March 2006 Archives
When I first upgraded from a dial-up account to DSL (in 1997), the DSL modem that was given to me was branded Alcatel. The pending merger between these two companies, in addition to the usual questions surrounding monopolization and trust, raises concerns of American national security. The New York Times explores some of these issues in �Lucent Talks Raise Issue of Security� by Vikas Bajaj and Andrew Ross Sorkin. (It's too bad that's not the same Andrew Ross who wrote No-Collar: the Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs and Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits, but that's a whole other entry.)
�The technologies which Lucent is engaged in are at the cutting edge of military innovation,� Mr. [Loren] Thompson[, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, VA,] said.
Some of the work has a decidedly futuristic focus, like an $11.5 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop high-speed wireless networks that can be quickly assembled to allow troops to communicate with one another on battlefields.
Such ad-hoc wireless networks are a step away from objects that are already enmeshed, not only able to join and propagate already existing meshes, but also able to create meshes. Once a standard protocol is developed by which mesh security, encryption, duration, radius (spatial), and population (number) can be controlled, assemblages can be instantiated and dissolved for military operations, music concerts, group research, artistic collaboration, collective sex, accompanied travel, and interconnection between assemblages, for example an artistic collaborative mesh coupled to an environmental rehabilitation network and a urban architectural grid.
Object-oriented programming achieves this in the domain of networked computer systems, even to the extent computer architectures and platforms are irrelevant to the network process. SETI@home is a particularly famous (if somewhat whimsical) example of a network computation model. SETI@home uses the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing as do projects such as climateprediction.net (global climate modeling), Folding@home (protein folding), and malariacontrol.net (malarial epidemiology). What kind of interface could combine the work of Folding@home and malariacontrol.net, an artistic mesh, an entrepreneurial collective?
The state-of-the-art is in its infancy as these meshes formally engage primitive computers for their processing capabilities. When humans (capital) can be formally connected to such meshes the age of informatic capital will have arrived.
