern of organizing our affairs. If we were more adventurous, there would be societies without love, without ambition, without sexual desire, without marriage, without art, without grammar, without music, without smiles – and with as many unimaginable novelties as are in that list.

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor
by John Kay
Published 24 May 2004

We can try to divine the intentions of these creators and believe that knowledge of such intentions might help us to understand their books, their buildings, their constitutions. That is why we study authors as well as texts and resist the postmodernist claim that there is only the text. An economic system has no architect. There is nothing but the text to study. The contrast between the eclecticism of the postmodern and the functionalist design of social engineers has been described by JeanFranc;ois Lyotard as the contrast between "little stories" and "grand narratives." 4 The most extensive "grand narrative" was Marxism, which purported to offer a unified explanation of human history and a prescriptive view of a just structure of society, linked by an assertion of historical inevitability.

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History
by Thomas Rid
Published 27 Jun 2016

The NSA hackers used dial-up modems and foreign internet service providers to enter machines abroad. Then, after multiple hops to mask their identity, they attempted to penetrate critical US networks. Some users of critical military systems, it turned out, simply used the word “password” as their password. The NSA also tricked and socially engineered PACOM staff to open dodgy e-mail attachments laced with malware. The Joint Staff using another, more tested method, sent very special forces out to Hickam Field to “dumpster-dive” for discarded printouts with log-in information or other useful details. One day the red team at FANX III received an e-mail from PACOM: “Don’t use MILNET,” it said.

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone
by Brian Merchant
Published 19 Jun 2017

If you input the wrong code, the screen will do that shake/buzz thing that sort of resembles a torpedo hit in old sci-fi movies. Then it makes you wait eighty milliseconds before trying again. Every time you get it wrong, the software forces you to wait longer before your next attempt, until you’re locked out completely. For hackers, there are two main ways to break through a password. The first is via social engineering—watching (or “sniffing”) a mark to gather enough information to guess it. The second is “brute-forcing” it—methodically guessing every single code combination until you hit the right one. Hackers—and security agencies—use sophisticated software to pull this off, but it can nonetheless take ages.

Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain
by John Grindrod
Published 2 Nov 2013

They were nervous about having lots and lots of large council estates,’ said Jim. He sat back, attempting to conjure up some kind of context for me. ‘By the end of the sixties Jane Jacobs had written her book in America’ – he was referring to the unlikely bestseller, The Death and Life of Great American Cities – ‘and there were lots of texts about “social engineering” it was called, steering people into these places. The town planning world was getting nervous about endlessly building council houses.’ ‘It’s funny, when you come from renting somewhere in London to renting somewhere here it didn’t seem like a big issue to me,’ Jo recalled with a shrug. ‘But a lot of people wanted to buy.

Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science)
by Thierry Bardini
Published 1 Dec 2000

But for Engelbart, the implementation of such an interpersonal interface also was supposed to involve active research on the human side of the system, on the ways to improve group collaboration to take advantage of the newly acquired computer aids. That led him from the engineering challenges of the new technology to "social engineering" experiments. These experiments reveal the problems of the laboratory at the time of the beginning of the im- plementation of the ARPANET and the early developments at PARCo I94 ARPANET, E-matl, and est OF MICE, AND MEN, AND WOMEN, AND EST In the late 1960's, when Engelbart translated his early concept of the "intelli- gence worker" in the somewhat less elite-sounding notion of "knowledge worker" under the influence of Peter Drucker,l S part of the cultural unaccept- ability of the notion of the "intelligence worker" was political.

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System
by James Rickards
Published 7 Apr 2014

Over time the dollar’s weight in the SDR basket will be reduced in favor of the Chinese yuan. The plan, as laid out by the IMF, exemplifies George Soros’s preferred modus operandi as described by his favorite philosopher, Karl Popper. Soros and Popper call it “piecemeal engineering” and consider it their preferred form of social engineering. The Soros-Popper ideal is to make large changes in small, scarcely noticeable increments, which can be advanced or postponed, as circumstances require. Popper wrote: The piecemeal engineer will, accordingly, adopt the method . . . whose advocacy may easily become a means of continually postponing action until a later date, when conditions are more favourable. . . .

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities
by John Cassidy
Published 10 Nov 2009

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia, Poland, and many other transition economies adopted “shock therapy” programs, which, in some cases, were explicitly modeled on the Chilean example. A new generation of American economists, such as Jeffrey Sachs, who now heads the Earth Institute at Columbia University, helped to organize these controversial exercises in social engineering. Many of them, Sachs included, hailed from Harvard and MIT, longtime strongholds of Keynesian economics. By the early 1990s the traditional distinction between monetarists and Keynesians had been blurred. Many economists who were nominally associated with the Keynesian tradition were strong supporters of the free market ideas that Friedman had devoted his life to espousing.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 1 Jan 2011

Today there are just shy of 7 billion Sapiens. Modern Time While all these Sapiens have grown increasingly impervious to the whims of nature, they have become ever more subject to the dictates of modern industry and government. The Industrial Revolution opened the way to a long line of experiments in social engineering and an even longer series of unpremeditated changes in daily life and human mentality. One example among many is the replacement of the rhythms of traditional agriculture with the uniform and precise schedule of industry. Traditional agriculture depended on cycles of natural time and organic growth.

The Divided Nation: A History of Germany, 1918-1990
by Mary Fulbrook
Published 14 Oct 1991

It must of course be added that this structural conditioning does not mean that actual political cultures are necessarily those desired by political elites: modes of adaptation may be quite subversive, and, despite certain elite theories of history, elites have by and large proved to be notoriously bad at social engineering. Can one in fact speak at all of national political cultures? In loose parlance, both scholars and others frequently do particularly when the concept is used as an independent causal factor. However, I would suggest that the answer must in fact be in the negative: there are too many subcultural variations with different bases.

Year 501
by Noam Chomsky
Published 19 Jan 2016

The second of these forces, furthermore, is to be veiled: its rights and power must be not only beyond challenge, but invisible, part of the natural order of things. We have travelled a fair distance on this path. The rhetoric of the 1992 election campaign illustrates the process. The Republicans call for faith in the entrepreneur, accusing the “other party” of being the tool of social engineers who have brought the disaster of Communism and the welfare state (virtually indistinguishable). The Democrats counter that they only intend to improve the efficiency of the private sector, leaving its dictatorial rights over most of life and the political sphere unchallenged. Candidates say “vote for me,” and I will do so-and-so for you.

Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics
by David A. Mindell
Published 10 Oct 2002

“Transmission Regulating System for Toll Cables.” Bell Laboratories Record 7, no. 5 (1929): 183–87. Johnson, J. B. “Thermal Agitation of Electricity in Conductors.” Physical Review 7 (1928): 97–113 . Jones, R. V. The Wizard War . New York: Coward, McCann, & Geoghegan, 1978. Jordan, John M. Machine-Age Ideology: Social Engineering and American Liberalism, 1911–1939 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Juley, Joseph. “The Ballistic Computer.” Bell Laboratories Record , December 1946, 5–9. Jurens, William J. “The Evolution of Battleship Gunnery in the U.S. Navy, 1920–1945.” Warship International , no. 3 (1991): 240–71.

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives
by Danny Dorling and Kirsten McClure
Published 18 May 2020

It is the very speed of the change, the very instability of capitalism, that reveals it to be a transition. It is so clear now, given so much change, that it is not a steady way in which the economy operates in a particular repeated manner. Capitalism depends on the relentless creation of ever more new products and the social engineering of new markets, engendering new demands and needs. In the course of the past century this has been done most effectively through the explosion of advertising. To survive, capitalism requires ever-greater demand and perpetual change—progress for progress’s sake. To keep buying and selling the next best thing, you have to keep creating new things and markets interested in acquiring them.

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy
by Adam Tooze
Published 15 Nov 2021

Despite these innovative elements, there was, however, no disguising the fact that the basic logic of the fiscal interventions in 2020 was conservative. Virtually none of the politicians who voted for the huge spending had started the year planning to change society. When one thinks of fiscal policy, it is tempting to associate it with redistribution and transformative social engineering. In general, the net effect of tax and welfare systems in all countries is to reduce inequality at least to some degree. However, welfare can also serve a conservative function. Indeed, the historic purpose of the welfare state as it emerged in Bismarckian Germany in the 1880s was precisely that—to preserve the social status hierarchy across the vicissitudes of sickness, old age, and, eventually, unemployment.34 That was the principal logic of spending in 2020.

Water: A Biography
by Giulio Boccaletti
Published 13 Sep 2021

And the first in line was, of course, Lenin. Comrade Lenin In the middle of the First World War, in October 1917, Lenin’s Bolsheviks had orchestrated a coup, and Russia descended into a long and bloody civil war. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Lenin, along with Leon Trotsky initiated a centrally planned social engineering project of unprecedented proportions. Most of it was built on water. Lenin was a radical, whose dreams more resembled those of Vera Pavlovna than those of Marx. He and Trotsky did not pursue an orthodox Marxist plan. Rather, they drew inspiration from the totalitarian strands increasingly common in Europe.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
by Isabel Wilkerson
Published 14 Sep 2020

It was the caste system, through the practice of endogamy—essentially state regulation of people’s romantic choices over the course of centuries—that created and reinforced “races,” by permitting only those with similar physical traits to legally mate. Combined with bans on immigrants who were not from Europe for much of American history, endogamy laws had the effect of controlled breeding, of curating the population of the United States. This form of social engineering served to maintain the superficial differences upon which the hierarchy was based, “race” ultimately becoming the result of who was officially allowed to procreate with whom. Endogamy ensures the very difference that a caste system relies on to justify inequality. “What we look like,” wrote the legal scholar Ian Haney López, “the literal and ‘racial’ features we in this country exhibit, is to a large extent the product of legal rules and decisions.”

Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain From the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times
by Lucy Lethbridge
Published 18 Nov 2013

The ‘mothers’, in keeping with the vocational spirit of the work, were unmarried, strictly teetotal and required to be Christians of an Evangelical flavour. Sometimes the ‘mothers’ were loving and tender; sometimes, as later accounts made clear, they were less so. The community was known only as ‘the Village’. Its residents were removed from the cruel anarchy of the streets, but as an exercise in social engineering, the Village operated by benign despotism and the close management of every detail. As Agnes Bowley, one former resident, put it: ‘There was a high fence and wrought iron gates and once they clanged behind you, you were shut in and you didn’t feel free.’12 There was a high level of supervision of the homes in which the girls would be placed as servants.

Ayn Rand Cult
by Jeff Walker
Published 30 Dec 1998

An inadequately addressed major social issue that Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and her later essays addressed was the gradual trading-off of economic freedom for regimented security requiring government interventions in the economy, as catalyzed by the Great Depression and World War II. Rand’s championing of self-reliant self-interest in opposition to the intellectuals’ social engineering schemes struck a resonant note with the non-intellectual reading public. At least it did so in the McCarthyite 1950s and in the early 1960s, by which time Rand’s favorite social grouping—big business—had re-gained heights of popularity not experienced since the roaring twenties. Rand’s advocacy of selfishness versus government demands for sacrifice (as exemplified by the Vietnam draft) kept her philosophy alive as a significant strand of Sixties anti-authoritarianism.

Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend
by Barbara Oakley Phd
Published 20 Oct 2008

This is because some or many of the children who had trouble with the unusual rhyming pattern were probably dyslexic, and dyslexia has a strong genetic component. Let's look again at the results from the study of psychopathy. Discarding the belief in the natural innocence of children and eliminating a century of social engineering, this means that some kids are born with a marked tendency toward evil. Sure, traditional forms of intervening in the family environment seem to work for kids with a light set of antisocial genes. But some type of genetic vulnerability appears to cause significant differences in the neurological development of children with psychopathic tendencies.

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt
by Sinan Aral
Published 14 Sep 2020

terrorists downloaded Telegram: Paul Cruickshank, “The Inside Story of the Paris and Brussels Attacks,” CNN, October 30, 2017. the Redirect Method: “The Redirect Method: A Blueprint for Bypassing Extremism,” The Redirect Method, https://redirectmethod.org/​downloads/​RedirectMethod-FullMethod-PDF.pdf. used to fight suicide: Patrick Berlinquette, “I Used Google Ads for Social Engineering. It Worked,” New York Times, July 7, 2019. a countermeasure to the Ku Klux Klan: Edward C. Baig, “Redirecting Hate: ADL Hopes Googling KKK or Jihad Will Take You Down a Different Path,” USA Today, June 24, 2019. The Ice Bucket Challenge: “Ice Bucket Challenge,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Ice_Bucket_Challenge.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire
by Jeff Berwick and Charlie Robinson
Published 14 Apr 2020

The thuggery, the arson, the murder in the name of BlackLivesMatter – the use of urban gangs as auxiliaries to ensure order through racial fear. Just like it was theorized and roll played. Funny how that happens. The Terrorist Organization That Wasn’t “The Marxist democrat &^%# that run twitter and faceberg used their social engineering platforms to whip this up and organize these riots. Soros used his subversion NGO shock troops to organize and direct the riots. &^%# burned down and looted their own cities with the encouragement of billionaire &^%&, which will make them poor and cause crime to increase in their shitholes long term.

In a Sunburned Country
by Bill Bryson
Published 31 Aug 2000

A calm, easygoing, immediately likable man with just a hint of the earnestness that must have led him to devote his working life to fighting for the disaffiliated rather than piling up money in private practice, he runs the Native Title Rights Office in Cairns, which helps native peoples with land issues, and was one of the members of a human rights commission set up in the mid-1990s to investigate an unfortunate experiment in social engineering popularly known as the Stolen Generations. This was an attempt by government to lift Aboriginal children out of poverty and disadvantage by physically distancing them from their families and communities. No one knows the actual numbers, but between 1910 and 1970 between one-tenth and one-third of Aboriginal children were taken from their parents and sent to foster homes or state training centers.

Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno
by Nancy Jo Sales
Published 17 May 2021

It’s one of the feelings that sends you back to swipe some more, to try and make this feeling go away. It makes a kind of twisted sense that swiping on a dating app can actually lead to more loneliness, if it’s causing us to engage with our screens more and interact with other human beings less. Which brings us back to social engineering. What exactly are dating apps engineered to make us do? Why, to use them more and more. The primary aim of all social media companies, according to Sean Parker in that 2017 interview, stems from the question: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” The value of these platforms rises with use; the more people use them, the more data is collected.

Vanishing New York
by Jeremiah Moss
Published 19 May 2017

It is not a policy, it is a reality—and it is as impossible for us to change this trend as it is to change the desire of birds to migrate to a more suitable location.” Again and again, we will hear the same insistence that this kind of urban change is natural and inevitable. But these are lies. As author Ta-Nehisi Coates has remarked, “white flight was a triumph of social engineering.” URBAN RENEWAL, SLUM CLEARANCE, AND BLOCKBUSTING In his 1932 critique of the Regional Plan, Lewis Mumford presciently noted that what the RPA had prepared was an elaborate scheme “to lead the population farther and farther out into the suburbs, without bothering to ask what will become of the wasted districts that remain.”

A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?
by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith
Published 6 Nov 2023

In the overall history of company towns, utopian cities like these are mostly an interesting footnote, but they may have special relevance in space settlement, whose most prominent advocates have ample portions of idiosyncrasy and utopian aspirations. An interesting element for anyone planning a settlement design is that there may be a strong temptation for social engineering. Recall from chapter 4 on spacefarer psychology the various proposals for managing human harmony by machine. We don’t think these are a good way to manage humans, but there is a certain logic to it. A space habitat will be a fragile bubble of life in a hostile world. The more people you have, the more chances there are for someone to do something dangerous.

Wonder Boy: Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley
by Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans
Published 25 Apr 2023

When people come visit us we basically hop from location to location to location, so even though they’ve been here only two or three nights, it will seem as though they’ve been here two weeks. It’ll have a big impact on their memory. Humans remember things in terms of geography and number of stories. I want a city where all this stuff is within walking distance so you can have a bunch of different experiences.” But given how literally he interpreted the social engineering tools in Strauss’s The Game, surely he had used them in his sex life. The Playboy reporter pointed out that he was forty and single. What were his thoughts about monogamy? Well, from a Darwinian perspective, Tony responded, a monogamous guy would have fewer copies of his genes in the next generation than a guy who wasn’t.

Narcotopia
by Patrick Winn
Published 30 Jan 2024

The chairman was about to rob many Wa of their livelihood: poppy farming. The United Nations couldn’t feed and clothe them all. Nor could Bao employ every highlander in some brand-new factory. So send them to me, Wei said. I’ll make use of them along the frontier. They called it the “great migration,” and it was one of the most ambitious social engineering feats in Southeast Asia’s modern history.4 The UWSA would round up more than one in four Wa, totaling 120,000 people, and transplant them to Wei’s territory along the Thai-Burma border. Every highlander chosen for relocation was instructed to show gratitude. UWSA officials told them Wa South was a slice of paradise.

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld
by Misha Glenny
Published 7 Apr 2008

“You tell me that the only safe computer is the one that is turned off,” retorts Marcos Flávio Assunção, a demigod among the white hats (noncriminal good hackers) of Belo Horizonte. “But what if I can persuade somebody to turn that computer on? Not so safe after all!” He beams. Marcos is explaining to me about what the cybercriminal and security worlds refer to as “social engineering” that is, the ability to influence people’s actions. The most popular method of invading computers is through downloads and websites that many users find irresistible—music and pornography. And here, dear reader (especially the men among you), is an important lesson—if you indulge in either of those two habits, stop it now if you value your privacy.

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100
by Michio Kaku
Published 15 Mar 2011

Although Singapore had no significant natural resources, its greatest resource was its own people, who were hardworking and semiskilled. His group embarked on a remarkable journey, taking this sleepy backwater nation and transforming it into a scientific powerhouse within one generation. It was perhaps one of the most interesting cases of social engineering in history. He and his party began a systematic process of revolutionizing the entire nation, stressing science and education and concentrating on the high-tech industries. Within just a few decades, Singapore created a large pool of highly educated technicians, which made it possible for the country to become one of the leading exporters of electronics, chemicals, and biomedical equipment.

