The debate about the Vlad Enigma gave birth to a general interest in problems of disinformation. The Prisoner’s Dilemma was dragged out of heavy mathematical tomes and popularized. The Turing Machine was reexamined in tabloid newspapers. The Empedoclean paradox even got mentioned on the Johnny Carson show.
Two Berkeley acid-heads, known on Telegraph Avenue as The Cat and The Dog, dreamed up a more intense disinformation matrix in 1980. “What would happen,” The Cat asked one day in the Cafe Mediterraneum, “if we bought a truck and painted on the side of it INTERNATIONAL COCAINE IMPORTERS INC., and drove it around the streets?”
“In Berkeley,” The Dog said, “the cops would just laugh. They’d be sure it was another put-on by the Hog Farm or the Merry Pranksters or somebody. But in San Francisco they wouldn’t take a chance. The first cop would stop the truck and search it.”
“Nah,” said an unsuccessful poet named Robert W. Anton. “They’re more hip than that in San Francisco. But in L.A ….”
The debate spread from the Med to Moe’s, from Moe’s to Sather Gate, leapt the Bay to appear in Herb Caen’s column, eventually spread from coast to coast as a tag-end poser to cap all discussions of the Vlad Enigma. Finally, taking the logical experimental step, a San Francisco theologian named Malaclypse the Younger actually painted a truck in very tasteful and professional lettering and drove it around the Bay Area for all to see:
INTERNATIONAL COCAINE IMPORTERS INC.
LIMA—SAN DIEGO—VANCOUVER
“THINGS GO BETTER WITH COKE”
He was stopped and searched three times the first week—once in Sausalito, which is the cocaine and Vaseline capital of Unistat and has particularly suspicious cops. He was never stopped in Berkeley. After the second week he was no longer stopped in San Francisco. Immediately a whole fleet of similar trucks began to appear.
Disinformation had been incarnated. “All hail Eris,” said Malaclypse, a pious man in his own odd way. Virtually none of the trucks was stopped and searched after the first month. Cops who had made horses’ asses of themselves in the joking phase of this uprising of surrealist politics refused to take the risk of being laughed at again. Nobody cared to guess how many of the trucks were really carrying cocaine.
It all became academic when victimless crimes were redefined in the Code Hubbard.