Since its launch five weeks ago, the Brookings Order from Chaos blog has received countless plaudits, and not just by its creators and their mothers. It has also been lauded by aspiring contributors, impressionable interns, and readers mistakenly assuming that it is a side project of the influential death metal band of the same name. In light of this success, the blog is growing and now looking for a new team member.
The new Truth Researcher and Online Logic Legitimator (TROLL) will lead the blog’s effort to reinforce the Brookings worldview, push its narrative, and counter malicious falsehoods spread by competing think tanks, media outlets, and academics jealous of its success.
This new position is a very modern response to an age-old problem. Outside forces, often supported by foreign powers, have ruthlessly sought to undermine the reputation of the blog’s research and commentary. A few effete bourgeois intellectuals and their various useful idiots have even suggested that the blog’s writers “are entitled to their own opinions, but NOT entitled to their own facts.”
Hogwash. In the internet age, what are facts? As savvy media innovators in Russia have recently shown, new technologies and organizational structures can engineer individualized high-quality facts with assembly-line efficiency. At Brookings, we know a promising new business model when we see it. Our job is no longer simply to describe reality–we will create it à la russe. And that requires a new type of Brookings researcher. The job posting is here and below.
BASIC FUNCTION
The successful TROLL candidate will spearhead our hybrid counteroffensive brigade, ensuring that the blog and its principals are always depicted in a glowing, ideally adulatory, light. The incumbent will use traditional and social media to respond to unfavorable or otherwise inconvenient accounts of the blog’s activities and other attacks (sometimes called “truths” by those enslaved by outdated concepts of “evidence”). He or she will seek to expose the intellectual, political and ethical decline of our adversaries. The TROLL will also promote the blog as the humble, but besieged, champion of moral rectitude, traditional values, and personal vanity selfless modesty that it so clearly is.
PRINCIPAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
55% Reality Denial Operations
- Uses Twitter, Facebook, and other social media to sow discord and infect public opinion by provoking arguments, excoriating critics, and posting incendiary and extraneous commentaries.
- Works in small groups to infiltrate newsgroups, chat rooms, and blogs to intersperse pro-Brookings actualities among banal posts about, among other things, celebrities, reality television, cooking, and fascists.
- Depicts other media sources as capricious and manipulated by foreign powers.
- Propagates conspiracy theories, and, if exposed, vociferously counterattacks his or her debunkers.
45% Truth Construction
- Extolls the genius of the blog across the global online community, affirming its unmatched influence and insight.
- Sifts the dustbin of history to recycle outdated ideologies and refine the historical narrative.
- Highlights how the blog and its potentates are all things to all people, to wit: intellectual giants of the foreign policy debate, restorers of foreign-usurped greatness, and deliverers of stability and strength after years of anarchy.
- Crafts an illusion of legitimacy for any future appropriations or annexations across the blog’s sphere of influence (Note to former Brookings interns and other ethnic Brookies forced to take jobs at neighboring think tanks–help is on the way.)
KNOWLEDGE REQUIREMENTS
- Cynical ignorance of international affairs, geopolitical realities, and logic required.
- Formal education not necessary. Advanced degrees from elite institutions of liberal intellectualism are discouraged, but practical training in post-modernism and constructivism is a plus.
- Virtuoso ability to quickly pen vivid internet-based screeds laced with expletives, insinuations, pejoratives, and ad hominem attacks.
- Antisocial, quarrelsome personality desired, with an unquestioning allegiance to any future employer.
- Ability to work well under pressure with minimal supervision and next-to-no discretion.
- Experience with Photoshop, MS-Office (especially advanced cutting, pasting, and “replace all” operations) and infographics is a plus.
BENEFITS
- A limitless supply of brains to wash.
Only applicants meeting minimum qualifications for the position will be considered. Completion of a background investigation is required. Candidates lacking a sense of humor will be summarily disqualified. Applications accepted only on April 1, 2015.
Editor’s Note: In the unlikely event that it is not already blindingly obvious, nothing contained in this post is remotely true. It is an April Fool’s joke. Please do not take it seriously. I am begging you.
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April 1, 2015