This is part of the week-long sprawling Glacier/Island/Storm conversation that’s happening in conjunction with BLDGBLOG’s design studio being taught at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. The introduction and list of participants is available here.

Strange Inhabitants

Biologists have identified a pair of complementary evolutionary phenomena relating to isolated populations of island-dwelling animals. Island gigantism happens when birds or reptiles step into the apex predator niche that would normally be held by a large mammal. Because they aren’t as naturally efficient killers as their mammalian counterparts, pressure eases off their prey who can afford to grow larger than normal as well. Island dwarfism occurs when a combination of inbreeding and lacking resources forces animals to grow smaller and consume less, maintaining the balance and viability of the ecosystem.

Which is all just to say that the situation gets weird when you stick things on islands.

View in Google Maps (I highly recommend clicking through and zooming in on the circles.)

Under a Titanium Net

In the Pacific ocean, about halfway between Japan and the Philippines, there is a patch of coral called Okinotori that may or may not include a pair of islands. They might only be rocks. The status of these two possible-islands is of deep personal interest to the governments of both China and Japan. If they’re islands, the atoll grants Japan exclusive economic zone rights over an area of ocean about the size of California. If they’re rocks, then Japan loses the claim. In 2004, the Chinese started calling them rocks. There is no dispute over who owns the atoll, instead the dispute is about what the atoll is.

For those keeping score at home, according to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, an island is “a naturally formed area of land, surrounded by water, which is above water at high tide.” Also, “rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own shall have no exclusive economic zone.” There used to be five rocks peeking over the surface of the waves, but erosion has claimed three of them. The remaining pair are barely larger than mattresses, which leaves very little room for habitation or economic life.

To preserve the alleged islands, Japan surrounded them in 60m diameter concrete sea walls (these are the circular structures you can see in the satellite images). The smaller one got a titanium net to protect it from chipping by wave-hurled debris. There are slits in the walls to ensure that the ‘naturally formed’ land remains ’surrounded by water’.

The entire preservation project is gloriously tautological. A solar-powered unmanned lighthouse, installed in 2007, provides economic life to the islands because they need economic life in order to be islands. An ongoing project to preserve the rocks and encourage new coral growth continues because it’s critical that the islands be naturally formed. A concrete barrier isn’t natural, but a reef grown from transplanted coral in the shelter of artificial structures is.

China might simply need to wait. With sea levels expected to continue to rise, Japan may not be able to grow coral fast enough.

Here’s a fun conspiracy story for you: When the Copenhagen climate talks failed to come to any real conclusion, Mark Lynas blamed it all on China. This led Jamais Cascio to wonder whether the cold war over warming he’d predicted was coming true. Could China be using delayed action on climate change as a kind of passive weather control to drown Okinotori once and for all? Surely that’s overkill.

The fight wages on.

Gothic High Tech

Here’s what fascinates me about artificial islands. They tend to be colossally impractical constructions rendered practical by some byzantine combination of laws and culture. Artificial islands contrast nicely with the woven spaces idea I wrote about last month. Instead of a physical space sub-divided by rules and norms, these are fabrications forced into existence by laws. They are architecture at the margins of the high end, the inverse of Stewart Brand’s beloved slums and Sterling’s favelas. This is real gothic high tech. Expensive, complicated, barely functional constructions that will be abandoned as soon as the winds of finance or international law shift (and they will shift).

Japan spends $600 million encasing coral in concrete and titanium because Chinese diplomats suddenly start calling them rocks. The Chinese start doing this because China is worried that the US Navy might use the surrounding ocean to ferry warships and supplies to Taiwan.

This isn’t Japan’s first foray into making artificial islands. Yesterday’s InfraNet Lab post discusses Dejima, an artificial island built in Nagasaki bay in 1634. The island serves to house Portuguese and then Dutch merchants, part of a strategy for keeping Japan culturally isolated while still allowing for some trade. When Commodore Perry forces an end to sakoku, the island is quietly absorbed into the mainland.

Real estate bubbles render beachfront property untenably valuable. A burst of construction never quite seems to reach the promise of the brochures, be they the incomplete Venetian Islands in Miami (also discussed by InfraNet Lab) or Dubai’s drowning Palm Islands.

