Page 18 - Like No Business I Know

Chiropuncture
(Fantastic Transactions 2, 1997)

mark@hotlink.com
10/22/96

Hey old buddy—you know we’re always looking for a way to get
out of our dead-end jobs and rake in the gravy from the sweat of
someone else’s brow. Okay, that was disgusting. :( Here we are sitting
on millions of dollars of computer equipment, databases up one side
of the room and down the other, and what good does it do us? Well,
I was installing a new printer up in a professor’s office this morning,
and I happened to see what he was working on. Being a techie is a
great job for an inquiring mind, if you know what I mean. Nobody
asks you why you are there, and everybody is always glad to see you,
because all the hardware and software is constantly screwing up and
they have been waiting for weeks for someone to fix it.

You know what “social engineering” is? Another fancy term for
manipulating people, making them buy things or go places or act one
way or another based on some laws of human nature. Sometimes it
works, sometimes it doesn’t. Point is that these eggheads in the
university have a grasp on how it can be done, and they write books
on the subject. This guy I’m talking about has reduced a lot of this
theory to equations and algorithms. I sneaked a copy of them and
will fax them to you right away. They can be programmed. So what,
you ask? Why should we do the number-crunching for some
professor, so we can tell him his ideas are either great or they stink?
We don’t. We assume they work, but we use them for a different end.

He is trying to show what effects a given set of policies will have in a
social group. If he wants to test them, he has to wait for ten or
twenty years to see if he was right. That’s crazy! So it occurred to me
that what we could profit from is “reverse social engineering.” Just
like industrial espionage: take something that works, and tear it apart
to see how it was built. Tell you what: you get the programming
done, and I will pull together all the possible factors going into the

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