In the Clickstream, Part 4

preterite Friday Fun

(This is the fourth part of a piece of serial speculative fiction attempting to imagine what future database composition might look like. For context, see Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.)

Mala looks at me and tilts her head and purses her lips, her chin drawing up and in, her eyebrows compressed, eyes narrowed. It’s an expression I’ve seen plenty of times in class, and she’s worse at disguising it than most cadets: it’s her “Sir, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me” expression.

“Sir,” she begins.

“Listen,” I respond. I’m thinking through the options: today’s Friday, a training day, and we’re almost at the end of first hour. As a cow, a junior, she’s got her afternoon clear, but it’s 0826 and she’s got three morning classes left and mandatory mid-day formation at Washington Hall. After the sit-down Cadet lunch — all 4,316 cadets eating in the same facility, at the same time, in an environment that every visitor I’ve had has said reminds them of the dining hall scenes in the old Harry Potter movies — her schedule gets a lot more free. “How are you doing in your other classes? What have you got B, C, D hour?”

She thinks for a moment. “I’m good, sir,” she says. “B minus in Chem but otherwise OK.”

So I ask: “If you get a COR, can you walk some hours?” CORs are electronic Cadet Observation Reports; the ways that faculty tell a Cadet’s chain of command that the Cadet has screwed up, and the penalty is marching for hours around the quad. Mala’s so scrupulously careful that she’s never had to worry much about hours, and the emotions that cross her face make it clear: Cadet Casey doesn’t walk hours.

She swallows. “Yessir.”

I nod. “OK,” I tell her. I speak slowly, deliberately, for the sake of clarity and emphasis. “What I am about to tell you is not an order. This is advice about one possible way to rectify the situation into which you’ve been put. Following it will violate policies and the orders of your chain of command.” I pause. “You will see trouble for this.” She nods. I’m now the one to take a deep breath. “I also believe,” I say, “that it’s the only way out of this situation that both upholds the integrity of this institution and the Corps of Cadets and keeps you from violating the Honor Code.” She nods again. “Cadet Casey,” I continue, “if you blow off the rest of your morning classes, you’re going to generate CORs for your B, C, and D hour classes, and you’re going to walk hours for those CORs.” Her eyes get a little wider, but she nods. I’m gambling here: most faculty I know don’t bother with reporting attendance until the end of the day, especially on Fridays, so Mala’s absences won’t hit her chain of command until COB, which makes lunch still fairly safe territory for her. And the fact that it’s a Friday works to our advantage.

“Sir,” she blurts. Frustrated. “There’s nothing I can do.”

“There’s plenty you can do,” I respond. I slip my antiquated civilian laptop out of my bag and hand it to her. “Take this. It’s Friday; you’ve got walking privileges. There’s wireless off post.”

She nods. She knows where the public wireless points are in Highland Falls, the tiny town outside the Academy’s south gate. They aren’t safe, but they’re temporarily anonymous to the point where she can at least get on a secure channel and not have her transmissions blocked by the military filters for a few hours. “First order of business,” I say. “Get Tim, get him to watch for what you’re going to write. Get his network in on it.”

She nods. “They’ll tag it,” she says. “That’s the idea, right?”

“That’s the idea.” Mala’s already grasped the nature of response here: the power of the disciplinary action being taken against her is that it lies in secrecy. The clickstream accusation of plagiarism and its concomitant implication of treason only hold teeth inasmuch as they connect to secret-classified Air Force documents; documents closely held. Mala can’t disprove synchronicity in terms of the time frames of document release. What she can do, though, is publicly reframe the debate over what happened, and that’s what I’m sending her to do. “After Tim,” I tell her, “update your public bookmarks. Make everything point your way, to this.” I gesture vaguely, but she understands: to this situation, this mess.

“Yessir,” she says. She’s buckling on the body armor as we talk, gearing up the distributed computing, the sounds of microturbines and hydraulics and the unmistakable pings from her earbud: nine in a row, messages received. We both know they’re likely from her Cadet Chain of Command, and they’re likely best not listened to right now. She grimaces and slips her browser into its front pocket and shoulders her carbine. “Sir,” she says.