In a more contemplative vein, BLDGBLOG points us to an island slowly growing in Montenegro’s Bay of Kotor around a rock that looks like the Virgin Mary. Over time, sailors and pilgrims add ships and stones in a process that feels more organic than the seeded coral around Okinotori but that will survive only as long as Christianity remains in the region.

(For an alcohol soaked vision of the same kind of construction, see Bacardi’s Island commercial.)

In the North Sea, the UK builds gun platforms in order to repel Axis bombers. Once the war is over, they are abandoned, only to be repopulated by pirate radio stations, driven there by broadcast laws and a thirst for pop music. One declares itself a sovereign nation and attempts to run a data haven. (Archinect’s Nick Sowers visited some of these platforms last year.)

At the Edge of the Law

Data havens are a staple of cyberpunk fiction and its offshoots. They’re a natural evolution of offshore banking and flags of convenience, both typically conducted from island nations. It’s a tenuous existence. Many rely on foreign aid and sovereignty is maintained only through the general legal goodwill of the international community. Few island nations could repel invaders so their main line of defence is not being worth invading. At the same time, what makes them attractive places to store one’s money or bits is an alternate system of laws that permit foreign nationals to skirt their own country’s rules.

photo credit: octal

These countries seem to survive on the idea of being a country. Look through their economic activities and you see a bizarre portfolio of enterprise on the edges of sovereignty. Nauru, stripped of its natural resources has tried being a tax haven, renting fishing rights, and hosting an Australian detention centre. Tonga is known for its colourful postage stamps. The Cayman Islands have 285 registered banks. It’s fitting that Tuvalu would end up with the .tv domain, a valuable property that it leases out along with its area code for 900 numbers.

Iceland, still recovering from its law-induced role as one of the epicentres of the financial crisis, seems intent on reinventing itself as real data haven. First, it began pointing out that its low temperatures and virtually unlimited supply of geothermal energy would make it a great place to put your server farms. Now it’s working on readjusting the laws to be much more media-friendly. (A move which may or may not work as intended.)

Building for Abandonment

What lessons in all this for the budding architect? If you’re going to grow your own island, understand how tenuous a construction this is. We live in an era when the natural island nations are at risk of becoming ghost states, let alone their artificial companions, many of which barely crest the waves. Artificial islands tend to be inhabited as briefly as possible, a pressure which conflicts with the relatively slow process of semi-natural growth. You need an egress-plan. What will become of your island when the legal and cultural environment that sustains it inevitably changes? Who will inhabit it after the lawyers, scientists, diplomats, bankers, and soldiers all go home?

In the summer of 2009, I was in San Francisco for the first time and on my way to meet Alexis Madrigal and Sarah Rich for a drink. Equipped with only a photocopied map and a dumb cellphone, I got off at the appointed BART stop with instructions to head south and no idea which way that was. Ever the intrepid explorer, I worked out the solution using the phone’s clock, the map, and the location of the sun. That’s so remarkable that it’s worth saying a second time: In 2009 in a major metropolitan area, confused and disoriented I resorted to navigation by the sun.

photo credit: teresawer

Here’s how that story goes in Edmonton, a city with which I am equally unfamiliar: I get off at the appointed stop, pull out my smartphone, put in the address, and the phone works out where I am and points me to my destination.

The difference? International roaming charges haven’t crippled me.

A fair number of future-facing writers like to call various aspects of our connected world their outboard brains. It’s a cute conceit but also an aspirational statement. It looks forward to the implanted memories and off-loaded cognition promised by cybernetics.

We already have prototypical versions of that to some degree. Just about everyone uses a calculator for simple math, many of us offload scheduling memory to a physical or digital calendar – that’s all elementary “everyone’s a cyborg” stuff. Expect this to intensify. The promise of intelligence in the cloud is that we get access to terabytes of data as needed, and that this access will make us better whatever it is we are trying to be.

Here’s how the San Francisco story goes in 2002: I get off the BART and my hosts are waiting to meet me, because they know it’s easy to get turned around OR I get off the BART and see the local landmark that I was careful to ask my hosts about, so that I could situate myself when I emerged from the station. In 2002 this is a natural part of the flow of planning. In 2009, it doesn’t enter into consideration until it’s too late. There’s an assumption by everyone involved in the planning process that getting from the exit to the bar is a solved problem, so it isn’t discussed.

