sometimes, people quite deliberately keep others in the dark. Yanjie Bian (forthcoming) tells us that officials in China assigned jobs as favours to people they were connected to. This was against the rules and could get people into trouble, so people kept things quiet by using strong ties to people they could trust to keep secrets. I found that secret societies work in a similar way (Erickson 1981). If there is real risk involved, as in political or criminal undergrounds, people build links in the secret society through stronger ties. One result is that secret societies rarely have the lovely cell structure that people think is best for overall organizational secrecy and survival. Most underground networks just grow along the messy lines of pre-existing strong ties, unless some people have enough resources to control this growth and force it into a more hierarchical outcome.
See more posts like this on Tumblr
#underground #illicit organisations #opsec #social tiesMore you might like
This is a great explanation of the power of narrative and various tricks to make narratives more powerful
Switching Ethernet ports between 100 & 10 MHz to generate RF signals in Morse code