Avian Sparks; States of Surveillance; Bureaucracy, Security, Europe
Pumpkin Dispatch
Greetings, Pilgrims,
It’s that time of year ‘round here: on some days, if you look up (and people rarely look up, I don’t hunt but deer stands work because deer rarely look up, either, make what you will of that) you may see huge flocks of seabirds, a thousand miles or more depending on direction from saltwater, coming down the great central flyways from their summer homes on Hudson Bay and the glacial lakes that stretch from the Great Lakes all the way to the Arctic Ocean, now crowding whatever patch of water they can find in the middle of the continent, including impoundments built biologically yesterday by the Army Corps of Engineers for flood control, like the reservoir near my house, and when the atmospheric pressure is just right and the bugs that are not yet dead because we haven’t yet had a frost swarm a hundred yards or less off the deck the birds, hungry from the wearying miles, fly over haute bourgeois homes and gardens, swirling and eating, only rarely crying out, and the people below do not look up to see the beauty of arctic white plumage, lit like sparks rising by the setting sun, against the cloudless Midwest sky.
The birds are in transit; the opportunity does not last long; the weather shifts. We had such a day a few days back. A few years back, on a really good day, I made a rough film, swirling through traffic, through my sunroof, random Eurotrash music playing. Found art: Blue White Yellow. I think it works, as something, and hope you like.
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States of Surveillance: Ethnographies of New Technologies in Policing and Justice, Maya Avis, Daniel Marciniak, Maria Sapignoli, eds., is out from Routledge. The book is what is known in the academy as an “edited volume,” i.e., different scholars contribute chapters, often based upon papers given at conferences. Rephrased, conferences often give rise to books. Mark Maguire and I (mostly Mark, tbh) wrote Chapter 8, Machine Learning and artificial intelligence in counterterrorism: the "realities" of security practitioners and technologists. It’s open access (thank you Max Planck), so you can read it online for free.
I think we made some serious points about the limitations on thinking in commercial/regulatory discourse. Mark and I tell a specific story, but our story is perhaps more interesting as a typical example of the strange combination of policy, jurisdiction, and hucksterism in which contemporary bureaucracies operate, and so where we find ourselves. The sale of machine learning systems for X, say counterterrorism, to the responsible bureaucrats doesn’t differ much from the sale of analogous systems for Y, say literacy education, to different responsibility bureaucrats, perhaps university administrators. Ho hum. No doubt we are getting better and better, despite our blinders. Right.
If you are in security, defense, computing, or design circles, and like the piece, please send to your networks.
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On a recent morning I awoke to a text from Europe, from a dear friend and a brilliant jurist en route to from Berlin to an argument at the Hague, who wrote to tell me he has been listening to the audiobook of Maguire & Westbrook, Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern. I was, of course, delighted to hear from him, and commended his good taste.
I’m not going to quote a WhatsApp message, and it’s hard to convey the charm with which my friend expresses himself, but to simplify: he suggests that there is something very American in the book’s argument that bureaucracies are rational, help to organize social life, and so are not that bad, on balance. In Europe, he says, such an argument would be unnecessary. Social democracy has turned nearly everyone into a bureaucrat of sorts, and so Europeans naturally think they are doing good things, and things for the good. But, my friend gracefully says, maybe he is overstating, the book is quite interesting, and congratulations.
There’s some truth in the familiar frames. Surely Europe presents itself vis-à-vis the United States as a place with more law, more social welfare, and therefore more bureaucrats. And, of course, morally superior. Conversely, the United States sees itself as the land of the free, and is somewhat embarrassed by its social welfare, extensive law, and its plethora of bureaucrats. And, of course, richer, more powerful, maybe more consequential. Here as often, there is a reason for clichés.
Turning to Getting Through Security itself, however, a different picture emerges. For starters, my coauthor, Mark Maguire, is European, indeed excessively Irish, a teller of lilting tales more or less right with multiple meanings, undercurrents of laughter and violence and of course sex, and maybe I need another? From Berlin or even Brussels or the Hague, however, Dublin might be seen as halfway to New York. Also, my continental friend was responding to early chapters, the framing: bureaucracy and particularly the bureaucracies that concern themselves with physical security in public infrastructure are set up as problems, about which we have things to say.
And maybe it is important to say some hard things. Despite my old friend’s claim that Europeans have faith in bureaucratic rationality, the political center, European social democracy, is in deep trouble in country after country, not just but much as the political establishment in the United States is in deep trouble. My friend is certainly a man of the center, as am I in many ways, and so it is painful to watch today’s politics on either side of the pond. The citizens of many European countries are demonstrably not content with their governance. I hate using the left/right spectrum, but for now, the right has gained great strength, and the far left some strength, at the expense of the center. Polarization, we call it in the Trump era, but it’s really not just an American thing. Much of what remains as the center has endured by coopting positions once taken by the far right, and by playing on fear of the far right, especially in Germany for obvious reasons. And note that the analysis is national: the European Union has lost a great deal of authority, too, not just among populists, but among Member State governments. Amidst such unhappiness, contentment with contemporary political arrangements and policies can do little to legitimate bureaucratic institutions and methods.
