My Weird Prompts
Daniel Rosehill
Podcast
Episodes
Listen, download, subscribe
Running a Company Like a Spy Agency
What happens when you strip the national security justification out of compartmentalization and run an ordinary company on it? This episode takes a listener's Netflix-style pitch seriously — a workplace where nobody understands their own workload, colleagues can't discuss their work, and feedback comes from a manager whose identity you may never learn. The closest real precedent isn't a corporation at all: it's Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a city of 75,000 that didn't appear on a single official map for six years. We walk through what a typical day actually looked like there, why the company's own documents admitted the job couldn't produce satisfaction, and how the 1977 CIA "Critique of the Codeword Compartment" documented what happens when secrecy scales — including the rise of "collectors of clearances" who equated knowledge with power. The result is a structure that converts secrecy into unaccountable power, with or without a national security reason. Key sources: • CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence, Critique of the Codeword Compartment in the CIA, March 1977 (TR/IM 77-02J) — https://sgp.fas.org/othergov/codeword.html • Conjecture, Information Hazard Policy, July 2022 — https://www.conjecture.dev/information-hazard-policy • Alex Wellerstein, Oak Ridge Confidential, or Baseball for Bombs, *Restricted Data*, 2012-04-16 — https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/04/16/oak-ridge-confidential-or-baseball-for-bombs/ Episode 5906 — myweirdprompts.com/n/5906 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/590660)
My Weird Prompts RSS Feed
