News Gloss

Real collaboration

This "advertocumentary" for giant US military contractors, and their expensive new collaborative systems, was on the PBS show "Innovation: life, inspired". It's about war, specifically about the invasion of Iraq, so it should have been "death, inspired".

The show included details about the new "non-hiearchical" approach to US military operations, letting soldiers see each other on the battleground, and coordinate their efforts, using network technology.

Of course, this technology doesn't let soldiers coordinate a rebellion against the war itself. It's only "non-hierarchical" in certain ways.

The US government understands "divide and conquer" quite well, because they use it on their own military. The show included soldiers saying "war is hell", and obviously they don't want to be there. But five soldiers can't desert effectively. If 50,000 of them decided to quit at once ... using their collaborative systems ... now that would be an interesting movie.

posted by Greg Bryant @ 9:58 PM