Here’s why this is interesting: As knowledge and information move further and further away from being something we have towards being something we process, we become increasingly reliant on the machines that enable this relationship. Having knowledge becomes an increasingly contingent and fragile state. As this stuff advances, there comes a point when the connectivity becomes mandatory instead of optional and unconscious instead of controllable.

This is the wild extreme of the transformation of intelligence documented in Lyotard’s The Post Modern Condition.

We may thus expect a thorough exteriorisation of knowledge with respect to the “knower,” at whatever point he or she may occupy in the knowledge process. The old principle that the acquisition of knowledge is indissociable from the training (Bildung) of minds, or even of individuals, is becoming obsolete and will become ever more so. The relationships of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now tending, and will increasingly tend, to assume the form already taken by the relationship of commodity producers and consumers to the commodities they produce and consume.

Jean François Lyotard The Post Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

Looking ahead to a time when these machines are more thoroughly integrated, we end up with some profoundly weird consequences. Travellers become literally less intelligent when they leave their coverage area, relative to their connected hosts. A civil emergency occurs because a brief service outage leads to a poor decision by a plant manager. Data corruption causes a segment of customers to suffer a kind of patchwork amnesia. Rumours abound of hackers able to execute man-in-the-middle attacks that allow them to lift and shift memories. Parents and school administrators spar over what constitutes fair or unfair augmentation when it comes to state testing. Augmented students stripped of their connections fare far worse than their have-not peers. When the machines are active, the scores are very different.

For a glimpse into your connected future, consider the case of Steve Mann, wearable computing pioneer. He’s been connected to various devices for the past 20 years and has become used to a computer-mediated relationship with the world. At the height of post 9/11 security paranoia, some overzealous airport guards decided they needed to see his rig removed. In the process of the inspection, some equipment was damaged and all of it torn off his body.

Without a fully functional system, he said, he found it difficult to navigate normally. He said he fell at least twice in the airport, once passing out after hitting his head on what he described as a pile of fire extinguishers in his way. He boarded the plane in a wheelchair.

By Lisa Guernsey At Airport Gate, a Cyborg Unplugged for the New York Times

If misplacing your cellphone gives rise to a panic beyond what would be reasonably expected for a few hundred dollar expenditure, you are beginning to get there. If you no longer remember addresses, you simply refer to a slip of paper, you are well on your way.

There will be outages. There will be coverage problems. There will be billing issues.

When it comes to video games, creating enemy artificial intelligence for a stealth-action game tends to be much harder than creating the AI for a plain shooter. One reason is a more complex sensory system. Another is the sheer amount of time that you spend in their presence.

In a shooter, the AI is unlikely to spend more than a few seconds alive after they appear on screen. Even when they do, it’s in the context of bullets, rockets, and grenades flying everywhere. There’s a limited emotional and intellectual range required for those circumstances.

In a stealth game, the player is likely to spend several minutes in the presence of the AI, silently observing them. This gives the enemy plenty of opportunities to be unbelievably stupid. In stealth games, the player watches the enemy move around, talk to their friends, get nervous, and investigate sounds. The extra exposure makes it easier for the AI to fall into the uncanny valley because the player has time to get to know them. The more you are watched, the more we can tell if you are human.


photo credit: MATEUS_27:24&25

In 1939 Russia invaded Finland. Over 100 days of fighting, sharpshooter Simo Häyhä killed 505 Russian soldiers with his bold-action rifle (he’s credited with 705 kills in total). The feat earned him the nickname “White Death” and a spot on Cracked.com’s prestigious list of Real Life Soldiers Who Make Rambo Look Like a Pussy.

The crew of the Enola Gay killed 66,000 people in Hiroshima.

Here’s Vanity Fair on relations between snipers and other soldiers in World War I.

…soldiers were willing to advance suicidally against machine-gun fire, but harbored a special dread of snipers’ single shots. To dread in war is to despise. In a conflict where hatred had faded between the combatants, and most killing was impersonal and mechanized, snipers who were captured were invariably bayoneted, shot, or hanged. Summary execution was the norm during World War II as well.

