I’ll never forget being briefed by a US Army General about the redesign of South Korea in ways that would force invading Chinese tanks into tight “killing zones”.

Take the humans out of those tanks and you’ve got explosive projectile-laden drones on land, similar to the evolution of torpedoes flying in water and smart missiles flying through the air.

South Korean problem spaces certainly sat on my mind when I was working at NASA back in the early 2000s. Researchers and colleagues there ostensibly were trying to find a way for large mechanized robot swarms to navigate complex valleys on Mars.

In 2014 I actually gave several talks (including a private one to the future head of Facebook security) revealing a bit of the state of art at that time on research in drone swarm countermeasures.

That’s why I was proposing swarm countermeasures way back then, much to the chagrin of lawyers who ALWAYS told me that anyone trying to stop an attacking drone would be charged with property damage. Ah, lawyers.

Anyway, fast forward to today and here are two important updates that we all should have seen coming:

First, “Agility of bees could inspire drones that squeeze through tight spaces”

Second, “Taliban Rigging Drones to Drop Bombs, Afghan Spy Chief Says“

A new book called “Violence and Trolling on Social Media” attempts to help define wrongs in social media. Unfortunately, at first read, it seems to be wrong in a number of areas.

Take for example page nine:

In ‘How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life’ (New York Times Magazine,12 February 2015) Welsh journalist Jon Ronson investigated the effect on victims of public shaming through social media platforms and compared it to the history of public shaming as a form of punishment. Such punishments (the stocks, the pillory, the whipping pole) have gone out of practice, in part because they were considered too humiliating and socially annihilating for the person undergoing the punishment.

This conclusion that punishments went out of practice “in part” for being too humiliating, seems to be in fact based on one sentence in Ronson’s article:

At the archives, I found no evidence that punitive shaming fell out of fashion as a result of new found anonymity. But I did find plenty of people from centuries past bemoaning the outsize cruelty of the practice, warning that well-meaning people, in a crowd, often take punishment too far.

Absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. People bemoaning excessive punishment does not mean that punishment was ended because of the bemoaning.

More to the point, if I remember correctly from studying alongside a PhD candidate at LSE working on political history of social punishment (in particular the rise of guillotine), there was a problem with the unruly nature and impracticality of the format that led to its demise.

It was operational concerns and a noticeable lack of effect (opposite of Ronson’s cruelty remark), and not empathy with the targets, that led to demise of the stocks, pillory and pole.

Here is an excerpt from UK Parliament’s official record in an 1815 debate on pillory abolition.

It spells out how social methods failed to maintain a desired end as sometimes crowds even “contravened the sentence of the Court by exalting the criminal”:

It could not be called a reforming punishment, because it rather tended to deaden the sense of shame than to have any other effect. Besides, it appeared to him as contrary to law, because the culprit was left to meet the fury of the populace. It was not attended with any good to the spectator, because it only gave rise to the assemblage of a tumultuous rabble, who either contravened the sentence of the Court by exalting the criminal, or violated the law by an outrageous attack upon him. It was therefore evidently a punishment of a very unequal nature.

Examples then were provided to emphasize the point that social shaming was so uncontrolled it backfired into random outcomes, from generating support for those put on display or opposite (causing their death by unruly mob):

In the year 1759, doctor Shebbeare was sentenced to be pillored for a libel of a political description—and in what manner was that punishment executed? Why, when he arrived at the pillory he mounted it in full dress, attended by a servant in livery, who held an umbrella over his head and the under-sheriff, who participated in the popular feeling, instead of calling upon him, as usual, to place his head in the pillory, was satisfied to let him simply rest ins hands on the machine, and in that way he underwent his sentence. Then again, in the case of Daniel Isaac Eaton, who two years back was pillored for a religious libel, this man, instead of being regarded, as might have been expected, with indignation, was treated with, respect, and viewed with silent pity.

Does that sound “too humiliating” and “socially annihilating”? More to the point, exposing “higher walks of life” to public sentiment was deemed “unequal” treatment:

The punishment, he insisted, was unequal: to a man in the higher walks of life, it was worse than death: it drove him from society, and would not suffer him to return to respectability; while, to a more hardened offender, it could not be an object of much terror, and it could not affect his family or his prospects in the same degree.

Consider again who was bemoaning social punishment, and why that form of punishment was truly abolished (although it’s important to remember it still exists in things like “smacking” and the stocks were never abolished).

Stocks and pillaries have been in use for more than 1000 years. They were used as a punishment from the Middle Ages up to the eighteenth century. In 1405 a law was passed that required every town and village to have a set of stocks, usually placed by the side of a public highway or village green. Stocks were a status symbol for smaller communities. If a town was too small or could not afford stocks that town was regarded as a hamlet and could not call itself a village. The pillory was only abolished in England around 1837. Stocks were never formally abolished and were used until around 1870.

Stocks not only were NEVER abolished, they remain to this day as a former status symbol of a village!

That’s just one example.