“Go change your clothes, Cadet Casey,” I say. “Highland Falls. Secure wireless. Change the topic. The swarms are secondary, not primary. Write your paper to shift the argument to management of affect and management of information rather than management of technology.”

She stands there in my office door a moment, thinking, and I hear the backpack hardware gear up as well, its tiny chuff of condensate. “Management of affect, Sir?”

“Tim’s a Tamil,” I say. “He loves you.” She blinks, nods. “Why?”

Then: gone. She moves quickly, faster than her peers.

Eight minutes later, I’m alone in my office with the door closed, hoping that my browsing and tagging on my government machine is sufficiently discreet. It isn’t, of course, and it doesn’t matter that it isn’t, and I knew it wouldn’t matter. There’s the knock of body-armor knuckles on wood.

A male voice: “Professor Edwards?”

I don’t answer.

Seconds later, the same voice, and again the rap of armored knuckles on my door: “Military Police, Professor Edwards.”

(To be continued.)

Individuals and Generations

preterite Culture, Writing

I’m putting off the update to Mala’s story until tomorrow, Friday proper. However, parts of it find their basis in what I’m going to write about here, as has been the idea with the serial as a whole: imagining the future practices of composition.

Geoffrey Hodgson uses the work of the economist Alexander Field to demonstrate that economic analysis cannot start from the figure of the lone individual and his microeconomic tastes and preferences, as so much neoclassical economic analysis has attempted to do with homo economicus. The gendered language is wholly intentional here, and intended to illustrate that some forms of labor — historically, those gendered as male — are deemed economically valuable and productive, while others — historically, those gendered as female; e.g. the caring professions, household labor — are defined as being outside the economy. Hodgson explains that in all economic attempts at explaining or analyzing behavior, “some norms and rules must inevitably be presumed at the start” (59). In other words, even if the individual’s neoclassical microeconomic tastes and preferences help to shape and create supply and demand, that individual is never ahistorical, and never outside a context, even as much as the neoclassical models of Pareto indifference curves and perfect competition might always wish it were so. In fact, we might take Hodgson’s assertion about economy as an analogue to Burke’s construction of the rhetorical parlor: the structures of economic activity have always preceded us, are always evolving, and will continue after we leave, no matter how important or irrelevant our own contributions might be to the conversation in that economic parlor. The individual’s tastes and preferences are not the sole originary point of economic valuation, no matter what conventional microeconomics might want to suggest in its ugly oversimplifications: value is social, networked, and historical, particularly in regard to information goods and experience goods.

Danah Boyd’s work has highlighted this social value and its connection to signaling behavior in networked communities, and there is — as Emily Nussbaum points out (and apparently continues to be amazed by) — a generation gap in the way people evaluate these relationships of value. Nussbaum clearly doesn’t want to be seen as a fuddy-duddy, and she italicizes her channeling of her own opinions so they won’t quite seem to come from her:

Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry—for God’s sake, their dirty photos!—online. They have virtual friends instead of real ones. They talk in illiterate instant messages. They are interested only in attention—and yet they have zero attention span, flitting like hummingbirds from one virtual stage to another.

Nussbaum’s piece is representative of an increasingly popular genre: the generational lament at perceived famewhoring. How dare, Nussbaum’s tone scolds, these kids want to be famous: aren’t there better, finer ambitions? You know, that whole romantic thing, or that other protestant work ethic thing, and doesn’t being a famewhore make you into Paris Hilton and so you can never do any sort of societal good, so why don’t you damn kids just get jobs and stop all this social foolishness?

(Perhaps we might here detect a tonal analogue to a certain recent under-discussed listserv post on techrhet that called bloggers assholes because they’re famewhores, or something like that. One has to at least admire the circumspection and restraint of those who were so disinterpellated by the post’s author: apparently, These aren’t the bloggers you’re looking for.)