The Right to Earn a Living: Economic Freedom and the Law
by Timothy Sandefur
Published 16 Aug 2010

Individual rights, they held, were just superstitions, which might have some social utility but were not attached to morality or to the prepolitical nature of human beings. They saw rights as social devices; privileges granted to individuals by the state, which could revoke or alter those rights to solve social ills.105 In the words of historian Louis Menand, the Progressives came to see individual rights as “socially engineered spaces” that are “created not for the good of individuals, but for the good of society. Individual freedoms are manufactured to achieve group ends.”106 This abandonment of the natural rights foundation of the Constitution had important ramifications for the courts, since it led to another of the Progressives’ intellectual innovations: the notion of judicial restraint.

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?
by David Brin
Published 1 Jan 1998

So might the populist revolt of Andrew Jackson, or, in a cultural sense, the Roaring Twenties. Consider the effects of one welltimed act of Congress, the GI Bill of Rights, which helped a million returning World War II veterans—sons of farmers and factory laborers—get university educations hitherto undreamt of. This piece of social engineering nearly demolished the functioning class system in America for more than a generation—at least for white people. For others, justice and opportunity had to wait twenty more years, for the civil rights movement and other medium-scale social fevers, which, largely nonviolently, inoculated the nation with more renewal and change.

The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community
by David C. Korten
Published 1 Jan 2001

This gave poor whites a floor of failure below which they could not fall and a human target against which to direct the frustrations of their station, encouraging them to define their identity by their whiteness rather than by their class. It proved to be one of history’s most odious and successful bits of social engineering. At the same time, members of the elite class proceeded to secure their own claim to preeminent status by cultivating the social and intellectual graces of their sons, providing them personal slaves and tutors, and sending them to England for finishing at elite colleges.20 The conditions of race-based slavery became especially harsh.

Trend Following: How Great Traders Make Millions in Up or Down Markets
by Michael W. Covel
Published 19 Mar 2007

“No, I’m lying down.” It is not unusual to see people frame market wins and losses as a morality tale. These types of questions are designed to absolve the guilt of the market losers for their bad strategies (i.e. Amaranth, Bear Stearns, Bernard Madoff, etc.). The market is no place for political excuses or social engineering. No law changes human nature. If you don’t like losing, examine the strategy of the winners. The performance histories of trend followers during the 2008 market crash, 2000–2002 stock market bubble, the 1998 LongTerm Capital Management (LTCM) crisis, the Asian contagion, the Barings Bank bust in 1995, and the German firm Metallgesellschaft’s collapse in 1993, answer that all important question: “Who won?”

How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism
by Eric Hobsbawm
Published 5 Sep 2011

‘USSR in Construction’ (to use the phrase which became the title of an opulently illustrated periodical for foreign propaganda) could appear as a society built in the image of reason, science and progress, the lineal descendant of the Enlightenment and the great French Revolution. It became the exemplification of social engineering for human purposes – of the force of human hope for a better society. It was this phase of Soviet history which appealed to writers who had been unmoved by the utopian hopes, the social eruption of the revolution itself, by the mixture of poverty and high hope, of ideals and absurdity, and the cultural efferves-cence of the 1920s.

Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government
by Robert Higgs and Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr.
Published 15 Jan 1987

As such, the problems could be "solved" only so far as the various interest groups might come to accept the existing distribution as legitimate. (Even then the problems would not stay solved, because a dynamic economy would inevitably disturb any existing distribution and thereby create new conflicts.)13 Certainly the Progressive faith in the efficacy of placing "experts" in positions of authority-social engineers to solve social problemswas naive at best. The federal investigatory commissions (Industrial, Monetary, Immigration, Industrial Relations, and others) produced valuable socioeconomic data, but their recommendations for legislative solutions reflected rather than replaced partisan politics. It could hardly have been otherwise, as the experts themselves had material, political, and ideological wars to wage.

Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East
by Sandy Tolan
Published 1 Jan 2006

The Sabra, by definition Ashkenazi, from a generation that had come to Palestine before the Holocaust, had shed the shameful baggage of the old country. He had become, in essence, the Israeli embodiment of Ari Ben Canaan, Leon Uris's hero in Exodus. The Sabra was, in the words of one Israeli writer, "the elect son of the chosen people." Social engineers consciously cultivated this image as an alternative to the diaspora Jew. In 1949, a Bulgarian-language paper of the leftist Mapam Party serialized a novel by writer Moshe Shamir in which the "New Jewish Man" is actually a giant, emerging from the sea in a fantastic aliyah to build up the land.

Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War
by P. W. Singer and August Cole
Published 28 Jun 2015

It was something the governor had decided to do, against the advice of the Defense Department. The bridge was a symbol of what they were fighting for, he argued, and it should not be lost in the fog of war and the Bay. That speech had gone over well; no doubt one of his public affairs team’s own social-engineering algorithms had come up with it. Jamie took a last sip of coffee and slowly dumped the rest out, watching it spatter the ground at his feet. It was oddly soothing and had become a ritual as he tried to slow his mind down from the past sixteen hours at work. “Halt!” said a voice in the dark.

The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible
by Simon Winchester
Published 14 Oct 2013

That was when he was first seized with the idea of joining a utopian commune, transforming himself from a mapmaker into a missionary, and becoming America’s first geological messiah. Owen was a Welshman who had made his fortune from the spinning of cotton in Scotland. He had carefully created in New Lanark a showpiece of social engineering for his mill workers—a near-ideal industrial environment, as he saw it, a community that was clean, healthy, well paid, disciplined, and morally sound, its children better educated than those in the finest paid schools in the land. So successful and admired had been New Lanark that Owen decided to expand.

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization
by Parag Khanna
Published 18 Apr 2016

We owe the concept of “freedom of the seas” to the Dutch legal scholar Hugo Grotius, who in his 1609 work Mare liberum argued that the oceans should be international rather than sovereign territory. There are remarkable similarities between Amsterdam’s strategy four hundred years ago and Beijing’s today. It is the Dutch model of infrastructure for resources that China follows, not British or French colonialism that sought to administer and socially engineer entire societies. Though the Dutch used force in alliance with local rulers to oust the Portuguese and establish administrative control—particularly in Sri Lanka and Indonesia—the objective was to secure trading posts and harness natural resource wealth, not to conquer the world for God or country.*2 Two hundred years earlier, the great Ming admiral Zheng He’s fifteenth-century “Treasure Fleet” voyages had also established China’s peaceful relations with kingdoms as far as East Africa.

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth
by Elizabeth Williamson
Published 8 Mar 2022

Watt and her allies formed Families Restoring Excellence in Education (FREE), a vanguard against plans by liberals in the Department of Education to mold Oklahoma schoolchildren into pliant underachievers. Inspired by books like Educating for the New World Order and Government Nannies, Watt exposed what she claimed were examples of social engineering in reading texts, math problems, even the free-lunch program. Her group campaigned to ban a book titled Earth Child and its corresponding science curriculum, saying it taught children to worship “earth above humans.” She compiled stacks of “research,” pressing it on PTA parents and local politicians, hand-delivering it to the Tulsa World newspaper and the city’s three network affiliates.

Daemon
by Daniel Suarez
Published 1 Dec 2006

He’d never been presented with such a grueling test of his intellect. The questions ranged from simple memory retention and spatial relationships to intense cryptographic theory. There were brutally complex logic problems—elaborate tautological diagrams and language math. The most enjoyable questions were the ones on social engineering. Gragg felt extremely confident of his answers there. In fact, he felt confident about most of the exam. He was just emotionally and intellectually spent. He expected to see a test score or something at the end, but instead a simple Web page announced the completion of the exam and the amount of time elapsed: 3 hrs 12 m.

Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made
by Gaia Vince
Published 19 Oct 2014

Some countries have actively promoted contraceptive use and delayed motherhood, as well as promoting female education, which reduces family size. China, the most populous nation, introduced a controversial one-child policy in 1978, which has prevented hundreds of millions of potential births. However, social engineering has turned out to be not quite as effective as economic growth in reducing family size: over the same period, Taiwan, in moving from ‘developing’ to ‘developed’ status, has seen a slightly bigger reduction in fertility than China. From now to 2050, population growth will take place almost entirely in the developing world.

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism
by Ed West
Published 19 Mar 2020

In today’s culture, the nonconformists are conservatives.’8 There is a certain truth in this, but then nonconformists and rebels don’t have to be James Dean or Marlon Brando in The Wild One – they can also be very uncool. ‘If there is hope it lies in the proles’ – George Orwell’s quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four has often been cited by conservatives who argue that opposition to mass migration and other forms of social engineering will come from the working class. Perhaps that is true, but the system also seems to be breeding a hardcore of highly educated ultra-conservatives. So while the proportion of American students identifying as consistently liberal has rapidly increased, the percentage of postgrad and college graduates with ‘consistently conservative’ views also went up between 2004 to 2014, from 4 to 11 per cent.9 Perhaps this is inevitable intra-elite conflict, or maybe also that Anglophone societies are becoming more isolated and atomised, and since liberalism is associated with higher sociability and social trust, it’s now producing more conservatives, too.

Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence
by Amy B. Zegart
Published 6 Nov 2021

The “vast majority of the documents he stole,” the report concludes, “have nothing to do with programs impacting individual privacy interests—they instead pertain to military, defense, and intelligence programs of great interest to America’s adversaries.”96 Snowden managed to download a mother lode with some clicks and clever social engineering, all from the comfort of his own desktop.97 The breaches keep coming. In the past few years, former CIA officer Kevin Mallory was sentenced to twenty years in prison for spying for China,98 and an NSA contractor named Hal Martin pleaded guilty to hoarding 50 terabytes of classified materials—that’s five hundred million pages of information—in his house, garden shed, and car.99 A mysterious group calling itself the Shadow Brokers somehow stole (either through a cyberattack or a human penetration) many of the National Security Agency’s most valuable hacking tools and dumped them on the Internet, where they have been used in global cyberattacks by North Korea and others.100 These stolen tools could be used for years to come, by an array of nefarious actors; once bad code is “in the wild,” it never really goes away.

The Art of Software Security Assessment: Identifying and Preventing Software Vulnerabilities
by Justin Schuh
Published 20 Nov 2006

Specifically, they can include issues with configuration of the software in its environment, issues with configuration of supporting software and computers, and issues caused by automated and manual processes that surround the system. Operational vulnerabilities can even include certain types of attacks on users of the system, such as social engineering and theft. These issues occur in the SDLC operation and maintenance phase, although they have some overlap into the integration and testing phase. Going back to the TELNET example, you know TELNET has a design flaw because of its lack of encryption. Say you’re looking at a software system for automated securities trading.

…

* * * Note You can find excellent information on security issues with Unicode in TR36—Unicode Security Considerations Technical Report. At the time of this writing, it’s available at www.unicode.org/reports/tr36/. * * * Homographic Attacks Homographic attacks are primarily useful as a form of social engineering; Evgeniy Gabrilovich and Alex Gontmakher originally described them in “The Homographic Attack” published in the February 2002 edition of Communications of the ACM. These attacks take advantage of a Unicode homograph, which includes different characters that have the same visual representation.

The City and the Stars / The Sands of Mars
by Arthur C. Clarke
Published 23 Oct 2010

Perhaps by tampering with our personality patterns; we may think we have free will, but can we be certain of that? “In any event, the problem was solved. Diaspar has survived and come safely down the ages, like a great ship carrying as its cargo all that is left of the human race. It is a tremendous achievement in social engineering, though whether it is worth doing is quite another matter. “Stability, however, is not enough. It leads too easily to stagnation, and thence to decadence. The designers of the city took elaborate steps to avoid this, though these deserted buildings suggest that they did not entirely succeed.

Oil: Money, Politics, and Power in the 21st Century
by Tom Bower
Published 1 Jan 2009

Including the bank in the lending consortium had been a Dutch idea to give political stability to the project. Instead, the EBRD’s officials in London began an “environmental and anthropological impact assessment” to evaluate how Sakhalin’s development would affect the island and its inhabitants. Shell had merely wanted to borrow money from the bank, but instead found itself encumbered by social engineers promoting “international standards of good governance” and concerning themselves with “the environment and democratic norms.” Although Russian politicians had consistently ignored such matters, the Kremlin was now using them to harass Shell. Van der Veer and his subordinates were struggling in uncharted waters.

Beautiful Architecture: Leading Thinkers Reveal the Hidden Beauty in Software Design
by Diomidis Spinellis and Georgios Gousios
Published 30 Dec 2008

“Co-operating sequential processes.” Programming Languages. Ed. F. Genuys. New York, NY: Academic Press. Garlan, D., and D. Perry. 1995. “Introduction to the special issue on software architecture.” IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 21, no. 4. Grinter, R. E. 1999. “Systems architecture: Product designing and social engineering.” Proceedings of ACM Conference on Work Activities Coordination and Collaboration (WACC ’99). 11–18. San Francisco, CA. Hanmer, R. 2001. “Call processing.” Pattern Languages of Programming (PLoP). Monticello, IL. http://hillside.net/plop/plop2001/accepted_submissions/PLoP2001/rhanmer0/PLoP2001_rhanmer0_1.pdf.

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us)
by Tom Vanderbilt
Published 28 Jul 2008

Eno proposed a series of “radical ordinances” to rein in New York’s traffic, a plan that seems hopelessly quaint now, with its instructions on the “right way to turn a corner” and its audacious demands that cars go in only one direction around Columbus Circle. But Eno, who became a global celebrity of sorts, boating off to Paris and São Paulo to solve local traffic problems, was as much a social engineer as a traffic engineer, teaching vast numbers of people to act and communicate in new ways, often against their will. In the beginning this language was more Tower of Babel than Esperanto. In one town, the blast of a policeman’s whistle might mean stop, in another go. A red light indicated one thing here, another thing there.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
by Nick Bostrom
Published 3 Jun 2014

But there we focused on the incentives faced by an agent as a consequence of its existence in a social world of near-equals. Here we are focusing on what happens inside a given agent: how its will is determined by its internal organization. We are therefore looking at a motivation selection method. Moreover, since this kind of internal institution design does not depend on large-scale social engineering or reform, it is a method that might be available to an individual project developing superintelligence even if the wider socioeconomic or international milieu is less than ideally favorable. Institution design is perhaps most plausible in contexts where it would be combined with augmentation.

The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism
by Noam Chomsky
Published 24 Oct 2014

Readers are carefully protected from exposure to any serious discussion of the concept that arouses such horror. We were in Indochina not because of any U.S. material interests motivating a “forward” foreign policy, but as a matter of higher principle, exactly as when we aid and support Stroessner in Paraguay or the Shah in Iran. And it goes without saying that U.S. military exploits or “social engineering” programs in Indochina could hardly be responsible for any current problems. To cite another example, William V. Shannon, liberal commentator for the New York Times and later President Carter’s ambassador to the Republic of Ireland, laments the failure of U.S. policy in these terms (28 September 1974): For a quarter century, the United States has been trying to do good, encourage political liberty, and promote social justice in the Third World.

After the Cataclysm
by Noam Chomsky
Published 17 Dec 2014

A major theme of the Time essay is that “somehow the enormity of the Cambodian tragedy—even leaving aside the grim question of how many or how few actually died in Angka Loeu’s experiment in genocide—has failed to evoke an appropriate response of outrage in the West,” and even worse, “some political theorists have defended it, as George Bernard Shaw and other Western intellectuals defended the brutal social engineering in the Soviet Union during the 1930s”; “there are intellectuals in the West so committed to the twin Molochs of our day—‘liberation’ and ‘revolution’—that they can actually defend what has happened in Cambodia.” In fact, the Western press since 1975 has poured forth reams of denunciations of Cambodia in the most strident tones, repeating the most extreme denunciations often on flimsy evidence, in striking contrast to its behavior in the case of massacres elsewhere, as in Timor; the U.S. press is particularly notable for a marked double standard in this regard, though it is hardly alone.

Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition
by Kindleberger, Charles P. and Robert Z., Aliber
Published 9 Aug 2011

Those who are engaged in reforming (or at least changing) the system would do well to ponder the lessons that emerge from this book. One of those lessons is very general, and is most applicable in contexts where irrationality may trump sober calculation. CPK was a skeptic by nature, just the opposite of doctrinaire. He mistrusted iron-clad intellectual systems, whether their proponents were free marketeers or social engineers. In fact, he considered clinging to rigid beliefs in the face of disconcerting evidence to be one of the more dangerous forms of irrationality, especially when it is practiced by those in charge. The international economy would be a safer place if CPK’s tolerant skepticism were more common among the powers that be.

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing
by Kevin Davies
Published 5 Oct 2020

While Jesse Gelsinger’s death set back the field of gene therapy by a decade, if it had occurred in China, “it would most likely have been either covered up or turned into propaganda depicting Gelsinger as a national martyr.”22 Finally, another contributing factor is China’s infamous one-child policy of social engineering and population control, launched by Mao Zedong in 1979. Before it was abandoned in 2015, the policy showcased China’s draconian determination to curb population growth and a totalitarian control over women’s reproductive rights. This was compounded by the Eugenics and Health Protection Law in 1995, which showed that China’s leaders were willing to impose measures not only to reduce overall births but also “new births of inferior quality.”23 Wang Jian, the billionaire cofounder of BGI, envisions a future society in which ubiquitous genetic testing will help eliminate a plethora of hereditary disorders.

Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat
by John P. Carlin and Garrett M. Graff
Published 15 Oct 2018

According to an interview he gave in 2012, Hussain—who went online originally by the moniker TriCk—said he started hacking at around age 11. He’d been playing a game online when another hacker knocked him offline. “I wanted revenge so I started googling around on how to hack,” he explained. “I joined a few online hacking forums, read tutorials, started with basic social engineering and worked my way up. I didn’t get my revenge, but I became one of the most hated hackers on this game.” By 13, he found the game childish, and by 15, he “became political.” He found himself sucked online into watching videos of children getting killed in countries like Kashmir and Pakistan and swept into conspiratorial websites about the Freemasons and Illuminati.

Peer-to-Peer
by Andy Oram
Published 26 Feb 2001

It is in the subscriber’s interest to be prompt in retrieving the web pages from the clients anyway, since the longer the delay, the greater the chance that the client’s IP address will become inactive. Still, stagnant IP lists are far more likely to be useless than dangerous. Skeptic: A social engineering question, then. Why would anyone want to run this client? They don’t get free music, and it doesn’t phone E.T. Aren’t you counting a little too much on people’s good will to assume they’ll sacrifice their valuable RAM for advancing human rights? Red Rover: This has been under some debate.

