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.

In the Pearson International Airport in Toronto, there’s a walkway that fascinates me. The walkway in question runs from where you get off the plane to the exit. If you get off the plane and have luggage, you proceed down the stairs to the carousels and the herd of humanity. If you don’t have luggage to collect, you can bypass the whole thing and take this walkway. It passes over the luggage claim area and then passes over the people waiting for their loved ones to emerge. A few meters later, its own set of doors opens and you are outside in a loading area, hailing a cab. Unremarkable.

photo credit: {tribal} photography

But there is that brief moment when you are crossing above the waiting throng. You are cleared through security, vetted and behind the cordon. They are random people milling about the airport. Physically, you are within shouting distance. Legally, they are miles away. It’s not a big drop, I’ve made worse without hurting myself. Physically, it’d be a simple movement. Legally, it would be as if I’d teleported.

At some point during a 36 hour multi-flight marathon, I have this dim memory of an airport escalator that skipped a floor. There was plexiglass on either side and as we were going from floors 3 to 1, we passed an escalator that ran from 2 to 4. Who was the other escalator for? I have no idea. Probably employees sporting a special badge with chips and magnetic codes that allow them to open certain doors. Doors that I’d be arrested for loitering near, alert levels being what they are.

Years ago, in a philosophy of mind seminar, we talked about abstract reasoning skills. I’m going to mangle it but the basic idea was something like this: Water has no abstract reasoning at all. You can trap water with a bowl. From water’s perspective, the floor is infinitely far away once the bowl has collected it. Animals like dogs can get out of obstacles like a bowl, but you can mess them up with a picket fence. They can see the thing they want to get, and they’ll stay stuck right where it is, barking. They are unwilling to move “away” from the tasty bone even though the open gate down the lane is actually the shortest route from their current position to the morsel. A human is able to make that kind of higher order of reasoning, happily sauntering down the road, popping the latch and collecting the prize. On the other hand, dogs don’t get tricked by lines painted on the ground.

Jackie is smiling at the zoo security guard like she’s not terrified. The guard is yelling something or other.

“Blah blah blah,” he yells. “Blah blah blah blah.” Jackie’s classmates are crowded around him now, watching her. She looks crazy up here, but they’re the ones who think that a little fence like that can stop them.

Joey Comeau One Bloody Thing After Another

Ordinarily, legal and physical architecture work in concert. You aren’t allowed into a certain area, so they helpfully wall it off and lock the doors. They’d prefer you to be in some other area and so offer you bright lighting and wide aisles. But there are times when the two work at cross purposes, either when some architect is being clever (as in the walkway and escalators) or when the subtleties of legal distinction are too much for dumb mortar and brick to implement. I’ve started thinking of these areas as woven spaces.

We start building legal architecture when we’re young. “Don’t touch the floor, it’s made of lava!” “The big comfy chair is ’safe’!” “No boys allowed!” Chalk, debris, and language are the tools of the budding legal architect. A patch of playground morphs between uses, guided only by a few well placed rocks or backpacks, some lines scratched in the dust, and an elaborately argued consensus.

This kind of rule-making gives us a means to shape our environment when we’re otherwise powerless. We can’t get together a voting block, draw up plans, lobby for, and build a new arena for kids’ hockey, but we can cart a net into the street and declare a manhole cover centre ice.

At the same time, the most prolific legal architects of our childhood are parents and authority figures. Under their watchful eye, otherwise easily traversed spaces become mazes of prohibition and regulation. It hardly seems fair. But these are hacks, allowing layers of use in a single space. Without stern looks and sharp words, it would be impossible to have a usable kitchen that was not also a toddler deathtrap.

As kids mature, the likely uses for a given room begin to collapse into a roughly consistent set of needs. The physical and legal spaces coalesce and begin to operate in concert once more. But even as kids turn into young adults, there are plenty of exceptions. Siblings argue about each other’s bedroom use (“His stuff is on MY SIDE.”), parents and children have to negotiate privacy and access, and politeness constrains what rooms guests do and don’t enter during parties. Finally, there is always the threat of being grounded.

