Geography's Quantitative Revolutions: Edward A. Ackerman and the Cold War Origins of Big Data
168
Geography's Quantitative Revolutions: Edward A. Ackerman and the Cold War Origins of Big Data
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Overview
Do you have a smartphone? Billions of people on the planet now navigate their daily lives with the kind of advanced Global Positioning System capabilities once reserved for the most secretive elements of America’s military-industrial complex. But when so many people have access to the most powerful technologies humanity has ever devised for the precise determination of geographical coordinates, do we still need a specialized field of knowledge called geography?
Just as big data and artificial intelligence promise to automate occupations ranging from customer service and truck driving to stock trading and financial analysis, our age of algorithmic efficiency seems to eliminate the need for humans who call themselves geographers—at the precise moment when engaging with information about the peoples, places, and environments of a diverse world is more popular than ever before. How did we get here? This book traces the recent history of geography, information, and technology through the biography of Edward A. Ackerman, an important but forgotten figure in geography’s “quantitative revolution.” It argues that Ackerman’s work helped encode the hidden logics of a distorted philosophical heritage—a dangerous, cybernetic form of thought known as militant neo-Kantianism—into the network architectures of today’s pervasive worlds of surveillance capitalism.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781949199109 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | West Virginia University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 168 |
| File size: | 715 KB |
About the Author
Elvin Wyly is a professor of geography and chair of the Urban Studies Coordinating Committee at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and former editor in chief of the journal Urban Geography.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Ackerman's Frontier
Consider three quotes on matters of geography, technology, and communications, separated by more than half a century:
Urban technology is the new frontier, a space into which big business is entering: after defence, health care, telecommunications and utilities, the management of our cities is being altered by digital and bio-technologies — touted by the World Economic Forum ... as the fourth industrial revolution.
* * *
I regret to say that my Lowell Institute lectures, "The Art of Coercion," have never been printed, and exist at the moment only in manuscript form. Although the first lecture, "The Theory and Practice of Blackmail," received considerable circulation in an earlier period, it is not now available for distribution. I hope in the near future to remedy this situation and will send you a copy of that lecture, at least, when possible.
* * *
The scientific revolution we have been going through is being accompanied by a revolution of rationalism in our economic structure. Indeed, it has been called a "second Industrial Revolution," with effects already very profound for all humankind. Industrial engineering years ago removed the individual decision making of the artisan. "Cybernation," or systems design and engineering, are now rapidly moving individuality from "middle management" decision. This development is part of the social problem of automation. Not least, systems design and engineering, through the nation's defense program, is having a dominant role in domestic political affairs and international relations. Research approaches have even been made toward understanding the process of human thought itself.
The first quote comes from an editorial in the fall of 2016 by Richard Shearmur, then editor-in-chief of Urban Geography, providing an update on the latest "technophilic" discourses of Google, Cisco, Uber, Airbnb, and the other corporations of contemporary digital disruption. Shearmur exposes the deep contradictions of urban technology lobbyists who demand that governments "get out of the way" in terms of regulation while aggressively harvesting public resources through R&D investments and pressuring governments to pay as clients of utopian "fourth-revolution" big data services and incessant updates. For technology companies, cities are now viewed as "untapped zones of extraction," while intensified neoliberal marketization and shrinkage of the public realm drives the consolidation of what Andy Merrifield diagnoses as "parasitic capitalism."
The second quote is from a letter written in April 1963 by Daniel Ellsberg, intelligence analyst inside the RAND Corporation defense think tank. A few years after he wrote this short, perfunctory letter — you wonder, how many of those requests did he have to reply to back in those days before email? — Ellsberg famously leaked the Defense Department's massive internal study of the impossibility of winning the Vietnam War. The New York Times' publication of the Pentagon Papers changed the U.S. presidency, set in motion key elements of what came to be known as Watergate, and exposed some of the most horrid details of American imperialism. Ellsberg has written a lot over the years, but if you want to see his most recent thoughts, you can visit the website maintained by his son (www.ellsberg.net), or you can follow him on Twitter at @DanielEllsberg.
