A Vacuum Airship
I love this stuff.
Tech
They Like to Watch
I used to admire watches, little nuggets of technology that rode along on your wrist. I loved the digital watches that had games built into them that came out in the 1980’s…..
…but eventually gravitated to rugged, military style, mechanical watches with Tritium inserts so they would always glow in the dark.
This changed four or five years ago when I finally decided to buy a cell phone. Even though it was a cheap giveaway model that was passed out when I signed a 2 year contract with my service provider, it was still laden with enough gadgets and features to make my geeky heart sing. It had a calculator, a calender, an alarm clock, a stop watch, an international time function, and a note pad so I could write stuff down. I could even download and play games on my phone, even though I have never bothered.
You would have to buy an array of watches to enjoy all those functions way back when, and now they were included in my cell phone as a minor selling point. Pretty cool, but there is also a crappy VGA camera as well. Not many watches also had a camera built in.
Don’t forget that this is a four year old phone that was given away for free even back then. Nowadays you can spring for a phone that is a media center, allowing you to access the Internet, watch TV or movies, and play music. It would take far more free time than I have to use all those functions, so I have deliberately avoided upgrading. But I will probably get a phone with a better camera when the one I have now eventually succumbs to all the weather to which I keep subjecting the poor thing.
Chris has found that a watch is so much more convenient than a cell phone when he is filling out incident reports. Just glance at your wrist instead of pulling your phone out of the belt pouch, press the button to get the face to light up, look at it to determine the time, and put it back. He is more interested in pure function than anything else, though. The time is the only thing he really needs from his watch.
Milo is a watch enthusiast of sorts. He likes Soviet style watches, something with a 24-hour face. He ordered one online, but it never was mailed off. Disappointing.
This is sort of ironic to me. I remember that there was a brisk trade in all things Soviet amongst collectors back in the 1960’s, 1970’s, and 1980’s before Glasnost. Now you order up what you want from a website, but it seems they still are having a problem delivering the goods even though they aren’t Communists any more. Proof we won the previous Great Clash of Civilizations, and that the losers are still struggling to get with the program.
Sevesteen is also a watch enthusiast, although his passion are American made watches which use mechanical movement. He has even bought a Timex watch display stand which graced store counters around 1970, so he can show off his collection in the proper soft focus glory.
Sevesteen has even perfectly articulated how technology has leveled the playing field so far as personal time pieces are concerned. In the quote below, he explains why he is fascinated with watches that were made in the 1970’s.
“Go back 10 years, and watches were tiny by todays’ standards. Forward 10 years, and they are mostly quartz–Superior timekeepers, but it isn’t nearly as interesting when even a basic department store watch is equal (or superior) in performance to an expensive luxury brand.”
I remember reading Larry Niven in the 1970’s and 1980’s. He did a pretty good job of predicting the future course of technology in some of his Known Space stories by having people rely on their portable phones for just about everything, at least on technologically advanced Earth. Pretty similar to the way cell phones are evolving today.
The protagonist in one short story has a surgically implanted watch. The dial is seen glowing through the skin on one wrist, a neat little detail to prove to the reader that the story was taking place in The Future.
Some people have predicted the ultimate demise of the wristwatch. I doubt that will happen, but I think it is undeniable that the sales of that once indispensable item have suffered with the growing popularity of cell phones. I think that the only way to turn the trend around is to offer a watch with limited cell phone functions built in, or to come up with some sort of snobbish gee-whiz technical application like the implanted glow watch mentioned in the previous paragraph.
(Cross posted at Hell in a Handbasket.)
Microtargeting in Politics
Eugene Burdick, best known as co-author of Fail-Safe and The Ugly American, also published (in 1964) a novel titled The 480, dealing with the use of advanced computer techniques to influence election results. (The number “480” refers to the number of demographic categories into which the analysts have divided the American electorate…the book was inspired by actual work done by a company called Simulmatics on John F Kennedy’s campaign.) The computing in the novel is done by an IBM 7094 (portrayed in slightly sinister terms), a machine which has less processing capacity than the computer on which you are reading this, but which looked a lot more impressive.
