obfuscatia

I think perhaps I have been focusing too heavily on the wool-related aspects of the case and negelecting to join the dots between other case-related activities. In effort to redress this imbalance I'd like to outline my knowledge of the movement known as the Obfuscationsts.

It is believed that the group began in the early fifties US of A with links to the military. Post-war analysis showed that deception tactics were vital to the military success and, once the troops had come home, stories were soon in the air about how some maverick had planned the perfect dupe and gained a critical victory for his batallion. Equally, when a soldier fell, it was always due to the duplicity of the enemy rather than an error on a comrade's part or just sheer bad luck with the odds of a war theatre.

Long story short, in the post-war era there were lots of draftees who had learned to cultivate and depend on deception techniques for their survival who were now looking to integrate back into society. This is how many of the ideas at the root of the Obfuscationist movement came into the public domain. Some of these ex-servicemen went to college and others found steady jobs working for the man, many of them ending up in the growing sales and marketing industry during a boom time for mass production. Their learned instinct to capitalise on weakness and expand territory made them particularly suited to mass-maketing and time has revealed a great overlap between obfuscationist thinking and advertising techniques.

Some of those who drifted into the college scene at this time are likely to have been involved in the devlopment of the op-art experiments noted earlier. By the time the hippie/'Nam north/south split happened in the sixties, ofuscationist ideology was widely permeated throughout the civilian mindset. The movement, or at least its ideology, appears to trascend politics. Photos from Vietnam show grafittied obfuscationst symbology in the jungles of SE Asia as well as on college campuses and on placards and pin badges at peace festivals and protest in the US at a similar time.

John Nash's game theory crystallised many fundamentals of the Obfuscationist modus operandi and was soon latched onto by the marketeers to promote the idea of the anti-Droitwich fix. Worthless items sold for a high price, elevated to must-have status through marketing techniques. Among other things, such groups are known to hold responsibility for pointlessly overdeveloped items of basic functionality such as the five bladed razor and the electric toothbrush, pitching them to the public under a shroud of faux personality. Current projections estimate that products will be named after people within 5-10 years. In 20-25 years is is expected that people will be named after products.