Dispatch #36
⚙️ World War II & steel production
Before the Rocket we went on believing, because we wanted to. But the Rocket can penetrate, from the sky, at any given point. Nowhere is safe. We can’t believe Them any more. Not if we are still sane, and love the truth. (Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, p. 742)
In 1945, the serial detonation of the Gadget, the Little Boy, and the Fat Man together altered Earth's atmospheric background radiation. As atmospheric testing crept up over the next decades, the ambient radiation level grew by several percent into the 1960s before slowly beginning a half-life-driven fall. The air itself was slightly contaminated, which besides inducing paranoia at the collapse of the walls of heaven also altered the profile of metal products and thus threw radiographic measurements off-kilter.
Low-background steel has been prized for its uncontaminated operational context. Particle detectors are more accurate without the radioactive signature of cobalt-60 and other hot fallout components.
The proliferation of artificial intelligence in the past few years has likewise sprinkled a dusting (or perhaps much more) of suspect information. Such is described by several overlapping categories:
Misinformation results from competing claims on reality.
Disinformation is actively seeded to corrupt information flows and worldviews, old-school spy style.
Slop is simply filler, material produced for SEO or wordcount purposes.
Kompromat is in place to provide a plausible claim for forced intervention, much like the old urban legend about cocaine on $20 bills.
Poison pills activate under certain conditions to render a system unusable or self-destructive.
You have no doubt noticed that many, perhaps most, websites form part of the “dead Internet”, the uncanny echo chamber of bots talking to bots spinning away into Borgesian mirrors. Content is king, after all, and clicks are dollars, and the incentives are more perverse than the Hollywood casting couch can imagine.
The core goal of The Extellıgencer is to arm people and communities with the tools to secure and defend memetic sovereignty.
If “an institution is a sustained collective fiction”, then organizations are mecha suits allow us to behave in ways that without that common story would not be feasible to us. (Dispatch #35)
“Organization as mecha” follows from the tools and scripts which are used on you either unwittingly and consensually, and which you use on others. (See, for instance, the nine steps of interrogation and basically any sales technique, which are formalizations of coercive structures.)
There is much to be done to see the world correctly as it is rather than as it is wished, and to identify and avoid death spirals (i.e., to have a self-correcting epistemology). These are the cybernetic mechanisms of an organization as organism, and the subject of our next investigative arc.
Pre-war steel. That's what you and I want, and what we shall have. More next time.