Here’s the thing: the increasing sociality of value comes straight out of Adam Smith. It’s self-interest (Wealth of Nations) and altruism (The Theory of Moral Sentiments) linked not to romantic self-interested isolate behavior, but to the network, wherein the motivation for producing, circulating, distributing, reproducing, and appropriating the value of texts both alters the value of those texts and is altered by the value of those texts, particularly in our contemporary circumstance where appropriation is unavoidable and an economic signal behavior. As Johndan Johnson-Eilola reminds us, “symbols are now a class of material objects, conceptual objects, with market value, social force, and dimension” (4): in a preexisting circumstance of the circulation of fame, of reputation, we see the ongoing evolution of norms and rhetorical context for a cultural conversation, but there are those — like Nussbaum, like the techrhet poster — who want to freeze context and define it synchronically.

What’s interesting is that such synchronic definition is always performed in relation to another earlier time. It’s a deeply conservative move: let’s look at things in this way because that’s the way we’ve always done it.

Which is a total Army mentality.

Hm.

Not Necessarily Complicitous

preterite Economics, Writing

I’ve been on a paper-grading binge the past week and I’ve got company this weekend, so the next update concerning Cadet Casey will be delayed a few days.

Which isn’t to say I’m not thinking about her. Certainly, neither she nor I are under any illusions about our roles as arms of the twenty-first century’s new imperial hegemony. We want to believe we’re making a difference, raising consciousness, contributing to the evolving understanding of the military as peacekeepers rather than warfighters under a regime of ubiquitous and ongoing distributed conflict, but we understand as well that ideological and economic and geopolitical pressures exerted by our own government and others work to sustain that regime. We are, we know, agents of capital.

Which isn’t to say we’re wholly complicitous.

We understand — we assert — we want to believe, at least, that it’s possible from the inside to work against “the assertions that capitalism really is the major force in contemporary life, that its dominance is not a discursive object but a reality that can’t simply be ‘thought away,’ that it has no outside and thus [our] so-called alternatives are actually part of the neoliberal, patriarchal, corporate capitalist agenda” (Gibson-Graham 2). The clickstream is an economic space, with its transactions of value and its signaling behaviors, and as such, it’s a site of intervention. It’s a space where multiplicitous economies can take root, have taken root, have in fact spread and dispersed from node to node with remarkable haste. In observing this behavior, perhaps writing teachers might move further towards understanding writing as an economy of circulation, and towards understanding “economy as a site of decision, of ethical praxis, instead of as the ultimate reality/container/constraint” (Gibson-Graham 87).

More on Mala soon.

Obvious But True

preterite Economics

I’ve been trying to think about inputs and outputs. Production and value. The cumulative nature of the value of inputs for various goods. How one tries to add up all the aspects of the factors of production — labor, space, capital — to understand what goes into producing an information good. How those factors are rivalrous and exhaustible, while information goods are not. And then Yochai Benkler helps me see one of the things I’ve been looking past in this system of economic value and production:

“Information is both input and output of its own production process.”

(The Wealth of Networks 37.)

In the Clickstream, Part 3

preterite Friday Fun

(I know; it’s a day late for Friday Fun. This is Part 3 of an ongoing series of speculative fiction attempting to imagine what teaching composition might look like twenty minutes into the future. Parts 1 and 2 are here and here.)

I’m a civilian, and as a civilian, there are things I’ll never know or understand about Cadets. First among those things is the emotional baggage with which Cadets approach their time at the Academy, and their time in what comes after. Not a single one has doubts about where they’re all going after graduation. Whether it’s our high-intensity local conflicts in Sudan and Indonesia; the emerging flashpoints in Guyana, Belarus, and Sri Lanka; or our dwindling counterinsurgency garrisons in the Middle East — they know they’re going to be in harm’s way. Their guaranteed graduation prospect is that soon, someone, somewhere, will shoot at them. As the Brian Turner poem puts it: here, bullet.

