Don’t silence me, bro!

There’s some more good news for those who have, by now, learnt to love bad news. Water cannons and tear gas shells are on their way out of the scene. TASERs and other stun guns will soon be antique pieces. Don’t get upset, or protest. I’ll tell you the good news I promised, for sure. It is about what they call the Silent Guardian. Even the much-celebrated Chinese torture techniques will look like squirt guns before the Grand Guardian.

The U.S. military equipment manufacturing giant Raytheon, the makers of Patriot missiles that got famous during Papa Bush’s Iraq war, has announced its new find. They are very particular about not calling it a ray gun. And as far as their claims go, this new Direct Energy Solution, which a layman would call a Direct Energy Weapon, is not designed to cause any permanent harm, but only to inflict pain and make people run away from places that the same people might want to walk to, or accidentally had stepped in to. The peace loving technological innovation is christened as Silent Guardian. But the message is quite vocal: Shut up and run.

In its final, field model, it will be a square transmitter that can be mounted on a defence vehicle. When activated, it’ll emit a microwave radiation that is tuned to the exact frequency to stimulate human nerve endings, to simulate the sensation of extreme pain. It can be effective up to half a mile of distance. According to Raytheon, the radiation penetrates only to the depth of 1/64^th of an inch, and thus wouldn’t leave any visible injuries on the victims. Don’t you think bloodless wars are going to be fun?

Daily Mail had a report on the equipment, a few weeks back. The reporter had seen, and experienced the effect, of a tabletop prototype of the weapon. He describes the sensation as equivalent to touching a red-hot wire, minus the burn injury. The field model mounted on a defence vehicle is potent to give the same pain all over the victim’s body. As per Raytheon experts the maximum a person can stand the pain is for a second. They didn’t tell whether the radiation will be emitted only for a second, or for an hour. The reporter humbly admits that he was not able to stand it even for a second. He had tried it only on the tip of one of his fingers.

The Silent Guardian is not that new an innovation. It’s only the latest, and one of the most potent inventions of the like. Dazzlers, that can cause temporary blindness to human eyes and electronic sensors were in use even at the time of WWII. The other direct energy weapons under development and production include particle beam weapons that can cause permanent damage, and laser and sonic weaponry with worse effects.

It’s not lethal, and absolutely harmless, asserts Raytheon. But that’s what TASER International claimed too. As per the count until 2006, there are over 150 deaths caused by the administration, often unnecessarily, of TASERs by the police in US alone. Just like TASER, Silent Guardian too is introduced as an alternative to lethal weaponry. But unlike TASER, the new weapon fixes its eyes on war fronts. But what I see is them being used by the police to handle protesters and mobs.

When thinking hypothetically, and with blind optimism, such an invention is a wonderful solution for peacekeepers. A Raytheon executive gives an example of a situation where it can be the only solution. He talks about a situation the US military faced in Iraq, where the combatants had taken media personnel as human shields. The invaders were left with the option of letting the combatants escape, or kill the non-combatants along with them. And it is in such situations a Silent Guardian can be of great, and only, help. And it could be the best possible ammunition against violent mobs. Or even peaceful protesters, like the one the world saw in Burma a week back. Well, Buddhist monks are a different matter all together. Remember the picture of a monk who torched himself and sat there like he was dreaming, during the Vietnam War protests?

Killing is unavoidable in wars. The amount of killing and destruction is the sole determinant of a victory. If victory could be accomplished without destruction, the war wouldn’t have happened in the first place. And that’s why machines like the Silent Guardian are of no great use. Or, of great use, where it is not necessary. Like in a prison as a torturing tool. With the police, where they can have some harmless, sweat-less fun.

Raytheon have no plans to sell its product to countries with questionable human rights records, informs the company executive. Except the United States of America, of course. The vast majority of the company’s US$ 20 bn revenue is contributed by US government’s defence purchases. That’s something they call the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Iron Triangle. Something, which was criticised and warned against by even Eisenhower. It was no surprise to anyone when the biggest contributors to the last Presidential campaign in US were Lockheed Martin, the top most military equipment supplier in the world, and Raytheon. They would most probably retain that status in the coming elections too.