…Truth is, the Allied snipers themselves — though sometimes sought after — were widely shunned by their fellow soldiers on the front lines. The snipers were indeed spooky, the way they stalked their victims, studied them through scopes, and then mercilessly took their lives. They were not wanton killers, as was often believed. But their single shots were handcrafted kills in an era of mass-produced slaughter.

William Langewiesche The Distant Executioner

After World War II, military theorists dreamed of a “push button” solution to war. With improvements in guidance systems and other feedback mechanisms, the goal was to move away from dumb explosives strapped to rockets, or high risk manned bombing runs that were either inaccurate or fatal. Here’s Time’s breathless coverage in 1947.

With enough accuracy, atomic warheads would not be necessary for all purposes. A fair charge of ordinary explosive is enough to destroy, for instance, an aerial target, e.g., an enemy bomber. When launching methods are perfected, the missiles may take off in flocks, rising like falcons from the deck of a giant submarine which has crept toward an enemy coast.

From Time Magazine Science: Push-Button War 1947

For me, “push button war” is permanently entwined with NATO’s 1999 campaign in Kosovo. It was always a pejorative, aimed by critics on the left and the right. The charge was that the U.S. military had become too risk-averse, too antiseptic, not manly enough. The feeling seems to be that if you don’t put people on the line, if you don’t have any skin in the game, then your military actions lack a moral centre. There’s a sense of a lack of fair play.

What we saw in the decision to bomb Yugoslavia was the result of combining US activism (often related to crusading moralism), a rationalist mindset, and the silicon chip. Add to this an extreme wariness of the prospect of US casualties being given the CNN treatment, a President who wants his war (like his sex) without the mess, and we arrived at a policy that rested on hope and ’smart’ weapons.

Andy Butfoy Kosovo and Western Strategic Hubris

The NATO bombing campaign was a symbol for the desensitization of technological elites. They become greek gods high in their flying fortresses, raining death from above, causing havoc in mortals’s lives without controlling or directing events on the ground to any degree of success. Like greek gods they are capricious – willing to destroy the lives of others to handle their domestic troubles. The unfortunate tendency to hit the wrong targets didn’t help.

In the years between 1947 and 1999 another cultural force had grown to give “push button” a distinctly unsettling edge. As video games became more realistic and violent, commentators worried that they were desensitizing players to killing. Recall that 1999 was also the year of the Columbine Massacre, a tragedy that was linked over and over again to violent games and movies. An abortive attempt was even made to sue video game makers for their supposed role the attack.

The fear is that as video games become more real, more like murder simulators and wars become more like video games, that we will further lose our moral compass when it comes to conflict. The enemy becomes anonymous, faceless, interchangeable, and easy to kill remorselessly. Our side becomes main characters. Each death is significant.

Depictions of events like the Black Hawk Down blunder don’t help. In the movie, we are invited to sympathize with the 7 U.S. soldiers who lose their lives and the rest who make it home. It is only as the credits roll that the toll on the other side gets mentioned. 300-1,500 Somalis killed to 7 U.S. soldiers. Those are arcade death ratios! The incident was turned into a game in 2003. Reviews were mixed.

It features some attractive visuals and a few particularly dramatic scenes. Still, Black Hawk Down is a deeply flawed shooter that has a moment of disappointment or frustration for every moment of fun.

Greg Kasavin Delta Force: Black Hawk Down Review on Gamespot

That video games are being used to train soldiers doesn’t do much to ease one’s fears. The military happily blurs the line between entertainment, training, and recruitment. Their America’s Army project is a free online shooter which features a mix of realistic training, lovingly recreated authentic weapons and, you know, respawning soldiers.

My favourite part of the increasingly cognitively dissonant gameplay is how the game handles being a multiplayer-only product. It’s a game about being in the US Army, but someone needs to be on the other end of your gun. Who plays the enemy? The US gov’t can’t be caught offering a “play as a terrorist” option on the tax payer’s dime. (Besides, they have their own game.) The solution is a technically elegant accidental comment on the relative morality of war.

