xls117

Automatic Console , War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991) is a book by Manuel de Landa that traces the history of warfare and of technology. It is influenced in part by Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1978), and also reinterprets the concepts of war machines and the machinic phylum, introduced in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Deleuze & Guattari appreciated Foucault's definition of philosophy as a "tool box" that was to encourage thinking about new ideas. Thus, they themselves prepared the field for a reappropriation of their concepts, that is, a different use in another context of the "same" concept, which they also theorized under the name of "actualization". Manuel de Landa wisely takes advantage of the liberty these authors offered to draw on their concepts in order to investigate his field of studies: the history of warfare and technologies. Contents 1 A social history of technology and of warfare 2 Centralization and decentralization 3 Wargaming and Game Theory 4 See also 5 Source // A social history of technology and of warfare An invention always needs to be inserted in social practices to become an effective technological innovation. Deleuze and Guattari pointed out how the feudal assemblage was composed of three heterogeneous components: the stirrup, the lance and the knight . Technology is thus inserted in social practices, creating the specific war machine of each social formation. "Tactical integration of new weapons has always been a lengthy process. Rifled firearms, for example, were available to hunters and duelists for over a century before they found their way into the war machine. The tactics of most European armies were based on the volume of fire delivered rather than on the accuracy of individual shots." (p.170) Manuel de Landa thus describes how social and economic formations influence the war machine, i.e. the form of armies, according to each historical period. Quoting warfare historians, he thus shows, for example, how the Roman empire created a phalanx from a centralized state, a political form not characteristic of the Greek cities. Manuel de Landa draws on chaos theory to show how the biosphere reaches singularities (or bifurcations) which mark self-organization thresholds where emergent properties are displayed, and claims that the "mecanosphere", constituted by the machinic phylum, possesses similar qualities. Examples of such systems include the atmosphere, the solar system, plate tectonics, turbulent fluids, economics, and population growth. Quoting Fernand Braudel's meteorological metaphor to Machiavelli's Italy as a "low pressure area", de Landa shows for example how a certain level of population growth may induce invasions and others wars. Population thus reaches a specific point where it changes nature: just as a solid may be transformed into a liquid if it reaches a specific singularity, which had to be traced by endless trials in the early creation of alloys the point where two different metals, put together, become a new metal this tr ack has been refined by modern military engineers, who are supported by think tanks in their efforts. As a historian, Manuel de Landa is thus indebted to Fernand Braudel's Annales School and the study of long-scale historical phenomena, as opposed to human-scale phenomena. However, both authors are far from any technological determinism, which would read history as the linear succession of technological progress. Like Foucault's "archeology", Manuel de Landa's philosophy of technology leaves openings for various causal series which interfers together. But as in A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997), de Landa doesn't allow this perspective to justify any anthropocentrism conception of history, which would be centered on teleological progress. Thus, instead of opposing the man to the machine as in classic philosophy, he plays on the interactions between the war machines and the machinic phylum. For example, he writes: The machinic phylum, seen as technology's own internal dynamics and cutting edge, could still be seen shining through the brilliant civilian discoveries of the transistor and the integrated chip, which had liberated electronic circuit designs from the constraints on their possible complexity. But the military had already begun to tighten its grip on the evolution of the phylum, on the events happening at its cutting edge, channeling its forces but limiting its potential mutations (p.153). The next threshold point, or singularity, to be reached, according to de Landa, is the point where man and machine cease to oppose themselves, becoming one single war machine, and when that war machine itself is crossed by the machinic phylum this last condition might be compared to Deleuze's call for the desiring molecular machines to use the social machines, instead of being composed and manipulated in order to form a complex molar machines. The developments of artificial intelligence, which will sooner or later lead to the creation of "predatory machines", that is intelligent machines. Even if "the advent of [truly autonomous weapons] may be quite far in the future, the will to endow machines with predatory capabilities has been institutionalized in the [US] military" (p.128) warns de Landa. This disconnection of the war machines from the machinic phylum, of the military institution from the social formation, may result in erratic war machines that become nomads because o f a lack of political control: if battles are not strategically ordered following political objectives, then even their victories become meaningless. In this specific case, the positive feedback between the war machine and the machinic phylum is broken. Such positive feedback may be illustrated by the virtuous circle between the raising of taxes, which permits funding for the creation of professional armies, used in monarchs' wars with other heads of state, but also used to maintain public order, and thus favoritizes economic growth and supports the amelioration of current armies; a positive feedback seen by the mercantilism movement). But an army that loses its political goals is doomed to permanently remain on the move, following rivers in order to be able to survive off the territory it occupies: its sheer size forces it to nomadism. In this sense, nomadism may be considered as the failure of the war machine, which has become its own end in itself, disconnected from any s ocial needs and energies. However, de Landa's warning against a certain military conception of technology and of warfare is not presented at all as a prophecy that describes the future with fatalism . Like some other critical theorists, Manuel de Landa avoids the trap that would force one to choose between plain simple unilateral technological or economic determinism (as in vulgar Marxism) and liberal individualism, which denies the existence of ideology (a denegation that Althusser has demonstrated was itself ideologically founded). Science fiction may refer to this previsioned radical shift to autonomous warfare as a technological singularity, although de Landa would probably argue that this singularity or bifurcation is yet another emergent property of the biosphere, which has led to the creation of a "mecanosphere" centered on the machinic phylum. In yet another passage, Manuel de Landa writes: I defined the machinic phylum as the set of all the singularities at the onset of processes of self-organization the critical points in the flow of matter and energy, points at which these flows spontaneously acquire a new form or pattern. All these processes, involving elements as different as molecules, cells or termites, may be represented by a few mathematical models. Thus, because one and the same singularity may be said to trigger two very different self-organizing effects, the singularity is said to be 'mechanism independent' (p.132) If "a same singularity may be said to trigger two very different self-organizing effects", neither technophobia, as presented by Virilio's work, or technophilia are justified in themselves. Manuel de Landa demonstrates that de-centering history from a human perspective is not necessarily denying human freedom, opposing himself to those who would argue, for example, that Louis Althusser's explicit "antihumanism" and insistence on Ideological State Apparatuses (I.S.A.) instead of on the universal and individual subject would be a form of Marxism opposed to the Enlightenment's ideals. Centralization and decentralization According to de Landa, centralization and decentralization are two trends in the "war machine": either military commanders try to centralize command and control of each event on the battlefield, and get "human will out of the decision-making loop" or, to the contrary, they delegate responsibility to individual soldiers (e.g. platoons or the German mission-type tactics) in order to avoid "friction". "Friction", according to de Landa, is like "noise" too much undispersed friction blocks the war machine, which destroys itself. Thus, rather than waiting for friction to accumulate at the head of the control, command and communication center (C3), which is the case in centralized armies, decentralized war machines allow it to disperse itself at each level of the machine. The 1805 Jacquard loom, which used the holes punched in pasteboard punch cards to control the weaving of patterns in fabric, is the first example of a "migration" of human control to machines control, and marks the invention of software according to de Landa. Command and control techniques adapted by the German were then introduced in army arsenals by Frederick Taylor and extended to civilian society: "the imposition of military production methods into the civilian society was accompanied by the transfer of a whole command and control grid." (p.153) The...