The economics of war is not as complicated, when one looks in to the complete picture. In his 1961 masterpiece Catch 22, Joseph Heller simplifies it as simple as it can get – with the story of the character Lieutenant Milo Minderbinder. In a free economic system, which is the fuelling idea of the contemporary libertarian discourses, cluster bombs and chocolates are given equal rights. More rights to the one, which can make more profits, quite deservingly.

In the US, the country that spends more than half of the global military expenses every year, many organisations and individuals are frequently heard of denouncing the wastage of State money on unnecessary military movements and wars. For a taxpayer, that worry might have some weight. Not as much as they are told to be though, as war is only one of the major GDP contributors for that country. This country, the USA, is home to seven of the top ten defence contractors in the world. These seven, including Raytheon, together has the revenue of about US$ 150 bn, only from defence contracts in a year. It’s only the revenue of the seven companies of the 44 US companies in the list of top 100 global defence equipment suppliers. Procurement cost specified in the last US defence budget is a mere US$ 84.2 billion, and is just about half of revenue of the top seven companies. There are more than 150 such companies in the US with global businesses. The specified amount is not inclusive of the expenditure on the war on terror. But the same equation works there too. More than 95% of the spending of the government is paid to its own citizens – as salaries and procurement charges. And it opens up the market for its powerful GDP generators. That way the US dollar is not only staying safe inside the US, but also sowed and harvested from the fertile desserts of Iraq and Afghanistan. I’m not ignoring the cost of human lives, but that’s only worth the labour it can contribute, and is a cause of spending than earning, in a capitalist system.

While we are at it, let’s talk a thing about capitalism. It was on this day, in 1967, Ernesto Che Guevara was shot dead and buried under a runway in Bolivia. 40 years after his murder, that famous portrait of Guevara for which the photographer Alberto Korda never received any royalties, is merchandised on anything and everything imaginable. From vodka bottles to bikinis. Many Catholics in Bolivia pray to the legend that the call Saint Ernesto of La Higuera, and the Christ of Vellegrande. “Shoot me, coward you are only going to kill a man,” Guevara had told his executioner. This solider, Mario Teran, received a free cataract operation by Cuban doctors under Cuba-Venezuela Operation Miracle programme, last year. And the news of it is being now celebrated in Cuba as a great act of unconditional forgiveness of the revolutionaries. Guevara proved to be a failure not just in Congo and Bolivia. More than a man was killed. If not then, by now.

What do you know about who do you know?

“Thank God! You didn’t name it after your family name!” Scraped Sig. Luca Venzella, who’s a 40-year old single, who knows there’s no such thing as an ideal match (neither in a matchbox nor on a football field), in Orkut Buyukkokten’s scrap book on February 27^th 2004. That was just about a month after orkut.com was officially launched. That wisecrack will go down on the pages of world history one day, if it hasn’t already.

The Young Turk, Buyukkokten came to USA in 1997, to do a Ph. D programme in Computer Science from Stanford. He modified the first sentence of Moby Dick, by changing the name and omitting ‘having little or no money in my purse’ part, to use as the first lines of his personal page in the University website. By completing the course by 2001, his visa had expired and he joined Google for a valid reason to continue living in the waterside of life where money floated and flowed.

Apart from giving massages to its employees (Buyukkokten has self-scraped about it in his scrapbook), Google also asks their employees to devote 20% of the paid working time on their personal projects. Using this one-day-a-week to work, Buyukkokten with his friend and fellow graduate Tyler Ziemann built a social network program called Club Nexus for the undergraduates in Stanford. Seeing its success the duo formed the company called Affinity Engines, and developed InCircle, a similar program for the Stanford Alumni Association. About a year later, Google declared to buy a program developed by its in-house engineers, and launched orkut.com on January 22^nd 2004. The site was just ‘in affiliation’ with Google at that time. And nobody then thought Google will want to become Yahoo, or MSN, but will stay what they are, enjoying their leading position in search engine business. Though it has later integrated to the Google portal along with Gmail, Gtalk and Blogger, even after 3 years, orkut.com is still its beta version. That’s about not ‘wasting’ any more money on development unnecessary.

