Tradecraft — Detect the Method, Not the Ideology
Parked / pre-release. This page documents a companion tool released with the series. The live, runnable code ships open-source at the final publication step.
What it is
Influence operations leave fingerprints — not in what a text argues, but in how it operates. Tradecraft is a small, open tool that reads a passage, an essay, a transcript, or a public figure’s corpus and scores it against a library of method-markers: the gradualist ratchet, institutional permeation, manufactured consent, the captured-neutral move, the initiatory register of the mystery schools, AI-mediated cognitive steering.
It is built for the reporter, the researcher, and the curious reader who has not spent ten years learning to recognize these movements — and who needs to know, fast, what they are looking at.
The one rule, and the one ethic
- Method, not ideology. Every marker keys on how a text works, never on whose side it is on. The permeation lens fires the same on a Fabian tract and a Powell memo. That is what makes it both useful and non-factional.
- It flags; it does not convict. The tool never renders a verdict about a person. It surfaces which markers fired, how densely, and quotes the exact spans — and leaves the judgment to you. One tell is rhetoric. Many tells, firing together, densely, across a body of work — that is tradecraft. Either way: check the receipt.
The lenses
| Lens | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Institutional permeation | The gradualist capture-and-hold method — irreversibility framing, infiltration of existing institutions, concentrated-benefit/diffuse-cost, the captured-neutral move, deniability architecture, crisis-with-no-exit, grassroots costume. |
| Cognitive capture | AI-mediated steering of individual thought — personalized persuasion, latent autocomplete persuasion, sycophancy, engagement steering against stated will, companion capture. |
| Adept speech | The initiatory/esoteric register — apophatic framing, secret-knowledge claims, “the Work,” unnamed-authority deference, deliberate incompleteness, the initiatory address. |
Each lens is a versioned, plain-text taxonomy. Anyone can read it, audit it, propose a new marker, or report a false positive. The grading is deterministic arithmetic you can re-run by hand.
A worked example
Run the institutional-permeation lens over a short passage:
“The work is patient. We permeate the institutions over decades, placing the right people, until the change is inevitable and cannot be reversed.”
The tool returns a profile, not a label:
lens: institutional_permeation tier: notable
markers: gradualism, permeation
receipts:
irreversibility-framing → "cannot be reversed"
indefinite-horizon → "permeate the institutions over decades"
infiltrate-institutions → "placing the right people"
Two distinct markers, three sourced spans. You decide what it means — with the evidence in front of you.
Reproducible by construction
The taxonomies are data, the grader is deterministic, every marker cites the gold example that defines it, and a local-model path means the tool can analyze the material that a moderated cloud API will not. The code, the lenses, and the research that seeds them are released together so anyone can reproduce a result or contribute a marker.
See it applied
The lenses do not only grade text you paste — the Ratchet Atlas runs them across the apparatus itself: click any node to see the method-markers that person’s own published words exhibit, each with the verbatim quote and a source. The Atlas is the map; this is the instrument that reads it.