Notes

 1Chasm

  1.‘The Cloud of Unknowing’, anonymous, 14th Century.

  2.‘Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics is not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do.’ From Aldous Huxley, Island, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962.

  3.H. P. Lovecraft, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, Weird Tales, February 1926.

  4.Rebecca Solnit, ‘Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable’, New Yorker, April 24, 2014, newyorker.com.

  5.Donna Haraway, ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble’ (lecture, ‘Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet’ conference, UC Santa Cruz, May 9, 2014), opentranscripts.org.

  6.Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, New York: Harvest, 1966.

 2Computation

  1.John Ruskin, The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century: Two Lectures Delivered at the London Institution February 4th and 11th, 1884, London: George Allen, 1884.

  2.Ibid.

  3.Ibid.

  4.Alexander Graham Bell, in a letter to his father Alexander Melville Bell, dated February 26, 1880, quoted in Robert V. Bruce, Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.

  5.‘The Photophone’, New York Times, August 30, 1880.

  6.Oliver M. Ashford, Prophet or Professor? The Life and Work of Lewis Fry Richardson, London: Adam Hilger Ltd, 1985.

  7.Lewis Fry Richardson, Weather Prediction by Numerical Process, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922.

  8.Ibid.

  9.Vannevar Bush, ‘As We May Think’, Atlantic, July 1945.

10.Ibid.

11.Ibid.

12.Ibid.

13.Vladimir K. Zworykin, Outline of Weather Proposal, Princeton, NJ: RCA Laboratories, October 1945, available at meteohistory.org.

14.As quoted in Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions, New York: Harper & Row, 1988.

15.‘Weather to Order’, New York Times, February 1, 1947.

16.John von Neumann, ‘Can We Survive Technology?’, Fortune, June 1955.

17.Peter Lynch, The Emergence of Numerical Weather Prediction: Richardson’s Dream, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

18.‘50 Years of Army Computing: From ENIAC to MSRC’, Army Research Laboratory, Adelphi, MD, November 1996.

19.George W. Platzman, ‘The ENIAC Computations of 1950 – Gateway to Numerical Weather Prediction’, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, April 1979.

20.Emerson W. Pugh, Building IBM: Shaping an Industry and Its Technology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1955.

21.Herbert R. J. Grosch, Computer: Bit Slices from A Life, London: Third Millennium Books, 1991.

22.George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe, New York: Penguin Random House, 2012.

23.IBM Corporation, ‘SAGE: The First National Air Defense Network’, IBM History, ibm.com.

24.Gary Anthes, ‘Sabre Timeline’, Computerworld, May 21, 2014, computerworld.com.

25.‘Flightradar24.com blocked Aircraft Plane List’, Radarspotters, community forum, radarspotters.eu.

26.Federal Aviation Administration, ‘Statement By The President Regarding The United States’ Decision To Stop Degrading Global Positioning System Accuracy’, May 1, 2000, faa.gov.

27.David Hambling, ‘Ships fooled in GPS spoofing attack suggest Russian cyberweapon’, New Scientist, August 10, 2017, newscientist.com.

28.Kevin Rothrock, ‘The Kremlin Eats GPS for Breakfast’, Moscow Times, October 21, 2016, themoscowtimes.com.

29.Chaim Gartenberg, ‘This Pokémon Go GPS hack is the most impressive yet’, Verge, Circuit Breaker, July 28, 2016, theverge.com.

30.Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.

31.Brad Stone, ‘Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle’, New York Times, July 17, 2009, nytimes.com.

32.R. Stuart Geiger, ‘The Lives of Bots’, in Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkaz, eds, Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader, Institute of Network Cultures, 2011, available at networkcultures.org.

33.Kathleen Mosier, Linda Skitka, Susan Heers, and Mark Burdick, ‘Automation Bias: Decision Making and Performance in High-Tech Cockpits’, International Journal of Aviation Psychology 8:1, 1997, 47–63.

34.‘CVR transcript, Korean Air Flight 007 – 31 Aug 1983’, Aviation Safety Network, aviation-safety.net.

35.K. L. Mosier, E. A. Palmer, and A. Degani, ‘Electronic Checklists: Implications for Decision Making’, Proceedings of the Human Factors Society 36th Annual Meeting, Atlanta, GA, 1992.

36.‘GPS Tracking Disaster: Japanese Tourists Drive Straight into the Pacific’, ABC News, March 16, 2012, abcnews.go.com.

37.‘Women trust GPS, drive SUV into Mercer Slough’, Seattle Times, June 15, 2011, seattletimes.com.

38.Greg Milner, ‘Death by GPS’, Ars Technica, June 3, 2016, arstechnica.com.

39.S. T. Fiske and S. E. Taylor, Social Cognition: From Brains to Culture, London: SAGE, 1994.

40.Lewis Fry Richardson, quoted in Ashford, Prophet or Professor?.

41.Lewis F. Richardson, ‘The problem of contiguity: An appendix to Statistics of Deadly Quarrels’, in General systems: Yearbook of the Society for the Advancement of General Systems Theory, Ann Arbor, MI: The Society for General Systems Research, 1961, 139–87.

 3Climate

  1.‘Trembling tundra – the latest weird phenomenon in Siberia’s land of craters’, Siberian Times, July 20, 2016, siberiantimes.com.

