Robert Gehl and Sean Lawson - Book talk: Social Engineering

Machine Agencies is an experiment between human and machine intelligences. Our research group encourages cooperation and play, resisting the antagonism of more instrumental approaches of AI. We engage with posthumanism, experience design, and public policy to find new formats, methods, and commons to sustain just, fair, and better worlds.

Machine Agencies / Algorithmic Media Observatory

Gehl & Lawson discuss their new book, Social Engineering, and its history from early twentieth-century propaganda to today's online cons

The United States is awash in manipulated information about everything from election results to the effectiveness of medical treatments. Corporate social media is an especially good channel for manipulative communication, with Facebook a particularly willing vehicle for it. In <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/social-engineering" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Social Engineering</a>, Robert Gehl and Sean Lawson show that online misinformation has its roots in earlier techniques: mass social engineering of the early twentieth century and interpersonal hacker social engineering of the 1970s, converging today into what they call “masspersonal social engineering.” As Gehl and Lawson trace contemporary manipulative communication back to earlier forms of social engineering, possibilities for amelioration become clearer.The authors show how specific manipulative communication practices are a mixture of information gathering, deception, and truth-indifferent statements, all with the instrumental goal of getting people to take actions the social engineer wants them to. Yet the term “fake news,” they claim, reduces everything to a true/false binary that fails to encompass the complexity of manipulative communication or to map onto many of its practices. They pay special attention to concepts and terms used by hacker social engineers, including the hacker concept of “bullshitting,” which the authors describe as a truth-indifferent mix of deception, accuracy, and sociability. They conclude with recommendations for how society can undermine masspersonal social engineering and move toward healthier democratic deliberation.Robert W. Gehl is F. Jay Taylor Endowed Research Chair of Communication at Louisiana Tech University and the author of Weaving the Dark Web (MIT Press).Sean T. Lawson is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Utah, Non-Resident Fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation &amp; Future Warfare at the Marine Corps University, and author of Cybersecurity Discourse in the United States.

The After Optimization Seminar Series is run by the <a href="https://www.amo-oma.ca/en/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Algorithmic Media Observatory </a>and the <a href="https://machineagencies.org/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Machine Agencies</a> based out of the <a href="https://speculativelife.com/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Speculative Life Cluster</a> at the <a href="https://milieux.concordia.ca/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology</a> at <a href="https://www.concordia.ca/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Concordia University</a> in Montreal.

Our {communityGuidelinesLink} describe the sort of content we prohibit on Eventbrite. If you suspect an event may be in violation, you can report it to us so we can investigate.

To report other categories of prohibited or illegal content, submit {link}

Robert Gehl and Sean Lawson - Book talk: Social Engineering

More events from Machine Agencies / Algorithmic Media Observatory

Follow organizers to get events picked for you

Still looking for the right event?

Explore all online events to browse and filter by date, category, and more.

Robert Gehl and Sean Lawson - Book talk: Social Engineering

More events from Machine Agencies / Algorithmic Media Observatory

Follow organizers to get events picked for you

You might also like...

Sign-In for personalized recommendations

Still looking for the right event?

Explore all online events to browse and filter by date, category, and more.