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Currently Happening Presently Now: GEOENGINEERING

7/30/14

Untitled 5668
"I pointed out to him that the larger the storm, and the more energy that is stored in it, the easier it should be at the proper stage in its development to get widespread effects. To assume that a hurricane could not be successfully modified by even a single pellet of dry ice is like assuming that a large forest could not be set on fire by such a small thing as a single match."
-Irving Langmuir, Final Report of Project Cirrus, quoted in Horace R. Byers, “History of Weather Modification,” in Weather and Climate Modification, ed. WN Hess, 1974.

Tukey, J. W., Alexander, M., Bennett, H. S., Brady, N. C., Calhoun Jr, J. C., Geyer, J. C., & Whittenberger, J. L. (1965). Restoring the quality of our environment. Report of the environmental pollution panel, President’s Science Advisory Committee, The White House.

The possibilities of deliberately bringing about countervailing climatic changes...need to be thoroughly explored.

Hart, D. M., & Victor, D. G. (1993). Scientific elites and the making of US policy for climate change research, 1957-74. Social Studies of Science, 23(4), 643-680.

This paper presents a case study of the role of scientific elites in mediating between science and politics, securing support for research and shaping the interests of the rank and file. We apply a 'garbage can' model, which posits that science, policy and politics typically evolve in seperate, unconnected streams, each with its own momentum. In this model, elites may act strategically as 'policy entrepreneurs' to take advantage of occasional temporary opportunities, or 'windows', to influence the policy and science streams. Our case study is of US policy toward research related to the Greenhouse Effect from the International Geophysical Year in 1957 to the aftermath of the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment. We trace the evolution of two research programmes - carbon-cycle research and atmospheric modelling. The major political strategies followed by the relevant elites connected with these programmes were concerned with the pursuit of professional autonomy, with weather modification and with environmentalism. Changes in elite strategy followed mainly from events outside science, in the policy and politics 'streams', rather than from scientific findings.

Lunde, L. (1991). Science or politics in the global greenhouse?: a study of the development towards scientific consensus on climate change.

The major aim of the report is to analyse to what extent, and possibly how, the level of scientific consensus on global warming has changed over the last twenty years, with a particular focus on the IPCC process (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)...Two 'constants' or basic structural variables are important elements of the explanatory framework of scientific consensus processes. The scientific problem structure is probably the most crucial one, and is made up of the following three indicators: the extent of heterogeneity, the extent of maturity and the extent of scientific uncertainty. Scientific problem structures that are heterogeneous, relatively immature and riddled with fundamental uncertainty are considered malign. The actual character of a scientific problem structure significantly conditions the scope for changes in the level of consensus, and not least the possible influences of more 'temporal' independent variables. Turning to the political problem structure, its main feature is viewed to be the affectedness of political actors to policies that are believed to be influenced by for instance a scientific consensus that gradually grows more robust. The stronger one expects to be touched by political action or inaction vis-a-vis a given problem, the stronger incentives one has to try to manipulate the developments of a scientific consensus process.

In brief, the scientific and political problem structures of global warming are found to be perhaps unprecedently malign. They are also related, in that scientific malignancy makes a political problem structure more malign, and vice versa. The scope for changes in scientific greenhouse consensus, as well as the possible influences of other independent variables, are strongly conditioned by the state of the problem structures.

The 'temporal' independent variables are grouped in three different clusters. Standard epistemic factors is the common denominator for variables that generally are viewed as either elements in or byproducts of 'rational scientific puzzle-solving'. Non-epistemic factors make up the opposite category. Included here are elements like political lobbying or manipulation, ostracism of scientists or scientific disciplines from debates in scientific journals or consensus processes, opportunism (conscious or unconscious) taking place when (or rather if) scientists skew research practices or results in order to please political authorities or funding agencies. Somewhere in the midst between the two other categories we then find non-standard epistemic factors. Elements included here are 'organization' of scientific consensus processes, the workings of 'epistemic communities', the possible influence wielded by political entrepreneurs' and 'leaming' by individual scientists.

Demeritt, D. (2001). The construction of global warming and the politics of science. Annals of the association of American geographers, 91(2), 307-337.

Having outlined a theory of heterogeneous social construction, this article describes the scientific construction of climate change as a global-scale environmental problem caused by the universal physical properties of greenhouse gases. Critics have noted that this reductionist formulation serves a variety of political purposes, but instrumental and interest-based critiques of the use of scientific knowledge tend to ignore the ways in which a politics gets built into science at the upstream end. By retracing the history of climate modeling and of several scientific controversies, I unmask the tacit social and epistemic commitments implied by its specific practices. The specific scientific framing of global climate change has reinforced and been reinforced by the technocratic inclinations of global climate management. The social organization of climate change science and its articulation with the political process raise important questions about trust, uncertainty, and expertise. The article concludes with a discussion of the political brittleness of this dominant science-led and global-scale formulation of the climate change problem and the need for a more reflexive politics of climate change and of scientific knowledge based on active trust.

Fleming, James Rodger. "A History of the Science and Politics of Climate Change: The Role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change." (2011): 93-94.

Miller, C. A. (2004). Climate science and the making of a global political order. States of knowledge: The coproduction of science and social order, 46-66.

Anderegg, W. R., Callaway, E. S., Boykoff, M. T., Yohe, G., & Root, T. L. (2014). Awareness of both type I and II errors in climate science and assessment. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

Treatment of error and uncertainty is an essential component of science and is crucial in policy-relevant disciplines such as climate science. We posit here that awareness of both “false positive” and “false negative” errors is particularly critical in climate science and assessments, such as those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Scientific and assessment practices likely focus more attention to avoiding false positives, which could lead to higher prevalence of false negative errors. We explore here the treatment of error avoidance in two prominent case studies regarding sea-level rise and Himalayan glacier melt as presented in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. While different decision rules are necessarily appropriate for different circumstances, we highlight that false negative errors also have consequences, including impaired communication of the risks of climate change. We present recommendations for better accounting for both types of errors in the scientific process and scientific assessments...Type I and Type II errors become especially important in what has been termed “post-normal science,” where risks and/or uncertainty are high in a policy-relevant issue and decisions must likely be made without complete certainty. With its dependence on the complex and chaotic coupled climate-land-ocean system, human activities, policy decisions, system inertia, and time lags, climate science and impacts is generally considered within these landscapes of post-normal science. These two types of errors factor into the complex landscape of uncertainty characterization, which has been increasingly explored and utilized within the context of the IPCC. Yet careful treatment of Type II errors can fall outside current uncertainty characterizations and has particular relevance to climate impacts. Failure to account for both Type I and Type II errors leaves a discipline or assessment processes in danger of irrelevancy, misrepresentation, and unnecessary damages to society and human well-being.

Brysse, K., Oreskes, N., O’Reilly, J., & Oppenheimer, M. (2013). Climate change prediction: Erring on the side of least drama?. Global Environmental Change, 23(1), 327-337.

Over the past two decades, skeptics of the reality and significance of anthropogenic climate change have frequently accused climate scientists of ‘‘alarmism’’: of over-interpreting or overreacting to evidence of human impacts on the climate system. However, the available evidence suggests that scientists have in fact been conservative in their projections of the impacts of climate change. In particular, we discuss recent studies showing that at least some of the key attributes of global warming from increased atmospheric greenhouse gases have been under-predicted, particularly in IPCC assessments of the physical science, by Working Group I. We also note the less frequent manifestation of over-prediction of key characteristics of climate in such assessments. We suggest, therefore, that scientists are biased not toward alarmism but rather the reverse: toward cautious estimates, where we define caution as erring on the side of less rather than more alarming predictions. We call this tendency ‘‘erring on the side of least drama (ESLD).’’ We explore some cases of ESLD at work, including predictions of Arctic ozone depletion and the possible disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet, and suggest some possible causes of this directional bias, including adherence to the scientific norms of restraint, objectivity, skepticism, rationality, dispassion, and moderation. We conclude with suggestions for further work to identify and explore ESLD.