The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life
by Robert Wright
Published 1 Jan 1994

And the government started trying to stop craftsmen and shopkeepers from changing vocations; it even insisted that their children follow in their footsteps. One classical historian believes that “the Mediterranean world came closer to a caste system than at any other time in its history.” Again, leaving aside the moral critique, this is just bad social engineering; it stifles the gains that can arise spontaneously from freedom of choice in a market economy. Even Rome’s great contribution to commerce—the large, low-friction zone created by the Pax Romana—was hardly an unmixed blessing. It had its element of simple exploitation, especially visible to those who had to be subdued for the sake of the Pax.

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality
by Blake J. Harris
Published 19 Feb 2019

Although it’s natural to empathize with the frustration that those joining this group must have felt, a handful of Facebook employees—people from both sides of the political spectrum—felt that something was very unnatural, creepy even, about seeing the election results as proof that Facebook had somehow failed. Because, frankly, it provided a pretty ugly answer to the question people continued to ask more and more: What is Facebook? Well, according to the founder of “Refocusing Our Mission” and the hundreds of employees who quickly joined and engaged, Facebook was basically some sort of social engineering tool—an invisible hand meant to guide its users toward the “correct” political beliefs. Or to put it another way: since Zuckerberg often described Facebook as “like a utility,” then this reaction was the equivalent of AT&T declaring that Mondale losing to Reagan meant it was time for them to rethink the mission of this whole phone line network thing.

Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country
by Simon Winder
Published 22 Apr 2019

Germans could point out until they were purple in the face that this was land snatched by various French monarchs from the sixteenth century onwards and that somewhere like Mulhouse had been Swiss less than a century before, but nobody in France was listening. The Germans could have tried to placate France, perhaps by at least handing Metz back, but this immediately came in turn to look both shamefully weak and beside the point. In the longer term the Germans understood that Metz would, with patience and social engineering, be duly absorbed. Many French-speakers left and German settlers arrived. Implacable generational churn put children through schools who assumed Strasbourg was Straßburg and were proud to live in the western lands of Europe’s greatest state. With control of education, government offices and the army, the Germans could reasonably expect the Frenchness of Metz to dilute to a barely tastable flavour over a century or so.

Of a Fire on the Moon
by Norman Mailer
Published 2 Jun 2014

Yes, the poor were not a gaggle to be collected by a bulldozer, shoved, mashed, annealed, and poured into plastic suits they could wear in New NASA Subsidiary Poverty Suburbs. No, they were rather part of the remaining resource of a spiritually anemic land, and so their economic deliverance was a mystery which would yet defy the first and the last of the social engineers. The truth was that their faces were better than the three perfectly pleasant and even honorable faces of the three astronauts. But the voice of the Public Affairs Officer came out of the loudspeaker mounted on a speaker’s platform on the grass in front of the grandstand. This is Apollo-Saturn Launch Control.

Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990
by Katja Hoyer
Published 5 Apr 2023

In 1989, working class recruits still filled 60 per cent of officer ranks in the NVA41 – this figure naturally reduced over time as the children of parents who originally came from humble backgrounds but had entered traditional middle class professions were no longer classed as workers. The common argument that officer recruits were universally blackmailed into accepting temporary commissions in exchange for university places is simplistic. The prestige that came with rank and degree would have been out of reach for the vast majority of them without the social engineering the GDR engaged in and many working class boys saw it as an opportunity rather than a chore. Eckehardt Neudecker, for example, joined the NVA in 1962, not for political reasons or because he was forced to but because he craved the stability and structure it offered. The eighteen-year-old had grown up in the tumultuous period of the post-war years.

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
by Robert Wright
Published 28 Dec 2010

And the government started trying to stop craftsmen and shopkeepers from changing vocations; it even insisted that their children follow in their footsteps. One classical historian believes that “the Mediterranean world came closer to a caste system than at any other time in its history.” Again, leaving aside the moral critique, this is just bad social engineering; it stifles the gains that can arise spontaneously from freedom of choice in a market economy. Even Rome’s great contribution to commerce—the large, low-friction zone created by the Pax Romana—was hardly an unmixed blessing. It had its element of simple exploitation, especially visible to those who had to be subdued for the sake of the Pax.

The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire
by Wikileaks
Published 24 Aug 2015

One might have hoped that access to such critical examination of the consequences of what were recognized as inappropriate efforts at modernization and Westernization might have helped lead to different decisions by US war strategists. But, instead, the United States and NATO installed pro-Western governments and schemes of social engineering in Afghanistan that, like those of their Soviet counterparts thirty years earlier, might “under other circumstances have been viewed as progressive, including measures to promote secular education and liberate women.” The United States and its chosen government in Kabul, like its Soviet predecessors, “had little understanding of the countryside or respect for rural traditions.

The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era
by Craig Nelson
Published 25 Mar 2014

Szilard replied, “But He may not know my version.” Leo’s parents, Louis and Tekla Spitz, changed their name to Szilard two years after his birth on February 11, 1898, in Austria-Hungary to comply with a government campaign to unify its disparate ethnicities including the Jews. This simple attempt at social engineering resulted, because of birth order, in their children having different surnames: Szilard, Szego, Salgo, and Spitz. The family lived in a stucco art nouveau villa, kitted out with stained glass and wooden turrets in Budapest’s Garden District. Leo’s notorious personality revealed itself early.

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Published 27 Nov 2012

Lecturing-Birds-How-to-Fly Effect: Inverting the arrow of knowledge to read academia → practice, or education → wealth, to make it look as though technology owes more to institutional science than it actually does. Touristification: The attempt to suck randomness out of life. Applies to soccer moms, Washington civil servants, strategic planners, social engineers, “nudge” manipulators, etc. Opposite: rational flâneur. Rational flâneur (or just flâneur): Someone who, unlike a tourist, makes a decision opportunistically at every step to revise his schedule (or his destination) so he can imbibe things based on new information obtained. In research and entrepreneurship, being a flâneur is called “looking for optionality.”

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
by Nancy Isenberg
Published 20 Jun 2016

In one of his dreamier moments in 1785, he wrote of the hope that America would be like China, completely cut off from European commerce and manufacturing and other entanglements: “We should thus avoid all wars, and all our citizens would be husbandmen.” He wished for a middle zone, between the two extremes.23 Jefferson was not above social engineering, believing that manners could be cultivated. His scheme for the Northwest Territory built upon his reforms for Virginia. As the chair of two congressional committees, he assumed a leading role in shaping how the land would be distributed and governed. In his report on the Land Ordinance of 1784, he devised a grid plan that would have divided the land into perfectly formed rectangles, offering individual lots, the basic unit of the family farm.

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
by Daniel Immerwahr
Published 19 Feb 2019

In one corner stood reformers, intent on imposing order. In the other, a discordant multitude of crosscutting interests and publics. It wasn’t just architecture. From battleground to battleground—politics, public health, the factory floor—the war raged on. Yet there was one arena where the fight was markedly less fair, where social engineers indisputably held the upper hand: the empire. Although the overseas territories had dropped off the maps, they were, for a certain type of professional, extremely interesting places. They functioned as laboratories, spaces for bold experimentation where ideas could be tried with practically no resistance, oversight, or consequences.

Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy
by Philippe van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght
Published 20 Mar 2017

Does this cautious gradual approach suffice to assuage skepticism stemming from the uncertainty that surrounds the consequences of implementing a basic income?83 In his vigorous critique of the basic-Â�income proposal, Jon Elster notes that “the state of the social sciences is light-Â�years away from allowing us to predict the global net long-Â�term equilibrium effects of major 167 BASIC INCOME institutional changes, while piecemeal social engineering, through incremental planning or trial-Â�and-Â�errorâ•‹.â•‹.â•‹.╋╉only allows us to estimate local, partial, short-Â�term, or transitional effects.”↜84 We agree with this observation, the first part of which was repeatedly paraphrased in our discussion of experiments. However, as Elster recognizes: “A counterargument might run as follows.

The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall
by Mark W. Moffett
Published 31 Mar 2019

A nation supporting strong ties among its people and similarly masterful in its dealings with other societies would serve the greater well-being of its citizens, extending its time on Earth and making its legacy a high point in the story of humankind. It would be the height of foolishness to think such an outcome could be achieved through cheerful goodwill or careful social engineering. However optimistic you feel about our adroitness as problem solvers, human minds—and the societies we fabricate when those minds interact—are malleable only to a degree. Our willingness to enjoy an advantageous social position, even hurt each other in the service of preserving our sense of dominance and superiority, is an abiding human trait.

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)
by Adam Fisher
Published 9 Jul 2018

And yet the two were like matter and antimatter: by all rights unable to exist in the same economic universe. Apache was giving away the server software that Netscape had planned to sell in order to keep the browser free. Paradoxically, it all worked out. The solution? An inspired bit of what Silicon Valley likes to call “social engineering.” John Giannandrea: It was a somewhat sneaky idea. Lou Montulli: We had put a price tag on the browser but with kind of a wink-wink. We were really saying, “Well, if anyone wants to download it, just download it.” It was freely available. Marc Andreessen: There was a clause in the license that said if you use it for business, you have to pay for it.

Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society
by Nicholas A. Christakis
Published 26 Mar 2019

In fact, belief in the sociological mutability of human beings has, in my judgment, done more harm to people through the ages than the belief in their genetic immutability. There is a long history, for example, of denying any biological basis for homosexuality and seeing it as a lifestyle choice under the control of the individual, a choice that others then may respond to with opprobrium, oppression, and violence.50 Efforts in social engineering, sponsored by leaders such as Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot, have killed countless millions of people, and they are often driven by a false belief that fundamental, genetically encoded, and universal aspects of human behavior and social order can simply be swept aside. Stalin, for example, advocated creating a “revolutionary authority” that could be used “to abolish by force the old system of productive relations and establish the new system.

The Big Score
by Michael S. Malone
Published 20 Jul 2021

Sales were doubling every year. But more than that, the company came to be looked upon as the world’s leader in high-technology innovation, the place to watch for a sneak preview of the future. Intel was more than just changing the technological landscape. It was also trying its hand at social engineering. The company attempted to create a new kind of company, one that combined the casual but ambitiously self-driven nature of the old Fairchild with the careful strategic planning of older East Coast establishment corporations, producing what might be called a sublimation of personal ego—a communal attitude fostering innovation and creativity, yet at the same time keeping away the sort of entrepreneurial selfishness and egocentrism that had torn up Fairchild.

The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning With the Myth of the Good Billionaire
by Tim Schwab
Published 13 Nov 2023

In the Gates Foundation’s work on education, which goes beyond educational standards, we see that the foundation operates in very much the same way at home as it does abroad in poor nations—orchestrating controversial, undemocratic, top-down policy changes by working behind the scenes. And as we see elsewhere in Gates’s work, the foundation’s social engineering efforts in U.S. education haven’t generally translated into improvements for the people it claims to help. By the foundation’s own admission, its work on education has largely failed. Gates spent $650 million on an experiment to build smaller schools, for example, and then abandoned it when it failed to deliver results.

City: Urbanism and Its End
by Douglas W. Rae
Published 15 Jan 2003

By setting out to re-create a region in which firms and families pressed inward on the central city, seeking out opportunities to produce, sell, and live in the middle of New Haven, Dick Lee had set himself against history. By setting CPI the task of expertly repairing a tattered social fabric, Lee had addressed a project of social engineering that no government on any scale has to my knowledge managed to fulfill. In his last years as mayor Dick Lee would often say, “If New Haven is a model city, God help America’s cities.” He had, in so saying, come to acknowledge the end of urbanism. 360 C H A P T E R 1 1 THE END OF URBANISM The Lee administration had struggled, often valiantly, to retain New Haven’s manufacturing jobs.

Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol
by Iain Gately
Published 30 Jun 2008

The restrictions it introduced had to be implemented, and the Volstead Bill, named after its sponsor, Andrew Joseph Volstead of Minnesota, and drafted by Wayne Wheeler, set out the mechanics of enforcement. Its sponsor, although partial to an occasional drink, was a disciplinarian at heart who believed “law regulates morality, law has regulated humanity since the Ten Commandments,” and hence had no qualms in attaching his name to what he considered to be a useful exercise in social engineering. The bill was debated at length in Congress and subjected to a string of amendments. President Wilson vetoed it in its final form for technical reasons, but the House and the Senate overrode him and the Volstead Act was adopted in October 1919. It was prima facie a Draconian piece of legislation: Violators of its provisions might be punished with substantial fines, prison terms, and confiscation of their property; and infringements were to be investigated by a force of fifteen hundred agents, who were endowed with intrusive powers of search and seizure.

NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity
by Steve Silberman
Published 24 Aug 2015

In the shadow of the rising numbers, making peace with autism—by viewing it as a lifelong disability that deserves support, rather than as a disease of children that can be cured—seemed like a new and radical idea. In fact, it was the oldest idea in autism research. But it had been forgotten, along with the story of a brave clinician who tried to rescue the children in his care from the darkest social engineering experiment in human history. Three WHAT SISTER VIKTORINE KNEW Once one has learnt to pay attention to the characteristic manifestations of autism, one realizes that they are not at all rare. —HANS ASPERGER Gottfried K. was nine and a half when his grandmother brought him to the Children’s Clinic at the University Hospital for an examination.

The Making of Global Capitalism
by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin
Published 8 Oct 2012

And it also started making “democracy” a condition of its loans through the 1990s, alongside its new sister agency, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Yet the means by which the restructuring of the old Communist states into capitalist ones was accomplished—from the stick of the economic slump created by shock therapy to the carrot of canceling no less than a half of Poland’s private and public debt—essentially amounted to “rapid social engineering at a micro level to create the desired goal of a state open to FDI.”81 The loans of over $16 billion that the IMF provided to Russia in 1995 and 1996 gave Yeltsin ample resources to spend liberally for his re-election in exchange for exactly this, as well as limiting inflation and privatizing public assets.

Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible
by William N. Goetzmann
Published 11 Apr 2016

How could actuarial mathematics, so crucial to the viability of the future nation-state, have been ignored? The design of US Social Security in the twentieth century suggest that the mispricing then, as now, was perhaps not due to the ignorance of the long-term costs, but rather to the political framework that gives higher weight to short-term dispute resolution. FINANCIAL SOCIAL ENGINEERING Such a major innovation as a government-guaranteed retirement life annuity to all American workers surely must have a profound impact on behavior. How does it affect savings rates, risk taking, personal initiative, family structure, employment decisions, and a host of other factors tied to long-term planning for the economic future?

Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class
by Charles Murray
Published 28 Jan 2020

The social democratic left in Europe and liberal thinkers in the United States did not aspire to create a “new man” as the Communists had, but they were confident that many of society’s problems of poverty, crime, and educational failure were waiting to be solved by rational thinking scientifically applied to malleable human beings. The phrase “social engineering” came into vogue—not used sarcastically as it usually is today, but as a label for policies that would move society closer to utopia. The designers of those programs did not spend time brooding over inborn, intractable characteristics of human beings that might foil their plans. The mid-1960s through the mid-1970s saw the apogee of American academic optimism for using public policy to change behaviors on a grand scale.

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning
by Jeremy Lent
Published 22 May 2017

We can't accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle.”32 We can see from this story how behavior that, at first sight, seems bizarre is actually a sophisticated form of social engineering that promotes sustainable community living. In fact, the sharing ethic of hunter-gatherer society can be seen as a sensible long-term insurance strategy. Anthropologist Polly Wiessner was studying a group of !Kung during a long drought that began to cause serious hunger. Suddenly, she saw them prepare gifts and begin a trek to a region the drought had spared, where other !

The Enlightened Capitalists
by James O'Toole
Published 29 Dec 2018

Now, back to our story . . . 4 Kisses Sweeter Than Wine Milton Snavely Hershey (1857–1945) Milton Hershey was to the milk chocolate bar what William Lever was to bar soap: if he didn’t invent it, he most certainly perfected and popularized it. Hershey and Lever led remarkably parallel lives: both had as much passion for social engineering as they did for business. The legacies of both the chocolate magnate and the soap baron became current news in the early twenty-first century. However, in contrast to Unilever’s promising rediscovery of Lever’s practices, recent news about Hershey’s legacy has threatened to stain what, for over seventy years, had been a sterling reputation.

The Story of Philosophy
by Will Durant
Published 23 Jul 2012

He was horrified at the waste of human energy in war; and he suggested that these mighty impulses of combat and mastery could find a better outlet in a “war against nature.” Why should not every man, rich or poor, give two years of his life to the state, not for the purpose of killing other people, but to conquer the plagues, and drain the marshes, and irrigate the deserts, and dig the canals, and democratically do the physical and social engineering which builds up so slowly and painfully what war so quickly destroys? He sympathized with socialism, but he disliked its deprecation of the individual and the genius. Taine’s formula, which reduced all cultural manifestations to “race, environment, and time,” was inadequate precisely because it left out the individual.

The Evolution of God
by Robert Wright
Published 8 Jun 2009

If Muhammad’s movement in Medina was to succeed, and if the Jesus movement in the Roman Empire was to succeed, they had to inspire a devotion that transcended existing allegiance. Both religions were engaged in re-engineering, creating a new kind of social organization. And if you want to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs. In fact, the births of all three Abrahamic religions were exercises in large-scale social engineering. With ancient Israel, once-autonomous tribes drew together, first into a confederacy and then into a state. The birth of Christianity saw a second kind of social consolidation, not of tribes but of whole ethnicities. There was “no longer Jew or Greek”—or Roman or Egyptian —for all believers were “one in Christ Jesus.”

The Dreaming Void
by Peter F. Hamilton
Published 1 Jan 2007

But for all their extraordinarily long life, they’d never experienced another way to live. And the longer they managed to maintain their own little empires around them, the more resistant to change they became. Nothing new was attempted; instead, they mined history for stability. On one planet in particular their social engineering had reached its nadir. A ruling Halgarth collective on Iaioud had founded and maintained a society that was even less susceptible to change than Huxley’s Haven by the simple expedient of prohibiting conception. At the end of a fifty-year life, all the citizens were rejuvenated and their memories wiped, except that the state knew who they were and what job they did best.

