Brian Holmes on Wed, 20 Dec 2017 11:39:04 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> The magnificent bribe


On 12/18/2017 11:01 PM, Morlock Elloi wrote:

This assumption then leads to conclusion that VCs pouring money into these data taps knew from the start what the end game was. This, in turn, implies some serious centralized long-term (15-20 year) planning.

Is there any evidence of such planning?

There is, but centralized long-term planning is far too crude a concept to catch what is going on.

One of the takeaways from JD Moreno's excellent little book, Mind Wars, is the pervasiveness of the Dual Use strategy in US military funding. Dual use means that a technology, or some strategic element of it, has a legitimate civilian use as well as a military one that need not be mentioned at any point in its development. An agency like Darpa or In-Q-Tel can selectively stimulate aspects of a civilian technological development process in order to create pieces of a puzzle that it alone can put together. That way, as new technological worlds emerge, it turns out they are already weaponized. It's like the nightmare scenario in Harun Farocki's Inextinguishable Fire, where the factory worker keeps stealing pieces of a vacuum cleaner he wants to bring home, but when he tries to assemble it, it always turns into a gun.

From this perspective the notion of comprehensive "planning" looks obsolete. Rather it's about managed co-evolution. This is done in the US by informal coordinating groups that keep high-level government functionaries in close contact with corporations, most of which in turn do a lot of work for the government and the military. The classic example is the Bohemian Grove summer camp founded by the owners of the engineering firm Bechtel. But from the dot-com era onward you can look to the Highlands Forum, described perfectly in the article you cite by by Nafeez Ahmed, who btw is one of my favorite journalists:

"Total participants in the DoD’s Highlands Forum number over a thousand, although sessions largely consist of small closed workshop style gatherings of maximum 25–30 people, bringing together experts and officials depending on the subject. Delegates have included senior personnel from SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton, RAND Corp., Cisco, Human Genome Sciences, eBay, PayPal, IBM, Google, Microsoft, AT&T, the BBC, Disney, General Electric, Enron, among innumerable others; Democrat and Republican members of Congress and the Senate; senior executives from the US energy industry such as Daniel Yergin of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates; and key people involved in both sides of presidential campaigns."

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e

It's obvious that for these military-industrial-entertainment circles, the prospect of being able to put whole societies in tin cans outfitted with multiple peep holes was too good to be true. And alas, that's the direction our capitalist economy has gone, dragging the rest of the world with it. For more insight you can check out Newton Lee's Facebook Nation: Total Information Awareness (2013), which seems damn good after having skimmed it. The Wikipedia article on In-Q-Tel quotes former director George Tenet saying that the strategic venture-capital fund "enabled CIA to take advantage of the technology that Las Vegas uses to identify corrupt card players and apply it to link analysis for terrorists." That's a direct reference to the Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery program of Total Information Awareness in the early 2000s, just so you can see how crucial the entertainment component is (Disney-Booz-GE, same struggle). They do not have to plan the development of such technology start-to-finish in the old operations-research way, instead they just look for it in the private sector, or seed-fund it if it's not already there. This is all totally coherent with the current corporate doctrine of Open Innovation (see book of same name), which relies on scanning the global technological landscape and appropriating the key components for any given job.

Open Innovation is very different from the former paradigm of coordinated academic-corporate-military research that emerged under direct government control during WWII. Centralized long-term planning was a good description for the innovation system of that time. The paradigm was maintained up to the late 1970s, when the Church Commission tried to specifically outlaw military research in universities. Subsequently, not only legality and citizen oversight were a problem, but also funding for big blue-sky projects was harder to secure. But from the dot-com era on, DoD and other US control agencies have made adversity into a virtue by adopting the new epistemology, which conceives socio-technical development as the interplay of multiple conflicting strategies. Though it's nowhere near as crudely sexy as a good conspiracy theory (like, Facebook is secretly run by the CIA!) still I recommend you read a 2014 military intelligence report called "Policy Challenges of Accelerating Technological Change: Security Policy and Strategy Implications of Parallel Scientific Revolutions." Here's a quasi-random quote to give you a flavor:

"An analytic framework needs to be developed for a new key strategic variable, namely, the study of how ST&E assets, commercialization resources, and technology adoption capacities are distributed globally, and how they may affect the economic and global security environment in the future. Analogous to the study of geopolitics, this variable could be termed GeoInnovation. The factors contributing to GeoInnovation ultimately enhance the diplomatic, information, military, and economic (DIME) levers of national power by underpinning the future economic, military, and political power of a nation. GeoInnovation factors, however, are leading indicators (by years or even decades) as they reflect the future capacity to develop and deploy technological innovations."

http://ctnsp.dodlive.mil/files/2014/09/DTP1061.pdf

The major concern in that paper is the declining US percentage of global science, technology and engineering research (ST&E). And that's the crucial thing to get your head around: the control agencies *lag behind* the global R&D process. However they know it, so they continually seed promising developments and then follow up by figuring out how to instrumentalize them in advance of widespread adoption and weaponization by other actors. The CIA and other control agencies do not just "turn on the taps" of the big social media companies when they want. However, they did fund aspects of social media development, they did appropriate elements of social media technology, and now that social media has been weaponized by many actors ranging from ISIS to Russia, they are actively working on data mining (see the article on recent In-Q-Tel investment, https://theintercept.com/2016/04/14/in-undisclosed-cia-investments-social-media-mining-looms-large).

Managed co-evolution, or what might better be termed "strategic steering," is what these agencies actually do, to the limits of their ability. It's not central planning and there is no puppet master. But if "breathing together" is the primal definition of conspiracy, well, yeah, there's a lot of that going on in the government-funded halls of the academic-corporate-military-entertainment complex, that's for sure.

best, BH
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