The Future: RAND, Brand and Dangerous to Know

The interdisciplinary field of futures research is now at the heart of policy-making and business strategy, but the serious study of the future has its roots in Cold War strategy, led by Hermann Kahn at the RAND Corporation and the Hudson Institute. The migration of futures research into business was accompanied by a burgeoning countercultural futurism, most vividly embodied in Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. The founding of the Global Business Network in 1987 brought together many of the key players from business futurism and the avant-garde wing of futures studies, forging a high-powered consultancy that went on to provide services for multi-national corporations and government agencies. As pressing contemporary issues such as global security and climate change prompt futures researchers to develop scenarios intended to deal with potentially extinction-level catastrophes, can an interrogation of the recent history of the future contribute to the release of a critical engagement with the future that is not beholden to the lockdown of its Cold War legacy?

Smart Dust and Remote Sensing: The Political Subject in Autonomous Systems

A legacy of the ‘Long Cold War’ can be found in the multiple large-scale interrelated remote sensing systems operative in the present. Smart dust, for example, constitutes the basis of polyscalar computer systems of remote sensing at micro-levels and relates to ubiquitous computing, ‘pervasive networks’ and ‘utility fogs’ as potentially transmitting endless streams of ‘real time’ or stored data. Developed initially for DARPA, Smart Dust started with work by Kris Pister's team at UC Berkeley, who refer to the project as ‘autonomous sensing and communication in a cubic millimetre.’ The Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 pushed nuclear testing underground, forcing innovations in modes of remote sensing for purposes of verification. Because so much of teletechnological development depends on the understanding of the subject as an agent enacting its will upon a world of objects (including other subjects), the means of imagining extensions of that sensing and acting self invariably fold into and influence the interpretation of that self. The chapter provides a meditation on 'the auto-' and ‘the nomos’ as they pertain to autonomous sensing systems and the immaterial worlds that helped them come into being as well as their continuation into further systems of control at a distance.

Insect Technics: War Vision Machines

This chapter investigates insectile weapons systems, 'weird' war machines that, in one way or another, pertain to a 'becoming-insect'. Jussi Parikka argues that ‘insect media’ might yield a weird futurity that emerges due to modes of perception that are radically other. Yet this ontology of perceptive enmeshment also functions as immersion into sovereign super power and its swarm technologies. What Peter Sloterdijk calls an ‘aesthetics of immersion’ is considered in relation to ‘weird’ (China Miéville) war machines, focusing on the 1960s anti-missile missile project Safeguard in North Dakota. This pyramidal architecture of ‘defense’ also repeats a gigantic insect eye on each side of its building, whose fly-like ‘gaze’ transposes a wish to perceive the latent dimensions of the earth as total vision-field. Safeguard is linked to newer conceptualizations of war machinery whose ‘scopic’ regime operates through drone warfare. As a networked entity, the drone, also fly-like, acts in a functional circle of immersion and death distribution: the ‘face’ of the drone as expression of a weird futurity in which the notion of the insectile expresses, updates, super power as affective, rhythmic, a ‘becoming-insect’ that maintains a ‘thanatopolitics’.

‘The Very Form of Perverse Artificial Societies’: The Unstable Emergence of the Network Family from its Cold War Nuclear Bunker

Deleuze and Guattari's ‘perverse artificial societies’ were the random ones thrown up by Paris’s unstable telephone system in the 1960s and 1970s, where crossed lines, misdialed numbers and bad connections created an entire phantom network of voices: ‘a society of unknowns’. Just as the ‘nuclear family’ was seen as a strategic element in the Cold War, dispersed into suburban enclaves of self-contained domestic units, so the ‘network family’ of today, distributed across social media now finds itself being defined as a strategic element in a warring online cyber community: its elusive and fragmented presence regarded as both a threat and a defence position. What this shift reveals is that the nuclear family was not as stable as it seemed and that the networked family is more tightly defined and structured according to what is perceived to exist outside of it. From this perspective it is easier to understand today’s panics over online security and ‘whistle blowers’ against state intervention in private communication, who are frequently presented by the mainstream media as domestically unstable – the chapter ends with a discussion Edward Snowden, Bradley/Chelsea Manning, and Julian Assange, together with the psychosexually aggressive language and imagery of Anonymous.

Alchemical Transformations? Fictions of the Nuclear State after 1989

James Flint’s novel The Book of Ash (2004) is a book concerned with the toxic legacy of the Cold War and the literary challenge of representing the security state inherited from Thomas Pynchon. The plot concerns Cooper James, a computer programmer employed by the US military at Featherbrooks, an RAF outpost in North Yorkshire, and his search for the truth about his father. The figure of the father is inspired by the real-life American sculptor James Acord (1944–2011), the only private citizen in the world licensed to own and handle high-level radioactive materials. In 1989 Acord moved close to Hanford, site of US plutonium production and the most polluted nuclear site in the US, where he sought to create something like a nuclear Stonehenge as a long-term memorial to the nuclear age, and to develop artistic practices for transmuting radioactive waste into less harmful substances. Acord imagined his own aesthetic practice to be a kind of alchemy, and The Book of Ash is precisely in this same style, making alchemical transformation a literary subject but also a literary technique: it is a radioactive novel in its subject matter and the way it transmutes novelistic style and content over time.

