Political Memes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung

The state someones randomly mess with your stuff to ruin your day. Spread rumors to your spouse about you "cheating", making your fellow revolutionaries suspect you of being a government agent, rearrange items in your house to gaslight you, beam radiation at you. You know about all the "crazy people" claiming to be persecuted by the govovernment, some may actually be real. Serbia has used energy weapons against protestors, there are videos on it. They could go in front of your house and point their energy beam right at you. Sounds so bizzare, but its real.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed-energy_weapon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-range_acoustic_device

On Zerzetzung:

As applied by the Stasi, Zersetzung is a technique to subvert and undermine an opponent. The aim was to disrupt the target's private or family life so they are unable to continue their "hostile-negative" activities towards the state. Typically, the Stasi would use collaborators to garner details from a victim's private life. They would then devise a strategy to "disintegrate" the target's personal circumstances—their career, their relationship with their spouse, their reputation in the community. They would even seek to alienate them from their children. [...] The security service's goal was to use Zersetzung to "switch off" regime opponents. After months and even years of Zersetzung a victim's domestic problems grew so large, so debilitating, and so psychologically burdensome that they would lose the will to struggle against the East German state. Best of all, the Stasi's role in the victim's personal misfortunes remained tantalisingly hidden. The Stasi operations were carried out in complete operational secrecy. The service acted like an unseen and malevolent god, manipulating the destinies of its victims.

It was in the mid-1970 that Honecker's secret police began to employ these perfidious methods. At that moment the GDR was finally achieving international respectability. [...] Honecker's predecessor, Walter Ulbricht, was an old-fashioned Stalinist thug. He used open terror methods to subdue his post-war population: show trials, mass arrests, camps, torture and the secret police.

But two decades after east Germany had become a communist paradise of workers and peasants, most citizens were acquiescent. When a new group of dissidents began to protest against the regime, Honecker came to the conclusion that different tactics were needed. Mass terror was no longer appropriate and might damage the GDR's international reputation. A cleverer strategy was called for. [...] The most insidious aspect of Zersetzung is that its victims are almost invariably not believed.

...the Stasi often used a method which was really diabolic. It was called Zersetzung, and it's described in another guideline. The word is difficult to translate because it means originally "biodegradation." But actually, it's a quite accurate description. The goal was to destroy secretly the self-confidence of people, for example by damaging their reputation, by organizing failures in their work, and by destroying their personal relationships. Considering this, East Germany was a very modern dictatorship. The Stasi didn't try to arrest every dissident. It preferred to paralyze them, and it could do so because it had access to so much personal information and to so many institutions.

The US's future might not be necessarily arresting everyone, plane ticket randomly cancelled, your purchases would suddenly fail, oops your internet went down, oh no your brand new phone suddenly dies. Random Gas Leak. Randomly have Carbon Monoxide in your house, and then all 3 of your CO detectors simultaneously fail for some reason. Random food poisoning when you eat outside. If its targeted enough and they know your routes, they could make the traffic lights turn red faster while you're in the middle of crossing the street. Or make it malfunction so that it shows green while oncoming traffic also shows green.

They can stage so many different "accidents". Not even necessarily lethal, just annoying enough to break your mind.

Welcome to the future, the dystopia is already here.

Not me personally, more like my employer. For me it's about being the "responsible adult" in the room, but what that really means is some sort of magic where I'm emotionally detached and invested at the same time.

Long term, being the responsible adult means to recognize hat the situation is untenable. For my employers it means, avoid trouble (with parents).

A clever reply. Maybe it shuts them up for a moment (unlikely), but then they go to their parents and say "teacher called me a nazi!" As I said, you cannot win.

Yeah, Apple changed theirs to a water pistol a few years ago and then later android, fb etc followed suit so it's everywhere now