WWII-Era Field Manual on Sabotage Is Suddenly One of the Internet's Most Popular Downloads
404 Media reported on the online surge in popularity of a World War II-era manual: Simple Sabotage Field Manual.
Jason Koebler
The manual was declassified by the CIA in 2008, and in recent days, it's surged up the list of downloads from Project Gutenberg.
It offers up "ways to train normal people to be purposefully annoying telephone operators, dysfunctional train conductors, befuddling middle managers, blundering factory workers, unruly movie theater patrons, and so on. In other words, teaching people to do their jobs badly."
Some gems:
- “Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.”
- “Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.”
- “‘Misunderstand’ orders. Ask endless questions or engage in long correspondence about such orders. Quibble over them when you can.”
Plus my personal favorite, which would be my biggest contribution to the resistance:
- “Make ‘speeches.’ Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your ‘points’ by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate ‘patriotic’ comments.”
I could bring the entire system down from the inside using this one.
404 Media had a pretty good idea why it might be so popular right now, and I tend to agree with them:
It is impossible to say why this book is currently going viral at this moment in time and why it may feel particularly relevant to a workforce of millions of people who have suddenly been asked to agree to be “loyal” and work under the quasi leadership of the world’s richest man, have been asked to take a buyout that may or may not exist, have had their jobs repeatedly denigrated and threatened, have suddenly been required to return to office, have been prevented from spending money, have had to turn off critical functions that help people, and have been asked to destroy years worth of work and to rid their workplaces of DEI programs.