Anyway, All The Dogs Are Howling a POSSIBLE FUTURES Podcast Exploration 1: Basics Conversation 6: Weaponised Incompetence More on this POSSIBLE FUTURES podcast at https://decolonise.possiblefutures.earth/anyway Anna Denardin: Hi, this is Anna Denardin, and you are a fly on the wall here amongst the POSSIBLE FUTURES Collective. Predators rarely come charging in with teeth bared. Predation often depends on disguise, on the appearance of harmlessness, on the performance of being non-threatening -- so the prey walks willingly into the trap. Colonisers are predators that have had centuries to perfect their hunting techniques. Weaponised incompetence is one of those evolved tricks. Usually it’s explained as pretending to be bad at something so you never have to do it. A performance of ineptitude that conveniently shifts the labor onto someone else. But let’s zoom out. What happens when weaponized incompetence scales up within our colonial world order? The coloniser pretends ignorance, innocence, or incapacity, and shifts the intellectual and emotional labour onto the colonised. You explain why this is harmful. You teach them how to do better. You provide the endless patience. Would you expect someone bleeding on the floor to comfort the attacker still stabbing them? That’s what colonial weaponised incompetence demands: compassion for the predator. It allows oppressors to infantilise themselves, making themselves look too clumsy, too confused, too naïve, to dismantle the systems they profit from. And it forces the oppressed to become unpaid teachers, babysitters, therapists, carrying the labour of explanation while harm continues uninterrupted, draining the oppressed of energy and delaying justice indefinitely. This is just one of the many tactics of manipulation colonisers and white supremacists alike use, amongst DARVO, scapegoating, gaslighting, tone-policing, just to name a few. All of them serve the same purpose: violence continues while responsibility is blurred, shifted, or erased. So today we’re asking: How does weaponised incompetence serve to uphold coloniality and shield accountability? What other manipulation tactics are actively being deployed to confuse, exhaust, and trap the prey? What does it take to resist the traps? What boundaries, strategies, or collective behaviors stop the predator from continuing to feast while pretending to be harmless? What does it take to recognise the lure before stepping into it, and to protect our time, energy and agency from being devoured? — Samantha Suppiah: The largest most blatant collective display of Western weaponised incompetence I can think of is the United Nations. The most ecocidal aspect is the United Nations' Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of the Parties. As a treaty, the UNFCCC was supposed to prevent "dangerous" human interference with the climate system. But it became used as a place where the global ruling elite lead the charge against planetary systems collapse by doing nothing whatsoever to undermine profit structures that are actually causing planetary systems collapse -- because they themselves benefit. If this isn't "dangerous human interference", then what is? They shift blame through "inclusion" and "collective responsibility". They overintellectualise by selectively obsessing over philosophies, frameworks, metrics, jargon, certifications, accolades and awards. They downplay real experiences while upselling sanitised datasets. They tokenise those who suffer and those who "stand in solidarity" with them. They spend more effort and resources explaining why real change is hard than actually achieving any change. And they "celebrate small wins" to obscure the collateral damage from far larger losses. And of course they continue to plot, behind closed and not-so-closed doors, to grow their violent and destructive profiteering. This is a system of criminality that is as overt as it is despicable: moral laundering coordinated at the global level, an organised crime syndicate built to weaponise incompetence and profit from extraction. The best way to recognise the lure and to avoid it is to understand how liberal hegemony has come to be established globally. The lure works by identifying areas of dissatisfaction, victimhood or other forms of grievances, and then sneaking in as though they are a harmless, helpful friend, to help you explain what is happening and to provide ready-made narratives, to direct your attention to specific actors and systems, away from the trap itself, but to the juicy ripe fruit hanging conveniently at eye-level just over the trap. "Don't you also believe in a better world that is diverse, just and equal? Well, then you must become involved in very specific actions, habits and thinking that we curate, we regulate." In academia we see precisely the same, again, liberal hegemony rearing its head. Here we have a whole bunch of tenured professors and PhD researchers who have no practical skills and have been deprived of real lived experiences, but yet handsomely rewarded to partake in meaningless