The closed world: Systems discourse, military strategy and post WWII American historical consciousness

This essay proposes a cultural and historical explanation for the American Military's fascination with computing. Three key elements of post-WWII US political culture — apocalyptic struggle with the USSR, subsuming all other conflicts: a long history of antimilitarist sentiment in American politics; and the rise of science-based military power — contributed to a sense of the world as a closed system accessible to American technological control. A developing scientific systems discourse, centrally including computer science and AI, was adopted for strategic thinking and military technology. The Strategic Computing and Strategic Defense Initiatives are discussed as contemporary examples of this conjunction.

Don't Get Distracted

I’m going to tell you about how I took a job building software to kill people. But don’t get distracted by that; I didn’t know at the time.

Computer Says Kill: The Toxic Love Triangle of Big Tech, Big War & Big Science w/ David Gray Widder

Academia, Big Tech, and the military are caught in a sordid love triangle — and their love language is money.

War in the age of intelligent machines

271 pages : 24 cm; In the aftermath of the methodical destruction of Iraq during the Persian Gulf War, the power and efficiency of new computerized weapons and suveillance technology has become chillingly apparent. This new weaponry has a significance that goes far beyond military applications; it represents a profound historical shift in the relation of human beings both to machines and to information. Details the mutating history of information analysis and machinic organization from the mobile siege artillery of the Renaissance, the clockwork armies of the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic campaigns, and the Nazi blitzkrieg up to present-day cybernetic battle-management systems and satellite reconnaissance network, and provides a philosophical and historical reflection on the changing forms through which human bodies and materials are combined, organized, deployed and made effective. [back cover]; Includes bibliographical references (pages 233-266) and index; Introduction -- Collision course -- Bloodless transfusion -- Policing the spectrum

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Chaos, Utopia, and Apocalypse: ideological readings of the nonlinear sciences

The secret story of the vocoder, the military tech that changed music forever

On Version History: how to play your voice like an instrument, with a little help from Chromeo.