Four months later Affinity Engines sued Orkut Buyukkokten and Google for breaking the contract and stealing their source code. According to them, they have uncovered nine software bugs in orkut.com, identical to InCircle, and indicative of a common source code. AEI claims that Buyukkokten had given written and verbal agreement that he won’t work on any other social network programs, as a commitment to support his project with them – InCircle. To promote orkut.com as a trustworthy site, the membership was only on invitation, a method that was proved a huge success for Gmail. And there were 100,000 members by 48 hours of its launch, and it crossed the million mark in 6 months. Proving their initial tagline – expand the circumference. That’s exactly what Google did with orkut.com – expanding its circumference.

The registration process demands 5 or 6 pages of personal information to be filled in. And more than 50 percentage of over 43 million registered users provided their personal information in detail. More than generating revenue directly from the new tool, it was this invaluable user data – the kind of demographic data any marketing machine would need, that Google was aiming for.

Another method they used to fuel the site’s popularity was the user-friendly public message board, instead of a private one. Though everyone knows that it’s a public message board and anybody can access it, people tend to use it like a private message service. That’s easy to understand from the psychological state of the user, because he or she is seeing their message board only after signing in, and it creates the same impression of reading your mails or private messages. And it successfully reduces the number of aliases, and profile of anybody belongs to a friend list has more chances to be authentic than fake. There’s also a private messaging facility, almost similar to the public one. But it purposely involves you more steps to reply to a message, and none of the users I know uses it.

Though, you should be 18 years or older to be eligible to be a member, there are millions who are much younger in the network. It had created a huge issue in Brasil, where over 90% people who have Internet access at home are registered users of orkut.com. Even now, over 60% of the users are from Brasil, and about 20% from India, and about10% from USA. “The people in Brasil are very friendly”, commented Buyukkokten, “and that’s the only reason I can think of its huge success in Brasil”. I can think of a few more. Because, sooner, Brasil and India will have an equal share in the network. Yes, the two havens newly opened up for global marketers.

I have also found on net, from unreliable sources, that Orkut Buyukkokten earns from every single profile registered, every single friend added, every single photograph uploaded, every single scrap and for each of its replies, etc. Though, I’m not sure about the amounts, I’m sure that Google pays to Buyukkokten. Why would they pay? By submitting, posting or displaying any Materials on or through the orkut.com service, you automatically grant to us [Google] a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to copy, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform and display such Materials. That’s one of the terms every single orkut.com user had agreed upon while registering. I don’t know what they will do with your photographs, or stupid scarps.

There’s a possibility that I can think of. Some more rambling before coming to that.

Some 12 years back, one of my friends who was more interested in textbooks than the usual philosophical bullshitting rebellious teenagers like me were aimlessly indulging, told me one small secret of life.

“There are no secrets as such,” he told me, “only that the people who know your secrets won’t meet the people who don’t know your secrets.”

“That’s my concept of God, the one who knows everything. Till that date when all the information is split and kept, we all will stay as humans ,” I quipped.

It sounded really funny then, and sounds somewhat scary now. It might take some more time before Google becomes God, but it can soon be a power Orwell, Burgess, Bradbury, and the other dystopians were warning us about. You very well know what it’s like if your bank’s server is down for a day. Once the filthy old currencies stop being around, you will be worth only a few digits in some remote storage device. And it will be a Google or Yahoo or MSN who will be having that device at their command. What do I know?

“By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.”

- The last sentence of Chapter One, Moby Dick, by Herman Melville