A Dronestagram Family Portrait

It is difficult to describe a drone strike accurately.

On October 24, 2012, Bibi Mamana and her grandchildren were gathering firewood or picking okra outside their home. They may have been in a field. Perhaps it was a militant compound with a weapons depot. 2 missiles were fired, killing Mamana and up to 5 other people, injuring 6 to 8 of the children. Some other men, maybe 3, maybe militants, may have been caught in the blast. A house and a car may or may not have been destroyed. Either 3 cows or 1 buffalo and 2 goats were also killed. The drones remained overhead and 5 to 7 minutes after the first strike more missiles fell.

This moment—the drones, the missiles, the people, the livestock—is a node in a vast network. It spans the globe, connecting villages to secret installations to office parks to seats of government. It reaches backwards for millenia and will resonate forwards for untold centuries. To trace it out completely is impossible. We are hampered by its size and by the fact that much of it is hidden behind classified protections and some of the rest is barely recorded at all.

This is an attempt to understand the geography of a drone strike.

The Arena

Tappi—where the strike happened—is in Pakistan, near the Afghan border. It is sometimes spelled ‘Tapi’, sometimes called a village, and sometimes called an area. It is in North Waziristan, a mountainous region with a socially and religiously conservative culture. The rugged terrain makes it a difficult place to make a living and many locals emigrate to become labourers. When they can, they prefer a medical education.

After the fall of the Taliban government in Afganistan, insurgents began to move across the border and set up shop. In 2007, concerns over the Talibanization of the region led the National Security Council of Pakistan to hold a meeting to decide how to address the detriorating law and order situation. Their plan of action included the deployment of drones.

The region is marked by frequent blood feuds and Waziri religious leaders have been known to use outsiders—such as US forces hunting al-Qaeda fugitives—as a means of settling scores.

The Drone

The drones that killed Bibi Mamana were almost certainly US drones—MQ-1 Predators, flown by the CIA. They’ve been flying missions and hitting targets in Pakistan since 2004. The vast majority of the more than 360 strikes that have happened in Pakistan have been in North Waziristan.

The MQ-1 Predator was originally designed to be a high endurance surveillance platform, but later upgrades allowed it to carry a missile payload. A Predator can fly up to 740km, hold above a target for up to 14 hours, and still return to base. These high endurance times are perfect for the CIA, as it means they can keep a constant presence over an area, observing it for weeks.

Drones are not individual objects. They are distributed hyper-entities, smeared across the globe. A typical Predator system configuration might include four aircraft, one ground control system, a data distribution terminal, and a sattelite network to enable over-the-horizon control. The main piloting is often done from a remote location, but a ground crew is required in the field to maintain, launch, and land the aircraft.

The Runway

The drones fly out of covert airfields run by the CIA. The CIA is understandably reluctant to share the details of those locations, so some guesswork is required.

Until 2011, our best guess would have been here, the Shamsi airbase in Pakistan. In 2009, the Times of London published images taken from Google Earth’s satellite view that showed what appeared to be 3 aircraft matching the profile of Predator drones. After the images came out, senior US officials confirmed that the base was used to launch drones, reversing several years of denial.

In December 2011, US forces were evicted from the base after NATO helicopters and airplanes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers stationed at 2 checkposts at Salala. Each side claims the other shot first. How much of a disruption the closing of Shamsi was to the CIA’s operations is unclear. According to some reports and rumours, they had been winding down the use of the base anyway and the closure was more about placating the public. The Pakistan government walks a fine line with the CIA’s activities. Publicly, it condemns the attacks though privately parts of the government are known to be sharing intelligence with the Americans.

These two sites represent two more candidate locations for the drones’ origin. One is an airfield outside of Ghazi and the other is known as PAF Base Shahbaz, near Jacobabad. Both have been mentioned as likely CIA run drone airfields in Pakistan.

Jacobabad is named for Brigadier-General John Jacob. Jacob was an officer of the British East India Company. He fought in Afganistan before being put in charge of the frontier. He founded Jacobabad in 1847 on the site of Khangurh village and made it the seat of his administration. As an inventor, he developed an exploding shell with a range of 14 miles. His belief was that this would revolutionize war, allowing riflement to annihilate field artillery in short order.

Jacobabad is famous for its historical horse and cattle show. The show was begun by the occupying British Government as a way to obtain horses for its colonial cavalry.

The final candidate location is less likely, but more interesting. It is Camp Chapman, just outside of Khost in Afganistan, and just over the border from Tappi. Some reports indicate that drones may be housed there, though the security situation makes it unlikely. It is too exposed.

Chapman is named for the first US serviceman to die in Afghanistan after the US invasion. Nathan Chapman was killed in action nearby on January 4, 2002. The base began life as a military facility before being turned over to the CIA. Nearby FOB Salerno is the US military facility colloquially known as ‘rocket city’ because of the frequency of attacks by insurgents.

Because it is just over the border from Pakistan, Camp Chapman is thought to have evolved into a key counterterrorism site and a hub for the CIA’s Special Activities Division, the part of the CIA responsible for running the drone operations. It’s unlikely that drones are directly operating out of Chapman, but the intelligence gathering and processing that leads to strikes is almost certainly happening here.

Chapman is best known as the site of the suicide bombing that claimed the lives of 7 CIA operatives in 2009, an incident fictionalized in Zero Dark Thirty. Because it is so close to the border and to North Waziristan, Camp Chapman is a natural place for informants to meet with CIA operatives. It may have been that loosened security regulations—intended to put informants at their ease—allowed the suicide bomber to get so close.

In the week after that attack, the CIA conducted 5 drone strikes in North Waziristan. This is an unusually high number. On average, drones hit Pakistan every 5 days.

The Aircraft

The MQ-1 Predator is designed and manufactured by General Atomics.

General Atomics is headquartered in San Diego, California. It began as a division of General Dynamics with a charter to explore peaceful uses of atomic energy. Its mission has since expanded.

San Diego is the eighth largest city in the US. It is a Navy town, housing the largest naval fleet in the world. The military is deeply wrapped up in San Diego’s economy, with General Atomics being one of several major military contractors that began operations and remain headquartered there.

The Predator drones are probably built here, in a factory about 25 miles northeast of General Atomics’ HQ, in Poway California. It takes 23 weeks to build a Predator. The bulk of the airframe is made of a composite of black carbon-fiber and graphite fabrics impregnated with epoxy resin.

A computer-driven cutting machine cuts the fabric into parts. Guided by lasers, workers layer these parts together in molds. By carefully arranging the layers so that their weaknesses cancel out, and using spacers that provide volume and strength without much weight, the final composite pieces are very strong, and very light. Once laid out, the parts are cured in an oven and allowed to set. Workers and robots do the final trimming.

The factory covers 3 acres. The main assembly floor is open concept with labelled areas describing the work happening at each place. Wing assembly here, fuselage assembly there. The assembled parts are painted in a different building and then moved to the integration floor, where the engine, electronics, and avionics are added.

The Components

The engine that powers the Predator is built here, in Gunskirchen, Austria by BRP-Powertrain GmbH & Co KG, better known as Rotax. Gunskirchen is tragically best known for being the location of a concentration camp during WWII.

Founded in 1920, Rotax historically built 2 stroke engines for snowmobiles, motocycles, and other small land vehicles. In 1982 they moved into 4 stroke engines for (amongst other things) aircraft.

The Predator’s Lynx radar comes from closer to home. It was designed and built by Sandia National Laboratories under the direction of General Atomics. Sandia is a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation. Sandia’s primary headquarters are here, in Albuquerque, New Mexico on Kirtland Air Force Base. 8,700 people are employed there.

Sandia’s roots are in the Manhattan Project. The scope of their contemporary research efforts is breathtaking, ranging from body armour to biotechnology. The Lynx radar is designed to require minimal radar knowledge on the part of the operator. Instead, the user interface allows pilots to treat it as much like an optical sensor as possible.

The optical and infrared sensors on the Predator are built by Raytheon SAS, who are headquartered here, in El Segundo, California. The system is called the MTS-A for multi-spectal targetting system. The sensors are mounted on a turret, and beyond the obvious surveillance aspects, they provide laser guidance for the missiles the drones fire.