Bonnheim, N. B. (2010). History of climate engineering. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 1(6), 891-897.

The modern concept of geoengineering as a response to anthropogenic climate change evolved from much earlier proposals to modify the climate. The well-documented history of weather modification provides a much-needed historical perspective on geoengineering in the face of current climate anxiety and the need for responsive action. Drawing on material from the mid-20th century until today, this paper asserts the importance of looking at geoengineering holistically—of integrating social considerations with technical promise, and scientific study with human and moral dimensions. While the debate is often couched in scientific terms, the consequences of geoengineering the climate stretch far beyond the world of science into the realms of ethics, legality, and society. Studying the history of geoengineering can help produce fresh insights about what has happened and about what may happen, and can help frame important decisions that will soon be made as to whether geoengineering is a feasible alternative to mitigation, a possible partner, or a dangerous experiment with our fragile planet.

Kwa, C. (2001). The rise and fall of weather modification: changes in American attitudes toward technology, nature, and society. Changing the Atmosphere: expert knowledge and environmental governance, 135-65.

Fleming, J. R. (2007). The climate engineers. The Wilson Quarterly, 46-60.

There is, moreover, a troubling motif of militarization in the history of weather and climate control. Military leaders in the United States and other countries have pondered the possibilities of weaponized weather manipulation for decades...Lowell Wood himself embodies the overlap of civilian and military interests. Now affiliated with the Hoover Institution, a think tank at Stanford -University, Wood was a protégé of the late Edward Teller, the weapons scientist who was credited with developing the hydrogen bomb and was the architect of the Reagan-era Star Wars missile defense system (which Wood worked on, too). Like Wood, Teller was known for his advocacy of controversial military and technological solutions to complex problems...Despite the large, unanswered questions about the implications of playing God with the elements, climate engineering is now being widely discussed in the scientific community and is taken seriously within the U.S. government...and there is a long paper trail of climate and weather modification studies by the Pentagon and other government agencies...In March 1971, nationally syndicated columnist Jack Anderson broke the story about Air Force rainmakers in Southeast Asia in the Washington Post, a story confirmed several months later with the leaking of the Pentagon Papers and splashed on the front page of The New York Times in 1972 by Seymour Hersh. By 1973, despite stonewalling by Nixon administration officials, the U.S. Senate had adopted a resolution calling for an international treaty “prohibiting the use of any environmental or geophysical modification activity as a weapon of war.” The following year, Senator Claiborne Pell (D.-R.I.), referring to the field as a “Pandora’s box,” published the transcript of a formerly top-secret briefing by the Defense Department on the topic of weather warfare. Eventually, it was revealed that the CIA had tried rainmaking in South Vietnam as early as 1963 in an attempt to break up the protests of Buddhist monks, and that cloud seeding was probably used in Cuba to disrupt the sugarcane harvest. Similar technology had been employed, yet proved ineffective, in drought relief efforts in India and Pakistan, the Philippines, Panama, Portugal, and Okinawa. All of the programs were conducted under military sponsorship and had the direct involvement of the White House...

Fleming, J. R. (2012). Fixing the sky: the checkered history of weather and climate control. Columbia University Press.

Harper, K. C. (2008). Climate control: United States weather modification in the cold war and beyond. Endeavour, 32(1), 20-26.

Fleming, J. R. (2007, December). On the Possibilities of Climate Control in 1962: Harry Wexler on Geoengineering and Ozone Destruction. In American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting.

In 1962, in the early days of GCMs and satellites, Harry Wexler, Chief of the Scientific Services Division of the U.S. Weather Bureau and one of the most influential meteorologists of the 20th century, turned his attention to techniques that could raise or lower the overall temperature of the planet or rearrange its thermal structure. He also investigated possible inadvertent and purposeful damage to the ozone layer involving catalytic reactions of chorine and bromine. This work pre-dated the Nobel Prize-winning work on ozone depletion of P. Crutzen, M. Molina, and S. Rowland by about a decade. Wexler revealed his concerns about geoengineering and ozone destruction in a series of lectures "On the Possibilities of Climate Control" presented to technical audiences in Boston, Hartford, and Los Angeles in 1962. Using newly available results from GCMs and satellite heat budget experiments, Wexler pointed out that strategic manipulations of the Earth's shortwave and longwave radiation budgets could result in rather large-scale effects on general circulation patterns in short or longer periods, even approaching that of climatic change. These techniques, included increasing world temperature by several degrees by detonating up to ten H-bombs in the Arctic Ocean; decreasing world temperature by launching powder into an equatorial orbit to shade the Earth and make it look somewhat like Saturn and its rings; warming the lower atmosphere and cooling the stratosphere by artificial injections of water vapor or other substances; and notably, destroying all stratospheric ozone above the Arctic circle or near the equator using a relatively small amount of a catalytic agent such as chlorine or bromine. Wexler was preparing a new lecture in the summer of 1962 on "The Climate of Earth and Its Modifications," and might, under normal circumstances, have prepared his ideas for publication, as he had done earlier. However, he was cut down in his prime by a sudden heart attack on August 11, 1962. His previously unexamined notes and papers on climate control and ozone destruction are located in the Library of Congress.

Fleming, J. R. (2010, December). Space Geoengineering: James A. Van Allen's Role in Detecting and Disrupting the Magnetosphere, 1958-1962. In AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts (Vol. 1, p. 03).

James A. Van Allen's celebrated discovery of Earth's radiation belts in 1958 using Explorer 1 and 3 satellites was immediately followed by his agreement to monitor tests of nuclear weapons in space aimed at disrupting the magnetosphere. This is ``space geoengineering'' on a planetary scale. ``Space is radioactive,'' noted Van Allen's colleague Eric Ray, and the military wanted to make it even more radioactive by nuclear detonations that, in time of war might disrupt enemy radio communications from half a world away and damage or destroy enemy intercontinental ballistic missiles. This study of Van Allen's participation in Project Argus (1958) and Project Starfish (1962) is based on new posthumous accessions to the Van Allen Papers. At the time radio astronomers protested that, ``No government has the right to change the environment in any significant way without prior international study and agreement.'' Van Allen later regretted his participation in experiments that disrupted the natural magnetosphere. In a larger policy framework, the history of these space interventions and the protests they generated serve as a cautionary tale for today's geoengineers who are proposing heavy-handed manipulation of the planetary environment as a response to future climate warming. Anyone claiming that geoengineering has not yet been attempted should be reminded of the planetary-scale engineering of these nukes in space. N. Christofilos describing the intended effect of the Argus nuclear explosions on the magnetosphere, which would direct a stream of radioactive particles along magnetic lines of force half a world away.

House, T. J., Near Jr, J. B., Shields, W. B., Celentano, R. J., & Husband, D. M. (1996). Weather as a force multiplier: Owning the weather in 2025. Air War Coll Maxwell Afb al.

In 2025, US aerospace forces can “own the weather” by capitalizing on emerging technologies and focusing development of those technologies to war-fighting applications. Such a capability offers the war fighter tools to shape the battlespace in ways never before possible. It provides opportunities to impact operations across the full spectrum of conflict and is pertinent to all possible futures. The purpose of this paper is to outline a strategy for the use of a future weather-modification system to achieve military objectives rather than to provide a detailed technical road map.

A high-risk, high-reward endeavor, weather-modification offers a dilemma not unlike the splitting of the atom. While some segments of society will always be reluctant to examine controversial issues such as weather-modification, the tremendous military capabilities that could result from this field are ignored at our own peril. From enhancing friendly operations or disrupting those of the enemy via small-scale tailoring of natural weather patterns to complete dominance of global communications and counterspace control, weather-modification offers the war fighter a wide-range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary. Some of the potential capabilities a weather-modification system could provide to a war-fighting commander in chief (CINC) are listed in table 1.