The third quote comes from one of the key figures of the "newest 'new geography' of the twentieth century," who has now been almost entirely forgotten: Edward A. Ackerman. This is from a published version of a talk he gave to the Association of American Geographers in September 1963. Do you see the typo in his quote? To be sure, systems engineering and the Greek kubernetes, "steersman" of Norbert Wiener's "theory of messages," is fundamentally about dynamism, change, motion, and acceleration — and in that sense, cybernetics is indeed about "moving individuality." But that's not what Ackerman had in mind. He meant removing individuality.
We could dismiss this typo as nothing more than a trivial error. But Ackerman was a legendary editor, and his friend and commanding officer Edward Ullman was constantly reminding him that attention to detail could win or lose a war: "Good editing, I still think, is about the highest level work in OSS," Ullman once wrote about their work together in the Office of Strategic Services. Thus we can learn something if we pause to consider what this copyediting error means in the context of geographical knowledge production in 1963. One aspect of that context involves the mundane mechanics of the writing process. We know that the typo was a product of (mistaken) human action of some sort — a misreading or a few omitted keystrokes by his typist, followed by a human proofreading error by Ackerman himself. Today we'd also need to consider the more-than-human possibilities of auto-correct, spell check, grammar check, or the speech-recognition algorithms that have become part of the cybernation of human communication practices.
A second aspect of the context of 1963 involves the grand scientific narrative Ackerman was presenting for his audience at the Awards Banquet session of the Fifty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, in Denver, Colorado, on September 4. Ackerman was appointed as honorary president of the association, and his presidential address was a panoramic manifesto for geography's role in the stunning scientific advances and possibilities that were then so clear. His lecture, "Where Is a Research Frontier?," began with a review of the twentieth century's achievements — the revelation of more than a billion galaxies in the universe, the general theory of relativity, the splitting of the atom, space orbit, the discovery of the biochemical processes of heredity, "the developments in engineering made possible by the Manhattan Project" — before considering the more modest contributions of geography. The cybernation passage appears in a section titled "Systems Methods Are Changing Society," where Ackerman advocates General Systems Theory as a means of unifying geography's focus on a central purpose: "nothing less than an understanding of the vast, interacting system comprising all humanity and its natural environment on the surface of the earth." Only a few lines later he speaks of "understanding the process of human thought itself," mentions the scientific advances of "manipulating some aspects of society, like consumer demands, in a more or less controlled fashion," and portrays a variegated yet unmistakable process of "rationalization" across the United States, Europe, Japan, and the Soviet Union.
In this short book, I analyze geography's quantitative revolutions — past and present — through the ideas of Edward Ackerman, especially his wildly ambitious Frontier lecture. This purpose, I admit, may seem like an esoteric digression from the urgency of "now" that shapes our present worlds of geographical theory, technology, and practice. In what Geoffrey Martin once sardonically labeled "that now receding genre in American geography, the history of geographic thought," few geographers today even remember Ackerman, and most outside the field who do remember him are unaware that he was a geographer. Ackerman is even more obscure than his wartime boss, Richard Hartshorne. Hartshorne was once among the most influential and widely read geographers in America, but not too many years later, the endless reissues, revisions, reflections, and remixes of his masterwork The Nature of Geography had become scriptural orthodoxy — always dutifully cited but never really read or used in any significant way, what Peter Gould once savaged as "authoritarianism without authority." Today, "Hartshorne" is only a proper noun, a keyword for a historical reference point rather than a theorist to be studied — although the exceptions can be quite revealing: Hartshorne remains part of "The Essence of Geography" in the syllabus for Geog 571, "Intelligence Analysis, Cultural Geography, and Homeland Security," a required course for the Geospatial Intelligence option of Penn State's Online Master of GIS Program.