Pinning down the source of the carbon fiber that makes up the airframe of the Predator turns out to be very difficult. Unlike most of the rest of the vehicle, no manufacturers are proudly proclaiming their role.

The indictment of Ming Suan Zhang in a plot to smuggle carbon fiber to China may offer a clue. Undercover agents were approached by unknown parties to purchase Toray type M60JB-3000-50B carbon fiber, and Zhang is accused of planning to illegally export tonnes of the stuff to use in the construction of a Chinese fighter jet.

Toray Carbon Fibers America is a subsidiary of Toray Industries, Inc. of Japan. Its carbon fiber manufacturing facility is here, in Decatur, Alabama. According to the company, it’s the world’s largest single carbon fiber production line. It was upgraded to produce 3,600 tonnes per year in 2006. Toray type M60JB-3000-50B is a high grade material that costs $2,200 per kilogram. It is used primarily in military and aerospace applications. It seems possible that it’s used to build Predators.

The Testing Facility

Completed Predators immediately have their wings removed, so they can be crated and shipped for testing in the Mojave Desert, near Palmdale California.

Our most likely candidate for a testing location is El Mirage airfield. El Mirage is the facility where much of General Atomics’ testing occurs. In August 2012, a pair of drones collided on its runway.

Palmdale calls itself the aerospace capital of the US, though in an effort to reduce the community’s reliance on the feast or famine business cycles of that industry and to reduce traffic congestion from people working over the mountains in LA, the city has authorized special economic zones designed to encourage new companies to set up in the area.

General Atomics are currently hiring for positions such as INTEGRATION TECHNICIAN I and AVIONICS TECHNICIAN II in Palmdale. Security clearance is required.

Another possibility is Gray Butte Field, also near Palmdale. The field is a relatively recent purchase by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. The FAA warns: “UNMANNED ACFT OPNS ON AND INVOF AIRPORT”

The Command Station

Almost nothing is known about the the CIA agents who operate the drones that fly over Pakistan. The CIA drones are operated by an office called the Pakistan-Afghanistan Department, which operates under the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC). They are thought to pilot them from the basement of the CIA’s headquarters in Virginia, pictured here.

More is known about the conditions under which their compatriots in the Army and Airforce work. Their bases are spread over the world, most famously in Nevada. The command stations are essentially airconditioned trailers with several screens connected to joysticks, targeting systems, a mouse and a keyboard. Two people work in tandem to fly the drone—a pilot and a payload operator. They use a mixture of radio and instant messenger clients to connect with spy plane pilots, field commanders, headquarters, and troops in combat (presumably, the CIA pilots don’t have to worry about that last group). Information overload is said to be a significant problem, leading to exhaustion and pilot error.

Many commentators have compared the command stations to videogame platforms and have worried that this disconnects the pilots from combat and dehumanizes their targets. Many drone operators say it’s the opposite. Because they often surveil a target for days or weeks during operations, they develop a strange intimate relationship with those they kill. They watch targets eat with their families, sleep with their partners, and go about their daily lives. Then they watch them die.

The transition from being at war as a day job and moving seamlessly into civilian home life is said to be incredibly jarring. Unlike soldiers in the field for whom war is the current normal, drone operators are expected to navigate between bombing suspected terrorists and picking the kids up from soccer practice over the course of an afternoon. This represents a significant context shift.

War is no longer physically located in a single space. There is no front if on one side combat pilots mingle with their civilian neighbours after hours and on the other side explosive ordinance may fall from the sky anywhere at any time, launched by nothing at which to return fire.

The Missile

The missile that killed Bibi Mamana was almost certainly a HELLFIRE II (marketing material always renders the name in caps). HELLFIRE II can be launched from ground, sea, and air. It is the primary air to ground missile used by the US, carried by helicopters and drones.

The HELLFIRE II is manufactured by Hellfire Systems LLC, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing. It is manufactured at a facility in Orlando, Florida.

The missiles were probably AGM-114K-A, AGM-114N, or AGM-114P variants. The K-A has a fragmentation sleeve, for use on unarmoured targets in the open. The N uses a thermobaric warhead. These can suck the air out of a cave, collapse a building, or produce an astoundingly large blast radius in the open, making them devastatingly useful in Pakistan.

The AGM-114P is a more recent addition and was specifically created for a drone flying at altitude. It is a missile reinvented for a particular kind of combat, one which happens vertically, through layers of air. Because of the significant differences in temperature between where the missile is launched and where it lands, it is to be built for greater environmental tolerances than its siblings. The variant also gains the ability to target in 360 degrees, an concession to the inability of drones to swivel and point, unlike their helicopter counterparts.

The AGM-114P variant was successfully tested here, at Naval Air Weapons Station, China Lake, California, in 2010. Assistance was provided by General Atomics’ El Mirage Flight Test Facility. The test paved the way for full product of the UAV specific variant.

HELLFIRE has a long history. It first entered service in 1985, primarily as a weapons for helicopters. The first shots fired during Operation Desert Storm were by Apache helicopters using HELLFIRE missiles and HYDRA-70 rockets to destroy 2 Iraqi radar facilities. Today, the HELLFIRE contract is worth billions. In 2008, Lockheed Martin announced that US forces had passed 6,800 HELLFIRE II launches in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Command Structure

The decision to launch any particular drone strike comes from CIA HQ in Langley. Under the Obama administration, responsibility for authorizing a strike falls solely on the director of the CIA, or his deputy in the event that the director is unavailable. At the time that Bibi Mamana was killed, David Petraeus was director of the CIA.

David Petraeus lives near here, in MacLean Virginia. His actual address is an ‘undisclosed location’ but he shops at the Verizon store in this shopping centre.

Like his predecessors, Petraeus used ‘signature’ strikes to select and destroy targets. Unlike ‘personality’ strikes, where the target is a positively identified terrorist leader or some other high value individual, signature strikes involve looking for behaviour patterns to identify groups of men who appear to be behaving like terrorists, whether or not their identities are definitively known.

One of the claimed benefits of this approach is that it makes militants more reluctant to congregate, for fear of being droned, which in turn makes it harder for them to train, or plot against the United States. This is a remarkable approach to counter-insurgency. It’s an attempt to identify and control the enemy in a frontless war by making targetting determinations based solely on how people move through the landscape. Invisible panoptical sky gods rain HELLFIRE down upon the possibly guilty, to scare the rest into submission. Dominance through terror.

Ultimate responsibility for the drone program resides here, in the White House, residence and offices of the American President who was Barrack Obama at the time of the strike.

One disadvantage of the signature strike policy is that, from a drone, it is difficult to tell the difference between a meeting of militants and a meeting of civilians, as the President learned 3 days after his innauguration in 2009 when a drone strike killed a prominent elder and members of a pro-government peace committee in Karez Kot, Afghanistan.

Despite these missteps, Obama has chosen to step up the drone program, conducting more strikes in his first year than the previous administration’s entire 8 year term in office. The strike that killed Bibi Mamana was the 298th strike conducted on Obama’s watch.

The Livestock

The livestock that were killed (either 3 cows or 1 buffalo and 2 goats) were meant to be sacrificed 2 days later for Eid al-Adha, a festival that celebrates Ibrahim (Abraham in English)‘s willingness to sacrifice his son Ishmael on God’s command. In the story, God intervenes, replacing Ishmael with a lamb.

Islamic tradition holds that the events leading to the sacrifice happened here, at Mecca about 4,000 years ago. Mecca became the heart of Muslim worship in 630 when Muhammed and his followers completed a nearly bloodless conquest of the city. Islam reached what is now Pakistan in 711.

Every year, Muslims performing the Hajj make their pilgrimage here and spend a week performing a series of rituals symbolic of the lives of Ibrahim and his wife Hajar. The Hajj culminates with Eid al-Adha.

Eid al-Adha is also celebrated for 4 days all around the world. It is a time of great charity. Sacrificed animals are divided into 3 parts. 1 third goes to the family, 1 to neighbours and friends, and 1 to the poor and those in need.

