Re: <nettime> rage against the machine

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

Seemingly totally unrelated:

1. flight recorders are brightly colored these days. The term "black 
box" originates in WW2, mostly because the first flight recorders, as 
all other "secret" electronics, was housed in metal boxes painted matte 
black.

See 
https://web.archive.org/web/20171019110346/http://siiri.tampere.fi/displayObject.do?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.profium.com%2Farchive%2FArchivedObject-8077CE76-2B43-6FAA-D11C-77AAFD6C72E8

2. Schematic "black box", meaning circuitry/algorithm that is opaque and 
not supposed to be seen or understood, and only I/O is available also 
originates in WW2.

It's hilarious that #1 and #2 overlap again these days, as most airlines 
have no capability of examining their own flight recorders, so we are 
back to black boxes: Ethiopian Airlines refused to hand over their black 
boxes to Americans, as they don't trust them. Instead they gave them to 
the French (this really existing trust hierarchy is getting 
interesting.) For Ethiopian Airlines, the brightly colored flight 
recorders are true black boxes: the input was something their aircraft 
generated, and the output is something that French will generate. 
Ethiopian Airlines doesn't get to understand the rest.

So term "black box" is fully justified and interchangeable with "flight 
recorder", in true schematic sense.



On 3/28/19, 11:48, Felix Stalder wrote:
> Let me just pick up on one point, because it kind of annoyed me since
> the start the thread, the significance of the the existence of a "black
> box" in the airplane and in cybernetic diagrams. To the best of my
> understanding, these two "black boxes" stand in no relation to each other.

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