[Air-L] Robert Gehl and Sean Lawson, Social Engineering

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Emma Briant asks Robert Gehl and Sean Lawson questions about their book,
Social Engineering
on the CaMP anthropology blog today.

https://campanthropology.org

Best,
Ilana

Press blurb: The United States is awash in manipulated information about
everything from election results to the effectiveness of medical
treatments. Corporate social media is an especially good channel for
manipulative communication, with Facebook a particularly willing vehicle
for it. In *Social Engineering*, Robert Gehl and Sean Lawson show that
online misinformation has its roots in earlier techniques: mass social
engineering of the early twentieth century and interpersonal hacker social
engineering of the 1970s, converging today into what they call
“masspersonal social engineering.” As Gehl and Lawson trace contemporary
manipulative communication back to earlier forms of social engineering,
possibilities for amelioration become clearer.

The authors show how specific manipulative communication practices are a
mixture of information gathering, deception, and truth-indifferent
statements, all with the instrumental goal of getting people to take
actions the social engineer wants them to. Yet the term “fake news,” they
claim, reduces everything to a true/false binary that fails to encompass
the complexity of manipulative communication or to map onto many of its
practices. They pay special attention to concepts and terms used by hacker
social engineers, including the hacker concept of “bullshitting,” which the
authors describe as a truth-indifferent mix of deception, accuracy, and
sociability. They conclude with recommendations for how society can
undermine masspersonal social engineering and move toward healthier
democratic deliberation.