Geoff Manaugh on Pandemonium:

Some of the coolest photographs I’ve seen recently are these long exposure shots of crowds in St. Petersburg, Russia. They were taken by Alexey Titarenko for a project called "City of Shadows." What I think is so interesting about this is that an otherwise unremarkable technique – the long exposure – has the effect of transforming these assemblies of people into demonic blurs, black masses moving through the city. These look more like scenes from Jacob’s Ladder or Silent Hill…. [in one photo] the repeating glimpse of a hand pulling itself up the banister seems strangely unnerving –– and, in the next photo, the crowd takes on the appearance of a machine, hauling itself through human gears up the stairs of old buildings. A mechanism of bones from the afterlife.

But I suppose this is what the world would look like if we could see the residue of everyone who’s ever passed through – a vast, multi-limbed creature made of tens of thousands of human bodies, winding its way through streets and buildings, looking for some place to go.

The value of perspective: lessons for Iraq and Afghanistan and Lebanon and the Maghreb and….  

In "Inside 61, 600 Sq. Ft.", Bryan Finoki continues scrutinizing Blackwater’s Border Bypass:

[Preemption] … Around 1,000 square miles of the Californian desert is given over to modeling the warzones of the Middle East. Here, as with other police/military training environments, they tackle calamity in an amusement park of unrest, insurgency and its abatement, architectures both elaborate and artful, designed solely for the purposes of being conquered and reconquered. As the accessories of the doctrine of preemption, these spaces are accompanied by a growing number of university research laboratories which engineer preliminary superstructures suspended in conjectural disaster, or simulate emergency landings and training flight paths under fake duress, or teach of non-linear dynamics and Deleuzo-Guattarian war machines. These arcade-labs of war prepare for conflict under the principle of continuous adaption, train flexible military units moving not only to protect boundary lines but through terrains marked by the threat of catastrophe. These are instructional handbooks of preemption made manifest as simulated cities, malls and oilfields, aiming to transform soldiers from grunts to self-managed risk-assessors, to move the border with them through chaotic environments. Seeking to relocate warfare within the paradoxical condition of preempting the emergence of the unpredictable they, as with recognition technologies, are elaborately armed and lethal signals of failure.

Always read Bryan Finoki. ‘Nuff said. 

In, "The Internet and Neurobiology," Kazys Varnelis reacts to Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic Monthly article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (which I’ll come back to later):

In this article Carr sounds the alarm about how the vast amount of information on the Net and the ease of searching it via Google are changing our ways of thinking, spurring us to replace solitary, deep thought with surface-level grazing for content. Carr’s entirely justifiable fear is that we are less able to process and analyze information these days and more prone for a quick fix, going off to search for the next source of stimulus

Oh, the irony… more:

This article comes at a time in which I’ve been reading a bit about Neuroaesthetics, in particular as developed by Warren Neidich in his essay "The Neurobiopolitics of Global Consciousness" and in the conference proceedings that you can find at Artbrain #4 (also Warren’s site).

There’s likely to be much more about this on the site in the future, but for now, I’d like to observe that what leads me down this path is the suggestion that historical conditions can correspond to neurobiological changes. In other words, that it isn’t just that we’re reading differently as we learn to navigate the net, it’s that as we select for one form of cognitive processing over another we are reprogramming our brains at a fundamental neurobiological level.

In doing so, we support that activity with the tools and environments. These, in turn, pass on the changes in our brains to future generations and affect the conditions they emerge in.

In this light, network culture wouldn’t be merely a cultural condition, it would be a neurobiological state, a plateau in a long, Darwinian evolution of humanity’s cognition…

Worth considering, esp. after Sam Power’s Comment on the same subject in Time a couple of weeks ago. 

A team of three academics – Jerry Ratcliffe of Temple University in the U.S., Shane D. Johnson of University College London in the U.K., and Michael Townsley from Griffith University in Australia  – have published their research on quantifcation of the "Space Time Dynamics of Insurgent Activity in Iraq".  Still in press so not yet available to the public, the article is forthcoming in the Palgrave MacMillan periodical Security Journal. Here’s the abstract:

This paper describes analyses to determine whether there is a space-time dependency for insurgent activity. The data used for the research were 3 months of terrorist incidents attributed to the insurgency in Iraq during U.S. occupation and the methods used are based on a body of work well established using police recorded crime data. It was found that events clustered in space and time more than would be expected if the events were unrelated, suggesting communication of risk in space and time and potentially informing next event prediction. The analysis represents a fi rst but important step and suggestions for further analysis addressing prevention or suppression of future incidents are briefl y discussed.

My first impression on reading this was that the authors had made the standard error of either conflating terrrorist and insurgent spatial syntax, or insufficiently distinguishing one from the other. They haven’t done either. This is important work, innovating in an area of knowledge long predicated on historically-contingent macro theories of guerrilla warfare. It treats insurgency through a criminological lens and applies fine-resolution police crime mapping and conflict prediction approaches to conditions in Iraq. The authors draw from rational choice theory, based on the notion that 

we should consider terrorism as a type of crime and that the decision-making processes of criminals and terrorists are broadly similar. Terrorists have certain goals (both short and long term), and are constantly evaluating opportunities to achieve these in terms of a risk and reward calculus. Like offenders, terrorists have limited resources (money, time and personnel) and attempt to evade the attention of organisations dedicated to preventing their activity. In short, attacks are carried when the perceived reward exceeds the perceived risk. In concrete terms:

(1) not all targets are equally attractive to terrorists; and

(2) terrorists are unlikely to be able to strike at will because they are constrained by finite resources or excessive risk. 

Their methodology relied on "an epidemiological model of infectious diseases to test for the communicability of future risk" (p. 4), something they’d used previously to assess the potential spread of burglary risk. Finer resolution scoping of the problem, they argue, is well suited to supporting the tactical-level prediction necessary for operational counter-network collection, analysis, and defeat. But, they acknowledge, it doesn’t really help with strategic level threat assessments.

I won’t spoil the fun by outlining their findings; stay tuned to Security Journal to read them for yourself. What’s worth noting at this point is that sub-tactical/micro-spatial phenomena are being investigated with this kind of precision – essentially driving our understading of the phenomenon from the bottom-up before we’ve even indexed any macro-spatial and multi-dimensional variables. This is less a comment on the article than it is a critique of the state of the art. 

In April I tagged Steve Coll’s write-up in the New Yorker on free-speaking senior military officers and their treatment by a thin-skinned White House ("Iraqi Jabberwocky"). The discussion was a good lead-in to the events of the past week, which saw senior US Air Force management sacked for a variety of reasons. Two new publications germane to the issue are worth reading:

• Robert L. Bateman, "Cause For Relief: Why Presidents No Longer Fire Generals." Armed Forces Journal (June 2008).
• Martin L. Cook. "Revolt of the Generals: A Case Study in Professional Ethics." Parameters (Spring 2008).

Historian Mark Grimsley, at Blog them Out of the Stone Age, notes of the Bateman piece: "It was conceived and written long before Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s recent relief of the Secretary of the Air Force and Air Force Chief of Staff, but I would imagine that this event hasn’t altered Bob’s overall perspective — though surely he must take it as a positive sign."