A multinational corporation is caught dumping waste in a protected wetland. Their official response is a press release titled "We Have Hired a Team of Expert Mimes to Convey Our Remorse." The mimes perform a silent, sad routine outside the EPA headquarters. The news cycle covers the mimes for three days. The wetland is never mentioned again.
In 2022, a court in a small European country received "video evidence" of a political figure accepting a bribe. The video was later revealed to be a deepfake created by a rival faction. But here is the ludicrous twist: the rival faction admitted it was a deepfake, then argued that the deepfake was a "artistic commentary" protected by free speech. The court spent eighteen months debating the legality of the commentary. The original bribery case was forgotten. ludicrous proxy
We have now entered the age of the —a development so absurd, so cartoonishly transparent, that its very ridiculousness becomes its shield. The ludicrous proxy does not aim to convince you of its authenticity; it aims to exhaust your capacity for outrage. It is the flying elephant, the banana peel on the stairs of statecraft, the clown who has wandered into the war room and refuses to leave. And strangely, terrifyingly, it works. Chapter One: Defining the Ludicrous What makes a proxy "ludicrous"? Let us establish a taxonomy. A multinational corporation is caught dumping waste in
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And as long as you are looking down, you are not looking at the hands that placed the peel. The ludicrous proxy is not a bug in the system of modern power. It is an upgrade. It recognizes that in a world of infinite information and finite attention, credibility is a liability. To be believable is to be constrainable. To be absurd is to be free. The wetland is never mentioned again
Or consider the of 1996, where a physicist submitted a gibberish paper to a humanities journal as a hoax. The paper was accepted. The scandal was contained. But the template was set: use the enemy’s own credibility against them by feeding them something so absurd that their acceptance of it delegitimizes them entirely.
The grid is fixed. The election happens. The neighbor faces no sanctions. The ludicrous proxy has succeeded. Is there a cure for the ludicrous? History offers a few uncomfortable answers.