Remembering the Space Age. - Black Vault Radio Network (BVRN)

a SeCoNd Nature rISINg:
SpaCeFLIght IN aN era oF repreSeNtatIoN
195
Brand saw post-industrial capitalism, rooted in Cold War knowledge and
technological practices, as the means to transport counterculture values into the
large society and to invigorate enlightenment beliefs in the individual as the
measure of all things—one instance of how the global construct emerging in
the 1970s provided a home for seemingly contrary belief systems, for the megamachine,
and for its fundamental transformation. 25 the distinctive feature of
the u.S. style of empire was to perform that very confation—to conjoin the
enlightenment heritage of abstract universals with an actual, rubber-meetsthe-road
total global everywhere-ness of state and market actors. Courtesy
of space-based capabilities, idealism and practice now confronted each other
literally everywhere. this twist on old colonial and imperial modalities gave
rise to diferent and nuanced intersections of the local and global—as suggested
by Kingsolver’s view from southwestern Virginia—whether as sites of contrast
and diference, of acceptance or rejection, or of absorption and transformation—
whether of music, flm, television, hamburgers, or IMaX space adventures.
IN the era oF repreSeNtatIoN, tWo eXaMpLeS:
gpS aNd IrIdIuM
Let’s shake this mix of semiotics, capitalism, spacefight, the global and the
local, and consider a couple of examples. In public discourse on globalization,
capitalism—restless, u.S. and european-centric, with asia on the rise—has
drawn the most attention. But the u.S. military, as already inferred, has played
an essential part, creating seemingly strange linkages between national security
and a rampant transnational consumer culture. Consider the example of the
global positioning System (gpS), a network of satellites designed and operated
by the u.S. air Force (uSaF). Conceived in the early 1970s and only becoming
fully operational in 1995, gpS’s history straddled the Cold War and its marketoriented
aftermath. the system provided a soldier, ship, airplane, or missile
with information on their exact position anyplace on the planet via signals
encoded with highly accurate time data, its profound efects symbolized by its
use in guiding “smart” bombs and missiles with deadly, precise accuracy in the
post-September 11 conficts in afghanistan and Iraq. 26 In recent years, satellite
photographic images of these “smart” actions have been a staple of television
news and are widely available on the Internet. 27
25. Fred turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the
Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago, IL: university of Chicago press, 2006).
26. a useful account of gpS to 1995 is Scott pace, et al., The Global Positioning System: Assessing
National Policies, Mr-614-oStp (Santa Monica, Ca: raNd Corporation, 1995).
27. as one example, see this “before and after” account of a strike in afghanistan from the
aerospace Corporation: http://www.aero.org/publications/crosslink/summer2002/05.html (accessed
on February 10, 2008).