TODAY.”Lavender” Where’s Daddy” -Sweet euphemisms for a dehumanized, grotesquely technologized future in “the Cloud”
It’s not really new. It has always been part of the playful little-boy mentality of the clever men who design weapons. Think of “Little Boy” – the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima, and the less fun-named “Fat Man” plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
Perhaps, for the servicemen actually dropping those bombs, the fun names might have helped to ease them in any anxiety about killing many thousands of civilians – children, women and men.
Well, no need for servicemen to worry like that nowadays. With Artificial Intelligence making the kill decisions, no human need feel any guilt.
So – why do they bother with the cute sweet names?
Well, apart from the little-boy mentality of the weapons designers, there is the very much more important reason – to deceive the public, to obfuscate, cover-up, veil, the horror of the new AI weaponry. And where better to hide things these days, than in the cloud?
I’ve written before about the cloud. It’s such a light, pretty, concept. Just wafting away into the never-never – nothing to worry about, nothing for mere mortals to try to understand. Leave it to the grown-up little boys to work out what to do with the cloud, and the new cute war toys too.
The cloud is, of course, an ever-increasing set of dirty great data “farms” (another cutesy word) around the world – large areas on land, not in the sky, with huge steel containers, with servers and computers guzzling electricity and water.
There is nothing vague about these things, except for the language used.
“Lavender” – an accurate name would be “Finder for Kill Victims “
“Where’s Daddy” – an accurate name would be “Tracker for Killing Location”
George Orwell would be delighted with this 21st Century obfuscating language. He warned us about vague and meaningless language intended to hide the truth rather than express it.
And – it’s not as if these automatic killing systems are just being perfected so that the evil Hamas can be defeated. There’s another purpose for using them in Gaza . They’re a practise run for trying out this merchandise – a lucrative industry for Israel for the future: –
“intelligent” weapons proven effective in Gaza were major attractions when Israel marketed them last month at the Singapore Airshow, East Asia’s biggest arms bazaar”.
No comments yet.
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 
Leave a comment