The above link is an interesting and potentially useful story.
One thing about social engineering (about most any human-behavior-related topic, really) is that, though boiling things down into simple little memes seems useful, it rarely is. The lessons we learn from situations and actions are generally not as important as those situations and actions themselves (the medium is the message, get it?).
I’m saying that guidelines are too rarely applicable. If a one line piece of advice is to be useful, it must be acted upon. To be acted upon, it must be incorporated into one’s behavior set, or used as a stimulus for new ideas which will turn into actions. How often do you put lessons to work in that way?
Handing someone a quote should be like handing them a gun: “Here, you can use this to blow someone away, transform your life, change the world,” that kind of thing. Handing someone 50 quotes is seldom useful.
Each meme can work for you or not. It depends on who you are and how you use it. Being able to recognize and discard what doesn’t work is important, but being able to really succeed with something requires a lot of investment and effort.
So here’s some advice: using information = brainstorm > generate ideas > act upon them. Now, are you going to take it all the way or leave it here? Have you already decided?
We can’t let our idea economy turn us into into ReadOnly sloths. Information not acted upon is detritus.
For more awesome examples of social engineering, have you heard of the Center for Tactical Magic?
One of my absolute favorites: How to Subvert Institutional Authority through Graffiti and Other Tactics in 13 Simple Steps.
The previous post is one of the most powerful quotes I’ve ever heard, and one I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. A dangerously poignant example of that sort of cultural engineering is this. Live and breathe Obama, be Obama better than him. Give me the face, I’ll give you the words.
“It doesn’t take long to realize that he’s totally synced up with Obama… . He has access to everything and everybody. There’s a lot weighing on his shoulders.”
He has mastered Obama’s writing style — short, elegant sentences — and internalized his boss’s tendency toward reflection and ideological balance.
He helps shape almost every word Obama says, yet the two men have formed a concert so harmonized that Favreau’s own voice disappears.
Obama sometimes jokes that Favreau is not so much a speechwriter as a mind reader.
“You should always aim to be as skillful as the most professional of government agencies. The way you live, conceive and market what you do should be as well thought out as a government coup. It’s a campaign, it has nothing to do with art.”
Answers to every “how” you can ask. This is fantastic juice, whatever your politics are.
“In consulting with Jeep, Rapaille discovered through his focus-grouping sessions that the code for Jeep is “horse,” i.e. that “horse” was the unconscious association people made with their Jeeps. So he advised Jeep to make the headlights round instead of square, to look like eyes, and apparently sales picked up. Elsewhere he discovers that the French consider cheese alive, while Americans consider cheese dead, and advises Kraft to emphasize sterility in its cheese advertising (this is why you now see pre-shredded cheese in the supermarket, packaged in re-sealable bags—because placing a re-sealable bag in a fridge creates an unconscious association with placing a body bag in a morgue, and assures the American mind that the cheese is dead and therefore safe to eat!)”
“The chaos magical view of self is that it is based on the same random capricious chaos which makes the universe exist and do what it does. The magical self has no center; it is not a unity but an assemblage of parts, any number of which may temporarily club together and call themselves “I.”