No matter which side you choose, you and your teammates always look like US soldiers, while the enemy always wears ski masks or other garb that marks them as terrorists.

Scott Osborne America’s Army Review on Gamespot

In the field, it’s much more difficult to tell who is or isn’t a terrorist. And in a conflict marked by the need to appeal to the hearts and minds of a populace (as opposed to merely bringing their leaders to heel) this is an enormous problem. Every dead civilian is a recruiting tool for the enemy. In this context, handcrafted kills start to look like a very good idea. Targets need to be checked carefully, lest you mistake someone gathering firewood for someone planting an IED. Commanders need to decide whether the risk to civilians is worth continuing a firefight. Patrols must dance a line between police-work, outreach, and combat. This is a far cry from firebombing Dresden.

With the rise of UAV drones, the line between video games and war seems to have blurred past the point of any meaningful distinction. Using networking technology, US troops near Las Vegas (of course it’s near Vegas) fly drones over Afghanistan and then go home to their families. They actually use Xbox controllers to fly some of the things.

And so “push button war” has returned, with questions about the morality of drones. We have no skin in the game. We can kill indiscriminately without consequence to the pilots. It’s distant death from above. Impersonal, antiseptic, and thoroughly desensitized. But the game being played by UAV pilots isn’t a shooter. They drop bombs rarely in Afghanistan; 187 launches over 135,000 hours of flight. Mostly, they spend their time watching.

A fighter pilot deploys for a few months and learns little about the ground he flies over, save for terrain features. But Predator and Reaper crews pull three-year tours at Creech, flying combat missions most days of the week. They can more easily see changes in village activity, or traffic on a stretch of road. If they’re tracking an individual, as they often will for days or weeks, they know when he goes to work, where he stops for tea, and whom he talks to along the way. Though civilians do die in some of the missile strikes, this ability to linger can do much to limit unintended deaths. If women and children or the unlucky neighbor is nearby, the plane can wait, and wait, without losing sight.

Brian Mockenhaupt We’ve Seen the Future, and It’s Unmanned for Esquire

This is a stealth action game. This is being a sniper. This is getting to know your target. Drone kills are handcrafted.

Anderson has dropped once. He centered the infrared targeting laser on a group of men that had just planted an IED, and the pilot squeezed the button and trigger, a slight movement of left thumb and right index finger. The missile raced along its invisible tether and half a minute later, the men were gone, erased in a cloud of black-and-white fire. A couple dozen people watched the strike, from operations centers in Afghanistan, Qatar, and the United States. Even a desk jockey at the Pentagon can monitor the feeds if he has the right clearance. So enticing are these voyeur views that a special term for them has arisen in military circles: Predator porn. Everybody likes to watch. But those idly watching aren’t the guys squeezing the triggers and guiding the missiles. That would be Anderson. And on the drive home that night, he kept his watch on longer than usual, replaying the moment.

Brian Mockenhaupt We’ve Seen the Future, and It’s Unmanned for Esquire

If you didn’t watch the drone criticism video I linked to above, watch it now. The deep dread and hatred of handcrafted kills raises it head here. Carefully selecting targets and aiming to remove them with a minimum of other casualties? Not OK. Combat operations with all the collateral damage to infrastructure, economy, people, and environment? Part of the cost of war.

Pay special attention to the complaint that the UN representative is levelling against the use of drones. He’s worried that the drones might be a program of targeted assassination, something which Gerald Ford banned in 1976.

No one ever signed an executive order against carpet bombing.

There is an arms race in progress between humans and bacteria. It started in earnest just before World War 1 with Salvarsan and really got going during World War 2 with the wide-spread use of Penicillin. In response to human aggression, resistant strains of bacteria evolved. Superbugs.

photo credit: US Army Africa

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus is the current star child. Harmless when carried on the skin, it gets into the body through wounds and then it kills. It accounts for 19,000 deaths per year in the U.S. (compare to about 17,000 from AIDS). It’s doing much better than its less resistant brethren. MRSA accounted for 2% of of staph infections in the U.S. in 1974. In 2004, it was 63%. MRSA thrives in hospitals.