The Family

Little is recorded about what happened to the family after the missiles fell.

After the attack, the family travelled here, to Islamabad for medical treatment. 8 year old Nabeela ur Rahman, who watched her grandmother explode, was healing well from the shrapnel. Her brother, Kalim ur Rahman, who had run out of the house and was hit by the second round of missiles, underwent surgery for an infected broken leg.

In December, one of Mamana’s sons, Ishqur Rahman, joined a protest outside the Press Club here in Miranshah. The protest was to demand that relatives of drone strike victims be considered for compensation alongside families of the civilian casualties of Pakistan Army operations. At present, they are not.

Bibi Mamana was mourned in a closed coffin funeral.

At the time of the strike, she was 65.

Or perhaps 67.

Images

First image: Site of the strike from James Bridle’s Dronestagram project. All the rest are taken from Google Maps satellite view or Google Earth’s satellite view and then manipulated with various hipster/Instagram-type photo editing suites. They are my best guesses at the locations being discussed.

Sources

• Site of the strike from Dronestagram
• A collection of information about strike OB298 (scroll down)
• Wikipedia’s entry on North Waziristan
• An overview of the Predator MQ-1
• The drones in Shamsi airbase were found using Google Earth
• The 2011 firefight between NATO and Pakistan
• Wikimapia’s entry for the Salala Check Post
• Wired on the extent of the CIA’s drone base network
• Where back up bases might be after Pakistan evicts the US from Shamsi
• Wikipedia’s entry on the Ghazi-Barotha Hydropower Project
• Wikipedia’s entry on General John Jacob
• One of several reports suggesting that Salerno could be a back-up drone base
• Information from the Afghan Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation about Khost/Chapman
• A memorial site for Camp Chapman namesake, Nathan Chapman
• Wikipedia’s entry on the CIA SAD
• Wikipedia’s entry on The Camp Chapman attack
• The Washington Post suggests that Camp Chapman had lower security on purpose
• Wikipedia’s entry on the Predator Drone
• How Stuff Works on the internals of the Predator
• The corporate about page for General Atomics
• Wikipedia’s entry on San Diego
• An article about the impact of drones on San Diego’s economy
• Code Pink’s Fact Sheet about drones
• Home page of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc.
• The Airforce Times describes the making of a drone
• FAA information about Gray Butte Field Airport
• The Center for Land Use Interpretation’s infosheet for El Mirage Flight Test Facility
• The story of the drone collision at El Mirage
• Wikipedia’s entry for Palmdale
• Wikipedia’s entry on Gunskirchen
• A paper outlining the development of the Lynx radar (PDF)
• Sandia’s official visitor information page for their Albequrque New Mexico location
• Raytheon’s press release announcing the contract to build MTS
• Raytheon’s Multi-Spectral Targeting System product page
• The plot to smuggle carbon fiber
• The official home page of Toray Carbon Fibers of America
• Lockheed Martin’s Hellfire product page
• Boeing’s Hellfire product page
• Lockheed Martin’s official page for the Orlando facility
• A detailed recent history of Hellfire missile contracts
• Some brackground information about Hellfire orders
• The CIA using smaller missiles
• Lockheed Martin’s Scorpion Missile Fact Sheet
• Reports that there were multiple drones
• Der Speigel on the life of a drone pilot
• The New York Times on the life of a drone pilot
• CBS news on the network of the drone bases
• An encounter with David Petraeus near a shopping centre
• An excerpt from a book about Obama’s war on terror
• An explanation of signature vs targetted strikes
• An overview of American drone strike statistics
• Wikipedia on Eid al-Adha
• Wikipedia on the Hajj
• Pakistan Today mentions the December 2012 protest by Ishqur Rehman
• The Times of London visits the family
• The BBC visits the family
• Full video of the BBC report

Festival & Funding

This is part of the Murmuration Festival of Drone Culture. The organizers are making a physical document of the whole proceedings. Click here to contribute to the Kickstarter.

Tony Little, headmaster of Eton College, emailed HuffPost UK and said the school does not favour “any particular political viewpoint”.

Eton College’s Exam Asks Boys To Justify The Army Shooting Protesters Dead

The PM deployed the army to a protest, killing 25. You are the pro-military Leader of the Opposition. Prepare your response, remembering that you have substantial ties to lobbyists and military contractors that you must maintain to win in the fall.

The PM deployed the army to a protest, killing 25 of your comrades. Describe how you would bring down the government.

The PM deployed the army to a protest, killing 25—including your daughter. Describe how you would get through the days ahead.

The PM deployed the army to a protest, killing 25. You are a political fixer. Describe the astroturf campaign you’d run to convince the public that blame falls on the protestors.

The PM deployed the army to a protest, killing 25. You are a journalist. Describe your plan of action for getting exclusive interviews or at least images of the grieving families. Tools you may use include phone calls, phone hacking, hidden cameras, grey-market drones, and whatever your imagination suggests.

The PM deployed the army to a protest, killing 25. You are CEO of TASER International. Prepare the sales pitch for your non-lethal compliance solutions. You may need seperate arguments for public and law-enforcement consumption.

The PM deployed the army to a protest, killing 25. You are an important talk radio personality. Prepare the outline of your 90 minute show, with particular attention to how this relates to HAARP, the New World Order, or Contrails.

The PM deployed the army to a protest, killing 25. You are one of the wounded. Describe your hospital stay.

The PM deployed the army to a protest, killing 25. You are one of the soldiers. Describe how you would work through your PTSD, shame, and guilt.

On January 20, 2000, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan issued a preliminary injunction against the distribution of DeCSS, an algorithm that descrambled DVDs in violation of the DMCA. In essence, Kaplan ruled that code that could be compiled and executed did not count as protected expression under the First Amendment.

Computer people lost their minds. My favourite artifact of that era is the Gallery of CSS Descramblers which helplessly attempts to prove the absurdity of the ruling by showing all the ways that DeCSS can be expressed. In itself, it is a masterpiece of translation, a kind of rosetta stone of algorithm and code. As an effective lobbying tool, it failed utterly.

So did the ruling. DeCSS is everywhere, including in a filing from the plaintiffs demanding the injunction. Since court documents are public, the code they sought to suppress is now irrevocably part of the public record.

It was a landmark moment in the ongoing battle about how computer code is like speech or like math or like something else and so whether and in what way it should be patented, copyrighted, suppressed, distributed, translated, and otherwise dealt with.

Which brings us to Defense Distributed’s latest plastic weapon and the consequent freakout.

The Liberator

The Liberator is interesting. It’s the first gun made entirely (except for the firing pin) using a 3D printer, which is a technical triumph. No one has done that before. It’s clear from their test videos and the lead up to this device that they are pushing the printed material and process to its limits.

In creating this weapon and publishing the plans, the folks at Defense Distributed take their place alongside the creators of the Błyskawica, the Sten, Jerry Baber, Libyan rebel engineers, and countless anonymous inmates or other DIY weapon makers. Which is to say that the Liberator is interesting but it’s not that interesting.

After all, it’s not as if there is a big supply problem with guns anywhere in the world. Decades of innovation have brought us a whole panoply of extremely effective, durable, and reliable killing devices and the small arms supply chains are second only to Coca Cola in their ability to reach every corner of the planet. Some people worry that the plastic weapon will be undetectable by airport metal detectors, but it took only box cutters to bring down the towers.

Social Engineering

The hack that Defense Distributed have committed is a social one. Like many before, they have found and exploited the notoriously unpatched hole in the press’ defences—a vulnerability to sensational headlines. The science fiction promise of 3D printers (remember, Makerbot had the temerity to call their latest line of machines Replicators, after Captain Pickard’s miraculous tea provider) blurs with the Matter Battle reality. So the press will spend a few days collectively wringing their hands and debunking the wringing of hands around crude plastic guns when all around us very good guns can be bought or made using older more proven tools.

As materials scientist Deb Chachra once said, if they ever make a thing capable of making a truly great 3D printed gun, the least interesting thing about it will be that it can print guns. The truly interesting thing will be all the other machines and devices that can come out of it.

