In Greek mythology, the titans were the first gods, directly tied to the universe’s primordial forces, who arose before the Olympians people once learned about in school and who are still depicted in popular media (you know the names: Zeus, Aphrodite and other cosmic celebrities).
The Titans were the former deities, the generation of gods preceding the Olympians. They were overthrown as part of the Greek succession myth, which tells how Cronus seized power from his father Uranus and ruled the cosmos with his fellow Titans before in turn being defeated and replaced as the ruling pantheon of gods by Zeus and the Olympians in a ten-year war known as the Titanomachy (‘battle of the Titans’). In the aftermath of this war, the vanquished Titans were banished from the upper world and held imprisoned under guard in Tartarus. Some Titans, such as Oceanus and Helios, were allowed to remain free.
Recently, the Titans came to mind when I read this post on Twitter:
A key quote:
“In Silicon Valley, [there’s] almost this Copernican principle — where people used to believe that the world revolved around the Earth, then realized that it revolves around the sun.”
“There’s a Silicon Valley parallel where people think that all of technology, all of industry, revolves around Silicon Valley, but it’s actually kind of the opposite.”
Typical of Americans, Sequoia Capital’s Maquire unnecessarily added, ‘kind of’ when, in fact, there’s no doubt or partial truth: the tech industry and all of its products and apparent power, are entirely dependent on a vast, complex supply chain of capital and resources commanded by older, and far more powerful sectors of the global system.
At the foundation of this system, primordially tied to the world like the Titans of myth, is oil.
For many years, we were encouraged to believe that ‘software was eating the world’. In fact, software and the software industry, were eating at the pleasure of the gods who were, from a media perspective (away from specialist circles) banished to the netherworld, outside of our thoughts as if to Tartarus. The tech industry builds (or, increasingly, pretends to build,) data centers that are supposedly temples in celebration of a glittering future. In fact, Cronus, drenched in crude, laughs in the dark recesses of the Earth at the pretensions of the tech lords who, despite all their talk of nuclear fusion and other exotic escapes, still need petroleum to function.
The US/Israel war on Iran, and all that has, quite predictably followed, has raised the reality of the old gods who never left to our consciousness. What is the United States, in its Olympian thrashing about, disrupting, perhaps even dismantling?
…
On 14 April, Twitter user ‘Victims of Capitalism Memorial Foundation’, (also known as ‘Mikey’ on various podcast appearances) posted what you see above to their account.
People who claim Marxist or, at the very least, materialist commitments should focus on how the world works and help others learn.
Unfortunately, in western Marxist circles, there’s a tendency to run from such understanding as if fleeing a ghost. This may be due to the balkanisation of Marxist thought (and inaction) in the academy, coordinated by the state (as Gabriel Rockhill compellingly argues in his book, ‘Who Paid the Pipers of Wester Marxism?‘).
Whatever the cause, as we approach a global crisis, it’s important to do what we can to correct this lack.
Below, some introductory guides. I’ll add more as I learn about them.
Key Aspects of the Global System That Will Be Disrupted by the War on Iran You Should Understand
I created the flowchart shown above a few years ago, while still an active Twitter user.
The purpose, was to illustrate the doctrine I applied to my social media usage to share with others as, hopefully, an aid and spark for thought.
Social media has always been terrible and has always been a field of struggle, indeed, war.
How could it be otherwise? The world we live in, a capitalist tyranny, built on mass death, has produced terrible human beings whose inhumanity is on display via electronic networks. It’s a big world and far from everyone is a monster but hard questions must be asked about a global society that openly supports and conducts genocide (shown on social media), violently suppressing dissent against mass murder.
Since October of 2023, when the genocide of Palestinians accelerated, it became clear to many of us that we were in the midst of a global war, waged by elites against all of us to reverse whatever gains had been made in the post World War Two period. In a time of war, our social media usage should become more deliberate, more disciplined and less open about our plans.
On Strategy
There are several books on war that are considered classics. The most venerable is Sun Tzu’s 5th century treatise, ‘Art of War’. In the 1980s and 90s, business idiots, inspired by the Gordon Gecko character in the 1987 film, Wall Street, imagining themselves to be generals (rather than coke addled thieves) flocked to the business section of bookstores to buy, and, mostly misunderstand the text.
1. Sun Tzŭ said: The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy.
2. To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.
4. Hence the saying: One may know how to conquer without being able to do it.
5. Security against defeat implies defensive tactics; ability to defeat the enemy means taking the offensive.
6. Standing on the defensive indicates insufficient strength; attacking, a superabundance of strength.
7. The general who is skilled in defence hides in the most secret recesses of the earth…
Today, we lack a “superabundance of strength” and must assume an intelligent, defensive posture.