  2.US Geological Survey, ‘Assessment of Undiscovered Oil and Gas in the Arctic’, USGS, 2009, energy.usgs.gov.

  3.‘40 now hospitalised after anthrax outbreak in Yamal, more than half are children’, Siberian Times, July 30, 2016, siberiantimes.com.

  4.Roni Horn, ‘Weather Reports You’, Artangel official website, February 15, 2017, artangel.org.uk.

  5.‘Immigrants Warmly Welcomed’, Al Jazeera, July 4, 2006, aljazeera.com.

  6.Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, ‘Crop biodiversity: use it or lose it’, FAO, 2010, fao.org.

  7.‘Banking against Doomsday’, Economist, March 10, 2012, economist.com.

  8.Somini Sengupta, ‘How a Seed Bank, Almost Lost in Syria’s War, Could Help Feed a Warming Planet’, New York Times, October 12, 2017, nytimes.com.

  9.Damian Carrington, ‘Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafrost melts’, Guardian, May 19, 2017, theguardian.com.

10.Alex Randall, ‘Syria and climate change: did the media get it right?’, Climate and Migration Coalition, climatemigration.atavist.com.

11.Jonas Salomonsen, ‘Climate change is destroying Greenland’s earliest history’, ScienceNordic, April 10, 2015, sciencenordic.com.

12.J. Hollesen, H. Matthiesen, A. B. Møller, and B. Elberling, ‘Permafrost thawing in organic Arctic soils accelerated by ground heat production’, Nature Climate Change 5:6 (2015), 574–8.

13.Elizabeth Kolbert, ‘A Song of Ice’, New Yorker, October 24, 2016, newyorker.com.

14.Council for Science and Technology, ‘A National Infrastructure for the 21st century’, 2009, cst.gov.uk.

15.AEA, ‘Adapting the ICT Sector to the Impacts of Climate Change’, 2010, gov.uk.

16.Council for Science and Technology, ‘A National Infrastructure for the 21st century’.

17.AEA, ‘Adapting the ICT Sector to the Impacts of Climate Change’.

18.Tom Bawden, ‘Global warming: Data centres to consume three times as much energy in next decade, experts warn’, Independent, January 23, 2016, independent.co.uk.

19.Institute of Energy Economics, ‘Japan Long-Term Energy Outlook – A Projection up to 2030 under Environmental Constraints and Changing Energy Markets’, Japan, 2006, eneken.ieej.or.jp.

20.Eric Holthaus, ‘Bitcoin could cost us our clean- energy future’, Grist, December 5, 2017, grist.org.

21.Digital Power Group, ‘The Cloud Begins With Coal – Big Data, Big Networks, Big Infrastructure, and Big Power’, 2013, tech-pundit.com.

22.Bawden, ‘Global warming’.

23.Alice Ross, ‘Severe turbulence on Aeroflot flight to Bangkok leaves 27 people injured’, Guardian, May 1, 2017, theguardian.com.

24.Anna Ledovskikh, ‘Accident on board of plane Moscow to Bangkok’, YouTube video, May 1, 2017.

25.Aeroflot, ‘Doctors Confirm No Passengers Are In Serious Condition After Flight Hits Unexpected Turbulence’, May 1, 2017, aeroflot.ru.

26.M. Kumar, ‘Passengers, crew injured due to turbulence on MAS flight’, Star of Malaysia, June 5, 2016, thestar.com.my.

27.Henry McDonald, ‘Passenger jet makes emergency landing in Ireland with 16 injured’, Guardian, August 31, 2016, theguardian.com.

28.National Transportation Safety Board, ‘NTSB Identification: DCA98MA015’, ntsb.gov.

29.Federal Aviation Administration, FAA Advisory Circular 120-88A, 2006.

30.Paul D. Williams & Manoj M. Joshi, ‘Intensification of winter transatlantic aviation turbulence in response to climate change’, Nature Climate Change 3 (2013), 644–8.

31.Wolfgang Tillmans, Concorde, Cologne: Walther Konig Books, 1997.

32.William B. Gail, ‘A New Dark Age Looms’, New York Times, April 19, 2016, nytimes.com.

33.Joseph G. Allen, et al., ‘Associations of Cognitive Function Scores with Carbon Dioxide, Ventilation, and Volatile Organic Compound Exposures in Office Workers: A Controlled Exposure Study of Green and Conventional Office Environments’, Environmental Health Perspectives 124 (June 2016), 805–12.

34.Usha Satish, et al., ‘Is CO2 an Indoor Pollutant? Direct Effects of Low-to-Moderate CO2 Concentrations on Human Decision-Making Performance’, Environmental Health Perspectives 120:12 (December 2012), 1671–7.

 4Calculation

  1.William Gibson, interviewed by David Wallace-Wells, ‘William Gibson, The Art of Fiction No. 211’, Paris Review 197 (Summer 2011).

  2.Tim Berners-Lee, ‘How the World Wide Web just happened’, Do Lectures, 2010, thedolectures.com.

  3.‘Cramming more components onto integrated circuits’, Electronics 38:8 (April 19, 1965).

  4.‘Moore’s Law at 40’, Economist, March 23, 2005, economist.com.

  5.Chris Anderson, ‘End of Theory’, Wired Magazine, June 23, 2008.

