Robin D. Laws
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Below are the 2 most recent journal entries recorded in the "robin_d_laws" journal:
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09:20 am
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Iran, Information Speed, and Futuristic Weaponry
As sources of communication are cut off and the regime crackdown murderously escalates, developments in the Iran uprising appears to be shifting from Internet speed to a more traditional pace. If you’ve been following the story you’ve probably read many reminders that the ‘79 revolution against the Shah took nearly a year to resolve itself. I wonder how many of the folks who greened their icons as a gesture of solidarity with the marchers will still be paying close attention six months from now, or nine. We burn out on news stories faster when doled out in tiny pellets of information than we would on in the old media landscape, with its daily papers and six o’clock newscasts.
The story would already be over, though, if another developing technology was already in the hands of the regime. I’ve mentioned my fears about pain ray weapons before, but these events put the issue in a stark context. Popular uprisings against repressive regimes are games of chicken played for deadly stakes. The people confront the security forces, hoping that the enforcers willl reach a point where they can’t bring themselves to apply the degree of violence needed to suppress them. Newly effective means of non-lethal force remove this tactic from the equation. A protester can consciously decide to risk her life to stand up to a man armed with a gun, but she can’t consciously choose to keep going when pain shuts her body down.
The weapons are being designed by the US with supposedly the best of intentions. It’s better to incapacitate than kill, right? And of course the technology will only be used to quell the bad protesters, whoever those are. Which you can tell thanks to the Orwellian name, Active Denial System. And from history we know that new weapons technologies never escape their original underwriters, get taken up by the powerful commercial arms industry, or trickle down into the hands of states we disapprove of.
Widespread availability of this technology will spell the end of the popular revolt, full stop. And that’s perhaps two generations away from us.
Tags: current events, iran, social networks, tech, warfare, weapons
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09:20 am
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Vapor Bursts
Looks like advancing technology is again going to force me to rearrange the part of my mental filing cabinet that separates far future science fictiony technology from what could conceivably happen in my life time. When I was a kid visiting the science centre, the lady giving the laser demonstration assured us that we would never see laser weapons in our lifetime. The technology would never be feasible, she promised, and I took that as reassuring fact. Jet packs and food pills might be cool, but laser weapons would be seriously bad news.
This Economist article describes the imminence of various battlefield laser projects. Anti-missile lasers are the source of open excitement for procurers and defense contractors. One of them is considered so promising that its builder, Raytheon, is financing the project itself instead of seeking funding from the Pentagon or another major military . You know that one’s gotta be good.
It’s easy to get behind war technology that prevents people from being hit. They’re more circumspect about the prospect of the laser as a mass-scale anti-troop weapon:
The aeroplane-mounted Advanced Tactical Laser, or ATL, another chemical laser being put together by Boeing and the American air force, is designed to “neutralise” targets on the ground from a distance of several kilometres. [...] Killing troops is rarely mentioned. However, John Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org, a military think-tank in Alexandria, Virginia, who is an expert on ATL, says its main goal is, indeed, to kill enemy combatants. Boeing is unwilling to discuss the matter and John Wachs, the head of the Space and Missile Defence Command’s Directed Energy Division, observes that it is “politically sensitive”. The public may have misgivings about a silent and invisible weapon that would boil the body’s fluids before tearing it apart in a burst of vapour. Since the age of modern warfare began about a century ago, well-equipped armed forces haven’t lacked for methods of mass killing. That we would be horrified by certain means of instantly wiping huge numbers of people off the battlefield while others speaks to the peculiar gaps in our conception of warfare and its justice. But the first time it happens, it will provoke an incredible jolt of future shock.
It will be different. Because they are lasers.
We already have a mythic framework for laser weapons, and it tells us that they don't belong in our contemporary reality.
Tags: cognitive dissonance, tech, warfare
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