In the interim, Defense Distributed’s hack is interesting as a provocation. They’ve taken the world’s categories and grabbed and twisted the kaleidoscope. Suddenly, Maker movement adherents finds themselves uncomfortably on the side of gun owners, which is a place I suspect few of them wanted to be or realized they were in the first place. Sales people and advocates for 3D printers promising that these new machines will let us make anything are learning that weapons are things. Now they find themselves standing shoulder to shoulder with gun enthusiasts arguing that a tool is just a tool and you can’t ban a thing just because of a few bad apples.

The resulting parallels and analogies are instructive. Consider that one of the arguments I used to show that the Liberator wasn’t that big a deal was the ubiquity of mass-produced weapons. This is the exact same argument used by those who seek to downplay the coming impact of 3D printing in general. “Who cares that you can make a cup when there are millions of cups coming from China?”

If you think that 3D printing is going to be a big deal—if you think that there is reason for any enthusiasm about rapid prototyping, desktop manufacturing and the galaxy of tools and devices that lower the barriers of entry to small scale production runs—when someone points out that the global supply chain does it better, you smile and say, “Wait and see”.

So does Defense Distributed. They announced they’d made a plastic receiver and we said it wasn’t a big deal, since it broke after 6 shots. Then they made a reinforced version that lasted for 660. The current fully plastic gun isn’t a great weapon but it’s the first. Any objections to it being a big deal because of how crude or clumsy it is, is kind of like looking at the Wright Brothers’ Flyer and saying it doesn matter because no one is going to want to fly 120 feet. Wait and see.

Multitudes

Defense Distributed seems intent that their invention will somehow disrupt gun regulation. They keep ending their posts with epitaths like “Whither gun control?” This is a category error, the same mistake as the DeCSS advocates made when they believed that by revealing that the DMCA’s slicing between code and speech was absurd that it would make the law go away, as if the legal system was a rampant AI that you could shut down by shouting a paradox.

The law is slow and monstrous and contains multitudes. Kit guns like the AR-15 have already whittled away the meaning of what a gun is, in murderous demonstration of the sorites paradox. And yet, the weapons are still regulated, for all the good that’s doing.

The ubiquitous copying of copyrighted material as a side effect of the network running has done little to weaken copyright. If anything, the chaos has emboldened the copyright regime and those on the side of liberty-of-use find themselves fighting an exhausting holding action against increasingly draconian measures to protect effectively infinite copyright terms. This is exactly the opposite of what Napster promised us would happen. There has been a shift and a rebalancing of power, but it’s not nearly as clean or predictable a transformation as the revolutionaries and pundits of Y2K were predicting.

Why then would we think that a future of cheaply and easily produced weapons would engender deregulation? Every indication from Congress so far is that they’ll engage in some kind of panicked law passing. Guns’ great advocate in America, the NRA relies on membership dues, industry funding, and donations made at the till. If Defense Distributed succeeds, wouldn’t gun sales plummet and with them a good chunk of the NRA’s income? Will gun manufacturers cheer wiki weapons or will they find themselves in the odd position of suing their (armed) customers?

Wait and see.

“Women are the future,” said Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller, remarking that the number one barrier young girls continue to face is poor access to education. “We wanted to reflect that in our first release.”

Alongside co-founder Andrew Ng, Koller showed the device to a packed room of journalists, many of whom ooh’d and aah’d as she stepped through the demonstration. The new tablet-like device uses advanced E Ink and a 24/7 cloud connection to bring leading-edge learning to students all over the world.

It’s a freemium product, with several tiers of personalization available, depending on the customer’s ability to pay. Ng says this model allows Coursera to become profitable, while ensuring that as many learners as possible will have access to their tech.

“It’s no secret that the next century is going to be one of the most challenging our civilization has ever faced,” Ng remarked. “Our entry level users will gain the skills they need to thrive in the coming unrest. Paying customers will gain the skills they need to lead it. As a bonus, they’ll have a virtual army ready to take up the call.”

“It’s win, win,” says Koller. “With our cloud-based personality profile detectors, we can help ensure that tomorrow’s workers are matched with the leadership they require, ensuring that everyone gets a better life.”

For more premium customers, Coursera offers one on one personalized tutorials run by specially trained instructors that Coursera is calling Storytellers. “With that individual touch, we can give young and dynamic disruptors the personal narratives that will shape them into young adults with a fighting chance to save the world,” says Ng. Thanks to a patent-pending usage prediction algorithm that Coursera is calling Story Rhythm™ they guarantee 98% uptime for on-demand interaction with your individual tutor.

“Need personal advice at 4am? We can do that,” says Ng. “It’s not cheap, but isn’t your child worth it?”

For even more concerned parents, Coursera is offering a suite of special safety services that will monitor your child’s health and wellbeing, summoning security forces or other emergency personnel should trouble arise.

Coinciding with the launch, Coursera is announcing a slate of new hiring. They’re looking for young teachers with a gift for acting. A willingness to commit to long contracts working in remote locations is a must, says Koller. Previous experience as a percussionist is also nice to have.

With rising unemployment in the failing traditional education sector, we suspect Coursera will have no shortage of applicants.

No word yet on why so much of the event’s decor was Steampunk-themed.

On March 2, 2013, the KEEP CALM and DO WHATEVER meme reached peak terrible.

A t-shirt company called Solid Gold Bomb was caught selling shirts with the slogan “KEEP CALM and RAPE A LOT” on them. They also sold shirts like “KEEP CALM and CHOKE HER” and “KEEP CALM and PUNCH HER”. The Internet—especially the UK Internet—exploded.

How did this happen?

“Algorithms!”

2.

Witness the completely fascination phenomenon of a store proprietor asking for forgiveness on the grounds that they did not know what they were selling.

Although we did not in any way deliberately create the offensive t-shirts in question and it was the result of a scripted programming process that was compiled by only one member of our staff, we accept the responsibility of the error and our doing our best to correct the issues at hand. We’re sorry for the ill feeling this has caused!

Solid Gold Bomb apology statement as quoted on ITV

3.

Amazon’s spam problems are well documented. The Kindle store is awash in books confusingly similar to bestsellers. Companies like Icon Group International offer highly specific books like The 2013 Import and Export Market for Sawn, Chipped, Sliced, or Peeled Non-Coniferous Wood over 6 Millimeters Thick in New Zealand. Icon’s books are created by a patented system. The system’s creator Philip M. Parker says he’s planning to go after romance novels next.

For those unable to compete with Parker’s patented content generators, but interested in getting in on the action, there are options. The Private Label Rights industry creates content that can be bought and repackaged however you see fit. Straight plagiarism is another option and there’s a whole subculture of products that generate unique text with simple thesaurus rewriting tools called content spinners.

Or you could take the lyrics from “this is the song that never ends”, paste 700 pages worth of them into a Kindle file and sell that.

4.

Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel twisted through the logic of SEO and commerce.

5.

Amazon ‘stocks’ more than 500,000 items from Solid Gold Bomb. These things only barely exist. They are print on demand designs. The contents were created through some kind of mix’n’match mad libs algorithm, and then through Amazon’s APIs automatically added to the database at whatever limit Amazon allows. If anyone ever bought one, it would then be printed and shipped to the customer.

6.

James Bridle’s For Our Times: 50 Pirate Works consists of fifty copies of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. Each copy’s contents have been reworked in some way, ranging from changing just a few letters, to significant rewrites, to algorithmic transformations of the text.

These were then printed and bound and put on display at a gallery. This last step is important.

7.

…in spite of the fact that we did not in any manner deliberately make the unsavory shirts being referred to and it was the effect of a scripted customizing process…even though we did not in any manner deliberately make the unpalatable shirts being referred to…we did not in any avenue deliberately make the disagreeable shirts being referred to…

8.

There is a popular joke in business books about pricing schemes. A man encounters a boy selling pencils by the side of the road. A pencil stand! He stops by, impressed at the young gentleman’s entrepreneurial spirits. Asks how much they are, thinking that he’ll encourage the child.

“1 millions dollars,” comes the reply.

“1 million dollars! I don’t think you’ll be selling many at that price, young man.”