  6.Jack W. Scannell, Alex Blanckley, Helen Boldon, and Brian Warrington, ‘Diagnosing the decline in pharmaceutical R&D efficiency’, Nature Reviews Drug Discover 11 (March 2012), 191–200.

  7.Richard Van Noorden, ‘Science publishing: The trouble with retractions’, Nature, October 5, 2011, nature.com.

  8.F. C. Fang, and A. Casadevall, ‘Retracted Science and the Retraction Index’, Infection and Immunity 79 (2011), 3855–9.

  9.F. C. Fang, R. G. Steen, and A. Casadevall, ‘Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications’, FAS, October 16, 2012, pnas.org.

10.Daniele Fanelli, ‘How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data’, PLOS ONE, May 29, 2009, PLOS ONE, journals.pl.

11.F. C. Fang, R. G. Steen, and A. Casadevall, ‘Why Has the Number of Scientific Retractions Increased?’, PLOS ONE, July 8, 2013, journals.plosone.org.

12.‘People Who Mattered 2014’, Time, December 2014, time.com.

13.Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, ‘The Mind of a Con Man’, New York Times, April 26, 2013, nytimes.com.

14.Monya Baker, ‘1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility’, Nature, May 25, 2016, nature.com.

15.For more on the math of this experiment, see Jean-Francois Puget, ‘Green dice are loaded (welcome to p-hacking)’, IBM developer-Works blog entry, March 22, 2016, ibm.com.

16.M. L. Head, et al., ‘The Extent and Consequences of P-Hacking in Science’, PLOS Biology 13:3 (2015).

17.John P. A. Ioannidis, ‘Why Most Published Research Findings Are False’, PLOS ONE, August 2005.

18.Derek J. de Solla Price, Little Science, Big Science, New York: Columbia University Press, 1963.

19.Siebert, Machesky, and Insall, ‘Overflow in science and its implications for trust’, eLife 14 (September 2015), ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

20.Ibid.

21.Michael Eisen, ‘Peer review is f***ed up – let’s fix it’, personal blog entry, October 28, 2011, michaeleisen.org.

22.Emily Singer, ‘Biology’s big problem: There’s too much data to handle’, Wired, October 11, 2013, wired.com.

23.Lisa Grossman and Maggie McKee, ‘Is the LHC throwing away too much data?’, New Scientist, March 14, 2012, newscientist.com.

24.Jack W. Scannell, et al., ‘Diagnosing the decline in pharmaceutical R&D efficiency’, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 11 (March 2012) 191–200.

25.Philip Ball, Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen, London: Bodley Head, 2014.

26.Daniel Clery, ‘Secretive fusion company claims reactor breakthrough’, Science, August 24, 2015, sciencemag.org.

27.E. A. Baltz, et al., ‘Achievement of Sustained Net Plasma Heating in a Fusion Experiment with the Optometrist Algorithm’, Nature Scientific Reports 7 (2017), nature.com.

28.Albert van Helden and Thomas Hankins, eds, Osiris, Volume 9: Instruments, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

 5Complexity

  1.Guy Debord, ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’, Les Lèvres Nues 6 (1955), available at library.nothingness.org.

  2.James Bridle, The Nor, essay series, 2014–15, available at shorttermmemoryloss.com.

  3.Jame Bridle, ‘All Cameras are Police Cameras’, The Nor, November 2014.

  4.James Bridle, ‘Living in the Electromagnetic Spectrum’, The Nor, December 2014.

  5.Christopher Steiner, ‘Wall Street’s Speed War’, Forbes, September 9, 2010, forbes.com.

  6.Kevin Fitchard, ‘Wall Street gains an edge by trading over microwaves’, GigaOM, February 10, 2012, gigaom.com.

  7.Luis A. Aguilar, ‘Shedding Light on Dark Pools’, US Securities and Exchange Commission, November 18, 2015, sec.gov.

  8.‘Barclays and Credit Suisse are fined over US “dark pools”’, BBC, February 1, 2016, bbc.com.

  9.Martin Arnold, et al., ‘Banks start to drain Barclays dark pool’, Financial Times, June 26, 2014, ft.com.

10.Care Quality Commission, Hillingdon Hospital report, 2015, cqc.org.uk/location/RAS01.

11.Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear, London: William Heinemann, 1952.

12.Correspondence with Hillingdon Hospital NHS Trust, 2017, whatdotheyknow.com/request/hillingdon_hospital_structure_us.

13.Chloe Mayer, ‘England’s NHS hospitals and ambulance trusts have £700million deficit’, Sun, May 23, 2017, thesun.co.uk.

14.Michael Lewis, Flash Boys, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.

15.Ibid.

16.‘Forget the 1%’, Economist, November 6, 2014, economist.com.

17.Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.

18.Jordan Golson, ‘Uber is using in-app podcasts to dissuade Seattle drivers from unionizing’, Verge, March 14, 2017, theverge.com.

19.Carla Green and Sam Levin, ‘Homeless, assaulted, broke: drivers left behind as Uber promises change at the top’, Guardian, June 17, 2017, theguardian.com.

20.Ben Kentish, ‘Hard-pressed Amazon workers in Scotland sleeping in tents near warehouse to save money’, Independent, December 10, 2016, independent.co.uk.

21.Kate Knibbs, ‘Uber Is Faking Us Out With “Ghost Cabs” on Its Passenger Map’, Gizmodo, July 28, 2015, gizmodo.com.

