The title of this post prompted me to write this - it's a theory I've had for some time, but haven't written about it since the days of Voat.

Let me start with a basic example to set the ground work:

1. you're in vacation in Italy, from NYC
2. an Italian man sees you have an NYC belt buckle and decides to mess with you
3. knowing NYC people flip each other off, he flips you off, just to get you to flip home off back
4. you respond by flipping him off

The Italian man has remote controlled you, by exploiting some basic knowledge about you.

Taking it to the Next Level

Secondly, let me use a more complex example to lay the framework for understanding this risk:

You receive the following email:

Hey <name>, you don't know me, but I got your email from <somebody you knew when you worked at <prior job>. I'm writing this to let you know that <your wife's name> has been cheating on you. A friend of mine recognized her during a gang bang and told me... [continues, goes into more detail, knows about a private tattoo on her body and even mentions some kinky things she's into, etc.] (things gleaned from audio spying via your mobile phone, social media, etc.)

If you're married, then even reading this hypothetical email probably triggered some parasympathetic reactions in your body; imagine how you'd feel, if you received a message like this...

The aforementioned example is extraordinarily simplistic, compared to what I'll get into, because A) the secret details are actually pretty basic, B) the result is most likely not deadly, and C) ... the really important bit ...

C) ... the M.O. of such an attack works from a basic premise, namely that the victim will likely react emotionally to the purported news that his wife is cheating on him in a really nasty way. But, people get over such things, dump their wife, talk through it and realize it was an elaborate scam, esp when they hear on the news that others have received such messages, etc.

Where Things Get Truly Scary

I posit that there exists sequences of words and social cues, for each person, which will cause that person to take each specific action within their capability, including committing violence and/or suicide.

Think of the secrets that make up your ego, the littlest things that you feel, have shame about, your nervous ticks, things you're afraid of, things you regret deeply, people you miss, moments in your life that you hate, your secret mortal enemies, envies you hold, etc., down to the deepest and most intricate detail.

Imagine something, with hyper intelligence, using that kind of knowledge, gleaned via what would essentially amount to a tempest attack on the human mind (e.g., sending minute signal modulations from your phone's antenna to a super computer with all fMRI and other telemetry data in existence) that, combined with the full corpus of available digital data available about you, to construct a sequence of words and social cues, whether all at once, or over a long period of time, through conversation. Now, imagine that happening to everyone in the US, all at once.

I believe this kind of attack will happen, at some point, and it'll likely work from the inside out, first using secret information to drive couples apart, and then to drive society into a state of unthinkable chaos.