ON THE FUTILITY OF HUMAN TECHNOLOGY © 2022 The Delta Green Partnership

On the Futility of Human Technology

A Delta Green Primer
It seems like an endless refrain I hear again and again: with all the technological breakthroughs
of the 21st century, surely the truth of the unnatural in the world of Delta Green would have
become public knowledge?

Yet again I will say: nope. And not only has the world proved this supposition correct, it has
shifted to the point where the line between truth and ction in the real world has changed
forever as well.

In our real world, we live in a twilight of fact, and those that believe that a cellphone or a
YouTube video could somehow change humanity (or, well, anything signi cant really) have lost
the thread of Delta Green. That thread is this:

Delta Green is about human failure.

How we fail in our plans and in our lives, and...you guessed it...in our technology. Human
technology is as imperfect as any other human creation, and just as pointless. In Delta Green,
nothing humans have achieved — and this includes those few tiny groups with a nger in the
pie of the unnatural — have achieved anything. Humans will persist while their order degrades,
then they will revel and shout and kill in horror and joy with the Great Old Ones as they stir from
their slumber, and then they will all burn.

No phone, rocket, computer or weapon will change that.

But, the contrarian will say, won't a video of [something] PROVE that it exists?

I invite these people to look at the world. The real world. A world where a measurable portion
of the US believes the Presidential election was stolen (but not the congressional one, on the
same ballot) without a shred of evidence. Where millions believe JFK Jr. is in hiding so he can
become Vice President, or that Tom Hanks was executed along with Dick Cheney in 2019, or
that the Queen was a Lizard Person, or that the Democrats secretly cannibalize children in
clandestine Pizza Parlor basements.

This is the same world where videos go up daily from various Reddits and YouTube channels
that look as good as professional horror lms (hell, many look real) but they were made
anonymously for a lark. Go look. There are thousands of them. Some are quite fun. Some are
thought provoking and bizarre. Others are wholly believable and terrifying1.

Remember, this real world is where the Navy publishes jet ghter gun camera footage of a
vehicle they can't identify that appears to have no source of propulsion, says "this is real" and
the entire world could not be bothered to care, really. It is an "also ran" story.

In this twilight of truth, a video of a sh man crawling from the ocean or a frantic voice mail
from a murder victim claiming a glowing gure that can walk through walls is coming to kill
them will do absolutely fuck all in the scheme of things in this world of untruth. Hell, a video of
a shoggoth spilling from Boston Bay and eating passersby would do nothing, even if you had
body parts and police reports to back it up.

1 I encourage you to look up a relatively ancient poster from the 2010s, the FakingHoaxer, on YouTube.

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Oh, it might get some discussion, hell it might even trend of Twitter, but in the end it would be
tossed on the slush pile of untruth. And if you don't believe that would happen, you have not
been paying attention to the world at all...

Now, add an active conspiracy with real-time access and control of every form and mode or
electronic communications on the planet and the mandate to suppress and hide such
knowledge, on top of Qanon and the endless streams of conspiracy propaganda.

That is the world of Delta Green.

"But Cellphones..."
Cellphones connect people over great distances, give them access to information on the
internet, allow them to broadcast video and audio, and can take lm quality pictures and video.
Many gamers are convinced they should therefore be the bane of horror games, but this is
simply untrue. In Delta Green, doubly so.

First, not once have I had to create a reason for Agents not to use their cellphones, or not to
have access to them. It is only fair to give Agents in an un-winnable scenario access to every
real world amenity possible. I would avoid removing them at all costs. In fact, their removal
would severely hamstring my ability to deliver the story.

Second, cellphones are a great tool to draw other Agents in. There is nothing like a hushed
voice mail from a colleague — now missing — reporting that the ruins of the asylum seem
abandoned, or some startled screams, the sounds of running, and mu ed gunshots before the
line goes dead to draw other Agents into the horror.

Third, at the core of Delta Green is the idea of the infectious nature of knowledge — that it is
like radiation — and exposure to too much of it can kill just as e ectively as any monster. The
cellphone is merely another method of transmitting that radiation to other Agents.

I encourage all Handlers to lean in to the cellphone as a storytelling tool. There is zero reason
to restrict them. In fact, the idea that they might "ruin" a Delta Green game (through what?
allowing the Agents to look up the history of the Necronomicon or who owned a strange house
in the 1860s?) is just bizarre. Information on the web is notoriously spotty, sometimes useful,
and often highly ctional. Just because an Agent looks up "how to dismiss the greater demon
Kutulu" doesn't mean they don't land on some search-optimized site completely invented by a
precocious teenager, a fragmented jumble of existing texts that contradict one another, or a
fan-site for an Anime program that found the name in some old archaeology textbook.

