| Complexity really is incredibly powerful. With it you can bury unspeakable evils in plain sight. It has wide applications too: you can obfuscate everything from financial issues to political events. For example, pretend the article of the Charleston white supremacist mass murderer said the following: "Roof was involved in the controversy of the events of June 17, 2015. After a flurry of media attention, he became the lead defendant in the trial United States v. Roof (2:15-cr-00472), which was noted for the request for a bench trial..." The above is entirely correct, and written in a neutral, flat tone, but it completely misrepresents the situation. By noting tiny, irrelevant details like the request for a bench trial and the criminal number, the article both becomes uninteresting and hides the truth. If you read the snippet you wouldn't get the idea that he was a mass murderer. I read something earlier by James Risen about the CIA covering up a number of horrible things. One quote I found very interesting: "But after I filed the first story, it sat in the Times computer system for days, then weeks, untouched by editors. I asked several editors about the story’s status, but no one knew. Finally, the story ran, but it was badly cut and buried deep inside the paper. I wrote another one, and the same thing happened. I tried to write more, but I started to get the message. It seemed to me that the Times didn’t want these stories." They didn't even have to threaten to not publish it - all they had to do was obfuscate it! Throw in a few complex words and kick it off the front page and behold, nobody will read it, even if it contains explosive information. |