On social media, this means:
Information Discipline
Resist the urge to overshare. This only provides your enemy with information that can be used against you. Needless to say, activist groups must be especially cautious and only communicate the bare minimum on social media required.
No Study, No Right to Speak
Social media platforms are designed to encourage stupidity, such as: arguing with people you don’t know, will never meet and who may not be people at all (i.e., bots). Conversation on complex topics is not possible with people who are unfamiliar with the topic. When people respond to a post about an article, book, etc with objections based on nothing, ignore them. Argumentation is a time waster and sometimes, a psyop.
Treat Social Media as Enemy Territory
There is a difference between paranoia and intelligent movement through hostile terrain. Do not be lulled into thinking you are among friends (though you may have friends on a platform). The platform owners are your enemies and so are many of the people monitoring and responding to your posts.
The World at War
We are in an age of global war. To many of us, relatively comfortable (though increasingly less so as supposedly democratic states use escalating tactics of control, including via algorithmic means, to suppress ever more restless populations) this sounds dramatic and seems counter-intuitive. After all, bills still must be paid, children cared for and kitchens cleaned. Nevertheless, it is true.
It’s time for each of us to put away our illusions and move more intelligently, ideally in cooperation with others. A critical part of this is changing the way we understand, and use social media.
I propose that cybernetics, as a practice area and way of thinking, has been hijacked by the tech industry and the military industrial complex. This has robbed us of a vital tool because we associate its use with our enemies.
To shine a light on the past, to hopefully help build a way to the future, let’s study cybernetics as it was imagined by its pioneers. To help in this effort, I suggest using ‘The Cybernetic Brain‘ by Andrew Pickering, as a grounding text.
Here’s a description from the Univ of Chicago publisher:
“The Cybernetic Brain explores a largely forgotten group of British thinkers, including Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask, and their singular work in a dazzling array of fields. Psychiatry, engineering, management, politics, music, architecture, education, tantric yoga, the Beats, and the sixties counterculture all come into play as Pickering follows the history of cybernetics’ impact on the world, from contemporary robotics and complexity theory to the Chilean economy under Salvador Allende. What underpins this fascinating history, Pickering contends, is a shared but unconventional vision of the world as ultimately unknowable, a place where genuine novelty is always emerging.”
Get a copy of the book (let me know if that’s a problem and I’ll try to find other ways to share the text)
Join the Discord for discussion (the invite will go to Patreon members once seriousness has been vetted; there are a lot of clowns out here, we need to be a good group)
When we have a ‘critical mass’ (at least five people) we can begin. The plan is to go through the book, chapter by chapter, meeting once a week to discuss what we’re learning and help each other understand and research.
Capitalism, a system as inescapable as breathless news items about Trump, Musk and decay, came into its own during the age of steam power, telegraphs and colonialism (first edition, we’re witnessing the attempted redux), long before the invention of digital computers. The creation of computers, initially, a tool for military purposes (ENIAC, the first programmable digital computer was immediately put to work performing calculations for then still theoretical hydrogen bombs) eventually enabled capitalists, particularly at the commanding heights, to employ what, in military circles is known as command and control at a level of sophistication and intrusiveness previously only dreamed of.
What is command and control?
Consider this excerpt from the essay, ‘Re-conceptualizing Command and Control‘, released in 2002 for the Canadian military and co-authored by Dr. Ross Pigeau and Carol McCann which provides a succinct definition:
“…controlling involves monitoring, carrying out and adjusting processes that have already been developed. Commanding involves creating new structures and processes (i.e., plans, SOPs, etc.), establishing the conditions for initiating and terminating action, and making unanticipated changes to plans. Most acts, including decision making, involve a sophisticated amalgam of both commanding and controlling.”
Everyone who has worked in a corporate enterprise, the land of key performance indicators (or, KPIs) and other metrics gathered and analyzed to determine profit and loss, and even, in some cases, who lives and dies, understands this definition in their bones; it captures the hierarchical structure of business, which is a form of tyranny (some of these fiefdoms have pleasant break-out rooms, decent coffee and declarations of workers being in a family until, of course, restructuring and endless re-orgs casts ‘family members’ onto the street).
From the birth of the corporate era, companies have pursued operational and logistics control to ensure profit, market share and high valuation. So-called scientific management, created and promoted by mechanical engineer and early managerial consultant Frederick Taylor in the late 19th century, was the first dedicated effort of the industrial era. Sears and Roebuck, a 19th century retail and mail order behemoth, the Amazon of the pre-digital computer age, employed an army of people, scientifically managed, to run its vast enterprise. There are commonalities between the Sears of old and Amazon:
Sears and Amazon Commonalities: Diagram by Author
The primary difference between Sears in the 19th century and Amazon today is the latter’s use of digital technology to enhance command and control techniques, enhancements that make it possible for Amazon to surveil delivery drivers on their routes, among other outrages.