argumentation around the most insignificant details, to publish them in obscure academic journals. These are papers that no one will or can ever really relate to or apply in a real context. That's because they are too busy enjoying the privileges of their ivory towers to make significant risks to their careers and reputations by actually practising what they preach in real projects with real stakes. — Anna Denardin: Samantha, you pulling apart the UN as a global spectacle of weaponised incompetence was spot on. And we can see the same playbook of weaponised incompetence, institutional wrangling, and other classic patterns of coloniality happening live and on full display in the recent Tucker Carlson interview with Sam Altman, with Altman constantly making use of vague narratives, evasive language and self-serving arguments to dodge accountability, a classic example of weaponised incompetence. He hedges and stalls multiple times with phrases like: “I’m thinking on the spot,” "I reserve the right to change my mind here," "I don't have a ready to go answer for this..." This inability to provide a clear stance, while framing it as thoughtful deliberation on a so-called complex "option space", delays commitment and allows him to operate in moral ambiguity, making it difficult to hold the company accountable for specific moral outcomes. Besides that, the DARVO predator pattern emerges just as clearly when the conversation turns to the suspicious death of a former OpenAI employee. Even after admitting he once found it suspicious, Altman insists that it looks like suicide to him, brushing off counter-evidence with lines like “people do that a lot.” When Carlson presses on behalf of the family, Altman flips the script, framing himself as accused and disrespected, positioning OpenAI as the burdened party, and casting Carlson as the insensitive aggressor. This is classic DARVO: deny the facts, attack the questioner, and reverse the roles of victim and offender. Altman’s communication style turbocharges these tactics while cloaking them in a calm, victimised tone, positioning himself as naive and harmless behind vague and lazy arguments. Even his solemn claim that he “doesn’t sleep that well at night” over the “small decisions” shaping the moral views of millions only sustains the illusion of benevolent oversight. Can’t you feel relieved, knowing he is paid handsomely well to “reflect humanity’s preferences”, a weighted average skewed by propaganda and political capture, while his employers and shareholders profit from operations that, by design, drive the very ecocidal and ethnocidal outcomes he pretends to worry about? — Samantha Suppiah: Oh it's classic blame avoidance, just like what happens at the UN, and any of the world's largest and most powerful institutions, companies and yes, even NGOs. It's based upon an argument that this is progress, but you know, bad stuff just happens, what can we do? We need to strive for progress, achievement, success, because, you know, these things are what create better futures for humanity. That's the narrative. No, they are maintaining hell on earth, and you have decision-making power and responsibility in that equation. This is what it looks like when weaponised incompetence is rewarded: Despicable behaviour is elevated, broadcasted, celebrated, and centred. The harms continue unabated, with responsibility and accountability legally and socially unassigned. Profits continue to be collected -- financial, political, social, or otherwise -- by those in power. Various excuses and deflections are deployed to buy time, space and investment. That's how economic bubbles are created: accumulation of wealth with a mindset cultivated by centuries of building a culture that centres and rewards white supremacist injustice. This is a system that systematically does not work. You want to get ahead in a colonial world order? Then you'd better be naturally talented at weaponised incompetence. In 1970, two Canadian men, Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull, wrote a book called The Peter Principle in which they described a concept in management in which people in a hierarchy tend to rise to a level of respective incompetence. Employees are promoted because they were successful in previous roles, and they stop being promoted when they are no longer competent in their current roles. This is the exact opposite of meritocracy, in which people in a system, be it a hierarchy or otherwise, are placed according to the merits of their competence, so that they are able to perform their roles in a way that best serves the broader system. The Peter Principle states that - being incompetent, the individual will not qualify for promotion again, and so will remain stuck at this final placement or Peter's plateau. This outcome is inevitable, given enough time and enough positions in the hierarchy to which competent employees may be promoted. The Peter Principle is therefore expressed as: "In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence." Of course, this is a