World In Bits
Organizational dark matter
A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable. - Leslie Lamport
You will find no measure or number or balance by referring to which you will know with certainty—except perception. - Xenophanes
Planetary-scale computation is a foundational megastructure of society, yet it has fragmented into confined domains. Grasping the boundaries of these domains and our encounters with them will become increasingly complicated, as their ordering and nonhuman sensing processes do not necessarily correspond to human awareness or expectations. Technology, such as satellite imaging or simulation, extends human sensing, while glitches, in the form of violence or interrupted movement, give us another kind of clue.
The significance of overlapping system boundaries is evident in geopolitics, though disparate border genealogies may not be. When the language of analysis is used to describe trajectories of explicit and enigmatic territorial boundaries, there exists an assumption that defensible boundaries can provide a logical sorting function. Analytical statements about infrastructure are correspondingly statements about perception. On reflection, our inability to perceive or conceive the shape of a confined domain does not mean the impossibility of that domain.
In its current state, our planet is the result of movement. No wonder logistics, supply chains, and transportation translate to political power. But the limits of material reality bind these arrangements. The logics and futures of global flows —the movement of objects, money, people, data, and machines— are contingent on defining and passing through polysemic borders.
Caricaturing digital and physical boundaries, therefore, as "what is yours" and "what is ours" omits dynamics of shared risk, malleable frontiers, and the aspirations and capabilities of bad actors.
Mobility and bordering bear upon one another yet are often treated separately. At the same time, our present-day distributed network of movable machines tethered to extensive databases and satellite-based positioning systems might be drawn as a massive turbulent shipyard (agile, mobile) where limits of perception lay beyond the horizon.
If, in the recent past, there has been a focus on humanity's concerns stemming from calculable "outer limits" (stressing physicality and finite resources considered by the Club of Rome, for example), the future of geopolitical arrangements might prompt our engagement with decisive "inner limits": a variety of unseen psychological, algorithmic, autonomous, cultural, and criminal modes. I'm interested in what might be called intellectual and organizational dark matter.
Examples of phenomena explaining these tensions include artifical intelligence in conflict, makeshift internet in cartel-controlled areas, mobile e-citizenships, gated futuristic New Cities in democratic and authoritarian states, freight delivery appointment apps deciding migrants' citizenship, cloud states, rescue beacons or "panic poles," Smart Border server/data localization, earth-imaging satellites, robotic sensors, planetary migration, digital exclusion, border externalization, and surveillance information shared between states in the name of state security effectively recognizing no state or border at all.
My research motivation is to develop comprehensive conceptual scenarios that contend with relationships between the stated phenomena. Means of scale, cultural interpretations of cyberspace, and glitches or violent political intrusions may help describe these relationships.
Sources and Characteristics
Politics
Sousveillance, surveillance, panopticon, cartel and transnational criminal organizations, dark sky ecological reserves, sacrifice zones, complex information systems spanning continents through satellites, astrobiology, cifra negra, or blind peace, first instances of satellites imaging (looking down upon) other satellites, future planetary migration.
Data
Russian and Iranian freight ships going dark or switching flags ("ghost ships"), AI and logistics, corporations marketing their product as the single source of truth on the global supply chain, the new lords of creation, the invisible hand, transnational data flow, data regulation, modeling and simulation advantages.
Cloud States
Novel forms of borders and passage, geopolitical gains from territorial and digital border policy, citizenship, phantom borders that remain in social memory after loss or reorganization, conflict, and technical glitches.
Institutional Foresight
Inner limits, outer limits, the future as a psychological landscape, projections of the future, conceptual failures, favored timescales by industry or location, deficits of perception and awareness, flattening of historical and media literacy, possible worlds, logic, choice and chance, foresight versus forecasting, and the institution as a criminal enterprise.
