[Spione] Adam Curtis, on MI5

[James_Nostack]

Adam Curtis is a BBC documentary maker who's spent most of his career looking at how the popular culture of the Cold War was shaped by bureaucratic incompetence, and he's got a really nifty piece up on the origins and development of MI5. 

Curtis's view is that basically MI5 was completely incompetent, but paranoid, so that it imagined its incompetence could only be the result of moles within the organization.  The organization's view of itself as simultaneously brilliant yet continually thwarted was reinforced by a symbiotic relationship with a news media that loved sensationalizing spy stories to obscure the petty, boring human nonsense that happens in any large institution.

Some of the stuff mentioned toward the end has some real nice Spy Vs. Guy stuff.

Incidentally, I heartily recommend Curtis's blog and his documentaries, which are quite well done and interesting.  If you remember James Burke's "Connections" and "The Day the Universe Changed" stuff from PBS in the 1980's, Curtis's body of work is sort of like that, except focused on Twentieth Century dysfunctional super power politics.

[Joshua Bearden]

Thanks for this link!  One of the most entertaining things I read all week.  The new view immediately informed my viewing of American TV Shows Homeland and Scandal.  The first is about domestic terrorism and the second about corruption in the White house.  While both question the wisdom of permitting government security organizations to operate out of public view... both assume that the organizations (and their opponents) are ruthlessly efficient and terrifyingly effective.

Assuming that they are more likely mostly incompetent doesn't ease my discomfort so much as transform it.  I move from feeling outraged to fatalistic. Instead of fearing the government might use my personal information to prosecute me for thought crimes, I now fear that a series of random events might result in me being prosecuted for completely nonsensical reasons. 

But this is a games forum.  I think this topic ought to be explored in game terms. Paranoia,  Steve Jackson's Illuminati series are starting points... but both are getting long in tooth.

Maybe it is time for a game that pits the players against an omniscient but myopic shadowy organization intent not of fighting true enemies of the state but on creating straw bogey's to shoot down in an effort to justify their existence. A player character is someone who was so unfortunate as to be nominated for the role. Any attempt to prove ones innocence will inevitably reveal the existence of a real plot and the challenge is to convince the authorities or the gullible media to focus on the true threat.  An alternate win condition is to simply join the counter conspiracy and assist it in carrying out its nefarious goals. A strategy that based on some of the examples from the history of MI5 that might have a greater chance of success.

I kind of picture a 1 on 1 mechanism similar to Baker's Murderous Ghosts being effective here. The player should have significant agency but with the constant risk of any positive action to clear your name actually have the opposite effect.   The opponent on the other hand will be the source of arbitrary and often inexplicable decrees mirroring the capricious behaviour of Baker's ghosts.

Tell me if you think this misses some better opportunity for ludicrous play within the source material.

[RangerEd]

Joshua,

I think it is important to remember people are still people, no matter the organization. Think of any office, university department, or high school academic club. There are qualifications and selection criteria for entry, which should make them elite in some way. However, from the inside, they all look like that terrible, but frighteningly realistic situation in the movie Idiocracy. Imagine actually being a few orders of magnitude (not a few dollars richer, but a bum versus Bill Gates) smarter and wiser than everyone else around you in an organization while you watch it function ineffectively from your point of view. Would you want that? My jury is still out on that verdict.

Fantasy is fun. I want to hear more about such a game and encourage you to explore those game ideas. Unfortunately, organizational reality is maddening. Conspiracy theory plays to our fears of the unknown and our desire for authority to be in charge, even if they are the bad guys. Conspiracy theories comfort those of us who need all causal chains to trace back to some scapegoat with agency (in the ability to make decisions sense, not a secretive government organization). Sure, there are occasional pricks that shoot to ruin the little guy or seek to benefit without regard for others, but I think those are rare given the power of information these days. Well, or so it seems, anyway. The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.

Complex adaptive system theory informs my argument here. The multi-disciplinary study of such systems offers a more plausible explanation for some injustices than conspiracy does. In some ways, sufficiently large organizations are like the human brain. The guy in a cubical or at the loading dock are like neurons. The neuron is likely unable to understand the entirety of the human brain. Even outsiders to the system sometimes have trouble explaining the emergent phenomena of the system, like sentience or long-term investor confidence. Prosecuting one individual in an interdependent system can be like killing one brain cell for a mistake on a math exam.

Ed

[Ron Edwards]

Shit, I just lost a really good post to a careless finger-swipe.

Ed, if you're interested, check out Spione, my game that James is referencing with his post. It's non-super non-glamorous spy fiction and history, plus a game. Very much as you describe, with the arrant stupidity of the institutions as well as the Cold War as a whole as the source of adversity. Also, neither James nor I are talking about conspiracy theory, which by definition presumes competence on the part of the nefarious entities behind the scenes. An old joke: we know the CIA didn't assassinate Kennedy because he died.

James, Phillip Knightley's biography of Kim Philby uses hilarious KGB documents which show their counter-intelligence had its own Angleton, who continually aggravated his handlers because of fear of double and triple agenting. I bet Curtis could have a field day with that stuff.

Best, Ron

[RangerEd]

Ron,

Thanks, but as an mid-grade leader and planner for a large organization, I play a version of that game too many hours a week as it is! I role-play for novelty, not catharsis. :D

Ed