Technology advancements in five major areas are necessary for an integrated weather-modification capability: (1) advanced nonlinear modeling techniques, (2) computational capability, (3) information gathering and transmission, (4) a global sensor array, and (5) weather intervention techniques. Some intervention tools exist today and others may be developed and refined in the future.


Bertell, R. (2001). Planet Earth: the latest weapon of war. Black Rose Books Ltd..

"Substantial progress within the environmental sciences is slowly overcoming the gaps between fact and fiction regarding manipulations of the earth's physical environment. As these manipulations become possible, history shows that attempts may be made to use them in support of national ambitions. To consider the consequences of environmental modification in struggles among nations, we need to consider the present state of the subject and how postulated developments in the field could lead, ten to fifty years from now, to weapons systems that would use nature in new and perhaps unexpected ways. The key to geophysical warfare is the identification of the environmental instabilities to which the addition of a small amount of energy would release vastly greater amounts of energy...There has been much controversy in recent years about conjectured over-all effects on the world's climate of emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere from furnaces and engines burning fossil fuels...Carbon dioxide placed in the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution has produced an increase in the average temperature of the lower atmosphere of a few tenths of a degree Fahrenheit. The water vapor that may be introduced into the stratosphere by supersonic transport may also result in a similar temperature rise. In principle it would be feasible to introduce material into the upper atmosphere that would absorb either incoming light (thereby cooling the surface) or outgoing heat (thereby warming the surface). In practice, the rarified and windswept upper atmosphere, the material would disperse rather quickly, so the military use of such a technique would probably rely upon global rather than local effects...If a nation's meteorologists calculated that that a general warming or cooling of the earth was in their national interest, improving their climate while worsening others, the temptation to release materials from high-altitude rockets might exist."
-Gordon J. F. MacDonald, How to Wreck the Environment, in Unless Peace Comes: a scientific forecast of new weapons, Nigel Calder, Ed., 1968, page 183, 190-191.

David B. Chang and I-Fu Shih, “Stratospheric Welsbach seeding for reduction of global warming,” U.S. Patent 5,003,186, 26 Mar 1991. Assignee: Hughes Aircraft Company.

Mitchell, D. L., & Finnegan, W. (2009). Modification of cirrus clouds to reduce global warming. Environmental Research Letters, 4(4), 045102.

Greenhouse gases and cirrus clouds regulate outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) and cirrus cloud coverage is predicted to be sensitive to the ice fall speed which depends on ice crystal size. The higher the cirrus, the greater their impact is on OLR. Thus by changing ice crystal size in the coldest cirrus, OLR and climate might be modified. Fortunately the coldest cirrus have the highest ice supersaturation due to the dominance of homogeneous freezing nucleation. Seeding such cirrus with very efficient heterogeneous ice nuclei should produce larger ice crystals due to vapor competition effects, thus increasing OLR and surface cooling. Preliminary estimates of this global net cloud forcing are more negative than −2.8 Wm−2 and could neutralize the radiative forcing due to a CO2 doubling (3.7 Wm−2). A potential delivery mechanism for the seeding material is already in place: the airline industry. Since seeding aerosol residence times in the troposphere are relatively short, the climate might return to its normal state within months after stopping the geoengineering experiment. The main known drawback to this approach is that it would not stop ocean acidification. It does not have many of the drawbacks that stratospheric injection of sulfur species has.

Hulme, M. (2012). Climate change: Climate engineering through stratospheric aerosol injection. Progress in Physical Geography, 0309133312456414.

Chuang, C. C., Bergman, D., Dignon, J., & Connell, P. (2002). Final Report for LDRD Project “A New Era of Research in Aerosol/Cloud/Climate Interactions at LLNL”. LDRD-UCRL-ID 146980.

Observations of global temperature records seem to show less warming than predictions of global warming brought on by increasing concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. One of the reasonable explanations for this apparent inconsistency is that the increasing concentrations of anthropogenic aerosols may be partially counteracting the effects of greenhouse gases. Aerosols can scatter or absorb the solar radiation, directly change the planetary albedo. Aerosols, unlike CO2, may also have a significant indirect effect by serving as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN). Increases in CCN can result in clouds with more but smaller droplets, enhancing the reflection of solar radiation. Aerosol direct and indirect effects are a strong function of the distributions of all aerosol types and the size distribution of the aerosol in question. However, the large spatial and temporal variabilities in the concentration, chemical characteristics, and size distribution of aerosols have made it difficult to assess the magnitude of aerosol effects on atmospheric radiation. These variabilities in aerosol characteristics as well as their effects on clouds are the leading sources of uncertainty in predicting future climate variation.

Brahic, C. (2009). Top science body calls for geoengineering ‘plan B’. New Scientist, 203(2724), 10.

Reflective technologies could cool the planet within a year, and according to the Royal Society's findings the most promising method in terms of cost and effectiveness would be to pump sulphate particles into the stratosphere. However, this will not curb ocean acidification and other side effects of greenhouse emissions, and could disrupt weather patterns, so another method is required...There are signs that the field is increasingly being taken seriously at national and international levels...."It is clear that a lot of people are arguing that the IPCC should include an assessment of geoengineering in its next report," says Ottmar Edenhofer of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and co-chair of one of the IPCC's three working groups. More worryingly, perhaps, military and naval representatives have also taken to attending research and policy workshops on the topic.

Vidal, J. (2012). Bill Gates backs climate scientists lobbying for large-scale geoengineering. The Guardian, 6.

"We will need to protect ourselves from vested interests [and] be sure that choices are not influenced by parties who might make significant amounts of money through a choice to modify climate, especially using proprietary intellectual property," said Jane Long, director at large for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US, in a paper delivered to a recent geoengineering conference on ethics...As well as Gates, other wealthy individuals including Sir Richard Branson, tar sands magnate Murray Edwards and the co-founder of Skype, Niklas Zennström, have funded a series of official reports into future use of the technology. Branson, who has frequently called for geoengineering to combat climate change, helped fund the Royal Society's inquiry into solar radiation management last year through his Carbon War Room charity. It is not known how much he contributed. Professors David Keith, of Harvard University, and Ken Caldeira of Stanford, are the world's two leading advocates of major research into geoengineering the upper atmosphere to provide earth with a reflective shield. They have so far received over $4.6m from Gates to run the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (Ficer). Nearly half Ficer's money, which comes directly from Gates's personal funds, has so far been used for their own research, but the rest is disbursed by them to fund the work of other advocates of large-scale interventions.

Robock, A. (2008). 20 reasons why geoengineering may be a bad idea. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Vol.64, No.2, p.14-18,59.

1. Effects on regional climate. Geoengineering proponents often suggest that volcanic eruptions are an innocuous natural analog for stratospheric injection of sulfate aerosols...If scientists and engineers were able to inject smaller amounts of stratospheric aerosols than result from volcanic eruptions, how would they affect summer wind and precipitation patterns? Could attempts to geoengineer isolated regions (say, the Arctic) be confined there? Scientists need to investigate these scenarios. At the fall 2007 American Geophysical Union meeting, researchers presented preliminary findings from several different climate models that simulated geoengineering schemes and found that they reduced precipitation over wide regions, condemning hundreds of millions of people to drought....3. Ozone depletion. Aerosol particles in the stratosphere serve as surfaces for chemical reactions that destroy ozone in the same way that water and nitric acid aerosols in polar stratospheric clouds produce the seasonal Antarctic ozone hole....6. Effects of cirrus clouds. As aerosol particles injected into the stratosphere fall to Earth, they may seed cirrus cloud formations in the troposphere...Cirrus clouds affect Earth’s radiative balance of incoming and outgoing heat, although the amplitude and even direction of the effects are not well understood. While evidence exists that some volcanic aerosols form cirrus clouds, the global effect has not been quantified...7. Whitening of the sky (but nice sunsets). Atmospheric aerosols close to the size of the wavelength of light produce a white, cloudy appearance to the sky. They also contribute to colorful sunsets, similar to those that occur after volcanic eruptions. The red and yellow sky in The Scream by Edvard Munch was inspired by the brilliant sunsets he witnessed over Oslo in 1883, following the eruption of Krakatau in Indonesia. Both the disappearance of blue skies and the appearance of red sunsets could have strong psychological impacts on humanity...

