The Brave and the Bold

by Hans G. Schantz

  “Lord Winslow was having none of McNew’s insolence. ‘What are you waiting for? The Chancellor needs gold and silver to go down. This big rise is making Her Majesty’s Government look bad.’”

  “‘How the bloody hell do you expect us to do that?’ McNew asked him.

  “‘You do know how to trade, don’t you?’

  “‘Aye, that we do,’ McNew snapped back.

  “Lord Winslow ignored the sarcasm. ‘Excellent,’ says he. ‘You have a month to make your plans. I want silver to start falling by May the first.’

  “One of the traders pointed out, ‘That’s a Saturday.’”

  “Lord Winslow glared at him. ‘Very well. You have two extra days. But silver must be falling by Monday, May the third. Oh and gold, too. But you may have until August to make gold fall.’

  Brother Francis had the crowd’s complete attention at this opportunity to glimpse behind the curtain and see how world economic markets were run. I looked around for Rob. A few of the catering staff were in and around, tending to their duties, but Rob was nowhere to be seen.

  “So I says to Lord Winslow,” Brother Francis continued, “‘If I may be so bold, my Lord, why must silver fall first?’

  “He looks down his nose at me and says, ‘I should not have to be telling you, but I shall, nevertheless. Her Majesty’s Treasury wants it to look realistic. Silver leads gold, and it went up more. The end of the bull market, and the start of a bear market must also begin with silver. You have your orders.’ He turned his back and left without another word.

  “Now, everyone’s looking at me to tell them what to do. Of course, with my decades of experience, keen intellect, and insider connections, I know exactly how to make silver fall.

  “I look at my head trader. ‘McNew,’ says I, ‘you heard Lord Winslow. Make silver fall. I’m going to the pub for a pint, and when I get back, I want to hear your plan.’

  “McNew’s eyes shot daggers at me as I walked on past him, but when I came back a hour later, the ol’ blackguard had a scheme outlined. ‘We canna move the market on our own,’ McNew stated the obvious, ‘it’s a raging bull out there. Canna stop that head-on. So, we gotta redirect it, wave a red cape at, use its strenth agin’ it, like judo.’”

  The change in Brother Francis’ personality was simply amazing. In his conversations with me, he was sober, deliberate, based, well-grounded – a man comfortable with who he was and the God whose purpose he served. The man I was watching now was a decadent aristocrat, securing his place in the social hierarchy by reveling in his corruption on a global scale.

  “McNew’s scheme was masterful,” Brother Francis said, sliding expertly from his own refined English accent back to McNew’s thick Scottish brogue. “‘First, we tell everyone that the dollar and pound are in terminal collapse and the bull market’s never gonna end,’ McNew explained. ‘We make the narrative so extreme that the silver bulls all latch on to it, but so over-the-top that the professional traders see right through the hype.’

  “‘Second, we publish reports all about how small investors love silver. Everyone’s buying silver in anticipation of the obvious gains right around the corner. That’s what we tell the public. Can’t hardly keep up with demand. The institutional investors and banks get a different message – the rally is being driven by retail. They’ll get the right message.”

  “I began to see McNew’s plan. ‘The message that the rally is driven by the dumb money,’ I told him.

  “‘Aye,’ McNew confirmed. ‘Third, we revive and push up all the balderdash about manipulation of prices. We need a wee undercurrent of fear along with the euphoria. We need the smart money on edge, so they think if the price drops, that’s us banks re-asserting control. That’ll crater the market for sure if we get the timing just right.’

  “You see the brilliance of McNew’s plan?” Brother Francis asked his growing audience. “Push a hyper-bullish story to excite the small investors, that’s so obviously bollocks that the institutional investors see right through it. Convince everyone we’re in the dumb-money phase of a market peak. Then FUD it all up, inject Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt to trigger a collapse.

  “You!” Brother Francis interrupted his story. I looked behind me. Rob approached at the summons. “Bring me a gin and soda.”

  “I’m sorry sir,” Rob replied, “but the bar is not open yet this morning.”