very simplified model of how people rise through the ranks despite their incompetence, and also, a lot has changed since the 1970s. Today, people are promoted in hierarchies because of their incompetences, or in fact because they are competent at their jobs, it's just that their actual job descriptions are vastly different to those filed by HR. This speaks more about the corruption of institutions and the coloniality of management than it does about the individuals weaponising incompetence. — Anna Denardin: Samantha, I think you’re absolutely right to point out how weaponized incompetence gets rewarded and normalised in institutional settings. So much of what we call “management” is itself a colonial inheritance. Caitlin Rosenthal, an American business historian argues in her book Accounting for Slavery, that plantations in the Americas were early laboratories of modern management. Enslaved labor was organized through meticulous record-keeping, quotas, punishments, and “efficiency” metrics that look disturbingly like the foundations of management science. The plantation fused economic extraction with control, surveillance, and psychological manipulation, logics that later migrated into factories and corporations, which now frame themselves as meritocracies while still relying on colonial tactics of control. The real function of those scripts is to metabolise dissonance into coping strategies that let institutions and individuals avoid accountability. We see willful blindness, or the strategic un-seeing to preserve stability. We see entitlement to comfort, where truth is sacrificed for a sense of ease. We see scapegoating, outsourcing conscience up the chain of command. We see endless rationalisation, where data and process become a shield against action. And of course, we see DARVO and gaslighting, where reputation management replaces accountability. Management culture trains people to be competent not at their nominal job descriptions as you were saying, but at maintaining the institution’s self-image. The Peter Principle, which you invoked, originally suggested people rise to their level of incompetence; what we see now is people rising because they are competent at institutional self-preservation, not because they are competent at the work itself. This sort of necropolitical management guides structures to be organised to preserve power even if it means perpetuating social, ecological, and psychological harm. — Samantha Suppiah: Oh absolutely Anna, institutional preservation is enabled by fundamental structures of corporate law, management and operational structure which are alive in organisations of all kinds, even charities, NGOs, and governments. Legal liability for instance is how crimes, especially systemic injustices within business models for primary revenue streams, can be successfully hidden by a group of people who willingly choose to collaborate for profit through a system of shareholding that discourages organising amongst shareholders. They are in fact rewarded to cover up the harms they cause, especially in geographies far from their own legal jurisdiction, but not only in those cases. This is what makes weaponised incompetence in our globalised human world lucrative and in fact powerful. And so this brings us back to common dynamics of moral laundering, including greenwashing, justice-washing, diversity-washing, what have you. The CEO is merely the face of the business models' systemically unjust primary revenue streams. Look closely at any of the most powerful and profitable organisations on the planet: follow the money to the first half of the supply chain, and there you'll find the defacto colonies within which systemic harms are in fact the foundation of the entire structure of profiteering. This is exactly what we expose and discuss in our curated resources on artificial intelligence, Recurring AI Nightmares. The reality is that you are not going to find tools to expose structural coloniality within our colonial world order. Colonial propaganda has been successful at presenting structural coloniality as the best, most efficient, most productive ways of organising a group of human beings to achieve financial profit through operating a particular approach to business and marketing. The very limited and narrow ways of life that capitalism presents us within our colonial world order are made to seem logical and indisputable, partly because very little exists outside of it, meaning there are no other options, and partly because other options are actively being destroyed by capitalist business models. Again, weaponised incompetence is used as justification for participation in capitalism itself, and in fact, coloniality itself, on an individual level, as well as by the system of capitalism and coloniality themselves. This is why we cover such explorations within our asynchronous course, Mechanisms of Ongoing Colonisation. Because once you start pulling on any red string, you soon find the tangled mess of coloniality. — Anna Denardin: Samantha, your point about liability shields