From Brighter than a Thousand Suns to the Office Commute
Digital computation’s first assignment was performing the subtle calculations physicists such as Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam needed to bring the thermonuclear devices of their fevered dreams to irradiated life. From that beginning, brighter than a thousand suns, the age of command and control fully took shape with the creation of systems such as the US Air Force’s Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) described in a Wikipedia article:
“The Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) was a system of large computers and associated networking equipment that coordinated data from many radar sites and processed it to produce a single unified image of the airspace over a wide area. SAGE directed and controlled the NORAD response to a possible Soviet air attack, operating in this role from the late 1950s into the 1980s.”
SAGE System Console: Wikipedia
The SAGE system was built to create a method and infrastructure for gathering data from far flung sources and coordinating a response to what its numerous displays told people in Strategic Air Command facilities. This military purpose provided the foundation, metaphor and philosophy shaping the uses of systems that eventually came online such as commercial mainframe computers, client server architectures and what is known as ‘cloud computing.’
In design intent and philosophy, there is a link between the vision of computation as a means of commanding people and controlling events that shaped the SAGE system and corporate methods such as business intelligence described in this Wikipedia article:
“Business intelligence (BI) consists of strategies, methodologies, and technologies used by enterprises for data analysis and management of business information. Common functions of BI technologies include reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, dashboard development, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, bench marking, text mining, predictive analytics, and prescriptive analytics.”
Microsoft, never one to miss an opportunity to simultaneously shape and profit from business requirements, real or imagined (does anyone recall the Metaverse? It disappeared, like youth, or money from your bank account) provides a visual of how a business intelligence platform can be built on their Azure platform:
Azure Business Intelligence Architecture: Microsoft
The common goal – the thematic bridge from SAGE to business intelligence – is data gathering and analysis which, as an objective in abstract, is not at all sinister. Every society and every social organization, no matter how large or small, needs to understand its environment, collect information and act upon what is learned. Just as SAGE applied that methodology to the task of nuclear war (which, outside of the insane circles running the world to ruin, is no one’s idea of a good use case) corporations apply it to maximizing profit. In the capitalist world, we are data points to be ingested, analyzed and optimized via something called KPIs.
Key Performance Indicators – the SAGE of Corporate Life
Key Performance Indicators or, KPIs, are the metric used to include our behavior and actions as workers, into a command and control schema. What, in the past, was directed without the aid of software (Taylorism being the first, formalized example of a pre software method) is now measured as data points stored in databases and spreadsheets. How ‘productive’ are you? KPIs, we’re told, are a way to ensure workers are on track from the perspective of owners. In a 2021 article titled ‘Why You Need Personal KPIs To Achieve Your Goals’, Forbes, a magazine once treated as scripture, advised ‘professionals’ (a word used to lobotomise that portion of one’s mind that is aware of your status as a precarious worker) to use KPIs to shape their careers:
“Peter Drucker famously said that “what is measured is managed, and what is managed gets improved.” Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are a staple of every business. It is the tool used to measure how effectively an organization is meeting vital business objectives. Teams, departments, and organizations initiate the KPIs so that it spreads to every level of an institution. If it’s such a prominent accountability measure in the business sector, why not use it for our professional success? Perhaps we should inculcate personal KPIs into our practice.”
This is good advice in a way not unlike the sort of contextually useful counsel you’d get on how to handle yourself in a bar fight or dealing with a cop who’s obsessed with demonstrating his authority; you contort yourself to survive. It’s useful, but its utility is a sign of a problem, of a system of artificially enforced limits whose boundaries serve others’ interests.
…
In his 2018 book, ‘Surveillance Valley’, journalist Yasha Levine details the links between the US’ intelligence agencies and Silicon Valley. From the beginning, Levine shows, companies such as Oracle and technologies we think sprung into existence on the sun blasted terrain of California like dreams were nurtured and even created by the US’ surveillance apparatus.
There is a similar link between the techniques used by the corporations who dominate our lives and the systems and thinking which shaped the US’ command and control fixated response to the Cold War. Our work lives exist in the long shadow of the computers used to determine if ICBMs should wing their way to targets.
Years ago, a man I’ve known for decades via electronic networks, started a blog.
He apologized because, to that class of people who assume a byline in the New York Times (described by Gore Vidal as always being “at the very heart of malice”) or a PhD confer a kind of omniscient expertise, starting a blog was akin to driving a Volkswagen (back when they were much cheaper) when a Mercedes was preferable as a class marker.
His blog was, indeed is, good. He ably writes about what he knows, how capital markets function, a topic he understands deeply from the inside. I suppose we could wait for a book by an academic or a series by a Columbia Journalism School trained NYT staffer on capital markets – such work is part of the fabric of what people who choose doing violence to the English language call ‘knowledge making’ but surely there is a place for information from the trenches.