  “Tonic water on the rocks then, and make it snappy!” Brother Francis bellowed, furious at the inept lout’s defiance.

  “Yes, sir,” Rob departed, submissively.

  “Where was I? Ah, yes,” Brother Francis continued, “the rest of the details were technical. Crafting the reports and releases, seeding them at the right places at the right times. Dodging management and the auditors who were wondering why our trading was running at such a loss as we kept trying to drive the price down and trigger the collapse. We thought we’d forced a sell-off a week early, but the bloody dumb money bought in on the dip! Finally, May 3, right on schedule, silver dropped four dollars. By the end of May it was down ten.

  “Gold was trickier. We had the advantage that silver had already collapsed, but the downside was gold has so much more liquidity. And our story wouldn’t work on gold since everyone knows every Chinaman and Hindu buys gold. We had to change it.

  Just then Rob arrived. “Your tonic water, sir.”

  “About time!” Then Brother Francis looked at me and with Rob in ear shot, he put an arm patronizingly on my shoulder. “Ah, lad! That dinner we were having tonight? Have to call it off! Swing by my cottage around noon.” He turned to Rob, “You, boy! Lunch for this fine young punk and me here at my cottage at noon; think you can handle that?”

  Rob was furious with him. Brother Francis was calling off the attack? What the hell were he and the Albertians doing?

  “Yes, sir,” Rob replied coldly, and stalked off.

  “Can’t find good help in the colonies,” Brother Francis muttered.

  I marveled at how beautifully he’d played Rob, giving him a perfect cover for the cold repressed anger Rob was no doubt feeling at being jerked around by these Albertian…

  “Now where was I?” Brother Francis interrupted my thoughts.

  “So, how did you crash the gold market?” one of his adoring fans asked eagerly.

  “Ah, yes!” Brother Francis continued. “We spiked the financial press with stories about the explosive growth in gold Electronically Traded Funds. How any tosser with a pound and a dial-up modem was buying shares. I mean, assets under management grew from next to nothing a few years ago to something like 50 billion dollars! This was retail with a capital R, dumb money with a capital D. This was the herd rushing in to the slaughterhouse, with a capital H! Imagine all those people buying into the ETFs! What were they going to do with their shares when the euphoria broke? Obviously, sell.

  “Still, gold was harder to crash. When we crashed silver, we got a $100 dip in gold, but it recovered immediately and went even higher! The price finally broke in late August, and by mid-September the bears were finally in control.”

  I was entranced by Brother Francis’ storytelling, while dumbfounded at the change in events. He’d been all for the attack last night, or as much as his religious vows would allow. My next step was clear. Get through the morning and meet him for lunch to get the details on what the hell had made him change his mind. And he’d neatly arranged for Rob to have an excuse to join us.

  “So, Lord Winslow, he drops by again at the end of September,” Brother Francis continued his story. ‘You men,’ the Lord began…

  I heard a woman mutter about sexist, patriarchal, swine.

  “You misses should save it for the masses,” Francis snapped back. “We were all men on the gold desk, there. Unkink your knickers, and let me finish!

  “So his Lordship said to us, he said, ‘You men have served your Queen, and God, and Britain well and Her Majesty is most pleased. You are heroes. Some of you may be criminally charged, and thrown in
prison, if you committed any crimes in carrying out your orders. Her Majesty’s government, of course, will deny any involvement in such sordid and sorry stunts. And we will not defend you. However, other than that, you have our profound gratitude. Your excellent work has averted a greater disaster than you may know.’

  “So McNew looks at Lord Winslow and back at me, and McNew says, ‘Don’t we get a bonus at least for our great work?’

  “Lord Winslow snorted, ‘A bonus? What, did you not make enough betting on the crash in your personal accounts!? You had the resources of one of the biggest financial institutions in the world at your disposal to engineer a crash. I would assume, being smart traders, that you would have profited handsomely from the crash that you knew was coming!’ Lord Winslow stalked out of the room. I’d made a killing, of course – nearly doubled my personal net worth by shorting silver in May and redoubled it and then some shorting gold in September.