22.Kashmir Hill, ‘“God View”: Uber Allegedly Stalked Users For Party-Goers’ Viewing Pleasure’, Forbes, October 3, 2014, forbes.com.

23.Julia Carrie Wong, ‘Greyball: how Uber used secret software to dodge the law’, Guardian, March 4, 2017, theguardian.com.

24.Russell Hotten, ‘Volkswagen: The scandal explained’, BBC, December 10, 2015, bbc.com.

25.Guillaume P. Chossière, et al., ‘Public health impacts of excess NOx emissions from Volkswagen diesel passenger vehicles in Germany’, Environmental Research Letters 12 (2017), iopscience.iop.org.

26.Sarah O’Connor, ‘When Your Boss Is An Algorithm’, Financial Times, September 8, 2016, ft.com.

27.Jill Treanor, ‘The 2010 “flash crash”: how it unfolded’, Guardian, April 22, 2015, theguardian.com.

28.‘Singapore Exchange regulators change rules following crash’, Singapore News, August 3, 2014, singaporenews.net.

29.Netty Idayu Ismail and Lillian Karununga, ‘Two-Minute Mystery Pound Rout Puts Spotlight on Robot Trades’, Bloomberg, October 7, 2017, bloomberg.com.

30.John Melloy, ‘Mysterious Algorithm Was 4% of Trading Activity Last Week’, CNBC, October 8, 2012, cnbc.com.

31.Samantha Murphy, ‘AP Twitter Hack Falsely Claims Explosions at White House’, Mashable, April 23, 2013, mashable.com.

32.Bloomberg Economics, @economics, Twitter post, April 23, 2013, 12:23 p.m.

33.For more examples from Zazzle, see Babak Radboy, ‘Spam-erican Apparel’, DIS magazine, dismagazine.com.

34.Roland Eisenbrand and Scott Peterson, ‘This Is The German Company Behind The Nightmarish Phone Cases On Amazon’, OMR, July 25, 2017, omr.com.

35.Jose Pagliery, ‘Man behind “Carry On” T-shirts says company is “dead”’, CNN Money, March 5, 2013, money.cnn.com.

36.Hito Steyerl and Kate Crawford, ‘Data Streams’, New Inquiry, January 23, 2017, thenewinquiry.com.

37.Ryan Lawler, ‘August’s Smart Lock Goes On Sale Online And At Apple Retail Stores For $250’, TechCrunch, October 14, 2014, techcrunch.com.

38.Iain Thomson, ‘Firmware update blunder bricks hundreds of home “smart” locks’, Register, August 11, 2017, theregister.co.uk.

39.John Leyden, ‘Samsung smart fridge leaves Gmail logins open to attack’, Register, August 24, 2017, theregister.co.uk.

40.Timothy J. Seppala, ‘Hackers hijack Philips Hue lights with a drone’, Engadget, November 3, 2016, engadget.com.

41.Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, ‘Blame the Internet of Things for Destroying the Internet Today’, Motherboard, October 21, 2016, motherboard.vice.com.

42.Yossi Melman, ‘Computer Virus in Iran Actually Targeted Larger Nuclear Facility’, Haaretz, September 28, 2010, haaretz.com.

43.Malcolm Gladwell, ‘The Formula’, New Yorker, October 16, 2006, newyorker.com.

44.Gareth Roberts, ‘Tragedy as computer gamer dies after 19-hour session playing World of Warcraft’, Mirror, March 3, 2015, mirror.co.uk; Kirstie McCrum, ‘Tragic teen gamer dies after “playing computer for 22 days in a row”’, Mirror, September 3, 2015, mirror.co.uk.

45.Author interview with medical staff, Evangelismos Hospital, Athens, Greece, 2016.

46.See, for example, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, London and New York: Verso, 2015.

47.Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

48.Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998; cited in Alexander Galloway, ‘Brometheanism’, boundary 2, June 21, 2017, boundary2.org.

 6Cognition

  1.Jeff Kaufman, ‘Detecting Tanks’, blog post, 2015, jefftk.com.

  2.‘New Navy Device Learns by Doing’, New York Times, July 8, 1958.

  3.Joaquín M. Fuster, ‘Hayek in Today’s Cognitive Neuroscience’, in Leslie Marsh, ed., Hayek in Mind: Hayek’s Philosophical Psychology, Advances in Austrian Economics, volume 15, Emerald Books, 2011.

  4.Jay Yarow, ‘Google Cofounder Sergey Brin: We Will Make Machines That “Can Reason, Think, And Do Things Better Than We Can”’, Business Insider, July 6, 2014, businessinsider.com.

  5.Quoc V. Le, et al., ‘Building High-level Features Using Large Scale Unsupervised Learning’, Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Machine Learning, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, 2012.

  6.Tom Simonite, ‘Facebook Creates Software That Matches Faces Almost as Well as You Do’, MIT Technology Review, March 17, 2014, technologyreview.com.

  7.Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang, ‘Automated Inference on Criminality using Face Images’, ARXIV, November 2016, arxiv.org.

  8.Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang, ‘Responses to Critiques on Machine Learning of Criminality Perceptions’, ARXIV, May 2017, arxiv.org.

  9.Stephen Wright and Ian Drury, ‘How old are they really?’, Daily Mail, October 19, 2016, dailymail.co.uk.