My friend’s unnecessary apology was inspired by snobbery. You know what I mean. It’s snobbery that causes people to dismiss Wikipedia, even as an introductory source. Is the Wikipedia entry on magnetohydrodynamics bad? Most of us don’t know but we’ve been told it’s in a bad neighborhood, far from the tree-lined campuses where police beat pro Palestinian students or Manhattan newsrooms (or what’s left of either). To participate in the game of snobbery, a game imposed on most of us by a few nervous elites and their minions, we must turn up our nose, as if detecting the scent of a pile of dog poop, carelessly left on a sidewalk.
…
This comes to mind because of the way Microsoft and Google, in their sales propaganda, have promoted large language models as the solution to the problem of writing. I wrote ‘problem,’ because for many of us, told that only a small group of people possess the ability to write, putting ideas to paper or screen is felt to be a problem.
Consider the way Microsoft describes its product, Copilot for Word:
Copilot in Word ushers in a new era of writing, leveraging the power of AI. It can help you go from a blank page to a complete draft in a fraction of the time it would take to compose text on your own. While it may write exactly what you need, sometimes it may be “usefully wrong” thus giving you some helpful inspiration.
The ‘problem’ solved by a machine that, as it bestows upon us a new era of writing, consumes, by some estimates, terawatts of electrical power. Writing, no matter how laborious, is a problem best solved by thought. Indeed, one of the critical aspects of writing – whether it’s fiction, non fiction or even a well considered social media post – is the application of thought to the process of organizing and recording your ideas and points of view.
Dependence on word assemblers such as ChatGPT and even our new silicon frenemy, DeepSeek, regardless of how cleverly architected, interrupts this process but so does snobbery. The snob industrial complex – which promotes the idea that good writing requires a university course or attachment to a media corporation – prepared the soil for the idea of replacing writing with machinery. Of course millions, harassed, short on time but also, purposely discouraged from writing, apologize for the blogs they should make to share their knowledge. Millions who are made to feel inferior when looking up a topic on Wikipedia, are, unsurprisingly, receptive to tech industry propaganda: never mind about thinking to write, we’ll do it for you.
…
Writing is a craft; putting one sentence after another to build a tale – sometimes true, or as near as one can come, sometimes fanciful. You hone your craft by reading and writing and, by assembling for yourself what a friend of mine calls a writer’s table. When writing about the tech industry, Raymond Chandler and Karl Marx are sitting at my writer’s table alongside others – living and dead – from whom I learn to sharpen my own, yes, voice. There is decades of experience – being in the data centers – and a love of writing that goes into the work.
There’s nothing stopping you from doing the same. I want to read from people who serve food in restaurants and pilots and nuclear plant workers and people who have been cast out of the world of work. I want to hear from everyone, not just the famous or celebrated writing about everyone.
Having reached this point in the piece it’s typical to try to create something pithy that sums up what came before. In lieu of that, I’ll say, please write if you want to. Do not surrender your creativity to snobbery or machinery. If you need encouragement, I’m here to help.
We need as many voices reporting from the various fronts as we can get.
Bad ideas, like death, are inevitable and just as inescapable.
The US-based tech industry is a Pandora’s box of bad ideas, unleashed upon an unwilling and unwitting populace, and indeed world, with reckless abandon, scorching lives and the Earth itself. Never mind, they say, we’re building the future.
The latest bad idea to spread dark wings and take flight is that building a super massive data center for ‘AI’ called ‘Stargate’- a megamachine that will solve all our problems like a resource and real estate devouring Wizard of Oz – is not only good, but essential.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Tuesday talked up a joint venture investing up to $500 billion for infrastructure tied to artificial intelligence by a new partnership formed by OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank.
The new entity, Stargate, will start building out data centers and the electricity generation needed for the further development of the fast-evolving AI in Texas, according to the White House. The initial investment is expected to be $100 billion and could reach five times that sum.
“It’s big money and high quality people,” said Trump, adding that it’s “a resounding declaration of confidence in America’s potential” under his new administration.
Microsoft and OpenAI are reportedly working on a massive datacenter to house an AI-focused supercomputer featuring millions of GPUs. The Information reports that the project could cost “in excess of $115 billion” and that the supercomputer, currently dubbed “Stargate” inside OpenAI, would be U.S.-based.
The report says that Microsoft would foot the bill for the datacenter, which could be “100 times more costly” than some of the biggest operating centers today. Stargate would be the largest in a string of datacenter projects the two companies hope to build in the next six years, and executives hope to have it running by 2028.
[…]
Bad ideas are inevitable but also, apparently, subject to cost overruns.