  “Only then I noticed, all the traders were just staring at the floor. They didn’t know if our scheme would work. I’d ordered them to put the bank at risk. I’d have landed somewhere else just fine, rank has its privileges, after all, but if they’d failed, they’d have been thrown out on their ears, maybe even prosecuted. I mean, Her Majesty’s government could just unlimber the printing press in the basement if they needed a few billion quid to bail themselves out. Them? Ha! Risk their own hard-earned money? No thank you, my Lord! Not one of the traders on the desk had risked his own money and profited from the crash we engineered!”

  The crowd was laughing at the expense of Brother Francis’ traders. He looked at his watch. “Time to hear from those Americans on the latest plan to keep the rabble in line!”

  The morning plenary was back again in the Morgan Center. Amit carefully checked my badge against the list of authorized attendees, and the security guards let me pass. My job was to make sure the speakers were taken care of. That was silly, because the catering staff were efficient, the water glasses full, and a pad of “Jekyll Island Club Resort” logo paper and a pen already lay neatly arranged by each speaker’s chair. Must be a panel discussion. I pretended the pens needed a better alignment, and I adjusted them. Have to keep the rabble in line, after all. As the speakers arrived, I told them to let me know if they needed anything. Then, I settled into my chair to listen to the presentation.

  “Hi, I’m Dr. Ken Frederick,” the Chairman announced. The name was familiar. I recognized it in the next moment. He was… “I’m the DARPA Program Director for SLIP, DARPA’s innovative program to assure communications dominance and protect our nation and the global order by bringing Security, Location, Information, and Performance – ‘SLIP” – to next generation consumer communications products. I’m here today, though, to talk about DARPA’s previous success, and how it’s being rolled out even now to fundamentally change the way the public interacts with the Internet and to make it easier to gather actionable intelligence about bad actors who threaten order and security.

  “As Director for the Total Information Awareness program, we faced a real challenge. A big problem with universal surveillance, is people don’t like being spied upon. Oh, we can read their emails and texts and listen to their phone calls, and they’ll never know their data is being scanned for keyword triggers and archived for future analysis. When that surveillance becomes intrusive, some people with archaic notions of personal privacy become uncomfortable. That was the original problem with Total Information Awareness.

  “We shifted strategy by funding the LifeLog project – the attempt to create a comprehensive cyber-memory recording a user’s every action, activity, who they meet, what they say, everything. We thought we could get people to accept the idea of a digital personal assistant keeping track of their own life experience. Unfortunately, that idea didn’t get much traction, either. We cancelled LifeLog a couple of years ago in favor of a new and stunningly effective technique that merges traditional media, social interaction, and ubiquitous surveillance. We left out the surveillance part to simply call it ‘Social Media.’”

  One by one, the speakers on the panel explained their role in developing and implementing Social Media. Dr. Alyssa Gottlieb, the polka-dot dress lady with the bulging eyes was there, only now she wore a more formal-looking dark blue dress. “As a cognitive scientist,” she began, “I’ve been responsible for the experimental designs involved in the implementation.” She explained something called A/B testing – give a population of users multiple versions of the same web page. Which version drives longer visits and more interaction? Upgrade the online portal, and experiment with the next generation of potential features to optimize further. “We’re engaging in the most comprehensive human subjects testing campaign in history,” she boasted, “and it’s all going on without the oversight of any Institutional Review Board, because ‘all’ we’re doing is just improving web pages. We’re tweaking the way a website interacts with its users to optimize a stimulus-response feedback loop that addicts users to the dopamine hit they get by participating online.”

  “Just like a lottery is effectively a tax on people too stupid to understand basic probability,” the Homeland Security official on the panel explained, “Social Media is surveillance on people too stupid to realize we’re monitoring them. It overcomes the public’s objections to surveillance. When the head doctors get it tweaked just right, Social Media actually makes people want to participate in their own surveillance!”

