The Locus of Command

PSA 013

Have you ever used GPS to get you to the gas station, and then on the way you find yourself taking some seriously weird route, passing right by other gas stations that you probably could have gotten to easier, but the algorithm was guiding you blindly towards its perfectly, algorithmically located gas station, using its perfectly, algorithmically calculated route? Focus on how angry and helpless that made you feel for a second. That happened because the decision maker for that route you took wasn’t entirely you.

Whoever decides what your choice-architecture is owns your programming. The commander who blindly accepts his staff’s decision support matrix is fighting their fight, not his. But how many DSMs exist in your life? IPSS-A tells you how to take leave, your S1 administers that system and cannot change it. MAVEN tells you how to target, your targeting warrant generally explains what it says. AFATDS tells you if you fire a mission or not… how many times have you clearly been able to fire a shot but had to override the AFATDS solution to do it? Before that option was built into the software you couldn’t even do that. The fire missions we shoot can only be AFATDS fire missions. GENESIS doesn’t even let soldiers enlist anymore, whereas we once had recruiters making the call, now ultimately there can only be GENESIS soldiers.

Clinton Ignatov brilliantly looks at nature of agency in this piece that I HIGHLY recommend.

Locus of Convergence

On personal agency-

Is the larger ecological system comprising my “choice architecture” (to use the contemporary euphamism for behaviourist Skinner-boxes) on-top of me? Or am I on top of it?

If you’ve read any modern books of contemporary, scientifically-derived motivational psychology or behavioral economics or commercial “app” “UX” design, you understand my lament for the “meat robot” conception of the human individual.

This is a deep question that we don’t often ask ourselves, likely because there may not be a single person in title 10 organizations who could change skinner-box that is on top of them. There is no viable way for units to control the acquisition process that brings the equipment we use to them, the establishment of AFC demonstrates. How much of how we fight is determined by the equipment we use?

Clinton hits on who or for our purposes, what, is driving our choice architecture.

I get the term “convergence” from the title and topic of a very-popular book in media studies, Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins. Writing early about the transmedia landscape of today’s ubiquitous pop-fiction “universes,” Jenkins highlights how each individual fans who are immersed in cross-references between multiple, overlapping media are easier controlled and left-guessing than audiences of traditional discrete media.

He’s talking about the convergence of content: how it is a fictional world is made more eminent by arriving through multiple portals. This is something that Disney has achieved with its theme-parks and board-books for decades, as Baudrillard well knew.

The insight here is in the convergence of algorithms and processes that are subtly steering thinking in our hyper-cyberized world. When commanders had less process and less machinery driving processes (like computers) they had larger mental latitude to visualize possibilities, thus they could see decisions and understand impacts in ways that we are growing blind to, as we have discussed here in the past.

PSA 007.5

On the locus of convergence-

What results is the digital twin, which I discussed with former McLuhan Centre Director Derrick de Kerckhove. When Facebook has access to my contacts and my location and begins finding events for me to attend, I’m not even the one doing the planning any more. A locus of agency begins to form, to converge, about me which is outhingstside of me. A parallel executive functioning—a foreign prefrontal cortex—employs a stead pressure of soft-power to overtake the one inside my own skull.

Now hold that up relative to the convergent movement that Jenkins prescribes, that of fictional universes which come at us from all angles. Our bodies become the center of convergence of fictional worlds at the same time as our real world ceases to converge therein. Just as rapidly as fantasy takes us over, reality recedes.

That is not how perception works. Perception works by slow, deliberate, conscious training. It works by learning. Habituating. Graphic artists spend hours with pencils drawing ovals and circles and arcs and lines over and over and over for months at the start of their training. They must do this until they can begin seeing the world in these forms, so as to capture them in a single, automatic gesture. The automation of perceptive gesture comes with practice.

This is why you can’t just “take off” the digital twin when you never put it on to begin with—it always was you. You’d have to start the long process of learning to live without it as would a child who never had it to begin with.

The convergence of data today makes the COP more eminent than the actual battlefield by arriving to a commander through multiple unseen portals. It’s not a single assessment, as you once had from a staffer. With systems like TITAN or MAVEN it is multiple data streams brought together through extra-human means. Your relation to the environment can be limited by the data the COP feeds you and the DSM produced by your staff or an algorithm.

When the locus of convergence grows beyond the capacity of the commander at echelon, the locus of agency quickly diminishes. At a certain threshold, the data he is bombarded with becomes consuming. That locus of agency may as well be a locus of command, and you’ve got serious issues if it is limited. Likewise, you can create serious issues by limiting it elsewhere. Without controlling that convergence, the locus of command is lost.

The impacts of uncontrolled convergence-

Services allow your calendar to be filled up automatically by appointments. Events are recalled to you. Your shopping purchases are recommended and incentivized by personalized ads and discounts, all calibrated according to data gathered by reward-points cards. What you’ll watch, what local events you’ll know about, and whose personal-life you’ll be informed of is increasingly decided outside of yourself. You sit back, resonating node, experiencing your identity rather than being it.

The sync matrix quickly becomes an EXCHECK or a step action drill. I remember watching so many units producing syncmats with timelines on them by hour rather than by event. They naturally drifted towards this because it’s the only way you can make all of your planned activities fit cleanly together... If you don’t, you run into situations where you have to decide what to decide on, rather than focusing on making a unit act when a planning threshold has been met.

This stems from a glut of data and our very poor ways of understanding it. Data compounded on top of data, mediated by algorithms, spreads out decisions beyond the scope of a commander’s capacity to understand on a meaningful level. TITAN removes decisions. This can be beneficial to targeting, but imposes on our ability to see beyond the target, or the act of targeting.

The commander’s ability to make decisions is the most important aspect of modern warfare, both on the battlefield and off, and our blind reliance on technology and process is quickly and imperceptibly slipping away. As our ability to automate data collection and processing increases the speed that those decisions can be made, our ability to find and make the right decisions decreases. We continue to down the road of technologization, and that road is now an expressway. The faster you go down that expressway, the more narrow and fixed your focus is on what is exactly ahead of you... but rarely to the sides.

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle! (the other half is violence)