Manufacturing Consent

26 February 2013

From a coworker:

Sounds good to me. I cannot wait to see those emails go away. :)

Magically, for the past two weeks, we saw a fairly high percentage (nearing 50%) of our EC2 instances start up with misconfigured local drives. And obviously, this makes the system complain a lot. Getting a chance to dive a little deeper over the weekend, I was able to make it complain a lot more.

The quote above refers to a perfectly rational approach to solving the problem, but it did occur to me that this is basically Propaganda 101: manufacture an unendurable scenario, propose to the public a terrible--but manageable--solution, and let them come to their own conclusion. Step 4, profit.