With that in mind, take a look at this story from the Associated Press. Look at the infection rates. Japan: 80%, Israel: 44%, Greece: 38%, Norway: less than 1%.

In 1980, when MRSA started to appear among the fjords, Norway responded aggressively… by cutting antibiotic use, and by stepping up the tracking and quarantine of the strains they found. The stunning result is encapsulated in that number. Even more stunning: old drugs are still useful in Norway.

Haug unlocks the dispensary, a small room lined with boxes of pills, bottles of syrups and tubes of ointment. What’s here? Medicines considered obsolete in many developed countries. What’s not? Some of the newest, most expensive antibiotics, which aren’t even registered for use in Norway, “because if we have them here, doctors will use them,” he says.

He points to an antibiotic. “If I treated someone with an infection in Spain with this penicillin I would probably be thrown in jail,” he says, “and rightly so because it’s useless there.”

From: Solution to killer superbug found in Norway by Martha Mendoza and Margie Mason

When the rest of us went to war trying to wipe out infections entirely, the Norwegians forged an uneasy truce. They intentionally deny themselves access to the latest infection-fighting technology. They suffer through colds and other minor illnesses, essentially letting the bacteria run rampant (Tylenol is used to control the symptoms rather than the disease and infected individuals are sent home and paid to stay there). In life-threatening situations, the big guns come out and antibiotics keep the staph at bay. It works because there is no evolved resistance. The staph gets to live day to day, so we get to live in the emergency room.

Norway’s biggest problem is that the rest of the world didn’t follow suit. Most Norwegian cases of MRSA are people who travelled to foreign soil, got infected, and came home. The resulting picture is of this island of sanity, doomed to be overwhelmed by everyone else’s poor decisions about antibiotics. Which brings me to the next twist the article: Norway’s success can be replicated.

Around the world, various medical providers have also successfully adapted Norway’s program with encouraging results. A medical center in Billings, Mont., cut MRSA infections by 89 percent by increasing screening, isolating patients and making all staff – not just doctors – responsible for increasing hygiene.

From: Solution to killer superbug found in Norway by Martha Mendoza and Margie Mason

I’d assumed that increasingly resistant strains of bacteria was a one-way trip, a monster that once we’d created we could not contain. But bacteria strains are competing amongst themselves all the time. The cost of being antibiotic-resistant might mean giving up advantages in other areas to non-resistant strains. Stop grinding the population under your medicinal heel, and the more benign strains take care of MRSA for you. Imagine! You can turn back the clock and calm staph infections to a dull roar.

Years ago, I saw an evolutionary microbiologist speak to the same idea around the AIDS virus. He’d done work tracing strains in sex-tourist-heavy Thailand and more chaste Japan and found that in Thailand, HIV was more virulent. It killed people faster. It could afford to, because the transmission rates were so high. In Japan, the incubation period was longer. It had to be – there were less opportunities to transmit. When Japanese sex tourists returned from Thailand infected with the high virulence HIV, those strains evolved toward longer incubation periods.

He ended the talk by suggesting that programs to reduce transmission rates could have a multiplicative effect. Not only would there be less AIDS but what HIV there was would be more benign. If, as you read this, you are thinking about William Gibson’s J.D. Shapely, you are not alone.

Every arms escalation is a race to the bottom. Each side has to invest more and more resources to end up at an equilibrium. The result is an exhausting and increasingly high stakes game of chicken.

The parallels between the military-industrial arms race and the bacterial arms race are as suggestive as they are obvious. Imagine a medicinal START 1 limiting the power and use of antibiotics. “If we have them here, doctors will use them.” Imagine a global treaty that steps us away from high alert and in turn domesticates our adversaries. Imagine a global detente with staph infections. They think their demands are being met, so they kill off their extremists. Secretly, we still have nukes.

It is worth emphasizing that there is a real trade-off at play. Norwegians are getting sick more often and are suffering through these minor illnesses for longer than the rest of us. It’s a national investment on their part in catastrophe insurance. Norway allows slack in the system by distributing the quality of life cost to individuals and spreading the income loss across the collective. Small inefficiencies are accepted and absorbed. In return, Norway gets evolutionarily complacent, easily controlled, staph.

