Mammoth blog has published the guest post I wrote for them as part of the Mammoth Book Club. It’s about traffic jams, freedom, and, yes, cyborgs.

The chapter they asked me to write about contains one of the most striking passages I’ve read all year. It goes like this:

Over time, the traffic cop was slowly transformed: his hands took on white gloves for visibility; his voice was replaced by a whistle; and eventually, he was elevated in a tower and communicated with the traffic via signs or coloured lights. The police officer slowly vanished, his body evolving into mechanical and electrical devices. His hands were replaced by standardized, colored signals. His eyes were replaced by sensing actuators, such as microphones, pressure sensors, electromagnets, or video cameras. All that was left was to replace his brain.

Sean Dockray, Fiona Whitton, Steven Rowell – Blocking All Lanes – The Infrastructural City p.106

If that doesn’t give you chills, then perhaps you are reading the wrong website?

The full post is here.

Two other things

First, it didn’t fit into the essay, but I want to build on one of the side notes. I have a minor fascination with city-driving car ads aimed at 20somethings. You know the kind: they are living life’s ups and downs, they are going to parties, there is never any traffic. In particular, I love this Scion ad that wants you to associate parkour with owning a car. The essay flowed away from examining this in more detail, but one of the most interesting things about cars is the interaction between their mythology of freedom and reality of tightly regimented movement.

I’m not just thinking about the stop and go signals of downtown gridlock (though the completely obvious contrast between the far ranging movements of Scion’s free runners and the constrained-to-the-road path of the vehicles is perfectly pertinent). I’m talking about the massive architectural network devoted to creating an environment where cars can roam.

For freedom machines, our vehicles are extremely sensitive. They like surfaces of a certain smoothness and within a range of grades. They hate a great variety of weather conditions. They can’t go far at all without needing to refuel. From a wider perspective, the freedom of the car compared to the herded imprisonment of public transit, airplanes, or rail seems pretty marginal. It’s all one dimensional ribbons of connectivity strung across a vast two dimensional plane.

I’ve talked about this theme in the past, the invisible infrastructure of cyborgs.

Second, I would be completely remiss if I didn’t thank August C. Bourré for pointing me to a number of excellent papers relating to this stuff. The final third of the essay was completely reworked based on material he sent my way.

Go read the guest post.

Are there any botnets that come from either public or private sectors?
“This is our public-sector botnet.” Boy, I’d like to see one of those.

Bruce Sterling in More Cyberwar Semantics at Beyond the Beyond

photo credit: Beverly & Pack

After years of rumoured increases in the number and sophistication of attacks on the nation’s public and private networked infrastructure, groups claiming to be from North Korea declare all out cyberwar. The U.S. government realizes that it needs its own, bigger, botnet to strike back. Rather than risk secure military computers, to say nothing of the hardware procurement and deployment time, the innovative Cyber Home Defence Initiative is announced.

Combining elements of Conficker, Folding@Home, and old fashioned American wartime patriotic spirit, the CHDI allows allows ordinary citizens to do their part by dedicating spare cycles and bandwidth to protecting the networked home front and striking back at America’s enemies. A quick download and completely automatic installation makes contributing to the defence effort as easy as leaving you computer on and online when it’s not in use.

Whichever political party isn’t in power decries the CHDI as yet another infringement on American liberties, a governmental land grab, and a violation of privacy in hearth and home. The other side leverages their extensive social networking capabilities to build support for, and sign-ups to, the initiative. Department of Defence officials decline to comment on rumours that Blackwater’s cyber security division is renting time on the Nucrypt botnet.

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?

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.