—End of Article—
The press conference is broadcast globally. Pundits spend 48 hours debating: Was that a threat? A joke? A sign of mental instability? A coded message? The cybersecurity report is buried on page A12. The badger becomes a meme. The meme is shared by the hostile neighbor’s disinformation bots. Within a week, a poll shows that 30% of the coastal nation’s citizens believe "the badger thing was probably just a prank, bro." ludicrous proxy
The Cold War gave us the —the genuine believer who unknowingly served a foreign power. The ludicrous proxy is the useful moron : an agent so transparently cynical that no one could possibly believe them, and yet the machinery of media and law must treat them as a legitimate actor. Chapter Three: The Digital Accelerant The internet did not invent the ludicrous proxy, but it perfected it. Consider the following contemporary archetypes: —End of Article— The press conference is broadcast
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. A sign of mental instability