Pidgeon, N., Corner, A., Parkhill, K., Spence, A., Butler, C., & Poortinga, W. (2012). Exploring early public responses to geoengineering. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 370(1974), 4176-4196.

Proposals for geoengineering the Earth's climate are prime examples of emerging or ‘upstream’ technologies, because many aspects of their effectiveness, cost and risks are yet to be researched, and in many cases are highly uncertain. This paper contributes to the emerging debate about the social acceptability of geoengineering technologies by presenting preliminary evidence on public responses to geoengineering from two of the very first UK studies of public perceptions and responses. The discussion draws upon two datasets: qualitative data (from an interview study conducted in 42 households in 2009), and quantitative data (from a subsequent nationwide survey (n=1822) of British public opinion). Unsurprisingly, baseline awareness of geoengineering was extremely low in both cases. The data from the survey indicate that, when briefly explained to people, carbon dioxide removal approaches were preferred to solar radiation management, while significant positive correlations were also found between concern about climate change and support for different geoengineering approaches. We discuss some of the wider considerations that are likely to shape public perceptions of geoengineering as it enters the media and public sphere, and conclude that, aside from technical considerations, public perceptions are likely to prove a key element influencing the debate over questions of the acceptability of geoengineering proposals.

Anshelm, J., & Hansson, A. (2014). Battling Promethean dreams and Trojan horses: Revealing the critical discourses of geoengineering. Energy Research & Social Science, 2, 135-144.

Macnaghten, P., & Szerszynski, B. (2013). Living the global social experiment: An analysis of public discourse on solar radiation management and its implications for governance. Global Environmental Change, 23(2), 465-474.

Carr, W. A., Preston, C. J., Yung, L., Szerszynski, B., Keith, D. W., & Mercer, A. M. (2013). Public engagement on solar radiation management and why it needs to happen now. Climatic change, 121(3), 567-577.

There have been a number of calls for public engagement in geoengineering in recent years. However, there has been limited discussion of why the public should have a say or what the public can be expected to contribute to geoengineering discussions. We explore how public engagement can contribute to the research, development, and governance of one branch of geoengineering, solar radiation management (SRM), in three key ways: 1. by fulfilling ethical requirements for the inclusion of affected parties in democratic decision making processes; 2. by contributing to improved dialogue and trust between scientists and the public; and 3. by ensuring that decisions about SRM research and possible deployment are informed by a broad set of societal interests, values, and framings. Finally, we argue that, despite the nascent state of many SRM technologies, the time is right for the public to participate in engagement processes.

Cairns, R. Climates of suspicion:‘chemtrail’conspiracy narratives and the international politics of geoengineering. Climate Geoengineering Governance Working Paper Series: 009.

Concurrent with growing academic and policy interest in ‘geoengineering’ the global climate in response to climate change, a more marginal discourse postulating the existence of a climate control conspiracy is also proliferating on the Internet. Here, the term ‘chemtrails’ is used interchangeably with the term geoengineering to describe the belief that the persistent contrails left by aeroplanes provide evidence that a secret programme of large scale weather and climate modification is on-going. Despite recent calls for greater appreciation of the diverse ways in which people conceive of and relate to ideas of climate control, and widespread acknowledgement of the importance of democratic public engagement in governance of geoengineering, the chemtrail conspiracy narrative has received very little attention in academic work to date. This paper builds on work highlighting the instability of the distinction between ‘conspiratorial’ versus ‘normal’ views, and examines conspiracy narratives as discourse rather than as pathologies (either psychological or sociological). A discourse analysis allows an exploration of parallel logics and concerns animating both the chemtrail narrative and wider discourses around climate and climate control. The analysis finds that while some elements of the chemtrail narrative do not lend themselves to democratic processes of deliberation, and potential for engagement with more mainstream discourse appears to be low, nevertheless, analysis of the chemtrail discourse offers some important insights for the politics of geoengineering....

However, conspiracy theory cannot be understood as false by definition, given the reoccurrence throughout history of plenty of examples of demonstrably real conspiracies. Given that conspiracies evidently can and do occur, the identification of persistent epistemological differences between conspiracy theories and other theories becomes in effect impossible, and distinguishing between a political analysis is neither ‘paranoid’ nor ‘naive’ is recognised as challenging. Awareness of the indeterminate epistemological characteristics of ‘conspiracy theory’, as well as the potential of the term to be used pejoratively as a means of ‘discrediting and stifling counter narratives’, has prompted various authors to problematize the term. According to Pelkmans and Machold, the term ‘conspiracy theory’ has more to do with the relationship of the claim in question to fields of power, than the content of the claim itself. As these authors point out, theories of conspiracy postulated by the powerful (such as the suggestion of the existence of a programme of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as justification for the U.S. led invasion of 2003) are never, even when demonstrably false, labelled as ‘conspiracy theories’. They stress that truth and untruth are produced in asymmetric fields of power and argue that ‘assessments of conspiracy theories should focus not on the epistemological qualities of these theories but on their interactions with the socio-political fields through which they travel...

Others have pointed to the ways in which even the conceptual rhetorics of social theory themselves have a ‘paranoid potential’. As Robinson argues, ‘the whole point of theory, of social science, is to uncover the forces and processes at work in the social universe which lie beneath -indeed epistemologically speaking, out of the range of- sensory perception’. Similarly conspiracy theorists are also ‘in the business of uncovering forces and processes lying just beyond sensory perception...The chemtrail belief hints at the probability that a program of solar geoengineering would have destabilising regional political effects, resonating with local political realities and suspicions of global economic powers. Likewise the moral outrage accompanying the chemtrail belief, based on the revulsion at the idea of powerful elites controlling the climate, is not something that can be dismissed as ‘irrational’. This is important to reflect upon, given the reality that powerful actors are currently discussing manipulating the global climate, and begs the question: is it necessarily more irrational to believe that the climate is being controlled, than to believe that one can control the climate?




 


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Currently Happening Presently Now: EUGENICS

7/25/14

Untitled 5550
Raz, A. E. (2009). Eugenic utopias/dystopias, reprogenetics, and community genetics. Sociology of health & illness, 31(4), 602-616.

The impetus for this review is the intriguing realisation that eugenics, viewed as dystopian and authoritarian in most of the 20th century, is in the process of being reinterpreted today – in the context of reproductive genetics – as utopian and liberal. This review offers an analytical framework for mapping the growing literature on this subject in order to provide a summary for both teaching and research in medical sociology. Recent works are subsumed and explored in three areas: historical criticism of the ‘old eugenics’; the continuation of this stream in the form of criticism of reprogenetics as a new, ‘backdoor’ eugenic regime of bio-governmentality – an area which also includes the application of Foucauldian and feminist perspectives; and the recent enthusiasm regarding ‘liberal eugenics,’ claiming that reprogenetic decisions should be left to individual consumers thus enhancing their options in the health market. The review concludes by discussing and illustrating potential research directions in this field, with a focus on the social and ethical aspects of ‘community genetics’ and its emerging networks of individuals genetically at risk.


 


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Currently Happening Presently Now: NEUROSCIENCE

7/22/14

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"The most alarming aspect of ESB (Electrical Stimulation of the Brain) is that psychological reactivity can be influenced by applying a few volts to a determined area of the brain. This fact has been interpreted by many people as a disturbing threat to human integrity. In the past, the individual could face risks and pressures with preservation of his own identity. His body could be tortured, his thoughts and desires could be challenged by bribes, by emotions, and by public opinion, and his behavior could be influenced by environmental circumstances, but he always had the privilege of deciding his own fate, of dying for an ideal without changing his mind...New neurological technology, however, has a refined efficiency. The individual is defenseless against direct manipulation of the brain because he is deprived of his most intimate mechanisms of biological reactivity. In experiments, electrical stimulation of appropriate intensity always prevailed over free will; and, for example, flexion of the hand evoked by stimulation of the motor cortex cannot be voluntarily avoided."
-Jose M. R. Delgado, Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized  Society, 1969, page 213-214.

