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The Future by Committee
The Collective "Wisdom" of the U.S. Intelligence Community
By Tom Engelhardt
They call themselves the U.S. "Intelligence Community," or the IC. If you include the office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which in 2005 began as a crew of 12 people, including its director, and by 2008 had already grown to a staff of 1,750, there are 17 members (adding up to an alphabet soup of acronyms including the CIA, the NSA, and the DIA). The IC spends something like $70 billion of your taxpayer dollars annually, mostly in secret, hires staggering numbers of private contractors from various warrior corporations to lend a hand, sucks up communications of every sort across the planet, runs a drone air force, monitors satellites galore, builds its agencies multi-billion-dollar headquarters and storage facilities, and does all of this, ostensibly, to provide the president and the rest of the government with the best information imaginable on what's happening in the world and what dangers the United States faces.
Since 9/11, expansion has been the name of its game, as the leading intelligence agencies gained ever more power, prestige, and the big bucks, while wrapping themselves in an unprecedented blanket of secrecy. Typically, in the final days of the Obama administration, the National Security Agency was given yet more leeway to share the warrantless data it scoops up worldwide (including from American citizens) with ever more members of the IC.
And oh yes, in the weeks leading up to the inauguration of Donald Trump, several of those intelligence outfits found themselves in a knock-down, drag-out barroom brawl with our new tweeter-in-chief (who has begun threatening to downsize parts of the IC) over the possible Russian hacking of an American election and his relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the process, they have received regular media plaudits for their crucial importance to all of us, our security and safety, along with tweeted curses from the then-president-elect.
Let me lay my own cards on the table here. Based on the relatively little we can know about the information the Intelligence Community has been delivering to the president and his people in these years, I've never been particularly impressed with its work. Again, given what's available to judge from, it seems as if, despite its size, reach, money, and power, the IC has been caught "off-guard" by developments in our world with startling regularity and might be thought of as something closer to an "un-intelligence machine." It's always been my suspicion that, if a group of smart, out-of-the-box thinkers were let loose on purely open-source material, the U.S. government might actually end up with a far more accurate view of our world and how it works, not to speak of what dangers lie in store for us.
There's just one problem in saying such things. In an era when the secrecy around the Intelligence Community has only grown and those leaking information from it have been prosecuted with a fierceness unprecedented in our history, we out here in what passes for the world don't have much of a way to judge the value of the "product" it produces.
There is, however, one modest exception to this rule. Every four years, before a newly elected president enters the Oval Office, the National Intelligence Council, or NIC, which bills itself as "the IC's center for long-term strategic analysis," produces just such a document. The NIC is largely staffed from the IC (evidently in significant measure from the CIA), presents "senior policymakers with coordinated views of the entire Intelligence Community, including National Intelligence Estimates," and does other classified work of various sorts.
Still, proudly and with some fanfare, it makes public one lengthy document quadrennially for any of us to read. Until now, that report has gone by the name of Global Trends with a futuristic year attached. The previous one, its fifth, made public just before Barack Obama's second term in office, was Global Trends 2030. This one would have been the 2035 edition, had the NIC not decided to drop that futuristic year for what it calls fear of "false precision" (though projections of developments to 2035 are still part of the text). Instead, the sixth edition arrives as Global Trends: The Paradox of Progress, an anodyne phrase whose meaning is summarized this way: "The achievements of the industrial and information ages are shaping a world to come that is both more dangerous and richer with opportunity than ever before. Whether promise or peril prevails will turn on the choices of humankind." According to the NIC, in producing such documents its role is to identify "key drivers and developments likely to shape world events a couple of decades into the future" for the incoming president and his people.
Think of Global Trends as another example of how the American world of intelligence has expanded in these years. Starting relatively modestly in 1997, the IC decided to go where no intelligence outfit had previously gone and plant its flag in the future. Chalk that up as a bold decision, since the future might be thought of as the most democratic as well as least penetrable of time frames. After all, any one of us is free to venture there any time we choose without either financing or staff. It's also a place where you can't embed spies, you can't gather communications from across the planet, you can't bug the phones or hack into the emails of world leaders, no drones can fly, and there are no satellite images to study or interpret. Historically, until the NIC decided to make the future its property, it had largely been left to visionaries and kooks, dreamers and sci-fi writers -- people, in short, with a penchant for thinking outside the box.
In these years, however, in the heartland of the world's "sole superpower," the urge to control and surveil everything grew to monumental proportions leading the IC directly into the future in the only way it knew how to do anything: monumentally. As a result, the new Global Trends boasts about the size and reach of the operation that produced it. Its team "visited more than 35 countries and one territory, soliciting ideas and feedback from over 2,500 people around the world from all walks of life."
As its massive acknowledgements section makes clear, along with all the unnamed officials and staff who did the basic work and many people who were consulted but could not be identified, the staff talked to everyone from a former prime minister and two foreign ministers to an ambassador and a sci-fi writer, not to mention "senior officials and strategists worldwide... hundreds of natural and social scientists, thought leaders, religious figures, business and industry representatives, diplomats, development experts, and women, youth, and civil society organizations around the world."
The NIC's two-year intelligence voyage into a universe that, by definition, must remain unknown to us all, even made "extensive use of analytic simulations -- employing teams of experts to represent key international actors -- to explore the future trajectories for regions of the world, the international order, the security environment, and the global economy." In other words, to produce this unclassified report on how, according to NIC Chairman Gregory Treverton, "the NIC is thinking about the future," it mounted a major intelligence operation that -- though no figures are offered -- must have cost millions of dollars. In the hands of the IC, the future like the present is, it seems, an endlessly expensive proposition.
A Grim Future Offset By Cheer
If you're now thinking about tossing your Ray Bradbury, Ursula Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, and Octavia Butler novels into the trash bin of history and diving into the newest Global Trends, then I've done you an enormous favor. I've already read it for you. And let me assure you that, unlike William Gibson's "discovery" of cyberspace in his futuristic novel Neuromancer, the NIC's document uncovers nothing in the future that hasn't already been clearly identified in the present and isn't obvious to you and just about everyone else on the planet. Perhaps Global Trends' greatest achievement is to transform that future into a reading experience so mind-numbing that it was my own vale of tears. A completely typical sentence: "The most powerful actors of the future will be states, groups, and individuals who can leverage material capabilities, relationships, and information in a more rapid, integrated, and adaptive mode than in generations past."
Admittedly, every now and then you stumble across a genuinely interesting stat or fact that catches your attention ("one in every 112 persons in the world is a refugee, an internally displaced person, or an asylum seeker") and, on rare occasions, the odd thought stops you momentarily. Generally, though, the future as imagined by the wordsmiths of the IC is a slog, a kind of living nightmare of groupthink.
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