But that is not to say it is all good news (I mean, it is all good news for the Handlers, less so for
the players). Cellphones in the real world can have very real consequences. Let us remember
that Delta Green often operates wholly outside legal mandate and routinely commits crimes
that might send people to prison for decades. Carrying around a tracking device that pings cell
towers with a unique identi er on you at all times might not be the best idea for a group of
criminals, no matter their mission. If things go south and regular law enforcement becomes
involved and Delta Green decides to let the Agents dangle, such evidence might be their end.

Of Course, Everything Is Real on YouTube

The absurdity of the claim that if enough people see a video of a Mi-Go or a Ghoul, the world
would shift towards a mode of belief and investigation is plainly ridiculous. The core response
would be "nice e ects," a more nuanced might be, "who made that? I know a producer looking

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for people to work with." It would never be "oh well, there's an inhuman intelligence, I better
get to the bottom of this!" To think otherwise is to ignore the world.

Thousands of UAP videos exist. Almost all of them look like terrible video of normal things like
birds or planes, a lot of them are obvious fakes, and a few are straight up con rmed non-fakes
as reported by the US government from impeccable sources. They have clearly stated on the
record: we don't know what UAPs are, or how they move the way they do, but they seem
piloted and are well beyond American (much less Russian or Chinese) technologies.

And the world's response has been? A bored yawn, more or less. In any news cycle now, it is
the ftieth story down the list, beneath wars, riots, death and the disintegration of the social
order. It barely even charts except within Reddits and message boards covered top to bottom
in scams, fakes, and false ags. It is a minor oddity, almost wholly ignored by the public at
large, and then endlessly argued about and never agreed upon by those few that pay attention.

I see no reason an unnatural leak on YouTube would not operate under those same principles
and reactions.

Drown The Leakers

In the world of Delta Green the Program's main method of suppression is "drowning".
Someone posts a real video of a huge, tentacled mass emerging from an old cave? An NSA
algorithm discovers it. The Program copies it, generates faux-outtakes, publishes duplicates of
the video with obvious fake elements added, or publishes articles on how the tentacles were
built for the 2014 lm Tentacular and were stolen in 2018 by a man known to commit hoaxes. It
oods the channels with disinformation about these things until the truth is even more
obfuscated than the standard reaction of "well, that CAN'T be real."

Then, it walks away.

Drowning the truth is the core method of the Program to suppress unnatural elements ending
up on the web to prevent them from going further. Most people's "research" begins and ends
at the Google search bar; and the Program has total access to all the powers of the NSA so
this is usually su cient.

Fixes and the Final Recourse

For those that somehow manage to remain coherent and convincing after a "drowning," and
whose media still nds social media traction, the Program employs several dirty tricks to
remove such threats.

First, the subject is secretly investigated by the NSA. This research process is automated. This
means access to all telecommunications the subject has used for a decade or more as well as
police records. If anything compromising is found there, it is exploited. Does the subject have a
DUI warrant in Florida? Well, the police there get an anonymous phone call. Did they lie on their
CV? Their employer gets an anonymous email. When your life falls apart, it becomes very
di cult to continue a side career as campaigner for the secret truth. Usually, this is enough.

Those that persist in trumpeting unnatural secrets are met with the nal recourse. An archive of
child pornography is secretly installed on their computer, along with various records of secret
cryptocurrency payments, encrypted and highly damning message board posts and more.
Then, a phone call is made. After such ruin, where none will believe your innocence, it is almost
certain their hopes of exposing the truth will not continue. Most spend years in prison, while a
few faced with the reality of the frame-up, commit suicide.

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Access to Non-Human Technologies

Ah, but what about March Technologies and Delta Green's access to the secrets of the
unnatural? you say. While it is true many small intelligence organizations have access to
unnatural secrets the rst thing those personnel learn is this: such knowledge eats people.

I mean, not literally (though sometimes literally) but mentally. The damaging infection of
unnatural knowledge causes the human mind to draw into itself and pull away from humanity
and more often than not, kills the infected. Suicide, madness, ruin, murder.

Those exposed to the unnatural for too long nd dark ends, and this is a wholly understood
fact in Delta Green. As such, few of those in power within Delta Green hold out any real hope in
the unnatural providing the answer to the unnatural.

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