Malicious Compliance

In which Rat has a plan to gnaw on the system

CWCID: inspired by John Carter:

Cryptocracy

…in particular:

But what if we just ... stopped complying?

and

Use disobedience to claw back whatever personal agency and responsibility you can in your own life, train yourself not to take these people seriously, encourage others to do the same, and if enough people do this, eventually it will become so prohibitively expensive to manage the population that the strangling vines of this parasitic organism we call the managerial state can be hacked back to something manageable.

…to which I responded:

The laws, rules and policies have become so numerous and voluminous they can never be enforced in full (and can't ever be known in full). This opens another opportunity – in some cases, pushing for full work-to-rule compliance might be preferable to non-compliance.

Here's an example. Here in our backwoods of Eastern Europe, we have a law that commands everyone who sees a stray dog or another animal to immediately inform the municipality of this fact. No one ever does that, and anyone why walks down a street violates said law about two to three times an hour.

Now... if couple hundred people suddenly decided to report all dog sightings, preferably in written form... I reckon the law would be gone in a week but we'd have some fun meanwhile.

Such opportunities for DDOSing the system are all around, and could be used to punish them for something else altogether.

It might take some gnawing to find the opportunities for malicious compliance, but they’re there.