10.Wu and Zhang, ‘Responses to Critiques on Machine Learning’.

11.Wu and Zhang, ‘Automated Inference on Criminality using Face Images’.

12.‘Racist Camera! No, I did not blink … I’m just Asian!’, blog post, May 2009, jozjozjoz.com.

13.‘HP cameras are racist’, YouTube video, username: wzamen01, December 10, 2009.

14.David Smith, ‘“Racism” of early colour photography explored in art exhibition’, Guardian, January 25, 2013, theguardian.com.

15.Phillip Martin, ‘How A Cambridge Woman’s Campaign Against Polaroid Weakened Apartheid’, WGBH News, December 9, 2013, news.wgbh.org.

16.Hewlett-Packard, ‘Global Citizenship Report 2009’, hp.com.

17.Trevor Paglen, ‘re:publica 2017 | Day 3 – Livestream Stage 1 – English’, YouTube video, username: re:publica, May 10, 2017.

18.Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

19.PredPol, ‘5 Common Myths about Predictive Policing’, predpol.com.

20.G. O. Mohler, M. B. Short, P. J. Brantingham, et al., ‘Self-exciting point process modeling of crime’, JASA 106 (2011).

21.Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin, Speech and language processing: an introduction to natural language processing, computational linguistics, and speech recognition, 2nd edition, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2009.

22.Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Selected Writings Volume 1 1913–1926, Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, eds, Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press, 1996.

23.Murat Nemet-Nejat, ‘Translation: Contemplating Against the Grain’, Cipher, 1999, cipherjournal.com.

24.Tim Adams, ‘Can Google break the computer language barrier?’, Guardian, December 19, 2010, theguardian.com.

25.Gideon Lewis-Kraus, ‘The Great A.I. Awakening’, New York Times, December 14, 2016, nytimes.com.

26.Cade Metz, ‘How Google’s AI viewed the move no human could understand’, Wired, March 14, 2016, wired.com.

27.Iain M. Banks, Excession, London: Orbit Books, 1996.

28.Sanjeev Arora, Yuanzhi Li, Yingyu Liang, et al., ‘RAND-WALK: A Latent Variable Model Approach to Word Embeddings’, ARXIV, February 12, 2015, arxiv.org.

29.Alec Radford, Luke Metz, and Soumith Chintala, ‘Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks’, Nov 19, 2015, ARXIV, arxiv.org.

30.Robert Elliott Smith, ‘It’s Official: AIs are now re-writing history’, blog post, October 2014, robertelliottsmith.com.

31.Stephen Levy, ‘Inside Deep Dreams: How Google Made Its Computers Go Crazy’, Wired, November 12, 2015, wired.com.

32.Liat Clark, ‘Google’s Artificial Brain Learns to Find Cat Videos’, Wired, June 26, 2012, wired.com.

33.Melvin Johnson, Mike Schuster, Quoc V. Le, et al., ‘Google’s Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System: Enabling Zero-Shot Translation’, ARXIV, November 14, 2016, arxiv.org.

34.Martín Abadi and David G. Andersen, ‘Learning to Protect Communications with Adversarial Neural Cryptography’, ARXIV, 2016, arxiv.org.

35.Isaac Asimov, I, Robot, New York: Doubleday, 1950.

36.Chris Baraniuk, ‘The cyborg chess players that can’t be beaten’, BBC Future, December 4, 2015, bbc.com.

7 Complicity

  1.Nick Hopkins and Sandra Laville, ‘London 2012: MI5 expects wave of terrorism warnings before Olympics’, Guardian, June 2012, theguardian.com.

  2.Jerome Taylor, ‘Drones to patrol the skies above Olympic Stadium’, Independent, November 25, 2011, independent.co.uk.

  3.‘£13,000 Merseyside Police drone lost as it crashes into River Mersey’, Liverpool Echo, October 31, 2011, liverpoolecho.co.uk.

  4.FOI Request, ‘Use of UAVs by the MPS’, March 19, 2013, available at whatdotheyknow.com.

  5.David Robarge, ‘The Glomar Explorer in Film and Print’, Studies in Intelligence 56:1 (March 2012), 28–9.

  6.Quoted in the majority opinion penned by Circuit Judge J. Skelly Wright, Phillippi v. CIA, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, 1976.

  7.Or see @glomarbot on Twitter, an automated search created by the author.

  8.W. Diffie and M. Hellman, ‘New directions in cryptography’, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 22:6 (1976), 644–54.

  9.‘GCHQ trio recognised for key to secure shopping online’, BBC News, October 5, 2010, bbc.co.uk.

10.Dan Goodin, ‘How the NSA can break trillions of encrypted Web and VPN connections’, Ars Technica, October 15, 2015, arstechnica.co.uk.

11.Tom Simonite, ‘NSA Says It “Must Act Now” Against the Quantum Computing Threat’, Technology Review, February 3, 2016, technologyreview.com.

12.Rebecca Boyle, ‘NASA Adopts Two Spare Spy Telescopes, Each Maybe More Powerful Than Hubble’, Popular Science, June 5, 2012, popsci.com.

13.Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

14.Zeke Miller, ‘JFK Files Release Is Trump’s Latest Clash With Spy Agencies’, New York Times, October 28, 2017, nytimes.com.