There are many ways to think and talk about this project, which is certain to fail (and there is news of far less costly methods, making the Olympian spending even more obviously suspicious). For me, the clearest way to understand the Stargate project and in fact, the entire ‘AI’ land grab, is as an attempt to create guaranteed profit for those tech firms who’re at the commanding heights – Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, Oracle and co-conspirators. Capital will flow into these firms whether the system works as advertised or not – i.e. they are paid for both function (such as it is) and malfunction.
This isn’t a new technique. The US defense industry has a long history of stuffing its coffers with cash for delivering weapons systems that work… sometimes. The most infamous example is Lockheed’s F-35 fighter, a project that provides the company with funding for both delivery and correction as described in the US Government Accounting Office article, ‘F-35 Joint Strike Fighter: More Actions Needed to Explain Cost Growth and Support Engine Modernization Decision’ May 2023 –
The Department of Defense’s most expensive weapon system—the F-35 aircraft—is now more than a decade behind schedule and $183 billion over original cost estimates.
[…]
That’s a decade and 183 billion of sweet, steady profit, the sort of profit the tech industry has long sought. First there was ‘enterprise software’, then there was subscription-based cloud, both efforts to create ‘growth’ and dependable cash infusions. Now, with Stargate, the industry may have, at last, found its F-35. Unlike the troubled fighter plane, there won’t be any Tom Cruise films featuring the data center. Then again, perhaps there will be. Netflix, like the rest of the industry, is out of ideas.
In part one of this series, I proposed that Trump’s second term, which, as we’re seeing with the rush of executive orders, has, unlike his first, a coherent agenda (centered on the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan), would be a time of increased aggression against ostracized individuals and groups, a state of exception in which the pretence of bourgeois democracy melts away.
Because of this, we should change our relationship with the technologies we’re compelled to use; a naive belief in the good will or benign neglect of tech corporations and the state should be abandoned. The correct perspective is to assume breach.
In a April, 2023 published blog post for the network equipment company, F5, systems security expert Ken Arora, described the concept of assume breach:
Plumbers, electricians, and other professionals who operate in the physical world have long internalized the true essence of “assume breach.” Because they are tasked with creating solutions that must be robust in tangible environments, they implicitly accept and incorporate the simple fact that failures occur within the scope of their work. They also understand that failures are not an indictment of their skills, nor a reason to forgo their services. Rather, it is only the most skilled who, understanding that their creations will eventually fail, incorporate learnings from past failures and are able to anticipate likely future failures.
[…]
For the purposes of this essay, the term, failure, is re-interpreted to mean the intrusion of hostile entities into the systems and devices you use. By adopting a technology praxis based on assumed breach, you can plan for intrusion by acknowledging the possibility that your systems have, or will be penetrated.
Primarily, there are five areas of concern:
Phones
Social Media
Personal computers
Workplace platforms, such as Microsoft 365 and Google’s G-Suite
‘Cloud’ platforms, such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS and Google Cloud Platform
It’s reasonable to think that following security best practices for each technology (links in the references section) offers a degree of protection from intrusion. Although this may be true to some extent, when contending with non-state hostiles, such as black hat hackers, state entities have direct access to the ownership of these systems, giving them the ability to circumvent standard security measures via the exercise of political power.
Phones (and tablets)
Phones are surveillance devices. No communications that require security and which, if intercepted, could lead to state harassment or worse should be done via phones. This applies to iPhones, Android phones and even niche devices such as Linux phones. Phones are a threat in two ways:
Location tracking – phones connect to cellular networks and utilize unique identifiers that enable location and geospatial tracking. This data is used to create maps of activity and associations (a technique the IDF has used in its genocidal wars)
Data seizure – phones store data that, if seized by hostiles, can be used against you and your organization. Social media account data, notes, contacts and other information
Phone use must be avoided for secure communications. If you must use a phone for your activist work, consider adopting a secure Linux-based phone such as GrapheneOS which may be more resistant to cracking if seized but not to communication interception. As an alternative, consider using old school methods, such as paper messages conveyed via trusted courier within your group. This sounds extreme and may turn out to be unnecessary depending on how conditions mutate. It is best however, to be prepared should it become necessary.
Social Media
Social media platforms such as Twitter/X, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook/Meta and even less public systems such as Discord, which enables the creation of privately managed servers, should not be used for secure communication. Not only because of posts, but because direct messages are vulnerable to surveillance and can be used to obtain pattern and association data. A comparatively secure (though not foolproof) alternative is the use of the Signal messaging platform. (Scratch that: Yasha Levine provides a full explantation of Signal as a government op here).