  “It’s a bit like how a vaccine works,” the professor from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab offered. “You don’t have to have 100% of a population vaccinated in order to get the benefit. If 70% to 80% are vaccinated, there’s a kind of herd immunity that will protect the entire population. That’s how Social Media works. If 70%-80% of people are busy documenting and sharing their interactions online, we catch enough of what the remaining 20%-30% are doing to maintain ubiquitous surveillance on everyone. It doesn’t matter if you opt out of social media. If you’re at a party, a meeting, or any activity with more than a handful of people, you’re guaranteed someone there is engaged on social media capturing what you do in their own shared photos and timeline. When you add in the phone, text, and email coverage we have even of those who opt out – it’s 98% of what we’d aimed for back in the Total Information Awareness program. Better yet, the people who scrupulously opt-out of social media can be flagged for extra attention through conventional surveillance methods.”

  During the break, I realized the Civic Circle had not thought through the implications of their scheme. They were so eager to push us all into the “open society” of their brave new world of Social Media that they hadn’t thought ahead to how the tools they were building might be used against them.

  It was just like how Rob had described the mechanism of universal surveillance – they were absolutely confident they would always be in control, so the fact that their data was being collected, too, didn’t concern them. The architects of this Social Media concept didn’t realize that putting everyone’s data on public display was a two-edged sword. The masses’ data would be on display for the elite, true, but the elite’s data would be on display for the masses. Could the elite hide their perversions, their contempt, and their arrogance as they used Social Media and wrestled for approval within their own social circles without revealing themselves to society at large? That was too far away in the future for me to be concerned about. For now.

  After the coffee break, we were back for another session.

  “We’ve been talking about Social Media for surveillance and security,” Dr. Gottlieb began again, “but the power of Social Media for social control cannot be underestimated. Social Media cripples attention span and the ability to focus. By constantly bombarding people with external stimuli, they never develop an internal narrative. In extreme cases, their emotional development can be arrested at the level of a three-year-old. They lose the ability to interact and empathize independently of that external stimulus. By controlling that external s
timulus, by curating which messages are emphasized and which are suppressed, we create a classic stimulus-response feedback loop that nudges or even controls their behavior.”

  “The marketing opportunity is incredible,” bragged the fresh-faced young CEO of “Omnibook,” the new division of Omnitia that had rolled up Facebook, MySpace, and FriendFace just months ago. As one of the CEOs of the companies involved in the merger, he was a natural pick to run Omnibook. “We monitor every click, every interaction. We can put cookies on your computer that let us track your online activity, even off the Omnibook website.”

  The CEO explained the technical details of how it all worked. He was another one who seemed on the wrong side of the uncanny valley. It didn’t help that he had a distinct resemblance to Star Trek’s Mr. Data.

  “We make surveillance pay for itself,” he explained. “Psychographic microtargeting lets us identify the specific users most receptive to a customer’s message and place the message right under their noses on our own site or in affiliate advertising on any site on the web.

  “We place your ad for veterinary services only under the noses of pet owners, sell diapers only to those with babies, and promote diet foods specifically to those trying to lose weight. In a week of use, we know who you are better than your mom. We know our users’ wants, their needs, their desires. We know where you shop, what credit cards you carry, where you like to eat, and whether you’re a value or high-end consumer. And we can use that power for good – blocking the flow of bad ideas and bad information, and reinforcing messages of peace, harmony, and inclusion. What we’re building is a revolutionary new way to collect comprehensive information on most of the public. Then, we can use that information to nudge the public in socially desirable directions.”

  Professor Gomulka – or maybe it was the Dean – had told me about the nude photos taken of all freshman attending Ivy League schools in the 1940s into the 1970s. Under the guise of a scientific study of posture, the Civic Circle’s academic agents had gathered blackmail material on a generation of American leaders – the generation filling this very conference room. What they were planning with Omnibook was far, far more invasive and wide reaching: a complete log of everyone’s activities, even their most private thoughts, opinions, and beliefs. And it was using all that information to automatically “nudge” us toward the Civic Circle’s agenda.