I was reminded of this book by a Washington Post article on microtargeting in contemporary politics. The idea is to identify groups of voters like “education-obsessed Hispanic moms” in New Mexico, who respond favorably to mailings about the No Child Left Behind law. Or, on the other side, Democrats microtargeting “Christian Conservative Environmentalists.” The article says that microtargeting has been enabled by cheaper and more powerful computer hardware and by the availability of more information about individuals and zip-code-level demographics.
Another example given involves the use of microtargeting by the Romney campaign. Romney voters were well-represented among what the article calls “‘country-club Republicans,’ well-off folks who care deeply about financial issues that favor their portfolios. TargetPoint, a political consulting firm, identified another group, one “not quite sold on Romney but susceptible to a pitch on his economic policies. These were people who didn’t make as much money as the country-clubbers but displayed consumer habits similar to those of the snob set — drove sport-utility vehicles, went to the theater, bought natural foods.”
I’m not sure whether term “snob set” comes from the WP writer (Steven Levy) or from TargetPoint, but would observe that people who drive SUVs, go to the theater, and buy natural foods represent a substantial part of the WP’s subscriber base. Levy also suggests that “the Romney camp has sorted out individuals whose striving makes them vulnerable to a pitch that, at least with their current financial status, is at odds with their economic interests.” Maybe some of these people are actually intelligent enough to think in terms of their expected future economic condition, as well as their present one, and to want to preserve economic opportunity, for others as well as themselves, rather than playing zero-sum games based on a static view of economic stratification.
Anyhow, The 480 is an interesting and well-writen novel.
On Synchronicity and Other Variables
Blogfriend Matt Armstrong was recently featured at the USC Center for Public Diplomacy where he had a very thorough and well-considered op-ed on Information Operations and New Media. Pretty much everything Matt had to say were things the USG should be doing in attempting to craft some kind of coherent narrative of it’s national objectives, policies and values:
SYNCHRONIZING INFORMATION: THE IMPORTANCE OF NEW MEDIA IN CONFLICT
Insurgents and terrorists increasingly leverage New Media to shape perceptions around the globe to be attractive to
some and intimidating to others. New Media collapses traditional concepts of time and space as information moves around the world in an instant. Unlike traditional media, search engines and the web in general, enable information, factual or not, to be quickly and easily accessed long after it was created.The result is a shift in the purpose of physical engagement to increasingly incorporate the information effect of words and deeds. Thus, the purpose of improvised explosive devices, for example, is not to kill or maim Americans but to replay images of David sticking it to Goliath.
The U.S. military is actively and aggressively revising its role in shaping its own narrative in cyberspace, but this is falling short. While the U.S. is finally coming to grips with the centrality of information and perceptions, it remains confused as to how to use information effectively. American responses seem to stem from the belief that the message and the messenger we are countering are the same without regard for the target audience, intent, or how the message fits into a larger narrative, which perhaps mirrors our own perception of information as propaganda. ….A famous dead Prussian once said that war is a continuation of politics by other means, but the reality today is that war is not part of political intercourse with foes but an orchestrated, if loosely, effort to gain strategic influence over friends, foes, and neutrals. YouTube, blogs, SMS and traditional media, make every GI Joe and Jihadi a communicator,
public diplomat, and persuader. Our adversaries understand and exploit this reality. Writing to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 2005, Ayman al-Zawahiri stated that “we are in a battle, and that more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media [sic].”The U.S. military as reluctant heir to the information throne in an online world has several inherent challenges. First, operating in the environment of New Media requires awareness and agility inconsistent with the current organizational culture of the military. For example, in Iraq the military broke through the bureaucratic red-tape and started posting videos on YouTube. However, this small “victory” was incomplete: the group that uploaded to YouTube was still not permitted to view YouTube. In effect, they were posting information they were not authorized to see.”
