When we fight the environment and disown it, our methods and weapons become part of it, part of the involuntary end and uncontrollable component of karma. This, as in the tale of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, is the fate of all power games…the destruction of the environment is based on contempt for everything outside the human skin… We are not in nature; we are nature.
- Alan Watts, 1972
“War! roared Motown recording artist Edwin Starr in his eponymous 1970 hit song. “What is it good for?”
“Absolutely nothing!” he thundered, which of course isn’t the case. War is good for many things besides redrawing borders and the reallocation of resources through organized theft. In modern times it’s been good for research and development subsidies to electronics, materials science, food preservation, and manufacturing. All these advances are repurposed as peacetime dividends to the toiling masses who paid for them.
War is also good for something lesser acknowledged: learning how to efficiently manipulate and control domestic populations in both totalitarian dictatorships and liberal democracies.
War and the Media Monopoly
“Until August 1914, a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman,” noted historian A.J.P. Taylor in English History 1914-1945. “He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country forever without a passport or any sort of official permission. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14 or rather less than eight percent of the national income.”
The First World War altered the dynamic between citizen and state across the AngloAmerican world. The US passed the Sedition Act in May of 1918, mere months before armistice. The Act was later used as a tool for the arrest, imprisonment, execution and deportation of dozens of unionists, anarchists and communists. It became a bludgeon for criminalizing “antipatriotic” and “antiwar” speech.
This was followed by the post-WW2 fallout on the US media, as noted by Ben Bagdikian, Dean Emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, in his 1983 book, The Media Monopoly.
“The incestuous relationship of the Monopoly Media Cartel and psychological warfare has a long history. Veterans of World War II, for example, the US Army’s Psychological Warfare Division, became the Cold War’s media giants. OSS agent William S. Paley became a CBS executive. C.D. Jackson [an expert on psychological warfare who served in the Office of Strategic Services in World War II] worked at Time/Life…William Casey was an executive at Capital Cities, which merged with ABC and was subsequently devoured by Disney. Casey himself, of course, became Director of the CIA.”
Beyond the infiltration and monopolization of the free press, the growth of the military-industrial complex in the US has run in tandem with increased domestic surveillance, decertified unions, the militarization of police departments, the sacking of Treasury finances and the concealment of state and corporate crimes under the banner of national security. These trends accelerated after 9/11.
Today more than half of the annual US domestic budget is allocated to defence spending, and that’s not counting the remaining portion of the private economy contracted to servicing the war machine.
From ENIAC to Skyborg
So where does Artificial Intelligence come in? Let’s go back a bit. Computers, big data, surveillance and militarism have been intertwined since the first half of the 20th century. The first benchmark for large-scale computing was reached in the 1930s, when a subsidiary of IBM supplied Nazi Germany with the punch card technology that allowed Hitler’s regime to create a pre-Holocaust racial census of Jewish Germans. A second benchmark was reached in 1945, the year of World War II’s end, with the first working electronic digital computer, ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer). The Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann tasked ENIAC to perform calculations modeling fusion reactions in a hydrogen bomb. The input/output for the military problem involved one million punch cards and the calculations took six weeks on a mechanical footprint of 1800 square feet.
We’re a long way from ENIAC. Today a notepad computer could handle Von Neumann’s problem in the space of a bathroom break.
The U.S. and China are now in competition for domination of near space, with aerospace canopies formed of low-orbit satellites. Some of these satellites are engineered for communicating with autonomous drones and 5G networks. This competition demands greater autonomy for systems making split-second decisions outside of human control. And that means massive computational power devoted to Artificial Intelligence.
In late June 2020, the U.S. Air Force released a video touting a “Skyborg” program, which involves a networked system of aerial combat vehicles led by an AI “computer brain.” Fully autonomous drones lead a penetrating force of unmanned aircraft, with manned aircraft in the rear. The Air Force intends for system to be capable of a broad range of tasks and decisions without human guidance. What could go wrong, right?
Well, here it is. Late April marked the first rollout of the technology.
The name “Skyborg” may sound familiar. An AI-controlled military defense system gone wrong, “Skynet,” served as the End Times premise for director James Cameron’s Terminator franchise. And of course the “Borg” was an evil AI fixture of Star Trek. I guess the US Air Force has a wicked sense of humour.
In any case, it’s no accident that sabre-rattling abroad come bundled with domestic surveillance at home. From drone strikes to wireless wiretapping to the rollout of Boston Dynamics robotic dogs to enforce social distancing, citizens in the east and west live under the central dictum of technocrats: “If it can be done, it will be done.”
From Stone Age to Anthropocene
Old-school historians traced the progress of civilization from Stone Age to Bronze Age to Iron Age. This wasn’t intended as a nod to the decorative arts. Metals furnished the armies of growing city states with the means to combat with greater force and superior protection. A succession of empires leveraged greater social complexity by competing in metal-based arms races - of swords, shields, chariots, chainmail, muskets, dreadnaughts, rocket launchers, tanks, aircraft carriers, jet fighters, bombers, missiles, drones, and those delightfully maternal bunker busters, the “Mother Of All Bombs” (MOAB).