Restraining orders, probation, curfew, and house arrest are legal architecture is literally legal. House arrest ties you to a specific place, imprisoned by purely theoretical walls. Probation offers more freedom but turns the city into a maze customized to your particular circumstances and crime. Restraining orders create roving spheres of forbidden space, a protective bubble around those to whom you have been deemed a threat.

The current technology used for these measures is pretty primitive, relying on phonecalls, eyewitnesses, and crude ankle monitors. It’s not hard to imagine a GPS-enabled or networked monitor that translates rulings into a highly granular set of instructions. According to a schedule negotiated with the courts, virtual pathways open and close to allow you to travel to and from your community service workplace, before sealing you in at home for the night or downtown for your mandated shifts. In the case of restraining orders, the system could monitor the location of all parties, warning victim, perpetrator, and authorities in case of a breach.

If this seems at all draconian, consider that the rest of us are already pretty used to this kind of thing. We happily use theatre tickets, conference badges, time-locked access cards, metro passes, and other tokens to open and close spaces according to all sorts of schedules and regulations. It’s all tricks and hacks. It’s a cybernetic solution to an architectural problem.

Imagine instead an environment built out of some suite of smart materials able reconfigure themselves in a highly contextual manner. Guests checking in to a hotel are assigned a room and then follow a path that lights up at their feet, guiding them to rest. An ancient forest reconfigures itself, trapping and confusing enemies, while friendlies pass unmolested. Adventurers become lost in a dungeon of shifting walls and traps. The entire plot of the movie Cube.

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.

A recurring puzzle of evolution is the persistence of certain entities or behaviours that – at first glance – seem to harm the reproductive fitness of individuals. From the naive standpoint, an individual worker ant makes a mockery of evolution. They’re sterile; a reproductive dead-end.

One way of conceptualizing the answer is the unit of selection. It’s the idea that natural selection happens at a variety of levels: genes, cells, individuals, groups. When you look at ants, you don’t just look at individuals, you also look at colonies. At the colony level, there is an enormous benefit to specialization. Having thousands of sterile disposable workers lets you do all kinds of things that individually self-interested organisms mightn’t.

photo credit: sharkbait

A similar explanation has been offered for why homosexuality keeps occurring in nature. Naively, you might wonder why it hasn’t been bred out of existence; individuals who are born homosexual are unlikely to have kids. It’s possible that having a certain percentage of your family be childless has a benefit to the group. If the group persists, then the genes will be carried on.

How big do the units of selection get? Family? Tribe? Society? Nation? Civilization?

Consider Stephen Hawking. He’s one of the smartest people around. The beneficial consequences of his discoveries still haven’t been worked out. In any other period of history, he’d be long dead or incapable of communicating his ideas. In a significant portion of our world, he’d be dead. The unit of selection is something like: Stephen Hawking + technoculture capable of building a speech synthesizer and keeping him alive + technoculture capable of benefiting from his insights.

No one knows how to make a pencil, economists like to point out. We rely on a massive network of local expertise and an infrastructure of transportation to pull all the parts together. James Burke’s Connections makes the same point over and over again. The first episode especially so, beginning with a blackout in NYC and proceeding to a fantasy about the collapse of civilization and what you’d need, in order to survive.

The collapse fantasy comes up all over the place. A fear or hope that it’s all spinning plates, liable to come crashing down at any moment. So we bullshit about what we’d do if the zombies come, or we carefully put together our 72 hour survival kits, or we spend weekends in the woods learning “essential” skills.

Gun rights, gardening, anything to help in the great unknown.

From The Texas Survivalist

No one knows how to make a gun, either.