Ackerman's Frontier was just one of more than fifty presidential addresses to one association (self-identified geographers) in one place (the United States) in one era (the twentieth century after the Second World War). His talk was one among the twenty-three agenda-setting presidential talks officially classified as "History and Philosophy of Geography" manifestos. Why, then, should we pay attention to Ackerman's speech? One justification is scholarly and genealogical. Ackerman is formally acknowledged in the literature as "one of the first geographers to point to the rise of systems research throughout the scientific world after World War II." Before that, however, Ackerman played an early, central role in the reconceptualization of a fundamental geographical concept — the region — as the scholarly priorities of academic geography changed with the development of America's military-industrial complex. If we accept the judgments of the science historian George Dyson, who identifies the nuclear computational breakthroughs of 1945 as the birth of a new "universe of self-replicating code" and militaristic cybernetic logics that connects today's everyday practices of Google searches and Twitter feeds with the cognitive-computational worlds envisioned by Alan Turing, then Ackerman merits serious consideration as a counterpart for the field of geography. Ackerman also lived through a maelstrom of professional and personal dramas that shaped the institutional position of the discipline in this crucial period. Revisiting Ackerman's life and work therefore helps us to recover forgotten episodes from our field's histories: it's been quite a few years since Trevor Barnes began a historical analysis by citing Ron Johnston's lament that "the quantitative revolution is rapidly receding from human geography's institutional memory." Our literatures provide an important reflection of our struggles for the "heart and soul" of our discipline, for resources, and for the "hearts and minds" of colleagues, allies, and students.
A second set of justifications, however, is more immediate, contemporary, and mundane. Our present, taken-for-granted geographical worlds seem to fulfill Ackerman's remarks about "cybernation," the "social problem of automation," and the "research approaches" to "understanding the process of human thought itself." In a world where more than 215 billion emails are sent every day — and two-thirds of users worldwide access their email with a mobile device — why should we waste our time reading the typographical errors of a long-dead geographer? Why are you spending your time reading my reflections on Ackerman's speculations on the "rationalizing" scientific management of consumer desires and public opinion, when you could just swipe a thumb to join more than a billion daily active users who use a mobile device to access Facebook, where your news feed might very well enroll you into the latest algorithmically randomized control trial "61-million person experiment in social influence and political mobilization," or perhaps an experiment of socially networked "emotional contagion" that can occur even without your direct interaction or awareness? The dominant analytics firm ComScore, with their cheeky corporate motto "Precisely Everywhere," tells us that in one recent month Google Maps had 64.49 million unique visitors by mobile device and that Apple Maps had 42.07 million; about two-thirds of all smartphone users use mapping apps. These figures are only for the United States, reflecting the enduring American hegemony of the world's "data rich" landscapes of mapping and measurement, but don't they provide one kind of estimate of how many people today might be considered "geographers"? And then we smile at the thought of one Canadian delegate's reaction to that "gigantic" meeting in September 1963, when eight hundred geographers gathered over four days for a conference program featuring a hundred eighty paper presentations in the "sumptuous" new Denver Hilton Hotel.
One premise of my argument is that, simply put, the quantitative revolution won. Today we are living in a mobilized, revolutionary, and evolutionary quantification of a cybernetic geography that, in 1963, was just getting under way. The early 1960s are therefore an especially fertile era for us to study to understand our bewildering present. Our current revolution is moving individuality by the billions, and, thanks to all the algorithms, bots, and artificial intelligence advances, it is removing individuality as well. This is why I am obsessively reading and rereading Ackerman's 1963 presidential address. I wasn't there in Denver, and (except for a tiny and diminishing share of the human eyes that may read these words) neither were you. But we are living in a world mutated by the General Systems Theory that Ackerman was advocating. Our lives in today's "Data Revolution" are saturated with the all-too-familiar routines of a cybernetic existence. We line up at the self-check-out kiosks that are proliferating at so many retail stores. We talk to artificial intelligence voices when we call customer service lines. We stare at our smartphones rather than making eye contact with anyone nearby, and we prioritize our every waking moment according to the endless streams of emails, text messages, status updates, and tweets. We wander through Pokémon Go's addictive augmented realities. After we escape the retail self-check-out kiosks, we head to the airport and line up at the self-check-in kiosks for passport and biometric authentication. We are living embodiments of the "social problem of automation" that Ackerman foresaw. As capital and code augment, magnify, and then replace what human geographers do, we confront a paradox of a world where human geography is more popular than ever before — and where it is no longer clear what, if anything, we need human geographers to do.
