This document was originally funded by a small French firm based in McLean, and ultimately led to an invitation to address a national conference in the French Senate. Two individuals in France made an impression during a trip to the 1993 information industry conference there:
Henry Stiller, whose booth had a caption that begins this paper, roughly translated, “95% of the information that an enterprise needs can be acquired by honorable means.”
The other person, the head of the French steel association, inspired our realization that one must case a wide net when he spoke of the millions that the French steel industry spent to study competing steel industries around the world, only to completely miss the plastics industry which came in and quickly took away the very lucrative market for automotive underbody parts.
Electromagnetic pollution–in the form of both increased levels of uncontrolled and misunderstood levels of emission, and in the form of broader and more intense bandwidth exploitation–constitutes the technical terror of the 21st century.[1]
There is another terror facing us in that era as well, and it is the terror of human isolation, of human irrelevance, of human disorientation, of human surrender to the madness of rationality run amok.
In essence, we face the prospects of technical and biological burn-out in the cultural equivalent of the Ice Age. Has man lost the ability to create civilization? It is in this context that we must consider the role of INTERVAL and the high priests of INTERVAL….hence the title of my rant, “God, Man, and Information: Comments to INTERVAL In-House”.
As presented to the National Federation of Abstracting and Indexing Services in Washington, D.C.
EXTRACT
The Intelligence Community Was Built To Do Soviet Secrets
The reality is that the intelligence community, in its designs and methods, its collection and production management decisions, and its resource allocations, has been so totally structured for a single mission, the collection of intelligence about a closed society, the only closed society that represented a strategic nuclear threat of consequence, that its capabilities do not lend themselves to re-orientation to other targets, much less to rapid and constant re-orientation among differing targets sets over time.
It is as if we had built a Cadillac and a single superhighway connecting two points–Moscow and Washington—and all of a sudden find that we need three jeeps, ten motorcycles, and a hundred bicycles in order to handle our information requirements. The Cadillac does not lend itself to off-road movement, nor does it lend itself to multiple “minor” missions.
Let me pursue this from another angle, that of cybernetics. Effective decision-making and action comes from having good feed-back loops—not only lots of feed-back loops, out to various sensors or informants or sources of information in different areas of interest, but also efficient feed-back loops, in which the time between change of circumstance, report of change, and notice of change is kept to a minimum.
By imposing its rules of secrecy, the intelligence community is pre-ordaining a longer feed-back loop, a slower response time, and—in this era more often than not—the possibility that it does not even have access to the right source which is only available outside the classified arena.
This was written for and disseminated within OSS '93. It subsrequently was printed in the membership publication Society of Photo-Optical Engineers (Spring 1994).
Although pioneers like Herman Daly had already outlined Ecological Economics, and Paul Hawkin and others would eventually define “true cost” metrics that prohibit the externalization of costs to the public, this piece was the beginning of the “Smart Nation” line of reflection.
