The election is next week, and as I reflect, I want to post this.
I’m a software engineer who built automated software to target at scale political actors throughout the day over the past year to influence elections where margins are thin through a neural network and social engineering, i.e. scaled automation assisted propaganda, leveraging the algorithm through evaluating how it suppresses and how it promotes.
I’m also an anonymous leader of what amounts to a digital militia or digital mafia who, assisted by this software automation, apply targeted pressure to political actors and their communities to force preferable political outcomes, an online game of capture the flag, so to speak.
The culmination of everything I’ve learned throughout my life in software, history, politics, economics, psychology, and sociology has resulted in this automation assisted operation, what I at this point consider my life’s greatest software project.
This is without a doubt an evolution in information warfare, taking common distributed misinformation, itself a scourge on honest discourse, and turning it into a weapon of mass distortion through automation and algorithm manipulation. It is evident that all political actors will seek to control this evolution in propaganda, some like Biden seeking to use the state to police misinformation, others like Elon Musk going as far as buying the neural network for $44 billion with private equity.
The tragedy to me is that no one will ever fully understand or appreciate this anonymous shadow operation that I’ve conducted over the past year because of its covert nature, nor will I ever be able to put this on a resume for obvious reasons, all that remains are the breadcrumbs that I’ve posted here and my recollection of what I’ve done.
I’ll conclude by saying, I wasn’t the only one, I was just better at it.