Personal Computers
Like phones, personal computers -laptops and Desktops – should not be considered secure. There are several sub-categories of vulnerability:
Vulnerabilities caused by security flaws in the operating system (for example, issues with Microsoft Windows or Apple MacOS)
Vulnerabilities designed into the operating systems by the companies developing, deploying and selling them for profit objectives (Windows CoPilot, is a known threat vector, for example)
Vulnerabilities exploited by state actors such as intelligence and law enforcement agencies (deliberate backdoors)
Data exposure if a computer is seized
Operating systems are the main threat vector – that is, opening to your data – when using a computer. In part one of this series, I suggested abandoning the use of Microsoft Windows, Google Chrome OS and Apple’s Mac OS for computer usage that requires security and using secure Debian Linux instead. This is covered in detail in part one.
Workplace Platforms such as Google G-Suite and Microsoft 365 and other ‘cloud’ platforms such Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services
Although convenient, and, in the case of Software as a Service offerings such as Google G-Suite and Microsoft 365, less technically demanding to manage than on-premises hosting, ‘cloud’ platforms should not be considered trustworthy for secure data storage or communications.
This is true, even when platform-specific security best practices are followed because such measures will be circumvented by the corporations that own these platforms when it suits their purposes – such as cooperating with state mandates to release customer data.
The challenge for organizations who’re concerned about state sanctioned breach is finding the equipment, technical talent, will and organizational skill (project management) to move away from these ‘cloud’ systems to on-premises platforms. This is not trivial and has so many complexities that it deserves a separate essay, which will be part three of this series.
The primary challenges are:
Inventorying the applications you use
Assessing where the organisation’s data is stored and the types of data
Assessing the types of communications and the levels of vulnerability (for example, how is email used? What about collaboration services such as SharePoint?)
Crafting an achievable strategy for moving applications, services and data off the vulnerable cloud service
Encrypting and deleting data
…
In part three of this series, I will describe moving your organisation’s data and applications off of cloud platforms: what are the challenges? What are the methods? What skills are required? I’ll talk about this and more.
In his 2005 published book, State of Exception, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (who, I feel moved to say, was an idiot on the topic of Covid 19, declaring the virus to be nonexistent) wrote:
“The state of exception is the political point at which the juridical stops, and a sovereign unaccountability begins; it is where the dam of individual liberties breaks and a society is flooded with the sovereign power of the state.”
The (apparently, merely delayed by four years) re-election of Donald Trump is certain to usher in a sustained period of domestic emergency in the United States, a state of exception when even the pretense of bourgeois democracy is dropped and state power is exercised with few restraints.
What does this mean for information technology usage by activist groups or really, anyone?
…
In Feb of 2024, I published the essay, Information Technology for Activists – What is To Be Done? In this essay, I provided an overview of the current information technology landscape, with the needs and requirements of activist groups in mind. When conditions change, our understanding should keep pace. As we enter the state of exception, the information technology practices of groups who can expect harassment, or worse, from the US state should be radically updated for a more aggressively defensive posture.
Abandon Cloud
The computer and software technology industry is the command and control apparatus of corporate and state entities. As such, its products and services should be considered enemy territory. Under the capitalist system, we are compelled to operate on this territory to live. This harsh necessity should not be confused with acceptance and is certainly not a reason to celebrate, like dupes, the system that is killing the world.
The use of operating systems and platforms from the tech industry’s primary powers – Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, X/Twitter, Apple, Oracle – and lesser known entities, creates a threat vector through which identities, data and activities can be tracked and recorded. Moving off these platforms will be very difficult but is essential. What are the alternatives?
There are three main areas of concern:
Services and platforms such as social media, cloud and related services
Personal computers (for example, laptops)
Phones
In this essay, cloud and computer usage are the focus.
By ‘cloud’, I’m referring to the platforms owned by Microsoft (Azure), Amazon (Amazon Web Services or, AWS) and Google (Google Cloud Platform or GCP) and services such as Microsoft 365 and Google’s G Suite. These services are not secure for the purposes of activist groups and individuals who can expect heightened surveillance and harassment from the state. There are technical reasons (Azure, for example, is known for various vulnerabilities) but these are of a distant, secondary concern to the fact that, regardless of each platform’s infrastructural qualities or deficits, the corporations owning them are elements of the state apparatus.
Your data and communications are not secure. If you are using these platforms, your top priority should be abandoning usage and moving your computational resources to what are called on-premises facilities and use the Linux operating system, rather than MacOS or Microsoft Windows.
On Computers
In brief, operating systems are a specialized type of software that makes computers useful. When you open Microsoft Excel on your computer, it’s the Microsoft Windows operating system that enables the Excel program to utilize computer hardware, such as memory and storage. You can learn more about operating systems by reading this Wikipedia article. This relationship – between software and computing machinery – applies to all the systems you use: whether it’s Windows, Mac or others.