Is our digital age - in which coltan and other rare earth metals are mined to exhaustion for the sake of our magic rectangles - a refinement of the above process, with our tools now coming to life? Silicon-based systems present a challenge to carbon-based life, but it’s too soon to tell if the symbiotic relationship will shade into mutualism, commensalism or parasitism. Yet it goes without saying that the human zeal for shaping metals into tools of strength and threads of connection has its Faustian side, which could end with either a nuclear bang or a cybernetic whimper.
The War on the Very Tiny
“We all have a general sense of what “national security” means and what threatens it,” notes a March 2020 report on CNN’s website. ”But we need to rethink and update the term, now that our way of life is facing a dangerous threat, not from a foreign army, spy network or terrorist organization, but from a microscopic virus that has, quite suddenly, changed everything.”
The CNN item goes on to quote American diplomat George Kennan, who in 1948 defined national security as “the continued ability of the country to pursue the development of its internal life without serious interference, or threat of interference, from foreign powers.”
And if the parallel to foreign threats hadn’t already been made obvious, CNN unironically describes the novel coronavirus as a “non-state actor.”
Pundits, politicians, and powerbrokers love militaristic lingo for tackling the Sars-CoV-2 virus. In a 2015 Ted Talk, philanthrocapitalist Bill Gates insisted the real threat to life is “not missiles, but microbes.” Five years later he observed that “the coronavirus pandemic pits all of humanity against the virus.”
In the epilogue to her 2020 book Oneness Vs. The One Percent, environmental activist Vandana Shiva objects to Gates’ description of the pandemic as a “world war”:
“In fact, the pandemic is not a war. The pandemic is a consequence of war. A war against life. The mechanical mind connected to the money machine of extraction has created the illusion of humans as separate from nature, and nature as dead, inert raw material to be exploited. But, in fact, we are part of the biome. And we are part of the virome. The biome and the virome are us. When we wage war on the biodiversity of our forests, our farms, and in our guts, we wage war on ourselves.”
Wars of any kind have always been profitable, and this latest iteration - a war on the very tiny - has granted a trillion dollar windfall to tech monopolies that are now massively expanding AI-mediated electronic networks for socially-distanced education, business and leisure. In other words, a future that sounds friendlier to robots than humans.
“In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies,” observed British Prime minister Winston Churchill. Postwar, the dark arts of psychological operations were rat-lined into the worlds of public relations, advertising, and media. With over half a century of increasingly sophisticated mass manipulation, designed to be as invisible as it is persuasive, it would be Panglossian to believe the ownership class and owing class (and the managerial/information class in between) share the same interests or are working for the same goals in this newest war. It’s never been the case in previous wars, and there’s no reasaon to believe it suddenly changed in 2020.
So in answer to Edwin Starr (and his interpreter below), war has existed seamlessly with civilization for millennia, like tracing your finger on a Möbius strip and discovering it has one side rather than two. Yet on a finite globe with hard biospheric limits, presided over by a species that’s learned to split the atom, state-to-state physical warring is a planetary bad bet, whether its presided over by thinking humans or autonomous networks. In this largest sense, it’s good for absolutely nothing.
Yet war continues regardless, turning inward from the macroscopic to the microscopic, as allopathic medicine merges with the technocratic imperatives of the biosecurity surveillance state.
In this war and any to follow, the losers certainly won’t be microbes, which have been around for billions of years. And the long-term winners may turn out to be our own tools, in the final revenge of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. That is, unless we recognize and treat the living world as a cross-species parliament of souls rather than a weaponized landscape of profit.
“The health emergency of the coronavirus is inseparable from the health emergency of extinction, the health emergency of biodiversity loss, and the health emergency of the climate crisis. All of these emergencies are rooted in a mechanistic, militaristic, anthropocentric worldview that considers humans separate from – and superior to – other beings. Beings we can own, manipulate, and control. All of these emergencies are rooted in an economic model based on the illusion of limitless growth and limitless greed, which violate planetary boundaries, and destroy the integrity of ecosystems and individual species.”
- Vandana Shiva
Thanks for reminding me that V Shiva is one of the most important voice of our time. Your quote goes on my email account. As I see it, we are in a war, but it's not the one we keep hearing about. No, it is simply this: on one side are the 'transhumanists' out of Silicon Valley who are going to make us live forever and move the entire species out of nature's realm. And on the other side are the Shiva people, who want to learn how to live in balance with Mother Nature. This is the epic war we are in, and it's going to be a long one. And I can't call it...
Viruses are not considered alive as they don't have the tools to replicate their genetic material themselves. In this respect, AI is similar. It's not clearly dead, but it isn't alive either. It needs organic material (us) to reproduce itself.
I sometimes wonder if a fetal Bill Gates was infected with a brain altering virus that prompted him to go on to enable the virus of AI to infect all of humanity. He seems a bit mechanical to me--like a robot. Is it mere coincidence?