It should be fairly obvious that communities are dynamic, they either grow, or they shrink. When was the last time you saw a community stay the same... ever.
There are times of population accumulation, and distribution.
Growth leads to being a bigger target, once you have a certain population, it makes sense to target them. If you have a community with access to something, it may make even more sense at a smaller population size.
Shrinking eventually hits an unsustainable participation point where content becomes stale, and/or benefits erode.
This is the standard lifecycle of a community, you either grow, or you shrink, and bots are cheap and provide downward bias with a well resourced adversary.
As soon as it makes sense as a target, you then have disunity, chaos, toxic behavior, trolls, fake accounts, and bots often targeting those that contribute most because volunteer psychology says you stop volunteering when it starts costing you personally.
The agenda is as I previously mentioned and progresses from there. If you are too busy putting out fires, you're too busy to notice important targeted shifts.
Unbounded growth is a fundamental evil. Our system of corporate organization has been creating troll accounts for a lot longer than the Internet has been around (they just call it marketing, but a pig by any other name...).
Nationalism is anachronistic and hasn't been anything but an infected social appendix since the Internet.
I wonder why it is that at the same time, you're so seemingly rose tinted about the situation domestically as you are paranoid about the situation internationally. I don't mean to say that bots, trolls, and psyops don't exist; they do.. But we perform them on our own people anyway and it's not as if the goals of the government are aligned with the people in it anyhow.
The effectiveness of these campaigns is about on par with that of what journalism has unfortunately become - mostly bullshit and everyone knows it but what are ya gonna do? They keep putting it out and it's not like you're going to convince those still locked to the cycle that they're living in a cave.
I'm not rose tinted about anything domestically, I think all the shennanigans with private bankers acting as a leg of government will likely end with us all dead, or at least a vast majority of us.
As for the international concerns, its very hard to not be concerned when you have the chinese with so much history going against them including their own documents, coupled with intentional acts to interfere for that purpose.
You don't run illicit police stations out of your embassy, spying sure, but domestic police forces internationally for shadow ops is another thing. (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63671943)
Then there's other things like targeted blocking of access to accounts due to 'technical issues' when you try to sign up for continuing education (in the US).
For example, GeeTest is required to be used by all California Community Colleges to even be admitted. Of course if you just let it happen it just happens in the background, and there is some whitelisting, but you have CCCApply staff saying you have to run and send a intrusive fingerprint to china if you want to apply for college (in the US). Yeah its been reported to CISA.
Maybe you just don't work in a profession where you see these things on a day-to-day basis. Its pretty in your face everywhere you go, unless of course your living under a rock.
Unfortunately, you are wrong about the effectiveness of the campaigns, and with education you wouldn't have as many people locked into that cycle. The way the psychology works, if you know and can identify it critically, its less effective thanks to reversal.
I don't really have thoughts about this thread - though reading that book from the US Marine Corp could be interesting.
However, your comment made me think: we talk about "cycle breakers" in the context of inter-generational trauma, usually within a family or group. Are we now approaching a critical mass where we need an entire generation (or >50%) of cultural cycle breakers to actually progress social norms and political discourse?
From the history I've read, that number is much lower than 50%.
You only ever really need 1/3 pushing in the right direction at the right time.
Inevitably 1/3 will be passively content to go about their daily lives regardless as long as they remain comfortable, if you can incite 1/3 into various disunity campaigns so they preoccupy most of the attention, and cause destabilization, shifts can occur, and after a shift purges are not uncommon afterwards to solidify a new normal, leaving the remaining 2/3 majority.
Similar to what happened in Hue, Vietnam back in the 70s.
This is what having that 'harmless' information being collected enables. Its dark, but a lot of history is dark.
The answer then is maybe run like the Goretex model where once a business group gets much over 300 people in size you split in two and diverge.
Around 300 people seems to be where the ability to be personally familiar with everyone in the group starts to drop off.
Larger than that it is like another step down the scale: friends->acquaintances->friends of friends->lowlife from around the corner you've seen once or twice and that might have killed your cat.
Then, it is easier to do something with lower regard and care towards another person you don't really know that well and aren't likely to have to socialise or eat with in the future.
This shapes cults as well, there is a name for the number (I can't remember at 2am) and I have seen varying sizes from 200 to 450.
> When was the last time you saw a community stay the same... ever.
I see it a lot . I see and am part of groups of friends (6-12 people) who have existed for decades. They're very stable. People do join and leave over time, but the "churn" rate is very close to zero.
I think this sort of thing is much more unlikely with communities that aren't small, though. The monkeysphere is a thing.
There are times of population accumulation, and distribution.
Growth leads to being a bigger target, once you have a certain population, it makes sense to target them. If you have a community with access to something, it may make even more sense at a smaller population size.
Shrinking eventually hits an unsustainable participation point where content becomes stale, and/or benefits erode.
This is the standard lifecycle of a community, you either grow, or you shrink, and bots are cheap and provide downward bias with a well resourced adversary.
As soon as it makes sense as a target, you then have disunity, chaos, toxic behavior, trolls, fake accounts, and bots often targeting those that contribute most because volunteer psychology says you stop volunteering when it starts costing you personally.
The agenda is as I previously mentioned and progresses from there. If you are too busy putting out fires, you're too busy to notice important targeted shifts.