Microsoft Windows (particularly the newest versions which include the insecure by design ‘Co-pilot plus PC’ feature) and Apple’s MacOS should be abandoned. Why? The tech industry, as outlined in Yasha Levine’s book, Surveillance Valley, works hand in glove with the surveillance state (and has done so since the industry’s infancy). If you or your organization are using computers for work that challenges the US state – for example, pro-Palestinian activism or indeed, work in support of any marginalized community, there is a possibility vital information will be compromised – either through seizure, or remote access that takes advantage of backdoors and vulnerabilities.
This was always a possibility (and for some, a harsh experience) but as the state’s apparatus is directed towards coordinated, targeted suppression, vague possibility turns into high probability (see, for example, UK police raid home, seize devices of EI’s Asa Winstanley).
The Linux operating system should be used instead, specifically, the Debian distribution, well known for its secure design. Secure by design does not mean invulnerable to attack; best practices such as those described in the article, Securing Debian Manual 3.19, on the Debian website, must be followed to make a machine a harder target.
Switching and Migration
Switching from Microsoft Windows to Debian Linux can be done in stages as described in the document ‘From Windows to Debian’. Replacing MacOS with Debian on Mac Pro computers is described in the document, ‘Macbook Pro’ on the Debian website. More recent Mac hardware (M1 Silicon) is being addressed via Debian’s Project Banana.
On software
If you’re using Microsoft Windows, it’s likely you’re also using the MS Office suite. You may also be using Microsoft’s cloud ‘productivity’ platform, Microsoft 365. Perhaps you’re using Google’s Workspace platform instead or in addition to Microsoft 365. In the section on ‘Services and Platforms’, I discuss the problems of these products from a security perspective. For now, let’s review replacements for commercial ‘productivity’ suites that are used to create documents, spreadsheets and other types of work files.
In the second installment of this essay series I will provide greater detail regarding each of the topics discussed and guidance about the use of phones which are spy devices and social media, which is insecure by design.
I came of age – emerging into young adulthood, liberated, it seemed, from teenaged concerns by entering my 20s – during what we were told was the Cold War’s end. A year before the Soviet Union fell in 1991, President George H.W. Bush, in a speech that was once infamous but is rarely discussed today, delivered to a joint session of the US Congress September 11, 1990 declared that a ‘new world order’ was born (Bush went on to repeat this phrase – a leitmotif of his foreign policy – during a speech at the UN in 1991). For those of us who grew up under the shadow of nuclear annihilation, what macabre war planners called Mutual Assured Destruction or MAD, this provided a form of comfort or at least, the prospect of release from modernity’s prime terror.
Fear inspires a variety of reactions, among them, real or pretended ignorance of danger or the opposite: a desire to know more, to feel, some sense of, not control, always an illusion, but awareness. If I was destined to die, vaporized by a luminous ball of atomic fire, at least there’d be a millisecond of knowing the infernal mechanism’s workings. Growing up in the latter stages of the MAD era, to get this sense of awareness, I studied nuclear weapons and nuclear war doctrines (at least, what was made public). If, on a given Sunday, during lunch, you wanted to know about hydrogen bombs and turned to me for an answer, I could take a sip of vodka and give a solid, well studied non-specialist’s reply.
In the collective imagination, there was a fixation on the scale of devastation. Whether in fictional depictions such as the Terminator films or grimly matter of fact Pentagon strategy documents, the total destruction of major cities – millions dead from blast, heat, radiation and fallout – was a common theme. When anyone said, ‘nuclear war’, it meant the end of the world. What most of us did not know was that just as rust never sleeps, war planners do not cease working to sharpen their blades. New types of nuclear weapons were in the minds of designers, expressed via mathematics and simulated using computation. There is evidence these abstractions have recently taken solid form to be unleashed on Syria’s tortured soil.
On December 23, 2024, Swiss physicist Hans-Benjamin Braun posted the following to his Twitter account:
Nuclear attack in Tartus (Syria):
Radioactive fingerprint of nuke (Tartus) measured in Cyprus within ~16 hours after the attack.
[Note that the dose rate peak cannot be ascribed to precipitation as higher precipitation occurred on Dec 5 with no discernible radiation increase]
The post, first in series that read like urgent dispatches, was based on an analysis of several data points: seismic, radiation and blast effects, used to present a dark conclusion: a new class of nuclear weapon, called Fourth Generation Fusion Nuclear Weapons (FGNW) by US Air Force researcher James Denton in a report titled ‘The Third Nuclear Age: How I learned to Start Worrying About the Clean Bomb’ was deployed in Tartus, Syria.