Wolpe, P. R. (2002). The neuroscience revolution. Center for Bioethics Papers, 17.

Neuroimaging advances, psychopharmaceuticals with enormous potential for clinical use, neural-technological interfaces, brain stimulation technologies, and organic implants such as fetal cell therapy are transforming our ability to understand and intervene in the brain. Along the way, they are also challenging accepted standards for the proper limits of technology, possibly giving criminal justice some revolutionary and troubling new tools, redefining our sense of selfhood and brain-body relations, and raising a host of other ethical and social questions...

Neuroimaging studies are beginning to demonstrate an ability to correlate mental states and traits to detectable brain patterns or structures. Research has shown, for example, that a history of depression, or addiction, leaves identifiable brain sequelae even if the disease is in remission. In some cases, neuroimaging may be able to detect racist ideation, to differentiate false and true memories, and to discover mood states (even when they are preconscious in the subject), intentional prevarication, and even the content of thought (to discover whether someone is thinking of a face or a chair, for example). While these studies are preliminary and their powers of prediction so far modest, they portend a time when the criminal justice system, employers, schools, and other institutions may want to use imaging to detect or refute other kinds of evidence about people's aptitudes, honesty, or history.


Butler, D. (1998). Advances in neuroscience ‘may threaten human rights’. Nature, 391(6665), 316-316.

Although the equipment needed is still highly specialized, it will become commonplace and capable of being used at a distance, he predicted...

Sample, I., & Adam, D. (2003). The brain can’t lie: brain scans reveal how you think and feel and even how you might behave. The Guardian, 4.

Brain scans can reveal how you think and feel, and even how you might behave. No wonder the CIA and big business are interested...

As scientists unravel the links between how the brain looks and how it functions, some believe we will also be able to use images of the brain to see how people will behave. "There's no scientific distinction between prediction and understanding how the brain works," says Stephen Smith, associate director of the Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain at Oxford University.

The suggestion that brain scans could reveal not just our future health, but the intricacies of our personalities and how we might behave in a given situation, is unsettling enough to some scientists that they want legislation to stop brain-scan records falling into the wrong hands. "We're starting to get detailed information from these brain-scan experiments and soon people are going to be able to use it to predict an individual's behaviour," says Paul Glimcher at the Centre for Neuroscience at New York University. "That information has got to be proprietary to the individual."

Spinney, L. (2002). The mind readers. New scientist, (2361), 38-41.

Images from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) pinpoint one's most intimate thoughts and emotions, reveal the basis of brain diseases and personality, and identify the neural pathways that allow people to move, see, hear and learn. However, researchers have found that the fMRI signal is a less reliable representation of neuron activity than was assumed.

Farah, M. J., & Wolpe, P. R. (2004). Monitoring and manipulating brain function: New neuroscience technologies and their ethical implications. Hastings Center Report, 34(3), 35-45.

Many of the new social and ethical issues in neuroscience result from one of two developments. The first is the ability to monitor brain function in living humans with a spatial and temporal resolution sufficient to capture psychologically meaningful fluctuations of activity. The second is the ability to alter the brain with chemical or anatomical selectivity that is sufficient to induce specific functional changes....Optical methods, such as near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), provide another noninvasive measure of regional brain activity based on the absorption of different wavelengths of light as it passes through the head...In principle, and increasingly in practice, imaging can be used to infer people’s psychological traits and states, in many cases without the person’s co-operation or consent. It can be used, in effect, as a crude form of mind reading...

In addition to privacy concerns, neuroimaging is liable to over-reliance on, or misapplication of, information from brain scans. The ability to assess personality, attitudes, and desires would be of interest in screening for employment, school tracking, or military service. The ability to distinguish between truth and false-hood, or veridical and false memory, would find wide use in the legal system. The demand for these abilities, coupled with the inevitable misunderstandings of brain imaging among the lay public, sets the stage for misuse. Physiological measures, especially brain-based measures, possess an illusory accuracy and objectivity as perceived by the general public...

Although brainwaves do not lie, neither do they tell the truth; they are simply measures of brain activity. Whether based on regional cerebral bloodflow or electrical activity, brain images must be interpreted like any other correlate of mental activity, behavioral or physiological. Brain images and waveforms give an impression of concreteness and directness compared to behavioral measures of psychological traits and states, and high-tech instrumentation lends an aura of accuracy and objectivity. Nevertheless, the psychological interpretations of these measures are far from direct or intrinsically objective. As the foregoing review suggests, progress has been made in the use of such measures, and some inferences to socially relevant traits and states can now be made with a degree of certainty under specific and highly controlled conditions. However, the current state of the art does not allow reliable screening, profiling, or lie detection.


Illes, J., & Bird, S. J. (2006). Neuroethics: a modern context for ethics in neuroscience. Trends in neurosciences, 29(9), 511-517.

Neuroethics, a recently modernized field at the intersection of bioethics and neuroscience, is founded on centuries of discussion of the ethical issues associated with mind and behavior. Broadly defined, neuroethics is concerned with ethical, legal and social policy implications of neuroscience, and with aspects of neuroscience research itself. Advances in neuroscience increasingly challenge long-held views of the self and the individual's relationship to society. Neuroscience also has led to innovations in clinical medicine that have not only therapeutic but also non-therapeutic dimensions that extend well beyond previously charted boundaries. The exponential increase in cross-disciplinary research, the commercialization of cognitive neuroscience, the impetus for training in ethics, and the increased attention being paid to public understanding of science all illuminate the important role of neuroethics in neuroscience.

Kennedy, D. (2003, November). Neuroethics: An uncertain future. In Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (New Orleans, LO, USA) (Vol. 10).

Estep, P., (2009). The Expanding Mind. SeedMagazine, February, 121-122.

This diversity of highly experimental research contributes to the overall advance toward cognitive BCI, but at least one better established area of biomedicine, functional brain imaging, has also begun to make important contributions. Functional brain imaging is a collection of technologies used to visualize changes in the behaving brain; it expands the repertoire of approaches for using machines to move information into and out of our heads. One very important approach in recent years has been functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), which was used in several landmark studies last year to “read minds.” These studies demonstrate a growing ability to infer or predict what is in a person’s mind and strongly suggest that reconstructions of sensory experiences, memories, mental imageries, and dreams are within reach.

Rose, N. (2014). The Human Brain Project: Social and Ethical Challenges. Neuron, 82(6), 1212-1215.

DARPA is a major funder of the U.S. brain initiative...
What if we move from "reading" the brain to manipulating the brain? Some readers—especially those who roam the internet—may be familiar with the name of Jose Delgado, whose research began when he was so appalled by witnessing crude interventions into the brain with lobotomies that he started to explore the possibility of treating mental illness with electrical stimulation. Delgado implanted electrodes in the skulls of over 20 human subjects in a psychiatric hospital and showed that electrical stimulation of their brains could elicit both motor actions and emotional experiences—fear, rage, lust, and more—depending on the area stimulated (Delgado, 1970). He also carried out extensive research with implanted electrodes in animals, showing, for example, that aggressive animals could be calmed by stimulation to certain areas of the brain (Delgado et al., 1968). His "stimoceivers" could both remotely monitor the electrical activity of the brain and be remotely adjusted to stimulate specific areas of the brain, opening the possibility of linking information on patterns of neural activity to calculated interventions to modulate that activity. While this work became mired in controversy, and involved invasive implants, new developments—DBT, TMS, tCDS—are once more showing that brain activity can be modulated by noninvasive electrical and magnetic stimulation. No doubt we are a long way from the "psychocivilized society" envisaged in Delgado’s controversial book of 1969 (Delgado,1969), but we should not be surprised in these emerging technologies for what he termed "physical control of the mind,"...

Nahmias, E. (2014). Is free will an illusion? Confronting challenges from the modern mind sciences.