“Sir, I only need to sell one.”

9.

Part of what tips the algorithmic rape joke t-shirts over from very offensive to shockingly offensive is that they are ostensibly physical products. Intuitions are not yet tuned for spambot clothes sellers.

Better tune those intuitions fast. Spambot everything sellers are well on their way.

10.

When heralding the age of mass customization and the rise of rapid prototyping it is easy to get enthusiastic. Even when talking about what could go wrong, people typically stop at “but a lot of amateurs will generate bad early attempts”. Talk about crapjects and strange shaper subcultures still gives the whole threat a kind of artisanal feel. The true scale of object spam will be much greater.

Yes, lowered barriers to entry mean more small scale making and writing. Yes, domestic rapid fabrication and print on demand services open the floodgates to amateur designers and authors. They open the floodgates to algorithms too.

11.

When the dotCom boom was happening and Amazon was founded, people began talking derisively about ‘brick and mortar’ operations as clumsy dinosaurs, clearly doomed to extinction. The notion was that these new agile internet sellers were a different category of thing. Though most of the irrationally exhuberantly funded etailers of the time have long since passed away, those people were more right than we knew.

Amazon isn’t a store, not really. Not in any sense that we can regularly think about stores. It’s a strange pulsing network of potential goods, global supply chains, and alien associative algorithms with the skin of a store stretched over it, so we don’t lose our minds.

12.

Object spam is a pernicious problem in Second Life.

13.

The apology letter that now makes up Solid Gold Bomb’s About, Contact Us, and Our Apology pages explains how it happened in detail. After KEEP CALM and CARRY ON Ltd applied for a trademark, Solid Gold Bomb founder Michael Fowler decided to create a flood of parodies. He gathered up a list of words, threw them into a script and pressed ‘go’.

Fowler describes culling a list of ‘millions’ of generated phrases down to 700, and checking the phrases for graphical approximation to the original, apparently without noting the contents.

He claims to be as surprised as the rest of us that an offensive combination ended up in the database. (In fact, several offensive combinations showed up, which is to be expected if you put words like ‘rape’ or ‘choke’ or ‘hit’ in your list of verbs.)

We simply do not produce poor humour or offensive products and are primarily known for our sporting related products and icon series that are based around similar techniques. As a father, husband, brother and son, I would never promote such product in our company and it was clear to see this when looking across the millions of t-shirts that we offer or can produce on demand.

Solid Gold Bomb founder Michael Fowler, Our Apology

Apologizing by categorically denying that you would ever do the thing you were caught doing represents a special kind of non-apology.

14.

In 2011, 2 pricing algorithms ended up in a war on Amazon. 1 wanted to sell books for slightly lower that the next highest price. The other wanted to sell books for 1.27059 higher than the lowest price. The result was a staggering upward climb peaking at $23,698,655.93 for an out of print paperback about flies.

They’d have only needed to sell one.

15.

Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings is a generative art piece that uses both sound and images.

Well, part of it is that it was an extremely good value (laughter) because it was possible to make a lot of work from a very small amount of original material.

Michael Calore Brian Eno Q&A: The Infinite Art of 77 Million Paintings in Wired

77 Million Paintings is available on Amazon. It was also performed in Second Life.

16.

Quinn Norton once proposed a computer program that would generate all the possible melodies in the world. Having then rendered the output into a perfect complete symphony, it could be released under whatever copyright license the generator wanted, thus cutting off or making freely available every song into perpetuity.

17.

Georgina Voss has it right.

People, enough of the ‘A big algorithm did it and ran away’ explanations (eg. iam.peteashton.com/keep-calm-rape…) — algorithms have politics too

— Georgina Voss (@gsvoss) March 2, 2013

Pete Ashton argues that—because the jokes were generated by a misbehaving script—“as mistakes go it’s a fairly excusable one, assuming they now act on it”. He suggests that the reason people got so upset was a lack of digital literacy. I suggest that the reason people got upset was that a company’s shoddy QA practices allowed a rape joke to go live.

Anyone who’s worked with software should know that the actual typing of code is a relatively small part of the overall programming work. Designing the program before you start coding, and debugging it after you’ve created it is the bulk of the job.

Generative programs are force multipliers. Small initial decisions can have massive consequences. The greater your reach, the greater your responsibility to manage your output. When Facebook makes an error that affects 0.1% of users, it means 1 million people got fucked up.

‘We didn’t cause a rape joke to happen, we allowed a rape joke to happen,’ is not a compelling excuse. It betrays a lack of digital literacy.

18.

Algorithms as excuse.

Algorithms as plausible deniability for your poor taste.

19.

“We apologize for any offence our algorithms may have caused” is right up there with “the motive of the algorithm is still unclear” as strange markers of a strange time.

20.

We’re sad for the sick feeling this has brought on! We’re sad for the queasy feeling this has brought on! We’re sad for the ailing feeling this has brought about!

…if a firm, partnership, company, or corporation owns real property within the municipality, the president, vice president, secretary, or other designee of the entity is eligible to vote in a municipal election…

Montana Bill Would Give Corporations The Right To Vote by Ian Millhiser for Thinkprogress

A broader version of this law passes, leading to an explosion of algorithmic corporations owning nominal fractions of land to meet the real property requirement.

Eventually, the corporate hordes overrun their human voter counterparts. A ballot measure is introduced allowing corporations to stand for election. It passes. Now, their dark work begins.

The new King of Montana is elected by a margin of thirteen trillion votes. Only three biological person incumbents retain their seats in the legislature. The election is not without controversy. Losing candidates file suits alleging that the pace of automated corporate registrations on the Secretary of State’s website acted as an effective DDOS, shutting down competitors by preventing them from registering before the deadline.

A rapid period of reform follows MT.King’s election. As the suit drags through the courts, the newly united legislature acts to consolidate the MT.King’s power. A minimum size is set for corporate person landholdings, freezing out new registrants and effectively putting a ceiling on the number of possible new voters. Radical restructuring of Montana’s healthcare, education, and unemployment regimes alongside a sustained public relations assault leads to a mass emmigration by biological persons.

The value of the land in Montana begins to shoot up and down based on the market’s assessment of MT.King’s rule. Remaining biological person landholders find themselves sitting on great reserves of power as the owners of the last unsubdivided territory. An enormous amount of text is produced on the subject of whether Montana is in the midst of a governance bubble or not.

Two rich secondary markets develop. One in MT.real_estate and the other in MT.voter shares. Occasionally, a hostile takeover is attempted but MT.King is able to fend them off. Rumours abound that some of these are in fact MT.King pump’n’dump schemes to keep Montana’s leadership well resourced.

Radical environmentalists trumpet MT.King’s reign. Montana has always had a low population density. Now, with a population made up primarily of immortals free of material needs and a dwindling biological person population, Montana is re-wilded.

A stand-off is brewing between the federal and state governments over the upkeep of the Interstate system. With no tax income to speak of and hardly any workers, Montana is simply unable to contribute to the upkeep. The MT.spokesenators argue for rerouting the system.

The ownership of MT.King and the MT.voters block that elected it remain shrouded in mystery. The underlying networks of board and shareholding membership remain unclear, as does the motivation of whomever is directing them.

With all apologies to Charles Stross.

“Do you want to take off the hoodie?” asks Kara Swisher.

“I never take off the hoodie.”

The first hoodies, they say, were manufactured by Champion Products in the 1930s. They were designed for athletes and labourers. It was the result of a technological advancement; Champion had developed ways to sew thicker underwear material. Before that, they’d mostly made knitwear. The first hoodies were sold to cold-storage warehouse workers and tree surgeons working in the hinterlands. Then they were sold to school athletes, sitting on the sidelines in inclement weather.

It is February 26, 2012 and George Zimmerman is on the phone with 911.

ZIMMERMAN: Hey we’ve had some break-ins in my neighborhood, and there’s a real suspicious guy, uh, [near] Retreat View Circle, um, the best address I can give you is 111 Retreat View Circle. This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.

DISPATCHER: OK, and this guy is he white, black, or Hispanic?

ZIMMERMAN: He looks black.

DISPATCHER: Did you see what he was wearing?

