CCS - Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson
Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson
Engelbart was a man driven by an intense personal philosophy that computing technology could provide people with the ability to increase their capability to deal with any given “complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems”. No-one could argue that the seminal work he conducted during his career hasn’t achieved this. Doug Engelbart led a small team of technicians and researchers from the Stamford University broke new ground and introduced revolutionary new technologies as part of the ‘Augment Project’ and many members of his team from the sixties are still powerful and influential figures in the computer world today. He envisioned or directly developed “the computer mouse, graphical user interface, display editing and integrated text and graphics, hyper-documents, and two-way video-conferencing with shared workspaces”, aspects of our modern day computer use we can hardly imagine being without. He is now involved in a foundation promoting the social and technological aspects of ‘Collective Intelligence’ whereby people can combine their intelligences to a greater goal and take the power of society into their own hands ( http://www.bootstrap.org/ ). He has held firm to his beliefs throughout his career; that the world is becoming an ever more complex and dangerous place to be and that both organisations and societies need to “boost their IQs” to meet all the challenges life will throw at them. He is a leading light in this new Utopianism, with plans to set up ‘Global Improvement Networks and the ongoing work on a new “open hyperdocument system”.
Ted Nelson always saw himself as an intellectual who could make a difference to the world believing at first he wanted to be a film-maker until he was exposed to the newly emerging field of computing while at College; “this was it - it was obvious, the human race would spend the rest of its career at computer screens”. His experiences with his own Attention Deficit Disorder where he found it very hard to recall events and important information in a logical order fired him with a life long desire to create a system “that would record all the connections and all the structures and all the thoughts that paper could not”. This was to be his Xanadu Project. A computing system whereby all the applications were linked and anyone could do whatever they wanted to a document; Nelson always hated the prescriptive and ‘One God’ approach to writing software. Along the way other, some might say cannier, inventors took aspects of his work and made them commercially successful, most famously Tim Berners-Lee and his appropriation of the HTML concept which has now become standard. Nelson still stands out today as a fiercely independent and original voice in the world of computing and still filled with an unshakeable belief in a new and more democratic way of computing.
CCS - Presentation - Directive: Fight the Net
The US Military and the Age of Information Warfare
For my presentation I chose to move slightly off topic and shed some light on an area I had brought up several times in discussion after our seminars but lacked the background knowledge to go deeply into. I also believe that it is very important for everyone in new media to be aware of the powerful players on the international scene who view the internet and worldwide communications networks as a new battlefield in which they can win our hearts and minds, destroy the capabilities of their rivals to do so or as the ultimate veto, shut down large sections or even the entirety of our communications networks at will. Cyber-warfare is already a reality; videos of British and American hostages held by Islamic Militant groups in Iraq were released on the net with the express intention of horrifying the Western public and eroding support for the war. During the recent Israeli invasion of the Lebanon both sides were conducting new media Psyops (Psychological Operations) attacks on each other. The Israelis used high powered transmitters to send the Lebanese people hundreds of thousands of automated calls and text messages, ‘hijacked’ a Hezbollah satellite channel for 90 seconds to broadcast their own propaganda, set up a websites encouraging informants and gave thousands of students ‘megaphone’ software allowing them to detect and infiltrate anti-Semitic websites.
Against this background the US military has laid plans for “total domination of the entire electromagnetic spectrum” and the strongly stated desire to “disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems” (Pentagon Document – Information Operations Roadmap, 2003). Hundreds of millions have already been signed off by high ranking Pentagon officials like Donald Rumsfeld to put the USA at the forefront of what could almost be seen as an Information Era arms race both with terrorist agencies and their world rivals. Various world events including terrorist’s successful use of the net for propagandas and recruitment, the re-emergence of Communist China with its own advanced plans for Information Warfare, an estimated 70,000 attempts to hack US military networks last year alone as well as America’s increasing reliance on communications technology to conduct modern warfare have pushed Information Operations and Psyops right to the top of the US military’s list of priorities. You only need to imagine the chaos that would ensue if a terrorist organisation used hackers or viruses to take down the New York Stock Exchange to see why government agencies are taking this so seriously.
During the recent Gulf War the Americans made extensive use of satellite imagery to guide troop movements and a fully integrated ‘internet in the sky’ system is seen as the future of field warfare. From enemy positions to weather reports and requests for medical supplies the TSAT system would allow US troops to be in touch with each other and with central command all the time, anywhere. The TSAT (Transformational Communications Satellite) network in low Earth orbit would enable the military’s Global Information Grid (War-Net) to cover every inch of the globe so that commanders can see and know practically everything they could want to about a situation, make up to date and well informed decisions maximizing the worth of every man on the ground. This kind of truly ubiquitous wireless, super broadband internet may well be available to the general populous at some point in the future.
With satellites becoming such an important part of military operations and with the increasing reliance on these networks for maintaining a large countries economic and civil infrastructure the US is becoming increasingly concerned about their vulnerability. We are approaching an age in which America “intends to develop systems to deny adversary use of space and maintain US space superiority”. This might be the century when wars in space move off the pages of science fiction novels and into reality. America is so concerned with protecting their satellites that they have commissioned the development of space based weapons, after all China is already believed to have such devices. Plans have been laid for the creation of machines that could move at will through low earth orbit targeting and destroying enemy communications satellites with high powered lasers or explosives. Many scientists argue that the debris created by any kind of war in space could create a field of debris which could destroy most civilian communications satellites as well and render much of the space around Earth an effective no-go zone. There is also the possibility that the power of US space superiority during a conflict might force smaller countries to release the equivalent of grit; metal junk up into the atmosphere as an low-tech but very effective anti-satellite measure.
A variety of ‘Offensive Information Era Weaponry’ has also been put into production. A HERF (High Energy Radio Frequency) gun can be targeted at networks or individual systems temporarily paralyzing them by overloading their circuits with a babble of 0s and 1s. EMP (Electro Magnetic Pulse) bombs could bring a city to its knees while leaving every building standing. EMPs are 100 times more powerful than HERF guns and the damage is permanent. Every electronic device in the blast radius would be rendered useless, cities would be plunged into blackouts and modern communications networks would simply cease to exist. In an age when overseas civilian deaths are increasingly unpalatable to the US population and with an increasing concern about improving America’s image worldwide these weapons provide the military with an appealing alternative to traditional bombs and bullets.
All this and of course the hacking, counter-hacking and viruses that are part of what is now called Network Warfare for which the US is well prepared with a top sectret multi-million team of the most formidable hackers ever assembled. Any modern war will now be fought as much in the information realm as it is in the physical world.