In America, if you get sick and stay home, you generally lose your pay. So you go in and make other people sick, or you take antibiotics and then go in. In return, America gets efficient, survivalist, killer staph. We get to work more and companies don’t have to pay people who aren’t contributing day today. But when things go wrong for us, they go really wrong.

I can’t help but think about the financial crisis and the problem of over-optimization that I wrote about in 2008. The banks that were most successful in the lead-up to the crash fell hard, while the ones that were merely profit generating (instead of profit maximizing) survived without a bailout. When things were going right, the most profitable banks optimized slack out of the system. When things went wrong, they went really wrong.

From a cybernetic perspective, this is a story of feedback and control. Domesticating and controlling a belligerent element by drawing it into a system.

Consider the parallels to asymmetric warfare. This is a variation of the hearts and minds strategy. It’s the hope that we’ll be greeted as liberators. It’s paying the enemy to switch sides. It’s drones watching targets for days, waiting for minimal collateral casualties before firing.

This summer the new U. S. commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, further restricted air strikes and ordered troops to withdraw from a fight in which they were being fired on from civilian areas — better to let enemy fighters slip away than risk alienating a village, or the whole country. This push to cut civilian casualties has only increased the military’s reliance on UAVs.

From: We’ve Seen the Future, and It’s Unmanned by Brian Mockenhaupt

What if the widely derided security theatre at airports is a form of terrorist domestication? If you can hijack a plane with box-cutters maybe you don’t bother learning to do much else. Maybe your superiors send disposable idiots instead of highly trained assassins. Maybe the highly trained commandos get stuck in the mountains or sent to Mumbai.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to apply the same lines of analogy to the War on Drugs.

Part of a series: Dematerialization

There were a lot of new buzzwords in play in 1999 when I was taking calls for our local Telecom’s ISP. This was 1999, just before the dotCom bubble burst; an exciting time that demanded exciting verbiage. Multimedia. Information Super-Highway. eVerb-of-your-choice.

My favourite was “Paperless Office”. We used to use it as a kind of curse word. An invocation said while waiting for copies of the meeting’s agenda to be printed so that if could be distributed, doodled upon, and then thrown away.

photo credit: Corey Holms

The computer was meant to herald an end to paper documentation but paper multiplied instead. Easy editing + cheap and fast laser printing changed the relationship we had to paper. Real world filing disappeared, as it became easier to just print a new copy if the document had gone missing. Perfection trumped conservation and every discovered typo meant a complete reprinting of all 7 copies of the 50 page report or proposal.

Think about what’s happening here. Documents are undergoing an transition from object to data. The paper copies become physical instantiations of the data but they’ve stopped being the data itself. There’s this sort of adolescent transition in progress, while we – the users of the data – aren’t sure how to treat it, so we end up with these bizarre hybrid entities that slide back and forth between digital and physical, all the while leaving behind recycling bins overflowing with the dead husks of stale snapshots.

A decade later, we’re slowly starting to come to grips with this. Very few of my friends own printers anymore – they feel like a costly burden. We prefer to avoid printing at all if we can, resorting to a trip to the copyshop only when absolutely necessary. The fact that we have to do this at all shows how much of the rest of the world that we’re interfacing with still fetishises paper. So we resort to hacks, using scanned signatures and fax-to-email services to generate much documentation, essentially resorting to forgery to navigate our way through the paper bureaucracy. Adolescence is still in progress.

If all these visionaries are right about the path that manufacturing is going to take, we are in for an even worse transition with objects. Just like with paper, the promise of 3d printers is a blurring between data and objects. Bruce Sterling calls these hybrid things Spimes. Data that gets instantiated in the physical world for a time, before being reclaimed, recycled and sustainably mined for future use.

Scenario: You buy a Spime with a credit card. Your account info is embedded in the transaction, including a special email address set up for your Spimes. After the purchase, a link is sent to you with customer support, relevant product data, history of ownership, geographies, manufacturing origins, ingredients, recipes for customization, and bluebook value. The spime is able to update its data in your database (via radio-frequency ID), to inform you of required service calls, with appropriate links to service centers. This removes guesswork and streamlines recycling.

Bruce Sterling – Viridian Note 00422: The Spime