A 73-page manuscript transcribed by V. Vale from a cassette recording in the possession of Genesis P-Orridge—data which situates “The Revised Boy Scout Manual”: An Electronic Revolution (though composed c. 1970) in the vicinity of the Industrial Culture Handbook, Throbbing Gristle, Survival Research Laboratories, The Atrocity Exhibition, and post-punk cassette culture. [There is also a partially defaced typewritten version among Burroughs’ papers in the New York Public Library (collated here with the cassette version, per the endnotes), and loose handwritten pages from university collections in Arizona and Ohio (appended here as supplements).] Burroughs regarded ”The Revised Boy Scout Manual” as a companion piece to The Job, and the two are similar in that they present some recurring themes in Burroughs’ thought that appear elsewhere in fragmentary form. Because it’s Burroughs, though, there is much that remains open to interpretation; different readers will respond as they will.

Burroughs begins with a review of the weapons and tactics available to revolutionaries in the West—assassinations, bombs, biological and chemical warfare. He fetishizes small armaments, and is creatively expansive on chemical and biological methods: the use of venomous snakes, or the introduction of leopards and tigers into South America, where the scarcity of game would soon drive them to man-eating. They would eat the CIA men first, since they are bigger and slower;

the good grey lard they call it, licking the blood off each other’s faces—plentiful, helpless, no fur, the ideal food animal.

Ultra-low freq infrasound weapons and Deadly Orgone Radiation could be surreptitiously deployed (fortunately, ‘DOR exposure on a gradient scale gives immunity. Be prepared.’). Assassination squads should target ‘decency leagues, John Birch billionaires, newspaper owners, finking cab drivers and hotel clerks, narks and ghetto landlords, any bastard connected with Men’s Rights Activism, all the servants and guard dogs and company cops of the rich.’

Wipe out the Bible Belt and you will glimpse the Garden of Eden.

Burroughs parodies revolutionary scenarios in the UK and South America then concedes that conventional techniques of violent disruption, agitation and subversion are utopian fantasies that offer little more than ‘a change in management.’ What we really need is a program of research and training to decondition subjects from past conditioning, to bring all a person's abilities under their own control—including heart rate, blood pressure, brain waves and sexual responses. We need to build a new language in which certain falsifications inherent in existing Western languages become impossible to formulate: we need to delete the IS of identity, which implies a body and nothing else, and suggests a permanent condition; we need to delete the definitive article THE, which contains the implication of the one and only (THE God, THE Universe, THE Way, THE Right, THE Wrong); we need to delete the whole concept of EITHER/OR. A project of real revolution requires a change of consciousness and the extension of awareness, plus good food and good sex. The project would rerun evolution, with a referee this time, with the aim of producing a variety of humanoid sub-species;

New species will arise by not knowing the old ways, the old words, the old laws and prohibitions, the so stupid RIGHT or WRONG.

At the heart of Burroughs’ revolution is the M.O.B. (My Own Business). M.O.B. ‘assumes the right of every individual to possess his inner space,’ to do what interests him with people he wants to be with. The good guys are dedicated to minding their own business without interference; the bad guys are dedicated to interference: their business is degrading, harassing and frightening other people. Against the bad guys, Burroughs advises the use of language, symbols, scrambled speech, the manipulation of recorded images, discombobulation—the weapons of illusion. Language games, satire and parody as cultural critique was Burroughs' modus for a long time. Here his powers of prophecy are uncanny. He coins the term ‘fake news,’ and visualizes the circulation of viruses made from bits of word and image. He saw the whole mess coming way before anyone else did. ( )