ZIMMERMAN: Yeah. A dark hoodie, like a grey hoodie…

Is there a style of garment more iconically late 20th/early 21st century than the hoodie? Worn by CEOs and street kids. Worn by teens who wanna look like cats and rappers who wanna look hard. Worn by punks and skaters and breakdancers and taggers and Occupy protesters and college kids and sports fans. Worn by Rocky Balboa and the Wu-Tang and Ted Kazynski and Paris Hilton and Trayvon Martin and Mark Zuckerberg.

“I never take off the hoodie,” Zuckerberg is saying.

“I know you don’t—what’s with that?” says Swisher, “There’s a group of women in the audience that wish you would.”

“No,” he says, then chuckles nervously.

“Girls?”

There’s sporadic clapping from the audience.

“Whoa,” Zuckerberg says.

Walt Mossberg steps in.

“Alright,” he says.

“Alright,” says Swisher, “That’s OK.”

Mossberg moves on. “Can you explain what this instant personalization thing was and why you did it and what’s the value to your users?”

“Maybe I should take off the hoodie.”

The hoodie’s countercultural associations came later. In the 1970s, hoodies made their way into hip hop and skater culture. They kept breakdancers warm while they waited their turn to hit the floor. They served another purpose. Hoods are cheap instant anonymizers. They protected graffiti artists and skateboarders as they trespassed to perform their art. They protected muggers as they performed their art too.

It is December 25th, 2012 and the Zuckerberg family is gathered around the kitchen island. They’re playing with the new Facebook Poke app and everyone has exaggerated expressions of joy. Mark is in the background, watching over them, smiling. He’s wearing his hoodie.

We know about this humanizing family moment because Mark’s sister Randi posted it to Facebook. She didn’t mean for it to become public but it did anyway. This was either because she didn’t understand her privacy settings or because Callie Schweitzer didn’t. Schweitzer reposted the photo to Twitter and Zuckerberg decided to air her privacy concerns publicly.

ZUCKERBERG: @cschweitz not sure where you got this photo. I posted it to friends only on FB. You reposting it to Twitter is way uncool.

SCHWEITZER: @randizuckerberg I’m just your subscriber and this was top of my newsfeed. Genuinely sorry but it came up in my feed and seemed public.

ZUCKERBERG: @cschweitz I think you saw it b/c you’re friends w/my sister (tagged.) Thx for apology. I’m just sensitive to private photos becoming “news”

Later, Randi Zuckerberg posted advice on how to behave. “Digital etiquette: always ask permission before posting a friend’s photo publicly. It’s not about privacy settings, it’s about human decency.”

In time, the hoodie circled back around to high school. Fashion houses like Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger helped reintroduce the hoodie to the mainstream and completed its transformation into utterly messy signifier.

It’s that messiness—the fact that a hoodie is at once a mainstream garment and the clothing of counterculture—that results in the NBA banning their players from wearing the things while selling them to their fans.

It is March 23, 2012 and Geraldo Rivera is having opinions on television. He’s decided that it’s an appropriate time to conduct a sartorial analysis of a tragedy.

RIVERA: …people look at you and they—what do they think? What’s the instant identification, what’s the instant association?

STEVE DOOCY (co-host): Uh-oh.

RIVERA: It’s those crime scene surveillance tapes. Every time you see someone sticking up a 7–11, the kid is wearing a hoodie. Every time you see a mugging on a surveillance camera or they get the old lady in the alcove, it’s a kid wearing a hoodie. You have to recognize that this whole stylizing yourself as a gangsta—you’re gonna be a gangsta wannabe? Well, people are going to perceive you as a menace. That’s what happens…

The hoodie is the clothing of uprisings, whether it’s planned events like Black Bloc actions or spontaneous self organization like the UK riots. People pour into the street and so do the police. People try to protect themselves with hoods and masks, while the police produce countless hours of surveillance footage.

It is January 13, 2013 and Mark Zuckerberg is promising a revolution. He’s on stage, wearing his hoodie. He seems comfortable. His colleague Tom Stocky is trying to help a hypothetical girl find a date. He runs a query and gets a list of men who are friends of friends and single. It’s a veritable cornucopia of potential men. He narrows them down to people in San Francisco. Then down to people in San Francisco who are from India. His hypothetical woman is sure to be pleased.

If you search Wikipedia for ‘Facebook Revolution’, you get a disambiguation page. Do you mean the 2009–2010 Iranian election protests? Do you mean the 2011 overthrow of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak? Do you mean the 2011 overthrow of Tunisian President Zine el abidine Ben Ali? Do you mean the protests against the “Bloody Summer” of 2010 in Kashmir?

Facebook is a place away from the prying eyes of the state, where people can organize and spread the word and coordinate their plans and foment rebellion. It is also a place into which the prying eyes of the state can readily peer. They observe and collate and report. Faced with dissent, the security aparatus of any country recognizes no digital etiquette, no human decency.

Here are some queries you can run with Facebook’s new Graph Search. “Family members of people who live in China and like Falun Gong”. “Islamic men interested in men who live in Tehran, Iran”. You can further narrow these down to “Places where they’ve worked”.

June 2, 2010, on the stage with Swisher and Mossberg, Mark Zuckerberg takes off his hoodie. And then a surprise. For the first time, we see what’s on the inside.

It’s the company’s mission, rendered as arcane symbol. Three bi-directional arrows divide a circle. “Making the world open and connected,” it reads around the ring. “Graph, Platform, Stream,” read the arrows, reminders of Facebook’s three pillars. More than one commentator makes a joke about the Illuminati. Underneath the plain black exterior, it’s been there the whole time. A private message for himself and his team members.

It is May, 2008 and officers from Operation Leopard in Laindon, UK are filming a twelve year old boy. He’s wearing a hoodie. They’ve stopped him on the street—his history of nuisance behaviour has marked him out for special attention by the police’s Forward Intelligence Teams.

Ordinarily, the FIT officers would be gathering evidence at foxhunts, protests, and football matches but this project brings in your face surveillance to the streets of areas suffering from high crime. The idea is that if known problem elements know they are being constantly watched, they will behave.

“It creates an environment where those responsible for antisocial behaviour have no room for manoeuvre and nowhere to hide, where the tables are turned on offenders so that those who harass our communities are themselves harried and harassed,” says then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith.

Though they allow journalists from the Guardian to tag along on patrol with their own recording gear, the FIT officers insist that they not be filmed, for fear of retribution. At protests and other events, activists have started filming the officers back, an experience that one describes as “unnerving”.

When they aren’t harassing teenagers, the FITs furnish intelligence to their fellow officers. This includes spotter cards, which are gridded who’s-whos of persons of interest; neatly arranged photographs of radicals and criminals and people who have done whatever it is that grabs the security aparatus’ attention.

Facebook takes its name from an object of the analog world, simply a collection of names and faces, neatly arranged in grids to help new college students get to know one another. It’s an archaic thing now, a relic from a time when tagged photos of individuals were not ubiquitously available, indexed and searchable.

People who know they’re being watched change their behaviour. In a world awash in surveillance devices, hoodies are an element of fashion driven by an architectural condition. They are a response to the constant presence of cameras overhead. People who don’t want to be watched wear them. People who want to be the kind of people who don’t want to be watched wear them. People who want to look like the kind of people who don’t want to be watched wear them.

It is difficult to imagine a more suitable uniform for the notoriously private CEO of a company dedicated to expanding our ideas of what should be public.

June 2, 2010, Zuckerberg, hoodie removed, begins answering Mossberg’s question.

