In this post I will use Paul N. Edwards work A Vast Machine (the title of this post is shamelessly lifted from his writing) to further an argument that I will take form within this blog: that the urban, sub-urban and/or rural- Is an interwoven complex technology. A synthetic machine and computer that encrypted all that it can sense regardless of the controllers intentions

Before our contemporary information system had eaten the world, or even prior to it being recognisable as a machine, computers were ‘people with pencils’ that involved a lot of moving parts. ‘Data are things’[4], and these things are not abstract. It is easy to forget this within our current pipelines and inter-play bubbles. Whether cancelling, trolling, hyping and so on, these systems make archives that ‘interface between one data process and another—collecting, recording, transmitting, receiving, correcting, storing—[having] a cost in time, effort, and potential error: data friction’.

This is a result of the need to forecast- to create certain uncertainties. ‘Information systems transform data (among other things) into information and knowledge’ that need to be worked on cooperatively. There had been ‘a theoretical tradition known as dynamical meteorology [that] had been slowly developing in Europe and the United States ever since William Ferrell’s work on general circulation in the 1850s’, advanced after the beginning of the twentieth century by a ‘resolution of the three-way split between forecasting, theoretical meteorology, and empirical climatology’.

View of the Blue Hill Observatory in 1897 Probably taken by William Eddy - Original published in "Century Magazine"

After 1914 “weather began to be perceived and used differently.”[5] A cease in international sharing of data exchange due to the outbreak of war meant meteoro- logical resources increased in density. The observation networks intensified on all sides, as there was a need for a ‘vastly augmented weather service’: ‘With the outbreak of World War I, the United States, like other combatant nations, scrambled to train new forecasters. The US Army Signal Service and the Blue Hill Observatory (near Boston) trained several hundred metorologists during the war, in crash courses of a few months’ duration’. Meaning that many climate scientists, such as Bjerknes, turned away from theoretical research to be involved in forecasting.

This was a shift in effort toward a complete statistical machine that is logistically entwined with both the educational and military industrial complex of each Nation-State it was constructed for. Leading to numerous accelerated advancements in the technology and science of forecasting.

Bjergen Synoptic School. Internet Archive/Public Domain

In 1917 Bjerknes returned to Norway (at the invitation of his own government) and built his own meteorological Institute. It’s from what became known as the Bergen school, that collaborators[6] redefined concepts of forecasting and weather prediction; most notable of the discoveries was the finding of a way to ‘visualize weather as the collision and conflict of discontinuous “masses” of air’[7], a process of discovery that Edwards goes into great depth. This produced the notion of the “polar front”: a single major surface of discontinuity where cold polar air collided with the warmer air of lower latitudes.

An image from the 1951 Compendium of Meteorology showing front activity, based on Bjerknes’ model. Internet Archive/Public Domain

An increasing friction and pressure for a globally active sensor network reshaped both upper air and ground networks. Known generally as intelligence, it was the start of the creation of something that could only be dreamed of by those who worked in the community of scientists and mathematicians. One such dream was that of the forecast factory of English mathematician Lewis Fry.

Location map of weather stations that received information from vessels within the areas of the circles. Bjerknes 1928.

In order to be able to effectively forecast - nations had to share their data and therefore pool local network efforts. Despite any ongoing territorial dispute/ arrangement, they share one planet through an infrastructure of sensing protocols. A simplistic statement of a complex truth.

Reference

1.  H. M. Collins, Artificial Experts: Social Knowledge and Intelligent Machines (MIT_
   Press, 1990);
2. Collins, “ Humans, Machines, and the Structure of Knowledge, ” Stanford Humanities Review 4, no. 2 (1995): 67 – 83
3. R. M. Friedman, Appropriating the Weather: Vilhelm Bjerknes and the Construction of a Modern Meteorology (Cornell University Press, 1989).
4. Including his son Jacob, Tor Bergeron, and Halvor Solberg.