15.Ian Cobain, The History Thieves, London: Portobello Books, 2016.

16.Ibid.

17.Ibid.

18.Ian Cobain and Richard Norton-Taylor, ‘Files on UK role in CIA rendition accidentally destroyed, says minister’, Guardian, July 9, 2014, theguardian.com.

19.‘Snowden-Interview: Transcript’, NDR, January 26, 2014, ndr.de.

20.Glyn Moody, ‘NSA spied on EU politicians and companies with help from German intelligence’, Ars Technica, April 24, 2014, arstechnica.com.

21.‘Optic Nerve: millions of Yahoo webcam images intercepted by GCHQ’, Guardian, February 28, 2014, theguardian.com.

22.‘NSA offers details on “LOVEINT”’, Cnet, September 27, 2013, cnet.com.

23.Kaspersky Lab, The Regin Platform: Nation-State Ownage of GSM Networks, November 24, 2014, available at securelist.com.

24.Ryan Gallagher, ‘From Radio to Porn, British Spies Track Web Users’ Online Identities’, Intercept, September 25, 2015, theintercept.com.

25.Andy Greenberg, ‘These Are the Emails Snowden Sent to First Introduce His Epic NSA Leaks’, Wired, October 13, 2014, wired.com.

26.James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, ‘Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts’, New York Times, December 16, 2005, nytimes.com.

27.James Bamford, ‘The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)’, Wired, March 14, 2012, wired.com.

28.‘Wiretap Whistle-Blower’s Account’, Wired, April 6, 2006, wired.com.

29.‘Obama admits intelligence failures over jet bomb plot’, BBC News, January 6, 2010, news.bbc.co.uk.

30.Bruce Crumley, ‘Flight 253: Too Much Intelligence to Blame?’, Time, January 7, 2010, time.com.

31.Christopher Drew, ‘Military Is Awash in Data From Drones’, New York Times, January 20, 2010, nytimes.com.

32.‘GCHQ mass spying will “cost lives in Britain”, warns ex-NSA tech chief’, The Register, January 6, 2016, theregister.co.uk.

33.Ellen Nakashima, ‘NSA phone record collection does little to prevent terrorist-attacks’, Washington Post, January 12, 2014, washingtonpost.com.

34.New America Foundation, ‘Do NSA’s Bulk Surveillance Programs Stop Terrorists?’, January 13, 2014, newamerica.org.

35.Jennifer King, Deirdre Mulligan, and Stephen Rafael, ‘CITRIS Report: The San Francisco Community Safety Program’, UC Berkeley, December 17, 2008, available at wired.com.

36.K. Pease, ‘A Review Of Street Lighting Evaluations: Crime Reduction Effects’, Crime Prevention Studies 10 (1999).

37.Stephen Atkins, ‘The Influence Of Street Lighting On Crime And Fear Of Crime’, Crime Prevention Unit Paper 28, UK Home Office, 1991, available at popcenter.org.

38.Julian Assange, ‘State and Terrorist Conspiracies’, Cryptome, November 10, 2006, cryptome.org.

39.Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005.

40.‘Owners Watched Fort McMurray Home Burn to Ground Over iPhone’, YouTube video, username: Storyful News, May 6, 2016.

 8Conspiracy

  1.Joseph Heller, Catch-22, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961.

  2.See James Bridle, ‘Planespotting’, blog post, December 18, 2013, booktwo.org, and other reports by the author.

  3.For a good overview of the trial, see: Kevin Hall, The ABC Trial (2006), originally published at ukcoldwar.simplenet.com, archived at archive.li/1xfT4.

  4.Richard Aldrich, GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency, New York: HarperPress, 2010.

  5.Duncan Campbell, ‘GCHQ’ (book review), New Statesman, June 28, 2010, newstatesman.com.

  6.Chris Blackhurst, ‘Police robbed of millions in plane fraud’, Independent, May 19, 1995, independent.co.uk.

  7.US Air Force, Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025, 1996, csat.au.af.mil.

  8.‘Take Ur Power Back!!: Vote to leave the EU’, YouTube video, username: Flat Earth Addict, June 21, 2016.

  9.‘Nigel Farage’s Brexit victory speech in full’, Daily Mirror, June 24, 2016, mirror.co.uk.

10.Carey Dunne, ‘My month with chemtrails conspiracy theorists’, Guardian, May 2017, theguardian.com.

11.Ibid.

12.International Cloud Atlas, cloudatlas.wmo.int.

13.A. Bows, K. Anderson, and P. Upham, Aviation and Climate Change: Lessons for European Policy, New York: Routledge, 2009.

14.Nicola Stuber, Piers Forster, Gaby Rädel, and Keith Shine, ‘The importance of the diurnal and annual cycle of air traffic for contrail radiative forcing’, Nature 441 (June 2006).

15.Patrick Minnis, et al., ‘Contrails, Cirrus Trends, and Climate’, Journal of Climate 17 (2006), available at areco.org.

16.Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, c. 430 BC, 477: ‘The flight of crook-taloned birds I distinguished clearly – which by nature are auspicious, which sinister.’

17.Susan Schuppli, ‘Can the Sun Lie?’, in Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, Forensic Architecture, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014, 56–64.

18.Kevin van Paassen, ‘New documentary recounts bizarre climate changes seen by Inuit elders’, Globe and Mail, October 19, 2010, theglobeandmail.com.

