© Studio Incendo under CC 2.0

Every major tech company has a team of “white hat” hackers whose main task is to find vulnerabilities and anticipate attacks, by taking the role of the attacker. These teams are there to defend the operation of some tech product such as a web service or piece of hardware like an iphone. The white hat hackers seek out weaknesses and flaws, in order to strengthen the defenses of the system.

What if you’re trying to secure a political movement? That’s far more complex and challenging. Why? The answer goes back to the analogy about “open systems” outlined by physicist and philosopher Sir Karl Popper in his essay “On Clocks and Clouds.” The analogy goes like this; clocks, even if they are tremendously complicated, are logical and self-contained systems that work in a certain way and cannot perform any other function. They either work or they don’t. Web sites and iphones are clocks.

Clouds are systems, but fundamentally more complex, and things go into the system, things go out, and any change in its contents, even just the passage of time, changes how the whole system works. Moreover, with all that complexity, new characteristics ‘emerge.’

Because ‘things go in, thing go out,’ political movements are clouds. So to keep them ‘working’ is much more difficult than to keep a clock running on time. Still, a cloud has a certain shape, it has an identity. We don’t want some ill wind to dissipate the cloud we have gathered.

If Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement is involved in a strategic game of chess with Beijing, it is a cloud-like game where the chessboard keeps changing, the number of pieces and what they can do keeps changing, and the rules of the game are not known for certain. Yet everyone keeps playing for their lives.

Hong Kong’s protesters can undoubtedly win this game. The adversary has vast resources of money, weapons, and power to compel people to do things. But the protesters have deeper resources of genuine belief in the cause, the arc of history on their side, the depth of popular support of people emboldened by every affront to their freedom, and the immense creativity and intellectual resourcefulness of people who are doing this out of sincere belief — not fear or greed.

But Hong Kong has enough cheer-leading. It has enough cool posters. It has more than enough people willing to work and take heroic action. What it needs more of is strategists. Development of political strategy, like learning to play piano, is something that has to be done behind the curtain before it is rolled out on the public stage.

The way this operation works is that people step back and look at the movement as it has evolved in this stage and put themselves in the shoes of Beijing. Ask as a strategist: how can we fuck this up? How can we break them? How can we ruin and destroy these kids? What would Beijing do? Its advocates need people who can think very critically, and brainstorm on how it can be ruined, in order to forestall that ruin.

You do this with your white hat on. But it is critically important work. Few are actually willing to do it. You can be damn sure that Beijing’s intelligence organs are doing something similar — war-gaming out how this could go badly for them, and figuring out how to mitigate those outcomes.

It’s much more specialized work than it appears to be at first glance. But there are specializations of the mind that go along with different occupations. Lawyers can see things from someone else’s point of view to anticipate their defensive moves. Journalists can ignore social norms in order to ask people rude but necessary questions. And the white-hat political saboteur can imagine strategic moves from the point of view of someone whose values are completely opposed to their own — to the point of mutual destruction. That’s a certain kind of person.

Identifying and neutralizing important threats is not just about mere tactical issues. Tactical matters are things like countering fake news, coping with police methods like kettling and tear gas, timing and locating events, etc.

This other dimension of work concerns top-level strategy. What are the vulnerabilities and the weaknesses of the movement that Beijing can exploit? How can Beijing split public support? How can they peel off the upper middle class, people who work for mainland companies, or sympathetic foreign allies? What are the vulnerabilities of timing? How can they exhaust attention and emotion and cause distraction? How can the movement be bought off? What can be done to give a convincing perception that Beijing has agreed to the demands?

If you think the answers are obvious, you’re not striving with all of your life force to destroy this movement. But someone else is. And these things have to be thought through in advance, not debated in an online forum after the opponent has moved his rook.

The way the protest movement is [dis]organized — leaderlessly — there has been a tendency to hash out important issues by an egalitarian but crude means of online voting. Moreover, there is an ideology of “no denunciation” within the ranks, that many agree is working well, although it has enabled escalating violence and destructiveness.

Most people sympathetic to the cause are okay with that. But a side effect is that it quashes critical voices in the name of unity. Some of the most prominent advocates of the movement are also aggressive in their hectoring of internal dissent. Paradoxically, it just results in denunciation of critical thought.

While ordinary people should contribute in ordinary ways, certain specialists should be afforded the privacy to conduct thought experiments challenging strategy, in a kind of laboratory of critical thought. This is sort of like ‘intellectual defensive weapons development.’ People need to have a clear space for this work where they are not denounced as traitors.

The protest movement is leaderless not by choice, but by necessity. In a world of 360-degree internet transparency, leaders are not only ‘decapitated’ by adversaries, but also sniped by allies, and subject to ferocious scrutiny and no small amount of jealousy. So the movement has to adapt and function without leaders. But where this becomes almost impossible is in the formation and promulgation of real strategic direction.

In order to make that work, we don’t need to accept the leadership of pan-dems, ‘spoiled kids’ like Joshua Wong, or anyone else. But we do have to encourage and cultivate the formation of ideas.

Moreover, it’s important that this kind of work does not get litigated in public. Let there be a quiet place in this movement for strategic thinking. Let it not be LIHKG. And let us offer to it our blessing. Because strategic innovation is the single most important force multiplier that Hong Kong will ever have.