Horgan, J. (2005). The forgotten era of brain chips. Scientific American, 293(4), 66-73.

Sarewitz, D., & Karas, T. H. (2012). 17 Policy Implications of Technologies for Cognitive Enhancement. Neurotechnology: Premises, Potential, and Problems, 267.

Hapgood, F. (2008). SCIENCE ON THE EDGE-Deus ex Machina-The next generation of robots will look and act like us. Get ready for Robo sapiens with soft skin, opposable thumbs, and the ability to express emotions. Discover, 30.

Until recently the concensus across many fields, from psychology to artifical intelligence, was that control of the body was centralized in the brain...This model, first defined decades ago when the very first computers were being built, got its authority from our concept of the brain as the center of thought. As time went on, however, it became apparent that central control required an almost endless amount of programming, essentially limiting what robots could do. The limits became clearer with deeper understanding of how living organisms work: not through commands from some kind of centralized mission control, but via a distributed interaction with their environment. "The traditional robotics model has the body following the brain, but in nature the brain follows the body," Fumiya Lida, of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, explains. Decisions flow from the properties of the materials our bodies are made of and their interactions with the environment...The theory that much of what we call intelligence is generated from the bottom up - that is, by the body - is now winning converts everywhere. (The unofficial motto of Lida's group is "From Locomotion to Cognition.")

Fox, D. (2007). Remote control brains: a neuroscience revolution. New Scientist, 195(2613), 30-34.

These new possibilities materialised when neuroscientists finally cracked a long-standing problem in their field: how to take control of individual neurons...A nerve cell is an electrical entity. Its membrane is normally charged like a battery, to about a tenth of a volt. Nerve cells communicate using electric pulses, which arise when the voltage across the membrane briefly leaps from -0.07 volts to around +0.04 volts. That spike of excitation races down the tendrils of the neuron until it reaches the ends, where it jumps across synapses to set up new waves of excitement in neighbouring cells...For years, neuroscientists and neurologists have wanted something better. If they could turn on nerve cells one at a time, leaving everything else alone, they'd be well on their way to targeted therapies, as well as decoding the function of the neural circuits that control complex behaviours. "The goal was to modify a subset of neurons and make them sensitive to light," says Gero Miesenböck, a neurobiologist at Yale University. "By shining light, you can then activate only one type of neuron at a time, while leaving the others alone....When Miesenböck's results appeared in April 2005 they caused an instant sensation (Cell, vol 121, p 141). Within an hour of the paper appearing online, Miesenböck's phone rang: it was the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wanting to know if his work had possible military applications (he now works with them).

Gilbert, F., Harris, A. R., & Kapsa, R. M. (2014). Controlling brain cells with light: Ethical considerations for optogenetic clinical trials. AJOB Neuroscience, 5(3), 3-11.

Optogenetics is being optimistically presented in contemporary media for its unprecedented capacity to control cell behaviour through the application of light to genetically modified target cells. As such, optogenetics holds obvious potential for application in a new generation of invasive medical devices by which to potentially provide treatment for neurological and psychiatric conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, addiction, schizophrenia, autism and depression. Design of a first-in-human optogenetics experimental trial has already begun for the treatment of blindness. Optogenetics trials involve a combination of highly invasive genetic and electronic interventions that results in irreversible and permanent modifications of an individual’s nervous system. Given its novelty, its uncertain benefit to patients, and its unique risk profile of irreversible physiological alteration, optogenetics requires a reassessment of the ethical challenges for protecting human participants in clinical trials, particularly at formative stages of clinical evaluation. This study explores the evolving ethical issues surrounding optogenetics’ potential harm to participants within trial design, especially focusing on whether Phase 1 trials should incorporate efficacy as well as safety endpoints in ways that are fair and respectful to research trial participants.




 


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Currently Happening Presently Now

7/16/14

Untitled 5416

 


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Currently Happening Presently Now: GEOSLAVERY

7/13/14

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Goss, J. (1995). "We Know Who You Are and We Know Where You Live": The Instrumental Rationality of Geodemographic Systems. Economic Geography, 171-198.

This paper provides a critique of geodemographic systems, sophisticated marketing tools that combine massive electronic data bases on consumer characteristics and behavior, segmentation schemes, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Responsible for a "revolution" in marketing research, geodemographics represents a strategy to exercise rational knowledge-power over everyday life. This critique examines the strategic implications of each component of geodemographics, including electronic surviellance and the erosion of privacy; GIS, spatial inference, and the representation of social space; and segmentation and construction of consumer identity. The paper concludes with remarks about the role of the consumer in geodemographics and the potential for tactical resistances to its strategy.

Curry, M. R. (1997). The digital individual and the private realm. Annals of the Association of American geographers, 87(4), 681-699.

Geographic information systems and the technological family associated with them—global positioning systems, geodemographics, and remote surveillance systems—raise important questions with respect to the issue of privacy. Of most immediate import, the systems store and represent data in ways that render ineffective the most popular safeguards against privacy abuse. But the systems are associated with more fundamental changes in the right to privacy and even, some would say, with challenges to the possibility of privacy itself. They make reasonable and acceptable the view that technological change is inevitable and autonomous, and therefore, too, are the development of increasingly comprehensive dossiers on individuals and households and the use of increasingly powerful means for the technological enhancements of vision. And their use in the creation of data profiles supports a wide ranging reconceptualization of community, place, and individual. Nonetheless, in the ways they create and use digital profiles, the systems do offer suggestions for a partial remedy to the problems that they have created.

Crampton, J. W. (2003). Cartographic rationality and the politics of geosurveillance and security. Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 30(2), 135-148.

This paper examines the prevalence of geosurveillance and cartographic rationality today by situating it in the age-old practice of governmental surveillance. I approach this question in a broadly Foucauldian historical framework. Foucault outlined a historical transition between a strictly disciplinary society that surveys and disciplines individuals and a "governmental" or biopolitical society that works at the level of a population and its distribution across territory. I argue that this governmental surveillance includes mapping and GIS, which, although they have taken different forms over time, have long been governmental technologies of control. I further argue that surveillance and security operate by establishing norms and statistical averages that allow assessments to be made about risk and threat. In order to illustrate the deployment of these cartographies of surveillance, and to examine their particular effects, I use a case study of crime mapping. I conclude that any assessment of mapping and GIS for surveillance and security uses must consider the genesis of cartographic rationality.

Dobson, J. E., & Fisher, P. F. (2003). Geoslavery. Technology and Society Magazine, IEEE, 22(1), 47-52.

Human tracking devices, however, introduce a new potential for real-time control that extends far beyond privacy and surveillance, per se. As a result, society must contemplate a new form of slavery characterized by location control...Geoslavery is defined here as a practice in which one entity, the master, coercively or surreptitiously monitors and exerts control over the physical location of another individual, the slave. Inherent in this concept is the potential for a master to routinely control time, location, speed, and direction for each and every movement of the slave or, indeed, of many slaves simultaneously. Enhanced surveillance and control may be attained through complementary monitoring of functional indicators such as body temperature, heart rate, and perspiration...Three current technologies can be combined to enable one person to monitor and control the actions of one or many other individuals. A miniature GPS receiver implantedin or attached to a person can continuously record that person’s location. A miniature radio transmitter can report that person’s location to anyone else with a radio receiver tuned to the proper frequency. A GIS can accept the continuous stream of incoming geo-coordinates and plot the person’s every movement in real time. The GIS can readily relate these individual movements to streets, roads, and buildings and to the movements of other individuals. Anyone operating the GIS can follow these movements in real time or retrospectively for as long as data are retained.

Monmonier, M. (2004). Spying with maps: Surveillance technologies and the future of privacy. University of Chicago Press.

Herbert, W. A. (2005). No direction home: Will the law keep pace with human tracking technology to protect individual privacy and stop geoslavery. ISJLP, 2, 409.