19.SpaceWeather.com, Time Machine, conditions for July 2, 2009.

20.Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Silver Lining’, Sheer Poetry, 2010, available at sheerpoetry.co.uk.

21.Lord Byron, ‘Darkness’, 1816.

22.Richard Panek, ‘“The Scream”, East of Krakatoa’, New York Times, February 8, 2004, nytimes.com.

23.Leo Hickman, ‘Iceland volcano gives warming world chance to debunk climate sceptic myths’, Guardian, April 21, 2010, theguardian.com.

24.David Adam, ‘Iceland volcano causes fall in carbon emissions as eruption grounds aircraft’, Guardian, April 19, 2010, theguardian.com.

25.‘Do volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans?’, Skeptical Science, skepticalscience.com.

26.J. Pongratz, et al., ‘Coupled climate–carbon simulations indicate minor global effects of wars and epidemics on atmospheric CO₂ between AD 800 and 1850’, Holocene 21:5 (2011).

27.Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, ‘Defining the Anthropocene’, Nature 519 (March 2015), nature.com.

28.David J. Travis, Andrew M. Carleton, and Ryan G. Lauritsen, ‘Climatology: Contrails reduce daily temperature range’, Nature 418 (August 2002), 601.

29.Richard J. Hofstadter, ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, Harper’s magazine, November 1964.

30.Fredric Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, in C. Nelson, L. Grossberg, eds, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

31.Hofstadter, ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’.

32.Dylan Matthews, ‘Donald Trump has tweeted climate change skepticism 115 times. Here’s all of it’, Vox, June 1, 2017, vox.com.

33.Tim Murphy, ‘How Donald Trump Became Conspiracy Theorist in Chief’, Mother Jones, November/December 2016, motherjones.com.

34.The Alex Jones Show, August 11, 2016, available at mediamatters.org.

35.US Air Force, ‘Weather as a Force Multiplier’.

36.Mike Jay, The Influencing Machine: James Tilly Matthews and the Air Loom, London: Strange Attractor Press, 2012.

37.Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, London: James Dodsley, 1790.

38.V. Bell, C. Maiden, A. Munoz-Solomando, and V. Reddy, ‘“Mind control” experiences on the internet: implications for the psychiatric diagnosis of delusions’, Psychopathology 39:2 (2006), 87–91.

39.Will Storr, ‘Morgellons: A hidden epidemic or mass hysteria?’, Guardian, May 7, 2011, theguardian.com.

40.Jane O’Brien and Matt Danzico, ‘“Wi-fi refugees” shelter in West Virginia mountains’, BBC, September 13, 2011, bbc.co.uk.

41.‘The Extinction of the Grayzone’, Dabiq 7, February 12, 2015.

42.Murtaza Hussain, ‘Islamic State’s goal: “Eliminating the Grayzone” of coexistence between Muslims and the West’, Intercept, November 17, 2015, theintercept.com.

43.Hal Brands, ‘Paradoxes of the Gray Zone’, Foreign Policy Research Institute, February 5, 2016, fpri.org.

 9Concurrency

  1.Adrienne Lafrance, ‘The Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed With YouTube’, Atlantic, July 25, 2017, theatlantic.com.

  2.Paul McCann, ‘To Teletubby or not to Teletubby’, Independent, October 12, 1997, independent.co.uk.

  3.Christopher Mims, ‘Google: Psy’s “Gangnam Style” Has Earned $8 Million On YouTube Alone’, Business Insider, January 23, 2013, businessinsider.com.

  4.‘Top 500 Most Viewed YouTube Channels’, SocialBlade, October 2017, socialblade.com.

  5.Ben Popper, ‘Youtube’s Biggest Star Is A 5-Year-Old That Makes Millions Opening Toys’, Verge, December 22, 2016, theverge.com.

  6.Blu Toys Club Surprise, YouTube channel.

  7.Play Go Toys, YouTube channel.

  8.Samanth Subramanian, ‘The Macedonian Teens Who Mastered Fake News’, Wired, February 15, 2017, wired.com.

  9.‘Finger Family’, YouTube video, username: Leehosok, May 25, 2007.

10.Bounce Patrol Kids, YouTube channel.

11.Charleyy Hodson, ‘We Need To Talk About Why THIS Creepy AF Video Is Trending On YouTube’, We The Unicorns, January 19, 2017, wetheunicorns.com.

12.In November 2017, after I published an article about this, Toy Freaks and numerous other channels mentioned in the article were removed by YouTube. At the time of writing, however, many similar channels and videos could still be easily found on the platform. See ‘Children’s YouTube is still churning out blood, suicide and cannibalism’, Wired, 23 March 2018, wired.co.uk.

13.‘Freak Family’ Facebook Page, administered by Nguyễn Hùng, facebook.com/touyentb2010.

14.Sapna Maheshwari, ‘On YouTube Kids, Startling Videos Slip Past Filters’, New York Times, November 4, 2017, nytimes.com.

15.David Remnick, ‘Obama Reckons with a Trump Presidency’, New Yorker, November 28, 2016, newyorker.com.

16.Subramanian, ‘The Macedonian Teens Who Mastered Fake News’.

17.Lalage Harris, ‘Letter from Veles’, Calvert Journal, 2017, calvertjournal.com.

