Maximum Sales Bay of Exception

    So today I read few essays I chose at random, which immediately seemed to tie together in a really strangely convenient way. I say "seemed" because I can't tell if I actually found a neat way to tie these together, or if instead of tying them together, the string is doing this:

    I started with Amy Ireland's recent The Infinite Sales Bay of the Universe, an essay about habit and novelty. Habit, it goes, is a backwards-looking organization of a set of events, it becomes an "extrapolation of the past and the present it is instantiated in into the future," [1]. If a habit is a projection of the past into the future, the inverse of habit is novelty. Novelty is the unforeseeable, impossible to expect, and "sometimes catastrophically unpredictable." The comfort of habits is broken down by the impossibility to fit novelty into a linear passage of time, since novelty is outside of human control. The force of novelty and creativity is characterized as a force that exists outside of human control, a force that usually needs to be channeled, to flow onto the page with the human as a mere conduit. As Ireland stresses, even though novelty can represent artistic potential, novelty can just as easily present a threat.

    A realm of pure novelty, pure unforeseeability, pure destruction of habit, is a space which Ireland deems "The Zone." A Zone is a familiar trope which is essentially an area in which the world, especially time and space, fail to conform to human expectations. The Zone is place or a time which is full potentiality and full threat. Like every novelty, this Zone destroys habits, upends any notion of dependability, and (as noted in Stalker, the film from which The Zone takes its name) "is a very complex maze of traps."

    Benedict Singleton's Maximum Jailbreak is perhaps the founding text of the modern bio-cosmist movement, but more interestingly examines the world of "traps," [2] A trap is a model of the victim's behavior, a map of the victims habits. This trap is the forceful introduction of an unforeseeable event into the victims life, an attack which uses the helpful map of the victim's past actions projected into the future. Whether the habit is a tendency to eat certain types of food (as in a rat poison), react to bait (snap trap), or go certain places (glue trap), a trap weaponizes and destroys habits. The key element to traps, Singleton argues, is cunning design; a type of design which allows the victim to entrap itself, to strangle itself struggling against the snare. This cunning design is the joining of material craft with intrigue, behavior modelling, and military tactics. As Amy Ireland notes in Infinite Sales Bay, the two main realms of novelty are "art and war." War, military tactics, require fighting against the potential threats an enemy could manifest, whether those threats are known, unknown, or "unknown unknowns." Novelty presents a military threat, and war becomes an attempt to preempt the future, to prevent habits from being exploited.

    Setting a trap requires an understanding of the mechanisms of the trap. To lay a mousetrap, you need to know where the mouse should step, how the snap works, and how the parts connect (at least in a generalized way). Interestingly, this further means that setting a trap, understanding a trap, means knowing how to open the mechanisms and escape the trap. Singleton therefore recommends a "generalized escapology" to learn how humans can avoid their greatest traps, which he figures as death and constraint to the planet Earth. This generalized escapology is extrapolating out the principles of trap design, towards understand traps and engineered behavior as a category.

The null choice is a social engineering technique which represents the artificial flattening of options available to the victim, and presenting the engineer's solution as the least bad option, often framed in ways such as "is there any better solution?." A classic example of a null choice in a security setting (taken from PenTest Partners, a security firm) is as follows:

"The boss is expecting me but he’s on the road and won’t be in till later, he asked you put me into a meeting room till he gets here.” This may not look like a null choice but it has the hallmarks of it. If you are the target you are faced with several options;

1. Reject the request, possibly upset the boss, and make the visitor feel unwelcome. This choice is unpalatable to most reception staff whose primary role it is to treat visitors well.
2. Track down the boss and ask him to verify the individual, but the choice has been made far more unpalatable by the fact the boss is “on the road” and thus harder to contact, and the visitor is right her in front of them. If the target “trusts” the person who is telling them that they have been given permission, it may be rude to question their information. Is the reception even capable of tracking down the boss?
3. Make the visitor wait, this is often unpalatable as reception areas unless designed to be holding zones do not often have much capability to be holding pens for unchecked visitors. They clutter up the aesthetic.
4. Let the visitor into a vacant meeting room, it solves several of the problems and keeps everyone happy. It has the least unpalatable outcome for all parties. It’s a Win/Win! Right? Wrong.

As noted in the post, "the only winning move is not to play"-- to refuse to struggle against the snare, and work your way out laterally instead. As the post is in a security setting, the way out of this trap is to extricate yourself from the situation by politely insisting that you need to validate the visitor. The target needs to understand their position in this behavioral trap in order to escape.

    The final essay of the day was about the "State of Exception" as formulated by Giorgio Agamben  [4]. Finding its legitimacy in the self-evident "necessity" of warding off "imminent danger resulting from foreign war or armed insurrection," the State of Exception serves to transfer power to the executive, lest the state be endangered. Alternatively called "Martial Law" or "State of Siege," the Stage of Exception is often a response to an unforeseen event; notably for Americans, Martial Law was declared as a response to the Civil war, and the President was granted vastly greater powers as a result of World War One, the Great Depression, World War Two, the Cold War, and the War on Terror. These powers—especially the Espionage, Overman, and Patriot Acts—served largely to curtail freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Each time the power of the executive was expanded, the winning argument was one of necessity. Its obvious that in exception times, a country must take exceptional measures. The State of exception is an a null choice on a mass scale.

    For really, "is there any better solution," other than relying on the executive to protect the people from the threat of bodily harm? Is there a better solution, other than empowering the government to fight against "Unknown unknowns," as Donald Rumsfeld called them? Is there another option, besides martial law, to fix the "looting and rioting" in the wake of the murder of George Floyd? A novelty, a trap, is most often found in art and the military. Maybe the only winning move is not to play.

[1] The Infinite Sales Bay of the Universe - Amy Ireland

[2] Maximum Jailbreak - Benedict Singleton

[3] The Null Choice - Pen Test Partners

[4] A Brief History of the State of Exception - Giorgio Agamben