House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street
by William D. Cohan
Published 15 Nov 2009

The buyers of the loans, according to Dale Westhoff in a May 1998 article in Mortgage Banking, “were money managers and insurance companies buying the loans strictly because of their investment appeal,” offering yields in excess of 7.5 percent, which in a low-interest-rate environment looked very attractive. Sewell saw the direct linkage from HUD's political pressure to the fissure in the credit markets a decade later. “So that's how we get from there to here,” he wrote, “from crude attempts at social engineering during the early, heady days of the first Clinton administration to the turmoil on Wall Street.” Sewell did not contact Achtenberg before he wrote his diatribe. After she read it, she said in an interview that Sewell's “assertions are laughable to me” and “quite inventive and preposterous.”

Understanding Power
by Noam Chomsky
Published 26 Jul 2010

And now they stay in business because the public pays for C-130s [military aircraft], and upgrading F-16s, and the F-22 project, and so on—none of which has anything to do with a “free market” either. Or take the fact that so many people live in the suburbs and everybody has to drive their own car everywhere. Was that a result of the “free market”? No, it was because the U.S. government carried out a massive social-engineering project in the 1950s to destroy the public transportation system in favor of expanding a highly inefficient system based on cars and airplanes—because that’s what benefits big industry. It started with corporate conspiracies to buy up and eliminate streetcar systems, and then continued with huge public subsidies to build the highway system and encourage an extremely inefficient and environmentally destructive alternative.

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist
by Alex Zevin
Published 12 Nov 2019

His New Deal inspired alarm at its infringement of the principles of the free market among thinkers who gathered in Paris in 1938 to honour the journalist Walter Lipmann. The reaction produced a powerful, if overstated antidote, with Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom in 1944, ‘a noir classic’ in which ‘a misunderstood liberal walks the mean streets of a collectivized world’. But in practice it supplied an exemplary case of the ‘piecemeal social engineering’ upheld as the antidote to communism by Karl Popper in his complementary classic The Open Society and Its Enemies a year later.21 Liberalism’s third period after 1945 would draw from each of these opposite reactions to the inter-war crisis, in successive phases. For three decades, it leant far more towards Keynes than to Lipmann and his circle, as Western societies transformed themselves into fully-fledged democracies based on universal suffrage and mass consumption, deploying the counter-cyclical instruments of fiscal and monetary policy he had urged, to secure full employment and high wages.

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller
by Alec Nevala-Lee
Published 1 Aug 2022

Glenn Olds, who brokered the arrangement, recalled, “One never knows why the final negotiations of so delicate a deal—negotiations between a man whose second nature was privacy but whose ideas were genuinely universal and invited implementation and an exceedingly successful public servant, business entrepreneur, and social engineer—should fail at the last moment, but they did.” According to Jaime, the real issue was the board’s insensitivity to Fuller’s reluctance to ask for support, which led to an unfortunate scene: “Everybody sat down at the huge conference table, with Klutznick and Bucky across from each other, and Klutznick started by saying, ‘Well, Bucky, what’cha got for me?’

The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food
by Lizzie Collingham
Published 1 Jan 2011

Pett, ‘The wartime nutrition programs for workers in the United States and Canada’, Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 23 (2) (April 1945): 161–79. Goodwin, Doris Kearns, No Ordinary Time. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (Simon & Schuster, London, 1994). Gordon, Bertram M., ‘Fascism, the neo-right and gastronomy. A case in the theory of the social engineering of taste’, Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. 1987. Taste Proceedings (Oxford, 1988). Gordon, David M., ‘The China–Japan war, 1931–1945’, Journal of Military History 70 (1) (2006): 137–82. Gosewinkel, Dieter (ed.), Wirtschaftskontrollen und Recht in der nationalsozialistischen Diktatur (Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main, 2005).

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
by Daniel C. Dennett
Published 15 Jan 1995

Wilson and Sober are right to present the Hutterite ideals as the essence of an organismic organization, but the big difference is that for people — unlike the cells in our bodies, or the bees in a colony — there is always the option of opting out. And that, I would think, is the last thing we want to destroy in our social engineering. The Hutterites disagree, apparently, and so, I gather, do the hosts of many non-Western memes.5 Do you like the idea of turning ourselves and our children into slaves to the summutn bonum of our groups? That is the direction in which the Hutterites have always been headed, and, by Wilson and Sober's account, they achieve impressive success, but only at the cost of prohibiting the free exchange of ideas and discouraging thinking for oneself (which is to be distinguished from being selfish).

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History
by David Edgerton
Published 27 Jun 2018

As we shall see, the dismantling of this developmental state in the 1980s would render it historically invisible, and in doing so it made a proper understanding of both the role of the state and of Thatcherism impossible. In the case of welfare measures Conservative politicians of the 1970s came to complain of what they called ‘social engineering’, the use of state measures to change the structure of society. This was deemed illegitimate. It was telling, perhaps, that the other engineering projects of the state were not so denounced. In particular there was no criticism of the great transformations to which the state contributed so much, such as creating a society of motorists and home-owners. 12 National Capitalism Far from leading in the race for higher productivity, Britain in these last years has been outpaced by almost every other industrial nation.

America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy
by Robert B. Zoellick
Published 3 Aug 2020

Bush hoped to become the first secretary of defense, but Truman never considered him. Bush opted instead to head the Pentagon’s new Research and Development Board, but the weak powers of the post and the secretary doomed Bush’s efforts to rationalize military research.57 Bush faced a challenge from a totally different quarter. The New Dealers were social engineers. The war had ended the Depression, but Progressives feared a return to mass unemployment. They wanted scientists, engineers, and planners to turn their skills from the arts of destruction to the social science challenges of economic management, housing, education, and hunger. Bush thought these “do-gooders” would pervert research with politics, statist economic policies, and populist policy fads.

The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom
by Graham Farmelo
Published 24 Aug 2009

. […] I feel that life for me is worth living if I just make you happy and do nothing else.6 Manci appears to have been no less intoxicated: ‘If by any reason a war or anything would prevent me to see you again, I could never love anybody else.’7 She and Betty were getting on well in Budapest, at the Moulin Rouge, skating on the rinks and doing the Charleston on the dance floor after a few glasses of champagne.8 ‘I am very very happy and being thoroughly spoiled,’ Betty wrote to Dirac.9 But she was depressed and mourning her father: ‘he was the finest man I ever knew’, she wailed.10 In Betty’s view, her parents had each been the victim of an unfortunate marriage, and she gave Manci a reason why her parents disliked each other, though this was too personal for Manci to spell it out explicitly in a letter to her husband.11 Manci decided to take Betty in hand and to find her a husband: ‘[Despite] her little faults, a bit of untidiness and unpunctuality, I shall try to […] improve her and she will be a very good wife.’12 Within days, Manci had decided that her Hungarian friend Joe Teszler was just the man for her sister-in-law: kind, gentle and – an essential requirement for Betty – a Roman Catholic. This was one of Manci’s most effective pieces of social engineering: after a brief courtship, Betty married Joe – six years her senior – in London on 1 April 1937. In Bristol, Flo was now quite alone. ‘Some say that I got married rather suddenly,’ Dirac wrote to his wife.13 One of the dons who were surprised by Dirac’s marriage was Rutherford, who wrote to Kapitza: ‘Our latest news is that Dirac has succumbed to the charms of a Hungarian widow with two children,’ adding cryptically, ‘I think it will require the ability of an experienced widow to look after him.’14 A few days later, Dirac wrote to tell Kapitza the news: ‘Have you heard that I was married during the vacation […]?’

Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design
by Matthew Carmona , Tim Heath , Steve Tiesdell and Taner Oc
Published 15 Feb 2010

For Krier, a city should be conceived of as a ‘family’ of quarters, with each quarter being a ‘City within a City’ integrating all the daily functions of urban life (dwelling, working, leisure) within a territory not exceeding 35 ha and 15 000 inhabitants. FIGURE 6.9 Mixed-use neighbourhood (Image: Urban Task Force 1999: 66) While a general criticism of all attempts at creating neighbourhoods/communities, the charge of social engineering has commonly been levelled at attempts to create socially balanced neighbourhoods and communities (see Banerjee & Baer 1984). Some element of social mix is, nevertheless, desirable and there are various benefits from mixed and (better) balanced neighbourhoods. Both the Urban Villages Forum and the Congress of the New Urbanism, for example, emphasised the need for a variety of house prices and tenures.