I believe that human geography is more urgent than ever before, in an era of accelerating transformations of social relations and spatial structures. Human geography matters not because of the essence of a particular body of "external" spatial-scientific realities (more of which are coded and codified in robotic data-processing assemblages), but for the sake of generations past and present of deeply flawed humans struggling to understand our place in the world. This book is not, however, a sustained argument for human geography: I am in awe of dozens — no, hundreds — of lengthy, detailed disciplinary visions produced through the generations that are far more compelling than anything I could hope to produce. Instead, what is offered here is a brief strategic intervention within a field caught up in a period of dramatic, accelerating change. I will read Ackerman's Frontier to disentangle a set of (largely overlooked) continuities and ruptures of geographical thought over the past century. Today's sudden, explosive popularity of human geography threatens to replicate a particular kind of spatial knowledge implicated in the most dangerous combinations of capital, code, and coercion. My method involves a blend of Foucault's technique of "discursive instaurations" as applied to the historically and geographically situated "author function," Barnes's "geo-historiography" connecting "the history of the discipline's ideas with where they were produced and traveled," and Hartshorne's narration of the "life and times" of a text as a "bibliobiography." I'll outline a story in three parts. First, we'll explore how geography made Ackerman. Second, we'll study how Ackerman made geography — how he tried, and partly succeeded, in remaking the means and ends of geographical knowledge production. Third, we'll consider how his General Systems Theory has evolved into a pervasive yet unstable operating system for a networked society of coercive consumption, automated cybernetic social relations, and militarized spatialities of surveillance. Taken together, I show that the achievement of the 1963 Frontier vision entails a machinic, evolutionary erasure of human agency, subjectivity, labor, thought, and understanding.
I should add one more caveat. Daniel Ellsberg's "Art of Coercion" lectures are, in fact, easy to find on the internet. But the cursory letter I've quoted is the only Ellsberg correspondence I could find in the Ackerman archives. Sadly, we don't find any evidence of direct connections to Ackerman's Frontier. But my use of Ellsberg's words is more than clickbait. Ellsberg was working in the same evolving informational infrastructures that shaped Ackerman's thought, and we have the good fortune that Ellsberg has lived much longer than Ackerman — and has continued to excavate the lost and suppressed histories of America's military-industrial complex. In his most recent book, Ellsberg reveals that at the same time Ackerman was in Denver and D.C. advocating for an omniscient, rationalist cybernetic geography, Ellsberg had been traveling throughout the Pacific, visiting the airbases where nuclear-alert bombers were stationed, ready to receive launch codes. Meeting with base commanders and pilots, Ellsberg learned about a series of fatal dangers in the control systems for the massive attack fleet. Launch authority was widely delegated across geographical territories where communications outages would, under certain crisis conditions, almost certainly be perceived as evidence of a Soviet strike. There were no provisions for recalling planes launched in error, and indeed all safeguards were designed to prevent any reversal of an "Execute" order for nuclear attack. And all these decision points were implemented in an entrenched military culture encouraging bold, decisive action even in defiance of formal protocol. Ellsberg spoke with a major at a base in Kunsan, South Korea, with near-daily communications outages, and they discussed a scenario where international tensions or a report of a nuclear explosion somewhere in the western Pacific could lead a base commander to decide (in violation of explicit directives) to initiate a precautionary, first-stage launch of at least some of the bombers under his command. Ellsberg asked him what would happen next. The major replied,
Well, you know what the orders are. They go to a rendezvous area and fly around, waiting for further orders. They can do that for about an hour and still have enough fuel to get to their targets or to come back. If they don't get an Execute message, they're supposed to come back. Those are their orders.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Geography's Quantitative Revolutions"
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Table of Contents
PrefaceAcknowledgments
1. Ackerman’s Frontier
2. The Ackerman Sample
3. Contradictions of “Mental Structuring”
4. Militant Neo-Kantianism
5. The New Evolution of Geographic Thought?
6. Notes on Desk
Notes
Index