Big Data/Operation Condor

[alice malice]

More to consider:

Project Cybersyn and the origins of the Big Data nation.

Project Cybersyn can also be viewed as a dispatch from the future.
These days, business publications and technology conferences endlessly
celebrate real-time dynamic planning, the widespread deployment of
tiny but powerful sensors, and, above all, Big Data—an infinitely
elastic concept that, according to some inexorable but yet unnamed law
of technological progress, packs twice as much ambiguity in the same
two words as it did the year before. In many respects, Beer’s
cybernetic dream has finally come true: the virtue of collecting and
analyzing information in real time is an article of faith shared by
corporations and governments alike.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine


On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 7:05 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
> Was the use of IBM by Nazis, technically, "Big Data"? I don't think
> so, though the term as Wiki notes here, is an all-encompassing one:
> "Big data is an all-encompassing term for any collection of data sets
> so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using
> traditional data processing applications"; it seems a stretch to call
> the Nazi use of IBM  big data.
>
> It was Big Science, again from Wiki, here is a definition: "Big
> science is a term used by scientists and historians of science to
> describe a series of changes in science which occurred in industrial
> nations during and after World War II, as scientific progress
> increasingly came to rely on large-scale projects usually funded by
> national governments or groups of governments", but not, what we call
> Big Data.
>
>
>
> On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 5:58 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
> <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>>
>> The dark side of Big Data goes further back in time.
>>
>> Although one shouldn't overemphasize the aspect - most victims were not
>> murdered in camps -, it must be said that the IBM supported punch card
>> system - on which Kubrick's 2001 possibly alludes -  played an important
>> role in the Holocaust.
>>
>> That's what the tattooed numbers were needed for.
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
>>
>>> ... Black also asserts that a "secret deal" was made between Heidinger and
>>> Watson during the latter's visit to Germany which allowed Dehomag commercial
>>> powers outside of Germany, enabling the "now Nazified" company to
>>> "circumvent and supplant" various national subsidiaries and licensees by
>>> "soliciting and delivering punch card solution technology directly to IBM
>>> customers in those territories." As a result, Nazi Germany soon became the
>>> second most important customer of IBM after the lucrative US market, Black
>>> notes.The 1933 census, with design help and tabulation services provided by
>>> IBM through its German subsidiary, proved to be pivotal to the Nazis in
>>> their efforts to identify, isolate, and ultimately destroy the country's
>>> Jewish minority. Machine-tabulated census data greatly expanded the
>>> estimated number of Jews in Germany by identifying individuals with only one
>>> or a few Jewish ancestors. Previous estimates of 400,000 to 600,000 were
>>> abandoned for a new estimate of 2 million Jews in the nation of 65 million.
>> As the Nazi war machine occupied successive nations of Europe, capitulation
>> was followed by a census of the population of each subjugated nation, with
>> an eye to the identification and isolation of Jews and Gypsies. These census
>> operations were intimately intertwined with technology and cards supplied by
>> IBM's German and new Polish subsidiaries, which were awarded specific sales
>> territories in Poland by decision of the New York office following Germany's
>> successful Blitzkrieg invasion. Data generated by means of counting and
>> alphabetization equipment supplied by IBM through its German and other
>> national subsidiaries was instrumental in the efforts of the German
>> government to concentrate and ultimately destroy ethnic Jewish populations
>> across Europe, Black demonstrates. Black reports that every Nazi
>> concentration camp maintained its own Hollerith-Abteilung (Hollerith
>> Department), assigned with keeping tabs on inmates through use of IBM's
>> punchcard technology. In his book, Black charges that "without IBM's
>> machinery, continuing upkeep and service, as well as the supply of punch
>> cards, whether located on-site or off-site, Hitler's camps could have never
>> managed the numbers they did." ... <
>>
>>
>> On 29.10.2014 15:32, Thomas Eckhardt wrote:
>>
>> Yet another link from the "Nation" with interesting information loosely
>> related to various aspects of BE:
>>
>> http://www.thenation.com/blog/185017/anti-socialist-origins-big-data
>>
>> On "computerized intelligence systems, including software" provided to South
>> American dictatorships by the U.S.:
>>
>> 'The information being handled by this equipment might not have been “big
>> data,” but the idea was the same: to gather real-time intelligence from as
>> many sources as possible, analyze it, act as quickly and in as coordinated a
>> manner as possible, and then store it for future use. These upgrades allowed
>> intelligence agencies, either working in tandem through Condor or
>> individually, to kill or disappear more than 100,000 Latin American citizens
>> and torture maybe an equal number.'
>>
>> An exaggeration of the importance of the software, I suspect, but
>> interesting nevertheless.
>>
>> Thomas
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>
>>
>>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l