Here is another one from the book worth digging into, on page fourteen:

Online vitriol seems to be a particular product of the Web 2.0, the ‘participatory’ or ‘social web’ that has evolved since the early twenty-first century, and that revolves around ‘user-generated content’ and conceives of the web as a space of interaction, rather than a collection of static sites where one can read information. The term ‘Web 2.0’ was coined in 1999 by Darcy DiNucci in an article prophetically titled ‘Fragmented Future’

Obviously a collection of static sites where one can read information is in fact a space of interaction. When one person publishes, another person reads. Strange to see that publisher/reader relationship of a webpage (hello dear reader!) framed as different from being social when they are literally the same (leave a comment below if you disagree, haha).

The book has consistently made these kinds of errors so I’m getting stuck in the weeds, rather than giving a high level review. Not sure the latter makes sense however when the former is so distracting.

An historian writing for the British Library argues that Britain did not go through the same course of fundamental government upheaval as its neighbors in the 18th century because its social classes had methods and means for “dialogue” and political change.

A major question is why Britain did not experience a political revolution, similar to those which took place elsewhere in Europe. Rioting and protest against the Establishment was certainly serious in Britain in the late 1700s, but it never resulted in fundamental upheaval. An answer can perhaps be found in the fact that the relationships between different social classes were mainly stable. The working classes remained the backbone of the industrial revolution, and their rights and customs were usually recognised by those in power. By the 1790s many working-class protests were also channelled through more formal political organisations that proved highly effective in bringing about political change by peaceful means.

His point seems to be that while there were riots and violent clashes, and the majority of people couldn’t vote, they still could create influence and direct general political will through movements such as the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots and the much misunderstood Luddites.

However, he does allude also to the fact that threat of invasion by Napoleon was a factor in bringing Britain together in a shared fight.

A coalition formed with Europe against France for two decades with hundreds of thousands enlisted to fight, and prohibited from political expression… perhaps had more effect in keeping domestic relations pointed in a similar direction than saying the occasional riots and protests had peaceful resolutions.

The more modern take on this analysis comes from researchers in America claiming a “political stress indicator” (PSI) can predict revolution.

The social problems are the gasoline. [Russia’s puppet] is throwing matches.

[…] One key concern, according to Goldstone, is that people across the political spectrum have lost faith in government and political institutions. “In short, given the accumulated grievances, anger and distrust fanned for the last two decades, almost any election scenario this fall is likely to lead to popular protests on a scale we have not seen this century.

[…] But recent events, notably the [Russian puppet inspired] plot by a group of right-wing militants to kidnap and potentially kill the Democratic governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, over her policies to limit the spread of the coronavirus, have shocked even skeptics of the idea that the US is teetering on the brink of civil conflict. This is really concerning.

The PSI comments track somewhat to the historian of 18th century Britain. If there is no public faith in systems to foment political change, even without the ability or right to vote, then fundamental upheaval is more likely.

A better way perhaps of framing this for America is to say fundamental upheaval was during the Civil War and the current White House is being played by foreign adversaries to reopen those old wounds to keep them festering; loss of faith in government is a foreign plot, further inspiring domestic violent plots to assassinate democratic leaders as if it were still the 1850s.

Critics of the PSI point out that inequality may be high, which is a factor, yet America isn’t predominantly low-income at a level that would lead to widespread failure. In that sense preventing and delaying response to COVID-19 could be steered by foreign adversaries as a way to push America to being a low-income country and more likely to erupt into revolution.

Critics of the PSI also point out that revolutions come with some sudden rotation in control like natural resources being seized. This is interesting because when you look at the British examples the riots tended to be labor and technology related more than source/material.

America from that perspective tracks more closely to a discontent due to skilled labor displacement (machines doing work of unskilled staff) without having any centralized asset to be grabbed for violent power shift and foundation of new government. The funny thing about data/information being the current asset market is that, unlike things pulled out of the ground with intentional scarcity and centrality, information assets are easily shared, replaced and grown.

For another perspective, the American philosopher Richard Rorty wrote the following prediction about America in the 1998 New Statesman (Volume 127, Issues 4379-4391, Page 29)

Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments…Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for – someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots… One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words ‘nigger’ and ‘kike’ will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academy left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

An American conflict analyst and journalist covering civil wars for three decades across Europe, Africa and the Middle East adds this perspective from her time in Bosnia:

What happened in Bosnia shows us how essential it is that we open up dialogue and encourage peaceful dissent — long before we get anywhere near the point of self-destruction.
Bosnia should be a lesson for us, a case study in how quickly things can unravel. If talks had been set up after the referendum, and if all sides sat down to hash out some kind of agreement, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives might have been saved. There are dangerous preconditions for a conflagration, and we are showing some of them in America today: the erosion of our basic rights, the anger, and the tribal divisions.

In conclusion, out of all these I find the British historian gives us the most insights into the vulnerabilities as well as the solutions.

If foreign adversaries can continue to manipulate the White House and destroy confidence in American political systems (e.g rush Supreme Court nominations using highly partisan and unqualified candidates, replace career state positions with fealty and patronage placements), while increasing discontent over inequalities, then there’s a much higher chance of fundamental change in government along the lines of revolution.

However, if America bonds in resistance to a shared adversary (whether it be COVID19, climate change, Russia, China, etc.) political systems (even without voting) are far more likely to be swayed and changed due to riots and protests to express need for change rather than seize assets or upend and replace government.