Those quotes were snippets. Matt’s post is rich in detail and really requires being read in full.
I have tilted at the IO windmill a few times in the past. It’s a subject that is both easy as wel as difficult to analyze. Easy, because the USG has yet to initiate and/or master the fundamentals of good IO as Matt’s post makes clear ( there are genuine IO experts in the USG, perhaps even a large number of them, but the bureaucracies are not institutionally optimized to conduct IO with consistency or coordination) but difficult because the level of genuine sophistication and effective nuance in strategic communication remains so far off. Even if that level of “play” was achieved by our civil service and soldiers, any IO campaign could be undone in an instant by some clumsy action or statement from a political appointee or elected official concerned primarily with fellating some domestic special interest group.
Matt’s focus on “synchronicity” is apt. It will be a herculean task needing laser beam focus to get all of the USG players on the same message most of the time; even then some dissension and debate being showcased is itself a vital advertisement of the attractive nature of a liberal, open society and a sharp contrast with the dismally intolerant and brutally ignorant alternative our Islamist enemies have to offer. In pursuing that, I’d like to offer a few suggestions:
Credibility is the COIN of the Realm:
Matt touched on this but I want to give this principle added weight. For all our official, overt, communication by any spokesman representing the United States, the best long term strategy is a reputation of credibility. It may hurt to concede errors or enemy 
successes in the short run but having the global audience grdugingly concede that “the Americans speak the truth” adds momentum of every word, every idea and every action we undertake. It will not bring us love because oftentimes, our pursuing national interests will come at the expense of others but truth-telling will yield something more valuable, respect. No one cares to be treated as if they were a fool and most of the transparently self-serving gibberish official spokesmen offer up pays dividends only in contempt being added to the anger foreigners already feel at some of our policies. Credibility is to the war of ideas what COIN is to guerilla warfare and it is a valuable and exceedingly rare quality because once your credibility is lost, it is lost.
Without Attention Being Paid All Our efforts Are Useless:
Credibility is not enough. Key messages or memes also have to be interesting. If people are not psychologically engaged in the presentation then they are not hearing it, much less reaching the points of comprehension, sympathy or agreement. American popular culture and commercial advertising is nothing short of an unrelenting global juggernaut that is eroding traditional mores of every society with which it comes into contact, yet our official proclamations remain starkly uninteresting even to most Americans so why should a Yemeni teen-ager or Afghan farmer tune in to what we are selling ? As long as our attempts at capturing attention remain at the level of dull mediocrity we can expect to fail.
Influence is a Long Term Investment:
The 1980’s saw a march toward capitalism and democracy in part because we were reaping the harvest of decades of student visas, cultural and scientific exchanges and consistent public diplomacy outreach. From Mongolia to Czechoslovakia Chile there were reformers taking power who were ” Chicago Boys” who had imbibed free markets at the feet of Nobel laureates. The National Endowment for Democracy, the USIA, VOA, Radio Free Europe and NGO’s like the AFL-CIO whose efforts and programs abroad were robust and self-confident. American society was permitted by the USG to sell itself. These things cost pennies on the dollar compared to having to use hard power options and they lower our transaction costs when sanctions or military intervention is the order of the day.
Deception is Best Left to the Clandestine Operators :
HUMINT based strategic influence efforts, black propaganda and disinformation and various arts of deception will be better left to covert 
programs, plausibly deniable third parties and used sparingly and with subtlety. The increasingly “radically transparent” world ensures that too many sophisticated eyes with all sorts of agendas will be analyzing our official spokesmen 24/7. The best will can hope to accomplish is effectively framing our public message to be truthful and compelling. Any meme that is verifiably false, if we believe we must put it out into the global media environment, cannot have a return address.
IO is a secondary area of operations for the United States. Good IO programs cannot remediate incompetent statecraft or poor military leadership or put a “happy face” on obvious disasters but poor or absent IO capabilities can fritter away the capital that successful diplomacy or military action can accrue when our enemies accusations go unanswered.
Crossposted at Zenpundit