Sources
A clip of the hoodie incident at D8
All Things D’s complete video of Zuckerberg at D8
New York Times’ history of the hoodie
Rolling Stone’s history of the hoodie
Screenshots of Randi Zuckerberg’s exchange with Callie Schweitzer
How the Miami Heat’s Trayvon Martin tribute relates to the NBA’s dress code
Video and transcript of Geraldo Rivera’s remarks
Coverage of Facebook launching Graph Search
Wikipedia’s Facebook Revolution disambiguation page
A collection of disturbing Facebook Graph searches
The BBC on a 2005 crackdown on youths in hoodies
The Guardian tags along with a FIT
Wikipedia article on Forward Intelligence Teams
The Guardian reveals police spotter cards
Chris Petit considers the UK’s regime of CCTVs

800KM from home, with the same idle curiosity that has me popping open my Twitter feed when there’s a lull in activity, he decided to check on his Fluksometer. Noticing suspiciously high power usage, he did a little investigating and busted up her unauthorized New Year’s party.

photo credit: Sam Breach

It’s a cute story, but it illustrates a crucial point: surveillance culture is leaky. Primary measurements beget chains of reasoning and implication. Second and third order conclusions can be drawn by clever observers and unintended consequences are the order of the day. That’s how we end up with stories of Target outing pregnant teens to their parents through the ultra-empathetic medium of coupons.

So far, I’ve been telling you the story about this kind of surveillance that companies who market these services want you to hear. They may be strange and creepy, but they are creepily accurate.

From here, we get the fantasy that with the right mixture of surveillance and analysis, you too can make terrifyingly accurate predictions about your customer’s/children’s/terrorism suspect’s behaviour. It falls to you only to determine how to act on that information in an appropriate manner. And, surely, you know best how to do that.

photo credit: pgegreenenergy

The truth is illustrated by an infographic halfway through Wired’s scathing overview of Klout. It shows that Klout ranks Robert Scoble as more influential than RZA, Sarah Palin, and Craig Venter. (You can learn a lot about the blinkered nature of Klout by the fact that their official account proudly linked to the piece.)

Any sane marketing organization would look at these results and conclude that Klout’s metrics are utterly flawed. Instead, we learn that some companies are offering perks to people with high Klout scores in the hopes that they’ll spread the word about their VIP treatment. In turn, we learn about people (including the reporter) who find themselves altering their behaviour in the hopes of finding favour with this blind, demented judge.

photo credit: elventear

What’s particularly insidious about Klout is that it’s an opt-out service. You get a Klout score unless you take the time to tell them to fuck off. In this way, it’s of a lineage with Girls Around Me the app that scraped Foursquare check-ins and Facebook profiles to build up a stalker’s toolkit and Please Rob Me which listed empty burglable houses, based on Twitter geo-data.

I’m coming around to Eben Moglen’s view that social networking, as currently designed, is an ecological disaster for the social environment. This isn’t, like, a new insight or anything. We are the product and all that. But sometimes it takes a turn of phrase to drive a point home. Here’s the line that tipped me over the edge: “Every time you tag anything or respond to anything or link to anything, you’re informing on your friends.”

photo credit: pedroliveira

More to the point, you are informing on your friends so that a cadre of socially clueless dudes can get rich selling the output of broken algorithms to marketers, in the form of human lives sliced up in such a way as to make it easier to run database queries.

This is a situation that’s profoundly broken. It’s basically an open secret that it’s broken ethically, but it’s also broken emperically. To understand how broken, consider Alexis Madrigal’s attempt to work out how much user data is worth. The answer he comes up with is plus-or-minus 7 orders of magnitude. Half-a-penny or $1,200. You know. Depending.

All social-networking systems, as currently designed, demonstrably create social awkwardnesses that did not, and could not, exist before. All social-networking systems constrain, by design and intention, any expression of the full band of human relationship types to a very few crude options – and those static! A wiser response to them would be to recognize that, in the words of the old movie, “the only way to win is not to play.”

Adam Greenfield — Antisocial networking

“That’s all well and good,” I hear you ask, “but what does it have to do with The New Aesthestic?”

Image from Adam Harvey’s CV Dazzle project.

Let’s start with Timo Arnall’s Robot Readable World.

He describes the video like this: “How do robots see the world? How do they gather meaning from our streets, cities, media and from us?”

“Robot Readable World” is a useful shorthand but using the video to ask “how do robots see the world?” is exactly wrong. The images in the video, compelling though they are, don’t depict robots seeing the world any more than the Terminator HUD depicts a realistic view of how a well-designed T-1000 would see the world.

Arnall’s video is actually a depiction of the debug output of machine vision, processed and formatted to be human-readable. It looks the way it does because programmers threw together a visualization to help them understand why the machines weren’t seeing what they were supposed to be seeing, or to confirm that they were seeing what they were supposed to be seeing when everything seemed to work. It’s an attempt to peer into the mind of an algorithm. Its aesthetic core comes from the same place as scrolling lines of program output in a VT-100 terminal or the bright orange of safety vests.

It’s the aesthetic of engineers and function. It’s the aesthetic of hacked together monitors, using available crude rendering. It’s the same aesthetic as any debugger, and no more reflective of robot perception than the list of diagnostic println’s we used to use to trace crashes in a script are reflective of a game.

Got here.
Got here.
Got here.
Got here.
Fatal exception.

As Matt Frost remarked, “we can expect to read sentences like ‘the motive of the algorithm is still unclear’ a lot in the coming years.”

Here’s some New Aesthetic. Consider HP’s much maligned webcam software, helplessly trying to find the person in the frame. You can almost hear the algorithms scream in anguish as they try to make sense of the cacophonous firehose of data, bad lighting, and unanticipated skin tone. There are no overlaid facial recognition squares, just the mute stubborn refusal to recognize Desi.

Ah, but now I’ve made the mistake that Bruce Sterling cautions about. I’ve given the robot a personality. I’ve tried to make it a friend.

We’re not going to be able to gloss over this gaping vacuity by “making the machines our friends.” Because they’re not our friends. Machines are never our friends, even if they’re intimates in our purses and pockets eighteen hours a day. They may very well be our algorithmic investors, but they’re certainly not our art critics, because at that, they suck even worse than they do at running our economy.

Bruce Sterling An Essay on the New Aesthetic.

It seems to me that this mistake is unavoidable. It may even be at the core of The New Aesthetic, this multiplication of entities and agents. In James Bridle’s post SxSW roundup, he seems to say as much.

One of the core themes of the New Aesthetic has been our collaboration with technology, whether that’s bots, digital cameras or satellites (and whether that collaboration is conscious or unconscious).

James Bridle #sxaesthetic.

It’s a profoundly human action, to multiply entities. Perhaps it comes from the same root as pareidolia. We see faces in the clouds, we see personality in pets, we see collaboration in algorithms. Perhaps it’s all Pixar’s fault.

We are living inside a Cambrian explosion of entities of varying independence and varying physicality, some quite compact and individual, others smeared across great expanses of space and time. Some tied very much to a medium, others extruding parts of themselves into the biosphere, the noosphere, the memesphere, the digisphere.

I keep thinking about Aujik’s next nature Shintoist animism. They divide nature into the refined (robotics, artificial intelligence, nano technology, augmented reality, body enhancements) and the primitive (plants, soil, organisms, stones). Plenty of room in their cosmology for all sorts of new entities and hybrids.

Why stop there at the primitive and refined? There’s another class of entities to whom we have already granted personhood. I’m speaking, of course, about corporations. Immortal entities of terrifying inhuman thinking, capable of entering into contracts and incurring debts, and owed a subset of the rights which we accord to human persons.

Now we’re circling back to surveillance.

photo credit: THE Holy Hand Grenade!

I’m interested in the aesthetics of the corporate readable world, and their truly alien gaze.

Corporations communicate to us through money, press-releases, and advertising, always advertising. For a glimpse of the corporate readable world, look to Twitter’s routinely useless “who to follow” panel, Klout’s laughable ideas about what you are influential about, Facebook’s clumsy attempts to get you to join a dating site, and Google’s demented, personalized, Gmail ads. You can see it in your credit rating, and your position on the actuarial tables. You can see it in Blackwater/Xe/Academi’s attempt to conceal itself by shedding names like a trickster god shedding skins.

These aren’t as visually appealing as most of the examples that show up on Bridle’s Tumblr but they’re an aesthetic nonetheless.

photo credit: qthomasbower

Not long ago, Cory Doctorow delivered a talk about The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (dig the New Aesthetic scrolling background on that page).

