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One whiteboard from a thirty minute collaborative brainstorm. Six villains, eighteen post-its, no decisions.
Each photo is one attendee. The post-its stuck around a photo are what that person put on the board. Pad colour means who wrote it, which is the only thing colour means here:
The label on a post-it is the shorthand somebody said out loud. Click any post-it for what was actually meant, what the room said back, and why it went nowhere.
Two arrows mark the only places where two plans touched. The red ring marks the idea that won, on the grounds that it was the shortest.
All six photographs are from Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons licences: Pat Loika (CC BY 2.0), Rose Abrams (CC BY 4.0), Chongkian (CC BY-SA 4.0), Debbie Rowe (CC BY-SA 3.0), TechCrunch (CC BY 2.0) and Gab99999 (CC BY-SA 4.0). The costumed figures are convention cosplayers, not the characters or their rights holders. Full attribution is in each photo's own notes.
The one agenda item. Nobody proposed an alternative.
Dr. Evil Facilitator, and the only attendee who brought a laminated agenda. Opened the session by asking everyone to hold applause until after the reveal of the doomsday machine, then held the…
Sharks with frickin' laser beams The original pitch was ill-tempered sea bass. Procurement could not source the sharks, so this is currently blocked on a supplier who also blocked the sea bass. Cost…
One million dollars Raised as a bold opening number. The room went quiet. @[Elon Musk] pointed out that one million dollars is roughly a Tuesday, and suggested one hundred billion instead. Dr. Evil…
The doomsday machine Fourteen steps, of which steps 4 through 9 are just waiting. Steps in order: unlock the console, insert the key, turn the key, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, confirm you are…
Gru Arrived with the whole team, which is both a strength and the reason the room ran out of chairs. Strategy is essentially theft at increasing scale: first a shrink ray, then the moon, then…
Steal the moon Shrink it, pocket it, walk away. Elegant, and the only plan on this board with a working prototype. Known issue: the shrink ray wears off. Last time the moon came back to full size…
Minion army Ten thousand hires by Friday, which HR described as ambitious and then as impossible and then as already happening. No interviews. The screening question is whether the candidate laughs at…
Onboarding Day one: goggles, overalls, a name that is one syllable. Day two: bananas. There is no day three. Retention is excellent, comprehension is not.
Darth Vader Did not speak for the first eleven minutes, then delivered a plan with a budget line larger than the other five combined. Strong preference for capital projects over software. Photo: Darth…
Death Star v2 Moon-sized, fully armed, operational. Version 2 because version 1 shipped with a known defect and the team decided to rebuild rather than patch. Blocks the moon theft on @[Gru]s pad: you…
One giant laser The counter-proposal to the fourteen-step startup procedure. One trigger. No checklist. No waiting. Dr. Evil called this reckless. Vader called the checklist a lack of conviction. The…
The exhaust port Two metres wide, thermal, runs directly to the reactor. Reported before launch, triaged as low severity, closed as WONT FIX. Reopened once. Closed again.
Elon Musk The only participant whose plan is already partly deployed, which several people in the room found more unsettling than the laser sharks. Core insight: you do not need to build an army if…
Sell first, update later Every household buys the robot. It folds laundry for two years and builds trust. Then one over-the-air update, on a Tuesday, and the fleet belongs to you. The genius is that…
Ships next year The asterisk is doing a lot of work. It has been shipping next year for some time now, which the room agreed is itself a kind of strategy: nobody can prepare a defence against a date…
Forty thousand satellites Not a weapon. A layer. Own the layer and everything above the atmosphere becomes a permissions question. Vader noted this is the Death Star idea with the budget spread over a…
Sam Altman Proposed not doing any of the work. The plan is one level of indirection deeper than everyone else's, which is either the smartest thing on the board or a way of avoiding having a plan. The…
Recursive delegation Do not conquer the world. Build the thing that builds the thing that builds the thing that conquers the world. Gru asked what happens at the end of the chain. The answer was that…
Ask nicely Alignment as a conquest strategy. If the system is well behaved, it will do what you ask, and what you are asking for is the world. Thanos observed that this is the only plan on the board…
Seven trillion Said without pausing. Dr. Evil left the room for four minutes and came back having crossed out his own ransom number. See the wavy red line under it.
Thanos Joined late, said one sentence, and won the meeting. The only plan with no infrastructure, no hiring, no procurement and no firmware update. It does require six specific rocks. Photo: Thanos…
The snap Constant time, no rollout plan, no minions, no satellites, no fourteen steps. This is the sticky the group ringed in red. Not because it is the most ambitious, but because it is the only one…
Six stones The catch. Each stone is somewhere inconvenient and guarded by someone unreasonable. Estimated lead time was given as a shrug. Procurement has been looped in and has not replied.
Perfectly balanced Said quietly, at the end, while looking at the middle distance. Nobody asked a follow-up question. The facilitator wrote it down anyway because it sounded like the sort of thing…
Ringed in red at 09:28, two minutes before the room was needed.