Is this real?

Sometimes.

What are you?

Animus Engineering is the somewhat tongue-in-cheek name for a nonorganized set of people who have been trained in a set of tactical skills. Generally, involving belief and doubt.

Some of these people know each other, most do not. Connections are made when help or expertise is necessary. Some of these people decided they could be more effective with an internet presence, though there is a wide range of opinions.

Engineers have all been introduced to a few key observations, but collectively follow no code, adhere to no philosophy. They decide for themselves.

What is this site, then?

A multipurpose tool for some of those engineers.

Are you a business?

Engineers do occasionally respond to requests for help. {LINK} Most work is conducted without financial transactions.

Basic economic or financial concepts are often useful metaphors or heuristics. Exempli gratia, because confidence in a belief is typically overvalued and doubt is typically undervalued, the gap between what people think they know and what they actually know is easy to exploit. Put another way, doubt is too cheap, and ripe for arbitrage.

Also, incidentally, for the sake of more exempli: Because moderns have outsourced so much decision making to institutions, which have in turn outsourced so much of their decision making to consulting firms, I will at times dress like a consultancy. Another useful metaphor.

Are you a secret society?

Not a society at all, nor secret. I have been pointing things out to people for a very long time. So now there are a lot of us. This is the first time I’ve tried out giving it a name. One of the central tactical advantages engineers have long enjoyed is the knowledge that nameless things are difficult to pin down, pursue, seek out. In the digital era, as the way we consume information is more and more dependent on text with Cntrl+F searchability, the nameless is all but invisible.

There are, again, no rules. People are free to discuss what they wish.

Engineers and those they work with are in thrall to no brand or boss, not even to me.

Why go public now?

Is this public? A hard-to-find website offering disorganized, anonymized accounts that have been tweaked and fictionalized until they’d be hard to connect to anything?
But the question is legitimate. It is an experiment, to be sure. It may not work.

See here for a longer answer. {LINK to ABout}

Yes, OK, but why? What is your motivation?

It works better if you don’t think about that just now.

And anyone can just buy your services as, what, an influencer or persuader or something?

Not really. The Request Services {LINK} page will explain in more detail.

And if you do something for me, I pay you for it?

That’s up to you. Though it is up to any engineer whose services you benefit from to act as she sees fit should you undervalue that service.

“Do something for you” exists on a bit of a spectrum, doesn’t it? There are clients who ask for help, and receive it, and find it obvious that whatever change of perspective they’ve requested was provided by design. They rarely have any objection to valuing that service. And if they consciously choose not to value it, it can crumble, or even be reversed by the engineer.

But that’s an unusual scenario. Often, clients ask for help, and receive it, but it is not obvious that whatever change of perspective they hoped for was provided by design. It felt very much like coincidence, or natural, or authentic, or organic, or whatever other metaphor they assign to things that “just happen” and that they don’t want to acknowledge were precipitated by a complex chain of human decisions and nonhuman events. But because they requested that change, from an engineer, they can’t be sure. In these cases, clients have to choose how to value what happened.

There are, of course, situations in which clients ask for help, and the change they requested comes about without the help of an engineer. In this case, they still have to choose how to value what happened. From their perspective, it is no different from the scenario described above.

It is also common for engineers to work in ways that have not been requested at all. No demands for financial compensation in these cases.

And then there is this site. If you spend time here, reading, and what you read affects you in a way that you benefit from, engineers whose work you’ve read will prefer to see that you value it appropriately. Or they may decide to take some or all of the benefit back. Up to them.

You can visit the Payments page {LINK} for more instruction.

But how will I know if what changed for me was because of something you did?

This is sort of the point, if you’re not picking up on that yet. You have to decide.

But what about the fact that modernity, with its delicate and intricately nested systems of distributing information and storing knowledge, now far more complex than any one person can keep track of let alone verify on his or her own, is built on trust that has revealed itself often, and a lot recently, to be, well, quite fragile? This work you’re doing seems like it has the potential to be destabilizing. The whole thing seems pretty cynical? Aren’t you worried about accidentally crashing the intellectual and psychological pylons that hold up democracy, science, politics, news and media, not to mention sales and marketing? Is this really a good idea?

That Q is not A’d as F as I’d like. But, yes, that is a potential outcome here. I am aiming for balance.

Can I become an engineer?

Maybe. There is no application process. Just live your life. I may come to you. Since you just asked.