Increasingly, public and private employers are utilizing human tracking devices to monitor employee movement and conduct. Due to the propensity of American labor law to give greater weight to employer property interests over most employee privacy expectations, there are currently few limitations on the use of human tracking in employment. The scope and nature of current legal principles regarding individual privacy are not sufficient to respond to the rapid development and use of human tracking technology. The academic use of the phrase “geoslavery” to describe the abusive use of such technology underscores its power. This article examines the use of such technology under current federal and state law and suggests potential means for developing greater legal protections against the abusive use of the technology and the intrusion into personal privacy.




 


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Currently Happening Presently Now: POWER

7/12/14

Untitled 5533
"I should like merely to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him."
-Ettiene de La Boetie, 1564.

Lukes, S. (1974). Power: A radical view (Vol. 1). Macmillan: London.

"What has to be explained is not the fact that the man who is hungry steals or the fact that the man who is exploited strikes, but why the majority of those who are hungry don’t steal and why the majority of those who are exploited don’t strike.”
-Wilhelm Reich

Boétie, E. D. L. (1975). Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, The Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Gunn, S. (2006). From hegemony to governmentality: changing conceptions of power in social history. Journal of Social History, 39(3), 705-720.

In the 1960s and 1970s the emergent domain of social history was marked by a reconceptualisation of the concept of power. The dimensions of power and its operations were no longer understood to be confined to elite institutions such as parliament, but extended to the relations and institutions of everyday life. In the process, social historical writing helped to redefine the notion of the political itself. Since this early phase a number of different conceptions of power have been utilised by social historians, including the Gramscian notion of hegemony and, more recently, the Foucauldian idea of governmentality. This article explores the theoretical implications of these concepts and looks at how ideas associated with governmentality in particular have been operationalised in recent historical writing, including the work of Mary Poovey and Patrick Joyce. In conclusion, the article identifies some of the problems arising from governmentality approaches and sketches briefly an alternative way of thinking about power centred on analysis of the body.

Barbalet, J. M. (1985). Power and resistance. British Journal of Sociology, 531-548.

Treatments of Weber's discussion of power have not adequately appreciated that in his analysis power and resistance are distinct but interdependent aspects of power relations. The concept 'resistance' is necessary for an understanding of power relations and irreducible to the concept of 'power'. However this insight cannot be developed from Weberian premises. Through a discussion of accounts of power in Lukes, Giddens, and others, it is shown that the distinction between power and resistance remains obscure for theories which emphasize the formal properties of power and ignore its social context. The exercise of power over others draws upon social resources not available to subordinate agents. Nevertheless, those subject to power can mobilize other social resources in a contribution to power relations through resistance. In limiting power, resistance influences the outcome of power relations.

"A classic device of power - and this is true whether we're talking about emperors or perpetrators of domestic violence - is to present their victims with a series of false choices whereby no matter which the victims choose, the perpetrators win and the victims are further victimized. Nazis, for example, sometimes gave the Jews the choice of different colored identity papers. Many Jews then focused, reasonably enough, on trying to figure out which of these colors would more likely save their lives. Of course the color of the identity papers made no material difference: the primary purpose of the choice was to divert victims' attention from the task of unmasking the whole system that was killing them. In addition, this false choice co-opted victims into believing they were making meaningful choices. In other words, it got them on some level to take responsibility for what was being done with them: If I am killed it is my own fault because I chose the wrong color."
-Derrick Jensen and George Draffan, Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control, 2004, page 29.

"We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be."
-George Orwell, 1984.

"Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless, and contented. Of these qualities probably contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researches of psycho-analysis, behaviourism, and biochemistry will be brought into play.... All the boys and girls will learn from an early age to be what is called `co-operative,' i.e., to do exactly what everybody is doing. Initiative will be discouraged in these children, and insubordination, without being punished, will be scientifically trained out of them."
-Bertrand Russell, The Scientific Outlook, 1931, page 251.




 


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Currently Happening Presently Now: WEAPONIZED CULTURE

7/10/14

Untitled 5549
Baard, M. (2007). Sentient world: war games on the grandest scale. The Register.

Perhaps your real life is so rich you don't have time for another.

Even so, the US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you in an alternate reality to see how long you can go without food or water, or how you will respond to televised propaganda.

The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual "nodes" to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR.

Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a "synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information", according to a concept paper for the project.

"SWS provides an environment for testing Psychological Operations (PSYOP)," the paper reads, so that military leaders can "develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners".

SWS also replicates financial institutions, utilities, media outlets, and street corner shops. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors...

In fact, Homeland Security and the Defense Department are already using SEAS to simulate crises on the US mainland...

"(SWS) is a hungry beast," Blank said. "A lot of data will be required to make this thing even credible."

Alok Chaturvedi wants SWS to match every person on the planet, one-to-one.

Right now, the 62 simulated nations in SEAS depict humans as composites, at a 100-to-1 ratio.

One organisation has achieved a one-to-one level of granularity for its simulations, according to Chaturvedi: the US Army, which is using SEAS to identify potential recruits.

Chaturvedi insists his goal for SWS is to have a depersonalised likeness for each individual, rather than an immediately identifiable duplicate. If your town census records your birthdate, job title, and whether you own a dog, SWS will generate what Chaturvedi calls a "like someone" with the same stats, but not the same name.

Of course, government agencies and corporations can add to SWS whatever personally-identifiable information they choose from their own databases, and for their own purposes.

And with consumers already giving up their personal information regularly to websites such as MySpace and Twitter, it is not a stretch to imagine SWS doing the same thing.

"There may be hooks through which individuals may voluntarily contribute information to SWS," Chaturvedi said.


Cerri, T., & Chaturvedi, A. (2007). Sentient World Simulation (SWS): A Continuously Running Model of the Real World [DB].

SWS consists of components capable of capturing new events as they occur anywhere in the world, focus on any local area of the synthetic world offers sufficient detail. In other words, the set of models that make up the synthetic environment encompass the behavior of individuals, organizations, institutions, infrastructures and geographies while simultaneously capturing the trends emerging from the interaction among entities as well as between entities and the environment. The multi-granularity detail provides a means for inserting new models of any temporal and spatial scales, or for incorporating user-supplied data at any level of granularity. Therefore, SWS can be continuously enriched and refined as new information becomes available.

Strader, O. K. (2006). Culture: The new key terrain integrating cultural competence into JIPB. ARMY COMMAND AND GENERAL STAFF COLL FORT LEAVENWORTH KS SCHOOL OF ADVANCED MILITARY STUDIES.

This monograph suggests that it maybe possible to weaponize culture, specifically through the use of cultural intelligence. In order to weaponize culture, commanders and staffs must develop competence culturally to leverage the key relationships, dependencies and vulnerabilities. Competence is “the fusion of cultural understanding with cultural intelligence that allows focused insight into current operations.” Finally, the purpose of this monograph is to convince operational leaders that a systems approach to culture is the best method of deduction to achieve cultural competence. The framework this monograph employees includes international relations, history, theory and an analysis of current doctrine. After establishing why culture has become they new key terrain this monograph suggests modification to the Joint Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield process and ways to incorporate cultural competence into campaign design using a systems approach to culture.

USJFCOM teams with Purdue University to add the human factor to war game
simulations
, By Army Sgt. Jon Cupp, USJFCOM Public Affairs, Feb. 6, 2004.

A newly developed modeling software prototype may allow joint warfighters to add realism to real world scenarios by accurately replicating a population's reactions to the various non-combat aspects of global combat operations...

Throughout the game, output devices allowed role players to see how well they are doing in influencing the population. “They show the measures of output like little thermometers,” said Dehncke.
“For instance, you will be able to see if the public mood is good or bad, and if the people's satisfaction with the government is high or low. You can tell how the people are reacting, whether they're ready for a revolution or if they're going to vote for the government again.”


Weinberger, Sharon, "Pentagon’s Project Minerva Sparks New Anthro Concerns", 1 May 2008.

Facebook's Psychological Experiments Connected to Department of Defense Research on Civil Unrest, SCGNews, July 1, 2014.