Survivalists fascinate me. They are in effect small groups of people attempting to redraw the borders of selection units. If the broader technoculture is the one by which most of us thrive or perish, serious survivalism is a bet on both the fragility of the larger system and one’s ability to continue past its end. In contrast, someone like me – perpetually connected, mildly asthmatic – won’t even make it to the wall when the revolution comes. The survivalists, meanwhile, expect to be happily ensconced in their compound, building a new authentic life while the rest of us go mad or starve.

The unit of selection is shorthand for a lot of ideas, and the edges of a unit are rarely precise. There is fluidity to definition. Civilization may collapse, but into rival tribes. A tribe might fall apart, while a family goes on. Two tribes might come together while a single loner escapes into the night.

For humans, disconnecting isn’t easy, indeed it may be impossible. In his manifesto, Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) considers the problem.

118 Conservatives and some others advocate more “local autonomy.” Local communities once did have autonomy, but such autonomy becomes less and less possible as local communities become more enmeshed with and dependent on large-scale systems like public utilities, computer networks, highway systems, the mass communications media, the modern health care system. Also operating against autonomy is the fact that technology applied in one location often affects people at other locations far away. Thus pesticide or chemical use near a creek may contaminate the water supply hundreds of miles downstream, and the greenhouse effect affects the whole world.

Ted Kaczynski Industrial Society and Its Future

You might feel that society is going the wrong way, Kaczynski argues, but you get very little say in the direction. If a decision affects a million people, you get (on average) a millionth share. And if the decision affects 6.7 billion?

Jamais Cascio has spent a great deal of time looking at the problem of global warming and the possibility of using geo-engineering as a tool to combat the worst of its effects. He’s also considered the fallout from those kinds of actions. There’s the obvious stuff like unintended consequences or uneven effects (say saving the Midwest breadbasket means drought in Cuba). And then there’s conflict over who gets to decide where, what kind, and how much geo-engineering happens.

In this scenario, the leadership of a powerful state might come to believe that:

• The effects of decarbonization would be slow and diffuse, but
• Said powerful state was well-suited to engage in adaptation projects, while
• The rival(s) of said powerful state were more vulnerable to the impacts of anthropogenic global warming, so that
• The rival(s) would be weakened relative to said powerful state if the effects of global warming persisted and said powerful state adapted.

In short, a powerful state believing itself better-able to adapt to or withstand the effects of global warming might see a persistent advantage to its rivals being hurt by global warming, and slow its decarbonization accordingly.

If all of that sounds ludicrous to you, you’ve probably forgotten about (or never lived through) the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union.

Jamais Cascio A Cold War Over Warming

7 angels with trumpets aside, the Cold War is probably the first time that a truly global unit of selection existed. 40 years is a long time to spend on the hair trigger edge of global annihilation, (we may still be). Though global integration is far from comprehensive, it’s hard to deny that there are more and more causal links all over the world and that they are getting stronger. The usual suspects can parade out at this point: global warming, the Internet, the stock market crash, food security, nuclear warfare, global pandemic, Coca Cola.

What to do? With only one unit of selection, the question of humanity’s survival becomes all or nothing. If you rely on overseas shipping for your food, then even jitters in the market can cause havoc. When the Mayan civilization collapsed, it had no effect at all on events in Europe or Asia. Now, we risk drowning entire islands because of bad decisions made decades ago.

Kaczynski thinks we should tear things down sooner rather than later.

2. The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy.

3. If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later.

Ted Kaczynski Industrial Society and Its Future

Hawking thinks we should establish extra-terrestrial colonies as soon as possible.

“It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species,” Hawking said. “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.”

Hawking: Space exploration a necessity by Sylvia Hui, Associated Press

Both solutions are aspects of the same approach. When the unit grows in size and power such that a self-perpetrated disaster could wipe out the entire territory, we must either shrink the size, or grow the territory. Either way, the scope of consequences must be limited. Otherwise? They had a name for that in the Cold War: “Mutually Assured Destruction.”

At this point, any number of post-humanists might pop up and point out that extinction might not be the end.

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.