Operation Lock Step

Operation Lock Step Is Not A Real Thing

The first thing that’s important to point out about this narrative is that there is no such thing as “Operation Lock Step.” That is a name derived from social media memes about a real document, meant to create a false perception that what is being discussed is a plan, or “operation.”

The document in question here is titled Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development, and it was released by the Rockefeller Foundation, in collaboration with the Global Business Network in 2010.

The goal of this document is to brainstorm ideas about how technological advancement could affect equitable growth in the developing world in the future, given certain imagined circumstances. When crafting a scenario exercise, the first step is to decide what uncertainties are going to be depicted by the scenarios you are exploring. In this case, the authors decided to use two variables, each with two possible values.

The first was “Global Political and Economic Alignment,” which could either be weak or strong.

On the strong end of that spectrum, you would see a “more integrated global economy with high trade volumes.” Conversely on the weak end, you would see a world with far more protectionism and breakdowns of trade relations.

The second variable was “Adaptive Capacity,” which could either be high or low.

This spectrum is defined by how able society is to deal with the changing technologies that emerge in coming years.

Since there are two variables, with two options each, they can be matched up to create four possible combinations, and each of these combinations is one of the scenarios the exercise explores. So, for instance, one scenario is an imagined future with weak political and economic alignment and high adaptive capacity.

One of the four scenarios in the exercise is titled Lock Step, which is where this conspiracy springs from. This is the scenario with strong political and economic alignment and low adaptive capacity.

Lock Step Does Not Mirror Our Current Reality

There are some aspects of the world imagined in the Lock Step scenario that are similar to events we’ve seen unfold since early 2020, and that is a large part of why this document has been really useful for meme-based researchers. There are very superficial similarities, but far more glaring differences.

One of the chief similarities between our reality and Lock Step is that there is a pandemic. However, the pandemic in the imagined scenario begins in 2012 and kills 8 million people in the first seven months, “the majority of them healthy young adults.”

Many of the things about this scenario that seem eerily predictive are actually things that are painfully predictable, like the detail of China imposing lockdown measures quickly. The goal of the exercise is to create a realistic feeling scenario for the participants to brainstorm within, and this is just a part of that.

To flesh out these scenarios, you need to create a world that feels like it has a history to it, and a part of that is adding in events that make things feel more alive. In each scenario, a handy list of headlines is included. Here is the timeline for Lock Step:

As you can see from this timeline, this does not match up with the real world very well at all, because it’s not a prediction of the future, nor is it a plan. This is one of four scenarios where exercise participants could explore the central question: “How might technology affect barriers to building resilience and equitable growth in the developing world over the next 15 to 20 years?”

The Lock Step scenario uses a pandemic as a way to build out the world, in the same what that other scenarios have elaborate imagined histories. The scenario titled Hack Attack takes place after there’s a bombing at the 2012 Olympics that killed 13,000, a bombing which never happened in real life. The fact that there is a pandemic in the Lock Step scenario and there has been one in the real world is a coincidence.

Misusing Scenario Exercises

It is a standard trick of propagandists and conspiracy theorists to use scenario exercises inappropriately, and this is one of the most relevant recent examples. They are particularly useful because the conspiracy theorist’s primary goal is finding some piece of evidence that demonstrates that the evil cabal they’re fighting against had foreknowledge of events that were yet to happen.

Scenario exercises are perfect for this because they involve robust explorations of imagined possible futures, and they offer a ton of options. This document alone provides four different possible futures, each with characteristics that you could pretend are predicting future nefarious plots.

That’s not what these documents are for. Most people will not take the time to read the document itself, so they can be forgiven for not understanding what it is about, but the people who claim that there is any kind of solid prediction or plan in this text is either dreadfully uninformed or a liar.