It's called Facility 67096. In China. The best,
brightest, fluent in both book and slang English, as well as being the most
Internet savvy are recruited by the People's Liberation Army. Here, they
digitally manipulate the West by producing some of the most contrived
'comments' for the social media craze. The idea being that the next war, a
digital war, can begin when the West goes into an upheaval over what everyone
else is thinking (via these contrived comments) inserted surreptitiously to
manipulate retail sales, services, social structure, and, importantly, politics.
These recruits are given luxury housing, high
salaries, access to trendy fashion, gourmet food in exchange for 12h days
making up the most outlandish stuff to insert into social media. Marks (muscle) and Lip (geek) lead
a small team trying to learn more about what goes on inside this manicured
compound. What they learn leads them to set up a near apocalyptic meltdown of
the Facility, weakening China's impending war effort.
I had a number of issues with this book. First, Buschi gives the reader
a really long and detailed account of just what is needed to screw up the minds
of the Internet-obsessed West. Second, Marks and Lip (who were sort of a
mismatched Mutt and Jeff in Buschi's Proportionate
Response) are little more than a sidelight to all the goings on inside the
Facility. Third, this book could've been cut by well over half and inserted
into some Internet Computing magazine providing a cautionary tale about how
social media can be (and is) manipulated; but it probably wouldn’t have the
same exposure. But seriously, do you reeeeeeeally believe all those reviews or
comments (or even waste your time) at the bottom of some many websites? If
anything, this book should make the reader either mad that such manipulation is
going on or angry that what was essentially (to me at least) a short story
turned into a droning lecture. After reading Proportionate
Response (not a bad effort, but for reasons beyond my grasp, is our 3rd most
read review), I thought more Marks/Lip might be pretty entertaining. Not any
more.
East Coast Don
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