Provocogen COG
Provocogen COG is unusual among the ranks of Citizen Oversight Groups in that, while generally acknowledged as serving a socially useful purpose, everyone individually would much rather be spared its attentions.
Provocogen, as its name might suggest, is a manufacturer of meme-allergens and other informational toxins. Extending the theory that an unchallenged immune system degrades, their purpose is to maintain and enhance the memetic immune system, lest parasites, meme-allergens, autotoxic and exotoxic ideas, recursive conspiracies, memetic vulnerabilities and plain old stupidity spread out of control.
Unlike the informational and warning efforts of other COGs and TAGs in the memetic security space, however, Provocogen generates examples of all these things (in a hopefully weakened state) and sends them out into the ideosphere to do their work, keeping people alert and priming the public’s memetic immune systems to other ideas of the same general kind, followed by painfully – for those taken in – debunking them in exquisite depth and architectural detail.
To this end, Provocogen has assembled what is undoubtedly the largest collection of trolls, conspiracists, grifters, meme-hackers, slash-traders, mystagogues, rhetoricians, sophists, unhanged scoundrels, and intellectual coprophiliacs to be found anywhere outside a full-quorum meeting of the Conclave of Galactic Polities.
– Sur-Dodeciad Parts in Approximate Formation: The Empire from Outside
"Yes, our psychiatric and booze and enforced-vacation budget line items are very, very high. There’s been some valid complaints about that.
“But, I want to show you this presentation on this particular meme complex we had to deal with, and what it required. Trust me, in comparison to what the meme would have done to us, our budget is cheaper by six orders of magnitude.”
That burn on the Conclave was so good that the IN checked their strangelet arsenals for missing inventory.
What does TAG stand for?
Threat Assessment Group.
They’re a specialized type of think-tank COG that crowdsources information about real and potential upcoming threats and other concerns, and publishes assessments such that people (especially the rest of the Plurality) can be prepared to do something about it.