18.‘The name game’, Economist, April 2, 2009, economist.com.

19.‘Macedonia police examine death threats over name dispute’, International Herald Tribune, March 27, 2008, available at archive.li/nkYzJ.

20.Joanna Berendt, ‘Macedonia Government Is Blamed for Wiretapping Scandal’, New York Times, June 21, 2015, nytimes.com.

21.‘Macedonia: Society on Tap’, YouTube video, username: Privacy International, March 29, 2016.

22.Adrian Chen, ‘The Agency’, New York Times, June 2, 2015, nytimes.com.

23.Adrian Chen, ‘The Real Paranoia-Inducing Purpose of Russian Hacks’, New Yorker, July 27, 2016, newyorker.com.

24.YouGov Poll, ‘The Times Results EU Referndum 160613’, June 13–14, 2016, available at bit.ly/1Ypml3w.

25.Andrew Griffin, ‘Brexit supporters urged to take their own pens to polling stations amid fears of MI5 conspiracy’, Independent, June 23, 2016, independent.co.uk.

26.Carole Cadwalladr, ‘The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked’, Guardian, May 7, 2017, theguardian.com.

27.Carole Cadwalladr, ‘Trump, Assange, Bannon, Farage … bound together in an unholy alliance’, Guardian, October 27, 2017, theguardian.com.

28.Robert Booth, Matthew Weaver, Alex Hern, and Shaun Walker, ‘Russia used hundreds of fake accounts to tweet about Brexit, data shows’, Guardian, November 14, 2017, theguardian.com.

29.Marco T. Bastos and Dan Mercea, ‘The Brexit Botnet and User-Generated Hyperpartisan News’, Social Science Computer Review, October 10, 2017.

30.Alessandro Bessi and Emilio Ferrara, ‘Social bots distort the 2016 U.S. Presidential election online discussion’, First Monday 21:11 (November 2016), firstmonday.org.

31.Annalee Newitz, ‘The Fembots of Ashley Madison’, Gizmodo, August 27, 2015, gizmodo.com.

10Cloud

  1.Matthew Holehouse, ‘Bilderberg Group 2013: guest list and agenda’, Telegraph, June 6, 2013, telegraph.co.uk.

  2.Eric Schmidt, ‘Action This Day – Eric Schmidt, Zeitgeist Europe 2013’, YouTube video, username: ZeitgeistMinds, May 20, 2013.

  3.Ibid.

  4.William Ferroggiaro, ‘The U.S. and the Genocide in Rwanda 1994’, The National Security Archive, March 24, 2004, nsarchive2.gwu.edu.

  5.Russell Smith, ‘The impact of hate media in Rwanda’, BBC, December 3, 2003, news.bbc.co.uk.

  6.Keith Harmon Snow, ‘Pentagon Satellite Photos: New Revelations Concerning “The Rwandan Genocide”’, Global Research, April 11, 2012, globalresearch.ca.

  7.Keith Harmon Snow, ‘Pentagon Produces Satellite Photos Of 1994 Rwanda Genocide’, Conscious Being, April 2012, consciousbeingalliance.com.

  8.Florence Hartmann and Ed Vulliamy, ‘How Britain and the US decided to abandon Srebrenica to its fate’, Observer, July 4, 2015, theguardian.com.

  9.‘Srebrenica: The Days of Slaughter’, New York Times, October 29, 1995, nytimes.com.

10.Ishaan Tharoor, ‘The Destruction of a Nation: Syria’s War Revealed in Satellite Imagery’, Time, March 15, 2013, world.time.com.

11.Samantha Power, ‘Bystanders to Genocide’, Atlantic, September 2001, theatlantic.com.

12.Ofeiba Quist-Arcton, ‘Text Messages Used to Incite Violence in Kenya’, NPR, February 20, 2008, npr.org.

13.Jan H. Pierskalla and Florian M. Hollenbach, ‘Technology and Collective Action: The Effect of Cell Phone Coverage on Political Violence in Africa’, American Political Science Review 107:2 (May 2013).

14.Michael Palmer, ‘Data is the New Oil’, blog post, ANA, November 2006, ana.blogs.com.

15.‘The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data’, Economist, May 6, 2017, economist.com.

16.David Reid, ‘Mastercard’s boss just told a Saudi audience that “data is the new oil”’, CNBC, October 24, 2017, cnbc.com.

17.Stephen Kerr MP, Kevin Brennan MP, debate on ‘Leaving the EU: Data Protection’, October 12, 2017, transcript.

18.Palmer, ‘Data is the New Oil’.

19.For details of imperial classification and forced naming, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

20.Arundhati Roy, ‘The End of Imagination’, Guardian, August 1, 1998, theguardian.com.

21.Sandia National Laboratories, ‘Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant’, report, SAND92-1382 / UC-721, page F-49, available at wipp.energy.gov.

22.And into Eternity … Communication over 10000s of Years: How Will We Tell our Children’s Children Where the Nuclear Waste is?, Zeitschrift für Semiotik (in German), Berlin: Deutschen Gesellschaft für Semiotik 6:3 (1984).

23.Michael Madsen, dir., Into Eternity, Films Transit International, 2010.

24.See Rocky Flats Nuclear Guardianship project, ‘Nuclear Guardianship Ethic statement’, 1990, rev. 2011, rockyflatsnuclearguardianship.org.