newspeak

Georgetown students shed light on China’s tunnel system for nuclear weapons – The Washington Post.

Interesting. But more for what it, along with other omics studies (analysis of massive data–basically, examining indirect traces of activity), suggests a) new modalities of knowledge (thankfully, I was really getting bored by the old modalities), and that these may be liberating and certainly exciting, especially as b) they provoke the powers that continue to be to act as they’ve always (re-)acted. In this case, the reaction may be to foreclose avenues of inquiry, to amputate the limb before it can walk, let alone run.  Or, there may be the even more fun (irony alert) tactic of misinformation.

But these and so many other strategies of state power (or corporate: what difference is there, sometimes?) are hackneyed: we saw them in the Soviet Union, and they continue to be practised as necessary by more or less savoury polities. So, there may be more creative approaches to rendering not only the data problematical, but the analysis itself; and even the desire…. and then I think: didn’t we see a version of this clever obfuscation with, first, Enron, and then, more profoundly and dangerously, with the continuing, escalating, crash of 2008 and on? For wasn’t one of the big problems the very success of the obfuscation, so that what was being secured, or insured, and what was then being traded, and traded upon, was a there whose actual position (value) and momentum (price) could never be fully determined, at least at the same time? In this quantum universe of mortage foolery, it was all probability, until one encountered the stochastic element whose house was foreclosed, and whose job was cut.