Austerity Britain: 1945-51
by David Kynaston
Published 12 May 2008

He lost the vote, and a new estate – to be called Ackroydon, with building due to start in 1952 – went ahead according to Matthew’s vision.21 It was in a sense an extraordinary situation. By comparison with 20 or 30 years earlier, British modernism was clearly on the retreat, most notably in literature and music; in architecture, however, with its obviously greater potential for social purpose and even social engineering, the reverse was true. At the mid-century point, nevertheless, it was predominantly a soft, relatively humanist modernism that (in Coventry as well as in London) held sway. Much turned on attitudes to the definitely non-soft Le Corbusier, whose landmark and intensely polarising block of flats, the Unité d’Habitation, was by this time rising from the ground in Marseilles.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
by Shoshana Zuboff
Published 15 Jan 2019

Facebook itself has hinted of its interest, even filing a patent.44 These efforts receded only because the Federal Trade Commission threatened regulatory intervention.45 Oxford University China scholar Rogier Creemers, who translated some of the first documents on the social credit system, observes that “the trend towards social engineering and ‘nudging’ individuals towards ‘better’ behavior is also part of the Silicon Valley approach that holds that human problems can be solved once and for all through the disruptive power of technology.… In that sense, perhaps the most shocking element of the story is not the Chinese government’s agenda, but how similar it is to the path technology is taking elsewhere.”46 In 2017 a surveillance technology trade show held in Shenzhen was packed with US companies selling their latest wares, especially cameras equipped with artificial intelligence and facial recognition.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris
Published 14 Feb 2023

Drawing from his extraordinarily eventful life, Bert pulled together something like a political philosophy. “Hoover in 1921 saw himself as the protagonist of a new and superior synthesis between the old industrialism and the new, a way whereby America could benefit from scientific rationalization and social engineering without sacrificing the energy and creativity inherent in individual effort, ‘grassroots’ involvement, and private enterprise,” writes historian Ellis Hawley in his classic 1974 study of the Commerce secretariat under the Stanford engineer.15 Hoover turned the fledgling department into Harding’s agency for modernity, casting the mold for the relationship between the industries that made America into a superpower and state bureaucracy.

The Web Application Hacker's Handbook: Finding and Exploiting Security Flaws
by Dafydd Stuttard and Marcus Pinto
Published 30 Sep 2007

However, providing an easy means for an attacker to identify valid usernames increases the likelihood that he will compromise the application given enough time, skill, and effort. A list of enumerated usernames can be used as the basis for various subsequent attacks, including password guessing, attacks on user data or sessions, or social engineering. In addition to the primary login function, username enumeration can arise in other components of the authentication mechanism. In principle, any function where an actual or potential username is submitted can be leveraged for this purpose. One location where username enumeration is commonly found is the user registration function.

Gorbachev: His Life and Times
by William Taubman

Gorbachev disdained detailed plans or blueprints because he associated them with the iron schema the Bolsheviks had forced on the Russian people. But his Communist training accustomed him to the idea that society could be drastically transformed almost overnight. A sworn opponent of Bolshevik-style social engineering, he tried to engineer his own anti-Bolshevik revolution by peaceful, evolutionary means. He trusted the people to embrace self-governance, and their elected representatives to shape democratic institutions—until it turned out that they didn’t know how and no longer trusted him. Gorbachev was indeed a brilliant tactician.

Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell
by Neal Stephenson
Published 3 Jun 2019

That she was now under Corvallis’s wing dampened the truthers’ ardor, since they were sadists and preferred to focus their energies on the helpless. But they did manage to find her sister, Verna, who lived in a bedroom community outside of Adelaide. After a first round of surgery and chemo, she’d enjoyed three years’ remission from her cancer, but it had now come back. She was on chemo again. Through a combination of social engineering and poor security precautions, a particularly avid set of nihilist hackers tracked her down to a hospital in Adelaide, and phoned in a bomb threat, and SWATted the place for good measure. All of the patients had to be taken out of the wing of the building where Verna was receiving her treatment.

Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C
by Bruce Schneier
Published 10 Nov 1993

The real world offers the attacker a richer menu of options than mere cryptanalysis. Often more worrisome are protocol attacks, Trojan horses, viruses, electromagnetic monitoring, physical compromise, blackmail and intimidation of key holders, operating system bugs, application program bugs, hardware bugs, user errors, physical eavesdropping, social engineering, and dumpster diving, to name just a few. High-quality ciphers and protocols are important tools, but by themselves make poor substitutes for realistic, critical thinking about what is actually being protected and how various defenses might fail (attackers, after all, rarely restrict themselves to the clean, well-defined threat models of the academic world).

The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal
by William D. Cohan
Published 8 Apr 2014

He observed that a number of the topics raised by the report—“the role of alcohol in social life” and the “experience of race and other forms of difference”—were not unique to Duke and represented “challenges” for every institution. The Duke administration braced for a powerful backlash. “To some . . . the report was a politically correct treatise by leftists intent on social engineering and a top-to-bottom remake of a great university,” the News & Observer found. Not so, said Brodhead. “It’s the very nature of these subjects that they require thought and participation by the community,” he explained. Added Larry Moneta, one of the two co-chairs of the committee, “The culmination of the report is the initiation of the conversation.

Thomas Cromwell: A Life
by Diarmaid MacCulloch
Published 26 Sep 2018

At the end of Elizabeth’s reign a much greater economic crisis than Henrician England ever experienced forced action on Parliament, and thereafter the poor law system glimpsed in 1536 endured till the nineteenth century.16 Like Parliament’s equally firm refusal to be bossed about in curbing agricultural enclosures in March 1534, the stuttering start to poor law legislation underlines the fact that in the 1530s it was perfectly possible for Parliament to show determined and successful opposition to measures proposed by the King’s chief minister, provided they did not focus on the two issues which aroused Henry’s murderous rage: religion and the future of the dynasty. Tudor England was never a simple monarchical tyranny. The King and his ministers may have been fairly relaxed about the fate of a measure of social engineering because alongside it they appeared to have gained a victory in an important matter of royal revenue that had been vexing the Crown long before Cromwell’s arrival in power.17 The theory of landholding in England was still that of the feudal system, set up to guarantee effective armies at the Crown’s disposal.

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism
by Peter Marshall
Published 2 Jan 1992

He adopted Newton’s view of the world as a machine governed by universal laws. Applying the same analytical method to society and nature, he felt that both could be refashioned according to reason. Just as he spent many years designing an iron bridge, so he tried to redesign society on the same simple and rational principles. He was a mechanical and social engineer: ‘What Archimedes said of the mechanical powers’, he wrote, ‘may be applied to Reason and Liberty: “Had we”, he said, “a place to stand upon, we might raise the world.” ‘22 Dismissed from service in Lewes, Paine decided to try his luck in the American colonies. On his arrival, he rapidly threw himself into the social and political struggles of the day.

Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health
by Laurie Garrett
Published 15 Feb 2000

But to hear their parents talk, there is a generational time bomb of cancer, genetic mutation, immune deficiency, and disease hidden beneath their youthful glow. These youngsters are damaged goods, they say, weakened to the genetic level by a dual legacy of environmental devastation and misanthropic social engineering. “The Russian gene pool has been destroyed,” Dr. Askold Maiboroda, dean of the Federal Medical University in Irkutsk, explained. “First there were Stalin’s slaughters of millions of people, especially the Jews and the most creative and intelligent people. Then the Nazis slaughtered more of the strongest people in the Great Patriotic War.

Germany
by Andrea Schulte-Peevers
Published 17 Oct 2010

The town achieved a modicum of prominence after the powerful Hohenzollern clan from southern Germany took charge in 1411, at least until the 17th century when it was ravaged during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) with only 6000 people surviving the pillage, plunder and starvation. The war’s aftermath gave Berlin its first taste of cosmopolitanism. In a clever bit of social engineering, Elector Friedrich Wilhelm (called the Great Elector; r 1640–88) managed to quickly increase the number of his subjects by inviting foreigners to settle in Berlin. Some Jewish families arrived from Vienna, but most of the new settlers were Huguenot refugees from France. By 1700, one in five locals was of French descent.

Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980
by Rick Perlstein
Published 17 Aug 2020

Another case involved little Hillsdale College, a conservative school in Michigan that the Crane brothers had attended. It was proudly racially integrated, with an equal number of male and female students, but like BJU it was refused federal funding—because, as Ronald Reagan raged in a column, “battalions of social engineers” at the Department Health, Education, and Welfare (who “spend all their working hours devising new ways to make schools conform to their view of what education should be”) demanded that, since some students accepted GI Bill funds and loans guaranteed by the federal government, administrators had to sign a statement affirming that the school did not discriminate against women.

Italy
by Damien Simonis
Published 31 Jul 2010

Modern artists and architects have created site-specific projects here: a recent Zaha Hadid installation used Palladio’s blueprint as a matrix for a 3-D fibreglass sculpture of liquid space. Groups of 10 or more can book between April and 14 November at €8 per person. To appreciate gardening and social engin­eering in the Brenta Riviera, stop by nearby Villa Widmann Rezzonico Foscari ( 041 560 06 90; www.riviera-brenta.it; Via Nazionale 420, Mira; adult/student €6/5; 10am-5pm Sat & Sun Nov-Mar, to 6pm Tue-Sun May-Sep). The 18th-century villa originally owned by Persian-Venetian nobility captures the Brenta’s last days of rococo decadence, with Murano sea-monster chandeliers, a frescoed grand salon and an upstairs ladies’ gambling parlour.

Europe: A History
by Norman Davies
Published 1 Jan 1996

This ‘Law of the Three States’, first expounded in the Système de politique positive (1842), provides the key to his elaborate classification of the sciences and to his outline of a new ‘science of society’ which he presented in the Philosophie positive (1850–4). The discipline of ‘social physics’ would permit the reordering of human society along scientific lines. The corps of ‘social engineers’ was armed with the slogan: ‘Savoir pour prévoir, prévoir pour prevenir’ (To know in order to foresee, to foresee in order to prevent). Comte must be regarded as one of the fathers of modern sociology, which he placed at the top of the hierarchy of sciences. At the same time, by insisting on the necessity of institutionalized spiritual power and by launching what was in effect a scientific Church, he ended up in the paradoxical position of turning science into the object of a mystical cult.