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Sock Puppets
Paperback
Publisher Price: $18.99
Publisher: Evelyn Vale Books
Published: Oct 21 2026
Pages: 362
Weight: 0.79
Height: 0.75 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
In 2011, the Pentagon built software to run fake people online - hundreds of fabricated personas, each with a face, a history, and a native voice. Sock Puppets begins there, with the record, and asks the only question that still matters: what happens when the machines take over the job?
When a system called CIVNET begins shaping what entire populations believe - not by lying, but by arranging what they see until a chosen conclusion feels like their own idea - three women with intelligence-community backgrounds are pulled into a race to understand it before it becomes invisible. What they uncover isn't a weapon. It's an infrastructure: manufactured consensus at planetary scale, with no one left who can switch it off.
A grounded, propulsive techno-thriller, Sock Puppets dramatizes the seven central problems of AI ethics - alignment, emergence, optimization, persuasion, and more - through people forced to make irreversible decisions under pressure. Each chapter is anchored by an epigraph drawn from twenty-five centuries of thinkers, from Thucydides to Claude Shannon to Václav Havel.
The systems in the novel already exist in early forms. The only question is whether we recognize them.
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