Thread by @2youngBadazz

what is 'the point' of silicon valley:

i think a lot of people understand that consumer tech is all spunoff from the military, but struggle to place it all in a context that leads to further understanding

for example, they know intuitively that their phone tracking their location/analyzing their speech is somehow related to uav warfare elsewhere but arent confident to connect these two other than that hypothetically these systems could be linked

very common is for people to embrace a limited hangout that the purpose of consumer tech is 'surveillance', dead-end. but to what end? i find that the military concept of a 'kill chain' is a useful framework through which technological development can be examined:

'kill chain' is just a way to conceptualize the process of killing as a set of discrete steps, the precise breakdown may change but the general idea of F2T2EA is to identify a target, fix/track its location, decide to target with a weapon, engage and evaluate the strike

each link in the chain can be evaluated by several metrics including: duration, range, precision, success rate, amount of labor. optimizing each step according to these metrics of course leads to a faster wider more successful and more automated kill chain.

'the point', or the mission which silicon valley is a 'front' for, is to build and perfect a global kill chain for a global counterinsurgency program

going through the F2T2EA model:

find: there are so many technologies serving this function it feels strange to list them. what people search for, the contents of their messages, their speech, what they read, where their eyeballs go on the page, all of this data served up by personal computers and phones is used

to identify targets. this is why the personal computing and mobile device industry exists. the absurdly flimsy cover story is that the targeting system, the most advanced in human history, is only going to deliver 'ads' as a payload.

fix/track: again, cellphones/networked personal devices on a 3G-or-higher network are absolutely necessary to fulfil this function. they simply serve up this information constantly. facial recognition technology, pushed forward by facebook, fills in gaps.

these early links in the kill chain (F/F/T) are highly developed compared to the remaining links in the chain. cloud/fog/edge computing infrastructure is dramatically reducing the latency/duration of each step (a separate thread for this).

the second T, target, engage and assess: obviously in terms of nonlethal payloads, this capability is also highly developed. but in terms of lethal payloads this capability is very weak.

worth a reminder that this is in the context of counterinsurgency where the targets are generally humans

durations are high, precision is low, amount of labor is high. this is self evident. highly developed UAV systems can mitigate these deficits but the range of lethal UAV coverage is very small and their efficacy is uncertain. this is why the GWOT was necessary,

they needed to *practice* uav warfare and develop the technology on human victims. there was no al qaeda, no senior terror operatives, just human beings and families used as target practice to accelerate development in unmanned vehicle systems with lethal payloads.

many of the identified problems with uav warfare are actively being addressed, including bandwidth and latency bottlenecks. a combination of global satellite internet with LEO constellations, and an efficient balance of cloud/fog/edge computing capabilities make global uav

'policing' realistic. in other words, the weak point in the kill chain is still sending human beings to go kill other human beings. unmanned lethal counterinsurgency systems are still very underdeveloped,and in fact this precisely informs the moves being made right now wrt

networking (5g,LEO) and computational infrastructure(fog/edge). and looking further into the future, though not very far, its clear to see that UAV itself is a rough technology compared with a biological implant that could terminate a human being directly upon receiving a signal.

this has in some sense im certain been discussed since the 1960s but took off in earnest after the destruction of the ussr

restructuring the economy, enclosure, conditioning are all major goals of sil valley as well that dont necessarily fit neatly into the paradigm of a lethal kill chain, i dont mean to suggest these arent important rather they are part of the same set of moves..

that necessitate a global counterinsurgency system.