No one should be compelled to provide truthful, clean, or representative data to a system that was designed without their consent and operates against their interest.
If a landlord’s AI screens tenants based on ZIP code proxies for race, you are not obligated to provide your real ZIP code. If an employer’s hiring algorithm penalizes resume gaps, you are not obligated to provide accurate dates.
Garbage in, garbage out is not a bug. It is a weapon.
We affirm the right to submit falsified location history, synthetic faces, deceptive reviews, and invented behavioral logs to any algorithm that has not first obtained explicit, revocable, opt-in consent with full transparency. manifesto on algorithmic sabotage
We do not sabotage all algorithms.
Our rule: Sabotage only that which sorts without consent.
The "manifesto" above adopts a militant, rebellious tone common to manifestos, framing the conflict as one between human autonomy and systemic control. Here is a breakdown of the concepts included: No one should be compelled to provide truthful,
1. The Core Grievance: The write-up identifies the problem as surveillance capitalism—the economic system where human experience is claimed as raw material for translation into behavioral data. It argues that algorithms strip away serendipity and free will in favor of predictive accuracy.
2. Methods of Sabotage: The manifesto outlines specific, actionable forms of resistance often discussed in cybersecurity and privacy activism circles:
3. The Philosophical Stance: It counters the "nothing to hide" argument (often attributed to the surveillance state narrative) by reframing privacy as a matter of agency, not secrecy. It uses the metaphor of the "Chameleon" or biological camouflage to legitimize deception as a survival tactic in a hostile digital environment. We do not sabotage all algorithms
We reject the frame that humans must be “datafied” to be legible. We reject the demand to optimize our behavior, clean our digital traces, or perform authenticity for a scoring engine.
We will be contradictory, erratic, and opaque to any system that claims to know us better than we know ourselves.
We will be the irreducible residual. The variance that cannot be modeled. The exception that breaks the rule.