As the days wore on, more evidence appeared. In a post made on December 26, Dr. Braun posted this update::
Tartus nuke:
DoD data yield for a 99.9% clean weapon (e.g. “Housatonic”) with 0.3kt yield at 110 miles a (max) fallout of 0.035 mR/h. With the obs. time decay at 15 to 20h this yields a dose rate of 9-12nSv/h.
This agrees with observation of 11.55 +/-1.27 nSv/h (>8 sigma signal).
A great deal of technical terrain is covered in this brief post so let’s walk through it.
By “DoD data yield” Dr. Braun is referring to the calculations of nuclear weapon outcomes derived from a US Department of Defense document, ‘The Effects of Nuclear Weapons’ (originally published in 1977). Using these calculations, Braun determined that the Tartus detonation’s characteristics were in line with what was calculated for the last of the 31 test explosions in the 1962, Operation Dominic series, the “Housatonic” detonation of Oct 30, 1962. This explosion was declared 99.9% ‘clean’ , that is, the amount of radiation was significantly less than what is usually produced by nuclear explosions. The reduction of radiation, while retaining other nuclear effects, was the result of the use of a design approach called Ripple.
The impetus for the Ripple program is described in the document, ‘Ripple: An Investigation of the World’s Most Advanced High-Yield Thermonuclear Weapon’. Here is an excerpt:
Operation Redwing and “Clean” Weapons
To help explain the significance of the Ripple concept and the context in which it was devised, we begin with this 1955 letter from then Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson:
Until the CASTLE (1954) tests confirmed the feasibility of megaton yields at comparatively small cost, military economy in the atomic weapons field had been largely dominated by blast effects and means of maximizing these (effects) in relation to design and delivery costs. As important as these blast considerations still are, we are now confronted with perhaps even more important considerations in the radioactive by-products field. Stated broadly, the problem appears to be that of maximizing the military effect at the desired time and place, and minimizing such effects where they are not desired. While blast effects are essentially instantaneous and local, the radioactive effects may cover very large areas and may persist for very long periods ranging, in fact, from days in the local fallout effects to many years in atmospheric contamination effects. In other words, radioactive effects force us to bring time in as an additional dimension in dealing with this problem. Moreover, the areas subject to lethal radiation are so large, that in planning the use of these weapons we must carefully weigh the damage to friendly as well as enemy installations.
[…]
“Stated broadly, the problem appears to be that of maximizing the military effect at the desired time and place, and minimizing such effects where they are not desired”.
Unsurprisingly and appropriately, Dr. Braun has faced objections, which, when offered in a spirit of scientific inquiry, he seems to welcome. Social media is an arena, where attempts at conversation or debate are as likely to come to the attention of people who are uninformed, yet confident in their ignorance as a peer who knows what you’re talking about. Among the informed challenges (as opposed to random objections and, potentially, IDF bots) were questions about the radiation levels; shouldn’t they be much higher? Dr. Braun’s answer, based on his understanding of the effects of more advanced designs – the ‘Housatonic’ class – is no, the Tartus detonation represents the first use of a new type of weapon. If he is right, we have entered a more dangerous phase of the nuclear era in which the use of nuclear weapons becomes more attractive because the goal of ‘maximizing the military effects while minimizing undesired effects’ has been achieved.
The March 6, 2022 edition of the BBC’s ‘Point of View’ radio program featured British novelist and essayist, Will Self, reading his work titled ‘Return of the Bomb’. Self used the Russian invasion of Ukraine, then only a month old, and statements President Putin made at the time about Russia’s readiness to use nuclear weapons to discuss what Self called the ‘60th year of the Arkhipov age’. Arkhipov, as in Vasily Arkhipov, the Soviet naval officer who, at a crucial moment in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, prevented the firing of an atomic torpedo on US naval vessels, which surely would have led to a full nuclear war and an end to all things. This decision, Self accurately tells us, earned Arkhipov a special place of honor (a place he has not been given, certainly not in ‘the West’).
Discussing the contradictions of the MAD doctrine we were told maintained a sort of nervous equilibrium, Self stated:
“One of the curious things about the doctrine [of mutually assured destruction] is that it assumes nation states, and even empires, behave as rational, self interested individuals, while the Arkhipov incident tells us that in fact, armageddon is often only averted by actual individuals who will rebel against groupthink. Another paradox of MAD besides its worrying acronym, is that it relies on hostile powers’ motivations and dispensations being transparent to one another. However, what we know from the record, is that both the possibility of nuclear war and its avoidance during the Cuban crisis were a function of ignorance and misreading of intelligence.”
If Dr. Braun is correct and, a precision type of nuclear weapon was used in Tartus, Syria, a productionized refinement of what was deployed in the ‘Housatonic’ test of 64 years ago, we have exited the MAD era (perhaps, as Self notes, we were never in it) and entered an age in which nuclear weapons become a regular part of military action.
Computational Impacts 