About the DEW Project
We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.
In 1968, Marshall McLuhan, or rather his son Eric, started publishing the DEW-Line Newsletter out of Madison Avenue as a series of cultural “probes” intended to provide foresight to marketing executives and business leaders about the far future and newly emerging impacts of media technology.
The newsletter only lasted a few years. If it had appeared in Mad Men, the partners and creatives at Sterling Cooper would have tossed it aside, suspecting DEW was just an expensive, largely incomprehensible, or “put-on” product poking fun at advertising agencies.1 The McLuhan newsletter’s choice of namesakes was a bit odd, too.
The DEW Line was an overbuilt, cutting-edge technological system designed without the foresight that it would quickly become obsolete.
The Distant Early Warning Line was a network of 63 radar stations spanning the Arctic Circle from Alaska to Greenland. Built by the US and Canada a few years ahead of NORAD’s formation, between 1955 and 1957, most were located in Canada.
By 1963, twenty-one DEW sites had been decommissioned and abandoned.
Why? DEW aimed to detect Soviet bombers coming over the North Pole. In the 60s, the threat model had shifted to ICBMs and nuclear submarines. Half the Canadian DEW sites were abandoned only five years after the massive project was completed.2
The idea and phrasing of a “distant early warning” takes hold of the imagination. It sounds oracular. However, the actual, unfolding Cold War history behind it contains this shadow-truth: The DEW Line was an overbuilt, cutting-edge technological system designed without the foresight that it would quickly become obsolete.
Only by standing aside from any phenomenon and taking an overview can you discover its operative principles and lines of force.
The Book of Probes
McLuhan would (and may well) have appreciated this duality. His claim that artists (and Canadians, or anyone at the periphery) are often the first to register the experience of technological change implicitly makes the point: technologists are often the last to understand what they are doing and how it will play out.
At the same time, and for the same reasons, McLuhan felt “The Arts” as an established institution is always one technology behind. Institutions necessarily live in the past. Nobody lives in the future, but sensitively attuned individuals catch what is novel, changing, or being lost from the world. They do us all a service by holding it up for scrutiny now, and sooner rather than later.
These are the kinds of things I want to explore here — the signals I want to send out and listen for — under the auspices of the DEW Project at distantearly.com. If you would like to contribute, do get in touch.
(Not Just) My Personal Notebook
I picked up the distantearly.com domain back around 2014-15, when I was following OSINT — about a decade before it gained wider popularity and awareness. Then events shifted, and much that has happened since then became more or less inevitable in that moment. Now I want to ask what futures we’re living through today, and what of the past is still reverberating through us, especially from unexpected perspectives and indirect sources.
“The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.”
Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories
As George Steiner pointed out, also in McLuhan’s era, Western societies have chosen to open doors that can’t be closed, and to see and know things that may not be possible to fully comprehend. Of course, once it’s opened, Pandora’s jar can’t be closed again.3
Later, in Grammars of Creation, Steiner suggested the late arrival of the future tense in human languages as the moment humanity gained the grammar necessary for speculative thought, planning, and hope.
The perils and hubris of planning how to best meet (let alone control) the future are best faced seriously and also not-seriously, which is also to say, humbly. For Steiner, the ability to discuss possible events, such as those occurring “the day after one’s funeral,” is unique to Homo sapiens and central to human creativity. “AI” is incapable of gallows humour. Jean Baudrillard intended something similar when he wrote, “The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.”
Only healthy human laughter can follow a joke that works at the expense of our own existence and egos. It is a kind of subaltern signal, a samizdat that gets under the wire. So distantearly.com begins as a lone signal emitter listening and waiting for return signals that are not echoes.
—Dan Knauss
Notes
- McLuhan and one of his most famous axioms — “The medium is the message” — do appear in an early Mad Men episode. Joan, the Sterling Cooper HWIC, uses it to indirectly explain that having her deliver Peggy news of her promotion expresses how the men view the women as having their own status hierarchy, entirely below the men. ↩︎
- The DEW Line remained in operation until the mid-to-late 1980s when it was replaced with unmanned sites — the North Warning System — and the messes left behind from the original project were remediated. Next up is the Arctic Over-the-Horizon Radar (A-OTHR) system. ↩︎
- “We cannot turn back… we shall, I expect, open the last door in the castle… because opening doors is the tragic merit of our identity.” In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (1971). ↩︎