Facts & Frictions: QMN003

The Quartermaster Newsletter, Friday, 26 April: Back on target.

FACTS AND FRICTIONS (today’s report is a five minute read)

K.S. here. One of the things I think about regularly are friction points – which I'll describe in a minute – and how they relate to physical security, urban planning, and, more and more often, communication, efficacy, and efficiency in the workplace. For the purposes of this article, we'll define friction points as any object, rule/regulation, or idea that either slows or stops the flow of movement towards an objective. Friction points can be fixed features, as in the case of poorly-planned, narrow sidewalks that inefficiently funnel traffic, or they can be fluid, like people inattentively walking down these same sidewalks, creating additional obstacles. As metaphysical items, they can come in the form of over-regulation, cultures of micromanagement, or outdated mental maps that influence policy, planning, and leadership.

In business, friction points hamper productivity, stall growth, and punish initiative. When it comes to physical friction points in an office, you can usually count on communications to be the major offender when it comes to creating friction: the wrong people know the wrong things, systems intended to create clarity and accountability become overwhelmed, and opacity replaces transparency. Miscommunication – like every friction point – eventually calcifies: it becomes such an accepted feature of a company's culture that employees – at least the ones who want to survive long enough to get to happy hour every night – begin to create workarounds: methods and hacks of bypassing friction points, whether it's storing three copies of documents that they only need one of, setting up their own internal communications network, or finding some other method to overcome the juggernaut of inefficiency that prevents them from doing their job.

Outside of the office, friction points ultimately represent a chink in society's armor: a soft spot, a threat to the actual well-being of a city and its citizenry. As the size of a city increases, so do its friction points. In Manhattan, you need only step outside to take stock of New York City's vast number of friction points. The range from gridlock in Times Square to disconnected communication in police operations to a disparity in width between avenues (north-south) and streets (east-west), particularly in Midtown. Harmless, if annoying, right? No. Not harmless at all.

Why might something like the latter be troublesome? Because it creates large stoppages of people in busy intersections, physically locked into street corners, leaving them an incredibly soft target to events like the terrorist attack that took place on Halloween in 2017 killing 8 and injuring 15 or the attack in Times Square earlier that year by a deranged man who killed an 18-year-old tourist when he drove his car into 23 people. That the city has responded by putting up large concrete blocks – more friction points – in high traffic areas speaks less to a cohesive anti-terrorist strategy than it does to a lack of imagination: likely the result of internal frictions that prevent those tasked with securing this city from red-teaming worst-case-scenarios and preparing accordingly. That, mind you, is a single example. Beneath the city and connecting four of the five boroughs is the subway system, whose history over the last 30 years is nothing but friction points wrought by decades of wear and tear coupled with technological obsolescence and political power struggles... all paid for by riders who tiredly move from overcrowded trains onto crowded trains. There's absolutely nothing preventing an attack like the ones executed against the Tokyo Underground in 1995, as evidenced by the bombing which took place at the Port Authority/Times Square Subway station last November. In that case, three received minor injuries, but the incident illustrates the potential for total havoc, especially given that in 2016, some 5.7 million people rode the subway every day.

Unfortunately, friction points tend to calcify over time: all one can really do is to be aware of – and prepare yourself for – them, not add to them, and seek roads less traveled when it comes to navigating your social and physical terrain and geography. You might hold out the hope that in identifying and naming them – and you should always identify and name bullshit wherever it's encountered, even if it’s to yourself – you might succeed in raising the awareness of one or two people... but don't count on it: you'll likely just run into more friction.

PLAN & REHEARSE: Fort Bragg cut power for thousands to test ‘real-world reactions’ to a cyber-attack Power was out for over 12 hours. “This exercise was not announced in order to replicate likely real-world reactions by everyone directly associated with the installation. In today’s world, cyber-attacks are very likely. This exercise is exactly what we needed to do to identify our vulnerabilities and work to improve our security and deployment posture.”(BJM)

EXTENDED INTELLIGENCE: Forget About Artificial Intelligence, Extended Intelligence is the Future (4 min) An interesting take on the Singlularity in Wired. “While one of the key drivers of science is to elegantly explain the complex and increase our ability to understand, we must also remember what Albert Einstein said: ‘Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.’ We need to embrace the unknowability – the irreducibility – of the real world that artists, biologists and those who work in the messy world of liberal arts and humanities are familiar and comfortable with.” (KSA)

GRAVEYARD OF ‘GOOD’ IDEAS: Cheetos Lip Balm, New Coke Among the 50 Worst Product Flops of All Time (25 min) You’ve gotta wonder about the thought process of the person who thought that the world would embrace Life Savers Soda. Some of these were simply poorly timed or quickly overshadowed: Friendster, after all, paved the way for MySpace, which catalyzed social media when Facebook was still aimed squarely at the college demographic. (KSA)

AUTOMATED SUPERVISION: How Amazon automatically tracks and fires warehouse workers for ‘productivity’ (3 min) Is being fired by a robot that much worse than being fired by a person? “The documents also show a deeply automated tracking and termination process. ‘Amazon’s system tracks the rates of each individual associate’s productivity,’ according to the letter, ‘and automatically generates any warnings or terminations regarding quality or productivity without input from supervisors.’”(BJM)

PRIVACY ACT: Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5 Billion by F.T.C. Over Privacy Issues (3 min))“The agency, which is charged with overseeing deceptive and unfair business practices, is riding a wave of anti-tech sentiment as questions about how tech companies have contributed to misinformation, election meddling and data privacy problems have stacked up.” Although the sum far exceeds the F.T.C.’s biggest fine – $22M levied against Google – it’s a drop in the bucket against Facebook’s 2018 estimated value of $138B… and unlikely to catalyze real change. (KSA)

We submit today’s report with thanks to Chris Sauceda and Dylan Goff for actionable feedback on approach. Two good dudes who can be forgiven for their choice of branches.

Remarks Complete. Nothing Follows.

KS Anthony (KSA) & Brady Moore (BJM)