Getting Through Security is about, well, security. It is in fact a rough draft of, notes toward, a philosophy of security. And Europeans, so badly burned, have not really thought seriously about security in a few generations. I am exaggerating, of course, but not by much. Internally, social democracy worked pretty well and populations were content. Economies were growing, and that helped as long as it lasted. Sometimes students rioted or train workers went on strike for shorter hours and longer vacations, but next to civil wars, revolutions, invasions, these were ripples, trivial annoyances. Most of the time, La dolce vita. War had been outlawed and was, besides, the responsibility of those barbaric Americans. I remember.
Europeans, thinking about social democracy, accessible education and “free” health care and the like, may be inclined to think of bureaucracy as the structured milk of human kindness under modern circumstances, good people doing good things, sensibly and collectively. As a teacher said to me, “law is love in large numbers.” True enough, but it is also true that bureaucracy organizes violence in modern technocratic societies, brings the ostensibly rational and blood lust together, to the point of ignition. Consider the team of operators, trained killers, on call in every major airport. This unseemly conjunction of rationality and violence is central to novels like Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse Five. That is why “the best and brightest” is a terrifying phrase, and the point of Eichmann in Jerusalem. Rational indeed. But the Europeans, in their long postwar sleep, have avoided serious engagement with such questions. Leave it to Americans, with their McNamaras and their Rumsfelds. In Europe, bureaucracy is good because our policy is good. Right. This is too simple, of course, but I am painting with a broad brush, in dark colors.
After Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and other violent expressions of whatever it is Russia is doing, after the migration crises, the widespread domestic unrest, various forms of more or less Islamist violence, the possibility of US withdrawal, Israel unleashed amid undoubted barbarism incubated under UN auspices, and so forth, security finally has bubbled up in the European consciousness. Some years ago, during the first Trump campaign, I asked some young university students: what happens if Trump wins, and the US pulls out, ceases to be the hegemon it is so easy for you to hate? What are you going to do? Give Putin what he wants (after the annexation of Crimea)? Urge the Germans to rearm? Build your own military? All of this will cost money, a lot of money, and paying for real muscle will get in the way of long trips to disco islands with nude beaches and raves that don’t start till after midnight. Sorry, it sucks to be you. Now celebrity English historian Ferguson is calling on the Germans to rearm themselves, which he admits is bizarre. Speaking as a kid born at the Fulda Gap, with a Social Democratic and paratrooper and Harvard Law lineage, if you live long enough, you will see most everything. And so here we are, back with fellow Hamburger Helmut Schmitt and my late grandmother, staring down the Russians, stationing weapons and smoking unfiltered cigarettes. Wondrous. I should take up smoking.
In the academy, of course, smoking, much less sympathy for the violent expressions of the state, spear chuckers, is strictly verboten. European generally, and academic generally, sympathy for bureaucracy does not extend to the bureaucratic organization of violence.
But things get more complicated still. Our thinking about bureaucracy, especially as rationalization, reflects Weber’s articulation of what modernity meant, perhaps the most influential effort to put a finger on why the next, the promises made by progress, were so disappointing. We were so advanced, and yet ever more unhappy. Weber argued that modernity, largely bureaucracy, replaced magic with rationality. We were disenchanted, if perhaps ruefully wiser. But ruefully, and so unhappy.
There is a great deal of truth here, and much wrong too, but for present purposes it suffices to note that Weber’s formulation flatters the (German) state and its officials, and by extension the university that was about to eviscerate itself on Hitler’s altar. Weber didn’t live to see his putatively rational state spin into madness, his beloved university prostate itself, although he thought about charismatic leaders. After the fact, thought, the idea that bureaucracies are “rational” is at best a formule de politesse, at worst profoundly dangerous, echoed in our own day by seemingly banal calls to trust the science, the therapist, the DEI expert, and the AI huckster. Makes one want to reach for the bottle and the Glock. Not to be unkind.
In our work, bureaucracies, and bureaucrats, are often uncertain, placed in unwinnable situations, frustrated by peers, struggling for but often unable to achieve legitimacy much less confidence – the list goes on. Weber was brilliant, and on a closer read, rightly troubled. But the “Weber” and so “bureaucracy” we imagine hardly describes the institutions that we have, or their predicaments, and therefore we have no image of our rulers. Is it any wonder so many people, across the North Atlantic, have withdrawn the mandate of heaven?
At the same time, the reach of power and the scale of the social make bureaucracy inevitable, at least this side of the apocalypse. Any large polity has its mandarins. William the Conqueror wins and takes a census. And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. Given the scale of our collective lives, and the brute fact of enormous power, something like bureaucracy cannot be avoided. But there is no reason to believe, with my European friends and family, that acknowledging the necessity of government through collectivities of mostly well-meaning middling minds solves anything much. The problem is to engage bureaucracy as it is, even as it might be, but not to assume its rationality and make our peace. Adding violence to the mix only makes the problem more dramatic. But the problem that the establishment does not want to confront, and the so-called populists are struggling to confront, is that we do not have a modernity that commands our loyalty, much less love. And at some deep level, that is the problem that Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern tries to confront.
Mark and I reacquired the audio rights, and we are serializing the audiobook. You can listen for free. Vincent Parlato is doing brilliant original music for each part, and you should listen even if you don’t stick around for the text. He is also mixing the sound, and seems to have a day job, so the segments appear from time to time. So far:
Getting Through Security Part Three
Getting Through Security Part Two
Getting Through Security Part One
Welcome to fall, and safe travels.
— David A. Westbrook