It turns out that one of the researchers who ran Facebook's recent psychological experiments received funding from the U.S. Department of Defense to study the contagion of ideas...Over 600,000 users were used as guinea pigs without their consent, which raises a number of serious ethical and legal questions (particularly due to the fact that this study received federal funding), however there is an even more disturbing angle to this story. It turns out that this research was connected to a Department of Defense project called the Minerva Initiative, which funds universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world.

In the official credits for the study conducted by Facebook you'll find Jeffrey T. Hancock from Cornell University. If you go to the Minerva initiative website you'll find that Jeffery Hancock received funding from the Department of Defense for a study called "Cornell: Modeling Discourse and Social Dynamics in Authoritarian Regimes". If you go to the project site for that study you'll find a visualization program that models the spread of beliefs and disease.

The Department of Defense's investment in the mechanics of psychological contagion and Facebook's assistance, have some very serious implications, particularly when placed in context with other scandals which have broken in the past two years. First of all we know that Facebook willingly participated (and presumably is still participating) in the NSA's PRISM program by giving the agency unfettered access to user communications. We also know that the U.S. government has invested heavily in technology used to track and model the spread of opinions on social media..


The Military Is Already Using Facebook to Track Your Mood, By Patrick Tucker, Defense One, July 2, 2014.

Though Cornell University, home to at least one of the researchers, said the study received no external funding, but it turns out that the university is currently receiving Defense Department money for some extremely similar-sounding research — the analysis of social network posts for “sentiment,” i.e. how people are feeling, in the hopes of identifying social “tipping points.”

The tipping points in question include “the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011 Russian Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi park protests in Turkey,” according to the website of the Minerva Initiative, a Defense Department social science project.




 


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Currently Happening Presently Now: EDUCATION

7/7/14

Untitled 5532
"The final difficulty that...must be faced in the attempt to integrate the science of learning and the technology of education is that of gaining access to children of school age for...experimental investigations."
-Arthur W. Melton, The science of learning and the technology of educational methods, Harvard Education Review, 29:97, 1959, page 103.

Paul, R. (1993). Pseudo critical thinking in the educational establishment: A case study in educational malpractice. Foundation for Critical Thinking.

"To the extent that the DOD promotes innovation in education and training, it offers itself as a huge laboratory to facilitate translation of educational research into educational technology. This underlies our desire to work closely with research and demonstration centers in universities and the emerging educational industry."
-Thomas D. Morris, Engineering Systems for Education and Training: Through DOD Industry Collaboration, in Proceedings of Conference on Engineering Systems for Education and Training. Washington, D.C, National Security Industrial Association, June, 1966, page 11.

Simon, H.A. (1980). Cognitive science: The newest science of the artificial. Cognitive Science, 4, 33-46.

Noble, D. (1989). Mental Materiel: The Militarization of Learning and Intelligence in US Education. Les Levidow and Kevin Robins. London: Free Association.

The new research on learning and intelligence underlying educator's elevated expectations has been sponsored not by the Department of Education, as one might expect, but rather by the Department of Defense, curiously enough, which leads one to wonder what is really going on.

Clearly, the sudden celebration of intellect and learning within an educational and intellectual wasteland, a celebration largely underwritten by the military, requires a deeper explanation. Could it be that educators have unwittingly adopted the framework of a larger military/scientific enterprise that only appears to be an agenda for public education because the language - intelligence, learning, thinking, and problem-solving - is the same?...

This new educational impulse is in fact a derivative venture. It is both a 'spin-off' from and a corollary of a much deeper and more pervasive enterprise, fuelled by military research and mirrored in corporate practice.This is the entrerprise to harness intelligence, both human and machine, for use within complex military and corporate technological systems...The new goal for education unwittingly reflects the need to fulfill this technological promise...The new appreciation of intellect represents the desiccation of human intellectual potential at the very moment it appears to be celebrating it. This is because cognitive processes of learning and thinking, needed as components in the complex information systems of the military and industry, are cultivated only with such needs in mind...

Successful utilization of intelligent systems requires maximizing the cognitive capacity and learning ability of the work force. This in turn requires the schools to serve both as laboratory and production site, bending human minds into technologies themselves...

Blaschke, C. L. (1967). The DOD: catalyst in educational technology. Phi Delta Kappan, 208-214.

Streibel, M. J. (1986). A critical analysis of the use of computers in education. ECTJ, 34(3), 137-161.

The drill-and-practice approach was shown to embody a deterministic, behavioral technology that turned learning into a systematically designed and quality-controlled form of work. Although drill-and-practice courseware programs were only intended to supplement instruction, they in fact introduced a technological framework into the classroom culture that mitigated against non-behavioral educational goals. Computerized tutorial programs were shown to extend the behavioral and technological approach to learning even further. That is, in tutorial courseware programs, interactions were still shaped by an external agent's intentions in order to maximize the learner's performance gains and still constrained by computable algorithms. Furthermore, the human learner was still treated as a means toward someone else's ends and only given a form of pseudo-control in the interaction. Most seriously, computerized tutorial interactions pre-empted personal intellectual agency and ultimately inner-directed learning. Finally, the use of computer programming and simulations in education was shown to limit the learner's mental landscape to objective, quantitive, and procedural "intellectual tools." This left the learner with an under-developed intellectual agency within the qualitive, dialectical, and experiential domains of natural and social events.

Neill, M. (1995). Computers, Thinking, and Schools in the "New World Economic Order." Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information. Ed. James Brook and Iain Boal. San Francisco: City Lights, 181-195.

So what's new? Surely not the drive for control or the use of behaviorism. What is potentially new are the means of control, the computer itself, and the target of control: thinking....While assessment is a necessary part of learning, it is all too likely that emerging cognitive techniques will simply become a more sophisticated method for sorting students...Moreover, the computer itself will be used to shape the personality. The model is the computer- the malleable, controllable, programmable "smart machine." Part of the information-technology agenda is to learn how better to control the thinking of humans. At the crudest level, schools will try to do what they have always tried to do, shape students into workers, but the more subtle strategy is to make the mind want to be computerized. Perhaps the child must be caught at a young enough age so that she is less able to resist effectively...The computer thus will be used to control how one learns to think in order to subsequently control how one thinks.




 


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Currently Happening Presently Now: TECHNOLOGY

7/6/14

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Balabanian, N. (2006). On the presumed neutrality of technology. Technology and Society Magazine, IEEE, 25(4), 15-25.

After the industrial revolution in England, a general feeling of optimism pervaded Western society. A common belief was that scientific knowledge, whose growth knew no limits, could always be applied to the problems of society. Since science and technology were so successful in producing marvelous inventions, it was felt that they could eventually solve any human problem.

Robins, K., & Webster, F. (1988). Cybernetic capitalism: Information, technology, everyday life. The political economy of information, 44-75.

Pfohl, S. (2005). New global technologies of power: Cybernetic capitalism and social inequality. The Blackwell Companion to social inequalities, 546-592.




 


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Currently Happening Presently Now: AUTISM

7/5/14

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Silverman, C. (2008). Fieldwork on another planet: Social science perspectives on the autism spectrum. BioSocieties, 3(3), 325-341.

The autism spectrum disorders are a group of neurodevelopmental syndromes of communication, behavior and social cognition. Over the past decade, they have received increasing attention from scholars in the social sciences. This research has been motivated by the prospect of critiquing and improving support services and therapies, by self-advocates who have argued that autism should be tolerated as a form of difference rather than treated as a disorder, and by the interest inherent in syndromes that seem to affect many of the attributes that we use to define personhood. In this commentary, I review social science research on the autism spectrum. I identify some key approaches in the work, including the idea of autism as a culture, transcultural comparisons, studies based on treatment strategies, investigations of subjectivity and interpersonal relations, and research on social movements. In the process, I suggest some further directions for this area of research. I also consider some reasons why the autism spectrum disorders are a particularly interesting site for studies of the ways that biomedical information is used to craft individual and group identities.



 


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