Maple Street

Aliens cause a few small, selective failures in electricity, cars, and phones. Rumor and suspicion do the rest: neighbors generate accusations, choose scapegoats, and turn violently on one another while the attackers watch from afar.

A cheap adversarial perturbation exploits a brittle social information system and induces decentralized actors to manufacture most of the damage themselves.

The attackers manipulate infrastructure rather than generating persuasive AI content, and the neighbors' preexisting distrust is the crucial vulnerability.