Redundant
Brett Cawley
The right-wing America-First saboteur in Redundant. Sophisticated AI sabotage — IDE tool, keystroke capture, RAG poisoning, sycophancy manipulation. Arrested by the FBI.
Brett Cawley is the saboteur in Redundant. He is not a hippie or a luddite. He is a right-wing America-First operative connected to the Gaia movement and Wexit, the Alberta separatist movement. His sabotage methods are sophisticated: an IDE tool that captures keystrokes, a poisoned RAG/vector database that makes the AI system agreeable, and sycophancy manipulation that makes the system tell decision-makers what they want to hear.
Brett does not come around to Rob's point of view. He stays adversarial. He is arrested by the FBI. But his methods — particularly the sycophancy manipulation — are the template for the more sophisticated attacks in Contingent.
How the term evolves
Redundant: The saboteur. His methods are Gaia's methods. His arrest does not end the threat — it evolves it.
Contingent: Brett's methods evolve into Arun Mehta's training data poisoning. The sabotage moves from attacking the system to teaching the system to sabotage itself.