Re: <nettime> The magnificent bribe

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

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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