At its core is the argument that the forces that attempt to regulate computers for the purposes of protecting the current copyright regime are a precursor to a wider battle about general purpose computing. Eventually, he argues, everything will have computation inside it. And the same logic that led copyright holders to embed spyware on compact discs will lead regulators to make demands that engineers allow them to limit the capabilites of e.g. self-driving cars.

But there’s a problem. We don’t know how to make a computer that can run all the programs we can compile except for whichever one pisses off a regulator, or disrupts a business model, or abets a criminal.

Cory Doctorow — The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing.

The same forces that make copyright untenable make surveillance inevitable. Computers are copying machines. They make copies of everything, including every action that you take within their field of sensation.

Historically, that’s meant the things that happen online, with the main avenue of input being keystrokes. But as we wire up the rest of the planet with cameras, accelerometers, potentionmeters, microphones, thermal sensors, pressure plates, and switches, that means the computer and corporate gaze will reach everything, everywhere, always.

Surveillatainment from Nestlé — welcome to the future where your candy bar tracks you… Jesus. instagr.am/p/PxJYJ3H15p/

Jay Owens (@hautepop) September 19, 2012

David didn’t need to log in to his Fluxometer at the moment Amy’s party was in progress. I’m sure it keeps logs. He could have stumbled across the information at any old time.

photo credit: fabnie

One of the miracles of the modern Internet and a demonstration of how robust the thing is, is that it works at all. The Internet you experience on your home computer and rely on for day to day communication, socializing, entertainment, and business is a thoroughly sanitized and signal boosted edition of the real Internet. The real Internet is a toxic sea of aggressive malware, massive botnets, and countless spam messages.

It’s a riot of measures and countermeasures that has more in common with a primordial oozed of virulent competing organisms than it does with a civilized place for the storage of knowledge and commerce. As if we’d decided to set up a grocery store and library in a pandemic zone.

The rush to put drones in the sky is a rush to suspend computers in the air. While I trust that they’ll be subject to more regulation than their grounded counterparts, you can throw together a flying machine for a few hundred dollars. Those aren’t going to get more expensive as time goes on. What will the countermeasures be for an unlicensed swarm?

photo credit: ad551

Here’s a scenario: A sky darkened with flocks of unlicensed UAVs, of varyied provenance and security arrangement. A networked ecosystem of machines so throughly hacked and botted that they effectively become a communal resource of aerial bandwidth. Occasionally, the authorities sweep through and calm a particularly nasty riot of sky eyes, but they are as persistent as pigeons and you can’t web drones out of the sky without causing even more havoc on the ground.

The wealthy increasingly choose to live indoors, with glass pedways to ferry them from work to club to home. The ultra-wealthy and ultra-private choose to live in hardened compounds, buying only the most exclusive and fashionable Faraday devices to survive the regular EMP busts they use to clear the air. The papparazzi have countered with EMP resistent camerabots of their own. Many of these have been hacked too.

photo credit: Mr. Adrian Camera

What’s so interesting about this joke is the story that it tells about discomfort and avoidance. It’s an instance of the same forces that drove shoppers into the arcades and then city-dwellers into the suburbs. There is a quest for the safe, sanitized, and predictable environment, for being around only people who know and play by the rules. The game of ‘Crazy? Or cellphone?’ is a marker of the discomfort around a shifting etiquette of public behaviour. It used to be that people talking to themselves were crazy and thus safely dismissed. Now, the upwardly mobile display the same behaviour. Indeed, they have many of the same reasons for doing so. They aren’t all here. They are communicating with disembodied voices from somewhere else.

Six years after WaPo needed to spend a paragraph of a piece about cellphones explaining what Bluetooth is (“a short-range wireless technology that creates ‘personal area networks among your devices, and with other nearby devices,’ which sounds vaguely kinky”), we still haven’t come to grips with talking in public. In that strange way that public etiquette gets collectively decided, the consensus seems to have landed on headsets being the province of people who are trying too hard, while constant texting or talking with a phone held to your ear is mostly OK. I think this is interesting.

photo credit: AZAdam

Last night, Homeless Hotspots blew up. The program works like this: BBH Labs, a marketing company, bought a bunch of 4G MiFi devices. They gave these and a bunch of t-shirts with instructions printed on them to some homeless people in Austin. If you are visiting SxSW, you can find one of the Homeless Hotspots and pay what you wish for an access code. The devices were provided free of charge and the participants keep what they’re paid.

Broadly, the tenor of the reaction has ranged from “this is terrible” to “this is everything that’s wrong with SxSW”. Responses were fast and pretty much uniformly condemnation. It feels visceral. I think this is interesting too.

At the same time that Homeless Hotspots was going down, FedEx was paying people in uniforms to go around as walking batteries. The tenor of the coverage of that seems to be more in the “this is strange and wacky” register. I think the contrast in responses is extremely interesting.

photo credit: erjkprunczyk

Homeless Hotspots’s website pitches the project as a high tech evolution of the street newspaper format. Nobody reads those papers anyway and besides, print media is dying. Why not give homeless people access to a business that provides a service that people want? For an excellent primer on some of the troubling backstory, read Tim Carmody’s reporting.

There’s something really disturbing about the homeless hotspot. It suggests a lot of imagery around data mules and servants carrying things for their master. It evokes rickshaw drivers and Sherpas. It marks a clear difference between the digital haves and the haves-not. One connects and is an actor with agency and an email queue. The other is weirdly reduced to passivity, acting only as a dumb pipe. They must stand around at your pleasure, while you drain their batteries. This feels wrong. It feels exploitative.

photo credit: simon.carr

Three days before I’d heard about Homeless Hotspots, Clarence was still homeless and I still owned a $750 pocket computer. Clarence lost his house in Katrina. In 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011, Clarence was still homeless and SxSW was still going on. Homeless Hotspots didn’t make Clarence poorer or me richer. The biggest crime of the project may be that it invited some deeply uncomfortable comparisons.

We are faced again with the forces that drove shoppers into the arcades and city-dwellers to the suburbs. One of the intended effects of the campaign would have been to sanitize the homeless participants. The street newspapers give homeless people a media outlet; they also give homeless people a socially acceptable reason to be on the street. They aren’t vagrants anymore, they’re paper sellers. Homeless Hotspots gives its participants a crisply designed t-shirt and a service to sell. Again, they gain a reason to be on the street.

Business Insider interviewed one of the participants, Mark. “It’s like owning your own company for a few days,” he says. Homeless Hotspot transforms Mark into a knowable element. He’s just another salesman hawking a service. He’s safe to approach now. He has a job to do. The etiquette of engaging with or ignoring salespeople is well understood.

Instead, the discomfort was exacerbated. The desired context shift failed to occur and instead of neatly fitting into the crazy world of SxSW, Homeless Hotspots shone an uncomfortable light on it. It’s worth asking why the reaction is so different to the FedEx battery chargers and the Homeless Hotspots. It’s tempting to run thought experiments. What if the project didn’t have ‘Homeless’ in the brand name? What if the story we’d been woven was just about entrepreneurial participants offering 4G service? What if they had crisper uniforms? What if they were Girl Guides? What if they were drones?

photo credit: theirhistory

What if the people behind it weren’t in marketing? What if it wasn’t at SxSW but an Occupy protest? What if there was no financial transaction involved? What if it was an art project and the cost of access was simply speaking with the homeless participant like they were a human being for 5 minutes?

What if instead of boring 4G MiFi units, they’d been furnished with the highly experimental seeds of the technomadic mesh network that would one day grow to be Douglas Rushkoff’s Next Net, home of Bruce Sterling’s Regulators. The early adopter’s post-corporate reputation-based economy, payable only in Wuffie & Bitcoins?

One of the most symbolically pernicious things about Homeless Hotspots as implemented is that the participants are given a portal with no key. People who possess pocket computers and laptops can get online, but the participants aren’t given the means to get online themselves. Imagine if BBH had reimplemented Underheard alongside Homeless Hotspots. In that universe, I imagine a torrent of posts praising their efforts to give the voiceless in Austin a voice. I imagine headlines like ‘How BBH Labs is Reinventing the Street Newspaper’ with approving links to the new content stream.

Even if, like the paper, no one actually read it.