#militarisms

[projectivespaces]

How Disabled People Get Exploited to Build the Technology of War

The cutting-edge products that Big Tech and the Pentagon are developing could be rebuilding an untold number of lives. Instead, they’re bein

In 2015, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, which is often referred to as the Department of Defense’s “mad science division,” adapted a flight simulator so a woman named Jan Scheuermann, who is paralyzed due to a neurodegenerative condition, could fly an F-35 fighter jet using only her mind—and the probes they implanted in her motor cortex. Scheuermann is a self-described “cutting-edge brain-computer interface lab rat” for DARPA’s Revolutionizing Prosthetics program, which in 2006 began “to expand prosthetic arm options for today’s wounded warriors.”

The Revolutionizing Prosthetics program consisted of two separate projects: the LUKE arm system, which, at $250,000, carries the distinction of being “the world’s most expensive prosthetic arm,” and the Modular Prosthetic Limb, which was “designed primarily as a research tool.” For a prosthetic with an unknown life span, it is not surprising LUKE hasn’t gained much adoption even from the self-pay amputee elite. Such experimental equipment is decades away from acceptance in a draconian insurance system that has demonstrated intractable commitment to gatekeeping technological advancements from most disabled people until they are no longer effective, relevant, or desirable.

But once researchers realized they could detach the LUKE arm from its human operator, they began working on a new plan to integrate “militarized ver­­sions of these terminal devices onto mobile-robotics platforms, making them efficient enough that human operators won’t have to go into the hazardous zones themselves.” Years on, that is where this technology has found its use: in “small robotic systems used by the military to manipulate unexploded ordnance.” [...]

The story of how we got here is a tangled one, one that tracks back over a century of history. But we may as well begin with Microsoft, which, despite its well-documented toxic culture, has long believed itself to be uniquely equipped to “provide Corporate America with a blueprint” for disability inclusion best practices. “In 2015, Microsoft published an inclusive design tool kit that has since become a bible for inclusive design. The tool kit has been downloaded more than 2 million times’’ and has been used to shape such products as its HoloLens augmented reality/virtual reality headset, which was announced that same year.

Not long after the Microsoft HoloLens Development Edition was made available, the Israel Defense Forces tweeted it was “using the … Hololens to bring augmented reality to the battlefield.” Microsoft’s subsequent $22 billion contract with the Department of Defense to supply the U.S. Army with more than 120,000 headsets extended the disabled use case to “the killer use case.” [...]

The 2019 deal was a follow-up to the initial phase of the project, during which Microsoft supplied DARPA’s Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology, or N3, program with the HoloLens so the agency could create “brain interfaces for able-bodied warfighters.” Up until this point, DARPA had claimed it was “focused on technologies for warfighters who have returned home with disabilities of the body or brain.” But suddenly, DARPA’s focus had shifted away from disabled vets, and N3 was now using “cooking as a proxy for unfamiliar, more complex tasks, such as battlefield medical procedures, military equipment sustainment, and co-piloting aircraft,” to develop the HoloLens for war.

In 2023, Microsoft addended its Inclusive Design Toolkit with an Inclusive Design for Cognition Guidebook that somehow also managed to propose cooking as a method to identify “what cognitive demands are being asked of the user.” This means it’s not just N3 as the program, Inclusive Design as the methodology, and HoloLens as the technology. The way developers used cooking—a common household task—as their use-case exemplar fairly explicitly put disability, writ large, at the heart of their work: an unimpeachably “feel-good” north star to follow.

This was no accident: Here, the illuminated connections between disability and warfare run deep—in well over a century of history, including the global conflicts that shaped our world. Cooking as a measure of cognition has roots in occupational therapy, a rehabilitative health care practice that was legitimized during World War I, when that era’s new weapons of war—such as poison gas and flamethrowers—didn’t necessarily kill soldiers but sent them home permanently disabled. At the time, O.T. broke down leisure activities into cognitive, motor, and neurological components that could be rehabilitated under the supervision of health care practitioners.

By the 1970s, the focus on leisure activities shifted, and occupational therapists started focusing on the “activities of daily living” that people would encounter in their lives. A small room in one of the formative occupational therapy clinics, which was housed at Johns Hopkins University, was converted into a kitchen where patients could prepare and cook food. According to Kathryn Kaufman, manager of inpatient therapy services in the Johns Hopkins Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, “We got away from the task-based activities to occupy a person’s time and started integrating interventions to address the areas that patients needed to get back to their lives.”

Those task-based activities derived from the Arts and Crafts movement, which conveniently brought resolution to a conundrum that asylums were facing at the turn of the twentieth century. The Enlightenment’s “moral treatment” approach to therapy tasked public patients with maintaining the asylum grounds because “work was believed to help patients develop self-control and boost their self-esteem.” These institutions couldn’t possibly compel private patients to engage in the labor of maintaining the facilities they were paying for, so curative workshops that housed “crafts such as weaving, carpentry, and basketry were introduced into asylums” for wealthy patients.

[projectivespaces]

computer protest & sabotage

a map of computer protests and sabotage

The late 1960s and early 1970s were pivotal years in the history of computing technology. But they were also pivotal years for what one contemporary writer called "the technology of computer destruction." [...]

News reports regularly depicted these computer-related protests as crimes of passion. Since computers connoted order and rationality, it seemed that maladjusted students had chosen these machines to vent their disorderly and irrational urges. Upon inspection, however, these computer-related protests exhibit the same two principal causes as the majority of campus protests at the time: the Vietnam War and racial injustice. [...]

Whether it was through a bombing or a sit-in or a rally, students used computers—and the university's immense ideological and capital investment in computing—to advance agendas of anti-racism, anti-imperialism, and student control of higher education.

[projectivespaces]

Rows of mammoth springs made from three-inch diameter steel support the NORAD buildings. More than 900 of the springs, weighing 1,000 pounds each, cushion the buildings and their contents against jarring nuclear blasts or earthquakes. Working with the springs are the hydraulic dampers seen in the row at right. Like automobile shock absorbers, the dampers would reduce oscillations caused by a shock wave.

Inside NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain Combat Center, c.1966

[projectivespaces]

Command and Control: Capitalism and Computation

Capitalism, a system as inescapable as breathless news items about Trump, Musk and decay, came into its own during the age of steam power, t

Digital computation’s first assignment was performing the subtle calculations physicists such as Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam needed to bring the thermonuclear devices of their fevered dreams to irradiated life. From that beginning, brighter than a thousand suns, the age of command and control fully took shape with the creation of systems such as the US Air Force’s Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) [...] The SAGE system was built to create a method and infrastructure for gathering data from far flung sources and coordinating a response to what its numerous displays told people in Strategic Air Command facilities. This military purpose provided the foundation, metaphor and philosophy shaping the uses of systems that eventually came online such as commercial mainframe computers, client server architectures and what is known as ‘cloud computing.’ [...] The common goal – the thematic bridge from SAGE to business intelligence – is data gathering and analysis which, as an objective in abstract, is not at all sinister. Every society and every social organization, no matter how large or small, needs to understand its environment, collect information and act upon what is learned. Just as SAGE applied that methodology to the task of nuclear war (which, outside of the insane circles running the world to ruin, is no one’s idea of a good use case) corporations apply it to maximizing profit. In the capitalist world, we are data points to be ingested, analyzed and optimized via something called KPIs.