Impulsive Synchronisation: A Conversation on Military Technologies and Audiovisual Arts

Stemming from their common interest in media archeology and the idea of the air as a medium of encrypted signals, Satz and Parikka explore the themes emerging from Satz's film installation 'Impulsive Synchronisation' (2013). Satz has used various technologies as the subject of her work, including the Chladni plate, mechanical music, phonograph grooves and optical sound, looking at how such objects tap into ideas of knowledge and communication in their use of notation systems, languages or codes. Satz is also interested in bringing to the fore key female figures largely excluded from mainstream historical discourse in an ongoing engagement with the question of women’s contributions to labour, technology and scientific knowledge. The starting point for ‘Impulsive Synchronisation’ was a 'Secret Communication System' patented during World War II by Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr and American composer George Antheil. This invention of 'frequency hopping', designed to protect radio-controlled torpedoes from enemy disruption by distributing the signal over many frequencies and synchronising the transmitter and receiver in rapidly changing patterns, has become the basis for today's spread-spectrum technology. In Satz’s work, these technologies are referenced to explore visual, musical and data notation, as well as its encryption, synchronisation and decipherment.

Simulate, Optimise, Partition: Algorithmic Diagrams of Pattern Recognition from 1953 Onwards

Contemporary attempts to find patterns in data, ranging from the now mundane technologies of hand-writing recognition through to mammoth infrastructure-heavy practices of deep learning conducted by major business and government actors, rely on a group of techniques intensively developed during the 1950-60s in physics, engineering and psychology. Whether we designate them as pattern recognition, data mining, or machine learning, these techniques all seek to uncover patterns in data that cannot appear directly to the human eye, either because there are too many items for anyone to look at, or because the patterns are too subtly woven through in the data. From the techniques in current use, three developed in the Cold War era iconify contemporary modes of pattern finding: Monte Carlo simulation, gradient descent, and clustering algorithms that search for groups or clusters in data. Each of these techniques implements a different mode of pattern, and these different modes of pattern recognition flow through into contemporary scientific, technological, business and governmental problematizations. The different perspectives on event, trajectory, and proximity they embody imbue many power relations, forms of value and the play of truth/falsehood today.

Deep Geological Disposal and Radioactive Time: Beckett, Bowen, Nirex and Onkalo

This chapter considers nuclear futurity and long-term radioactive half-life and decay as timescales of continuity that are figured in eerie and apocalyptic ways not only in fictions that engage with nuclear anxiety during the Cold War (Elizabeth Bowen and Samuel Beckett) but also in the engineering projects that deal with the inconceivably long aftermath risks in deep underground nuclear waste disposal. Gunther Anders’ 1962 ‘Theses for an Atomic Age’ is compared with late 1980s Nuclear Industry Radioactive Waste Executive (Nirex) reports into the suitability of storing highly radioactive waste in deep boreholes, and pairs literary/cultural speculation with actual storage facility technologies to explore the deep time of nuclear waste continuities beyond the Cold War. The bunker mentality of the high Cold War is addressed through the relation between family nuclear shelters and the underground systems of the nuclear state. Geologist J. Laurence Kulp, who developed radioactive isotope dating of ancient rock formations, inadvertently stumbled on the radioactive effect of nuclear tests. Kulp's discovery led to the test ban treaty of 1963 and consolidated in the public imagination the link between deep geological time, radioactivity, and underground secret tomb/refuge systems. The article ends with a meditation on the contemporary nuclear repository.

Notes from the Underground: Microwaves, Backbones, Party Lines and the Post Office Tower

This chapter links the essential parasitism of cold war systems to some general trends of 20th century telecommunications (economically motivated service-oriented multi-media). Certain (existential) fictions of the second half of the century explore and instantiate the peculiar logic of the parasite. The chapter draws out the implications of an ethics grounded in the attempt to deal with this logic and questions where such attempts, and the desires that drive them, might lead. These ethical concerns are connected via technological analysis to the 1956 plan for a radio link (known as Backbone) running north and south through the UK, avoiding large towns and meant to provide a safe route for communications vital to the prosecution of a war. The conjunction of existentialist fiction with the cold war technology ties together a triad of puzzles of the era: communication, existence and the problem of other minds. But the problems have since shifted—the rational subject now comes into being belatedly as an interrupter, a parasite, displacing or replacing the previous parasite. The parasitical arrangement does not follow the formal order of subject and object but occurs intersubjectively, producing its subjects in the process and figuring a fundamental alteration in social relations.

The Signal-Haunted Cold War: Persistence of the SIGINT Ontology

This chapter addresses a non-linear signal archaeology that connects Cold War architectures to current politics of global surveillance. In the wake of the NSA/PRISM/Snowden revelations in June 2013, it was discovered that Britain still has a “secret listening post” in the heart of Berlin. The story about Britain’s involvement in Berlin is indicative of some continuities in the Cold War narratives that persist, and some media technological practices that never disappeared: from the Teufelsberg listening post in Berlin to the current NSA culture, we are forced to admit the significance of what Thomas Elsaesser referred to as the S/M perversion of cinematic media: the centrality of technical media in Surveillance and Military. Indeed, excavating “signal architecture archaeologies” means looking at those non-human spaces built for signals – a preparation for the war conducted over signals, or what nowadays is referred to as “cyberwar”. This theme haunts the abandoned buildings and remnants of the Cold War like Teufelsberg, which is approached poetically as a haunted signal space: the ghosts that characterise military architectures are not dead souls of humans, but the non-human pings of massive infrastructures of signal processing.