hits at the core. Liability is the skeleton of corporatocracy, the global ruling order where CEOs, financiers, and political elites collaborate to maintain control. It began at the roots of coloniality: in the 17th century, the British Crown granted a charter to the East India Company, giving it the powers of a nation-state. It traded, taxed, enslaved, governed, even waged wars, all while cloaked in the legitimacy of the Crown. It pioneered the model. Fast forward, and today’s corporate empires run the same playbook. Unelected executives sit behind the façades of democracy and free markets, pulling levers for their own gain. Their loyalty is not to nations, not to people, not to livable futures, only to profit. Corporatocracy elevates weaponised incompetence to the level of global governance. It thrives on designed failure: debt, trade rules, and privatisation schemes that entrench dependency. It normalises accountability avoidance: responsibility diffused across shareholders, boards, and supranational institutions like the International Monetary Fund or World Trade Organization. Each actor claims “hands tied” or “beyond our scope,” echoing the classic incompetence move of incapacity as an excuse. It deploys moral laundry as cover: greenwashing, diversity washing, as you mentioned, buying legitimacy while leaving harm untouched. And above all, it represents colonial continuity: from the East India Company to Exxon to BlackRock, incompetence is profitable. Failing to fix the system is the system. So let’s be honest: democracy may still exist on paper, but when corporations bankroll elections, dictate trade, and crash economies, what we actually live in is corporate feudalism. A world where our identities, expectations, and even our sense of possibility are choreographed by elites. The predator keeps smiling politely with our blood on its teeth. — Samantha Suppiah: Anna, you had asked - What boundaries, strategies or collective behaviours stop the predator from continuing to feast while pretending to be harmless? When we are born into these dominant systems of coloniality, we are starved of alternatives, forced to become enslaved within this grotesque system. My answer to your question is going to sound like a cryptic equation: What I have is - BDS + UTS + CFG. BDS is of course boycott, divest, and sanction. This is how we destroy behaviours, habits and cultures of coloniality such as systems of incentivisation for weaponised incompetence. UTS refers to unlearn, transform, and strategise. This is how we shed coloniality within ourselves. CFG refers to create, foster and grow. With our new understandings of coloniality, we can create, foster and grow new systems, habits, behaviours and indeed personalities, communities and societies that lean into a decolonial mode of life -- without co-opting, misappropriating or stealing from indigenous or traditional cultures to which we do not belong. Otherwise, we are simply starting a new cycle of weaponised incompetence. — Anna Denardin: I have to say, as an engineer, that I really appreciate the elegance of your equation and I think it summarizes very well the processes we need to allow ourselves to go through to combat this. For me, it also starts with getting good at recognizing the patterns: not just weaponised incompetence, but the full repertoire of white supremacist and colonial strategies of manipulation and deceit. Protecting our time, energy, and agency from being devoured requires, first and foremost, seeing these patterns with clarity. The system thrives on our ignorance and complacency. When we know the modus operandi, then our choices can be made from awareness rather than blind habit. And this is where agency lives. Then comes strategy, developing ways to disarm manipulations when they happen. As you said, disinvestment from unhealthy relationships, environments, and contexts is often the most secure and effective move. People often choose the harder path of trying to “fix” or “improve” toxic systems, but it’s like an intervention with an addict: nothing changes unless openness to change exists. The same applies to industries, institutions, everything. And disinvestment isn’t painless. It requires sacrifices, hard choices, and the uncomfortable process of building new habits. That’s where embodiment comes in. Learning isn’t real if it only happens in your head. Like group therapy, you need people willing to sit in discomfort and practice accountability and right relationship. Embodying new learnings means living them, even if awkwardly or inconsistently at first. From there, you can begin curating healthier environments where testing, designing, and iterating new interventions becomes possible. The predator also feeds on our belief that we can’t walk away. Believing that these colonial dynamics are normal, that there is nothing we can do, or that we cannot reclaim power from systems of harm is, in itself, weaponised incompetence. — POSSIBLE FUTURES Crew: This is Anna Denardin. This is Samantha Suppiah. Anyway, all the dogs are howling.