What I can’t get used to is that the guarantee of mortal peril makes Cadets the most fatalistically cheerful students I’ve ever met. There’s no time here for being sad, for performing unhappiness, real or purported. Here there are no drama queens.

I turn to Mala. “Is he on?”

She thumbs, nods. He’s not only on, he’s realtime, in front of his webcam. From a Sri Lankan satphone, though, there are drops, so they cut out the sound and refresh the headshot every ten seconds, with the T9 filling in the nuance. PONNAMBALAM THURAISINGAM shows up at the bottom of the screen, but Mala thumbs him as Tim. I’m one of my generation’s dwindling population of breeders, but I’ll admit: from his headshot, he’s a hot boy. Although Tamil by heritage, he wears his Sri Lankan Army uniform with pride, and it’s clear he knows he looks good in it.

“Tell him what’s going on,” I say. “Free channel. You know to be careful.”

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Production and Appropriation

preterite Computers, Economics, Writing

Last Friday night, I was having dinner and seeing Pan’s Labyrinth with my attorney (she was drunk, of course, and amazed me yet again by somehow fitting a twelve-pack of St. Ides, an enormous Smith & Wesson 460 with the 8-inch barrel, and a two-pound venison tenderloin for snacking on into the hunting vest she wore beneath her DKNY wool coat), so the next installment of Cadet Mala Casey’s story will have to wait until this coming Friday.

Tonight, I went into the city for dinner (vegetarian on Curry Hill at Pongal, on Lexington between 27th and 28th: excellent, excellent Indian food but indifferent service) with some new acquaintances, some old friends, and my Master’s thesis advisor, and so had a stretch of useful focused reading time on the train. And it helped me put together some stuff about value and appropriation that I’ll likely talk about at CCCC.

First: in an article on social networking sites in BT Technology Journal, Judith Donath and danah boyd offer a brief discussion of the ways economic signaling theory can be used to analyze the way people display (wear? badge? perform? publicize?) their connections in social networks. While Donath’s and boyd’s discussion is largely confined to social networking sites like Orkut and Friendster, their conclusions are generalizable to our increasingly networked culture in general, and to blogs in particular: “The expenditure of energy to maintain a connection,” they argue, “is a signal of its importance and of the benefits it bestows” (Donath and boyd 81), or–in other words–a signal of its value. When I leave a comment on a post by Bradley, Jeff, or Joanna, I’m signaling its subjective value to me in ways that are socially reinforced, to varying degrees, by other commenters, while at the same time creating additional value for myself through the labor expended in creating my comment on the post. In much the same way, if Chris or Liz or Amanda leaves a comment here, they’re also producing additional value that can be appropriated by the broader community constituted by our various blogrolls, and the semi-invisible (to us, at least) community of lurkers. And as we know, the scholarly apparatus of citation is another form of value-signaling.

But the concerns emerge when we start to talk about the appropriation of value. We know that information is a non-rivalrous and non-scarce good, but with the intellectual DRM of plagiarism policies, we treat it as rivalrous and scarce. While plagiarism policies predate the information age, they’ve become inextricably embedded in its evolution. In Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion, John Logie (I’m a bit late, but thanks for suggesting it, Clancy!), approvingly deploys Andrew Ross’s 1990 description of “the ongoing attempt to rewrite property law in order to contain the effect of the new information technologies that… have transformed the way in which modern power is exercised and maintained” (Ross 10, qtd. in Logie 31) in order to help illustrate “the degree to which the state depends on the maintenance of stable property lines” (Logie 31). Logie offers a strong critique of the ways bureaucratic attempts to respond to the digital reproducibility of information have wholly failed to account for its not-rivalrous nature. At the same time, though, Logie points out that “U.S. courts have repeatedly rejected the notion that creators of intellectual property are entitled to any special consideration based on their investment of labor,” and cites Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s insistence in Feist v. Rural Telephone Service that “the public’s interest in access to information can trump the creator’s expectation for a return on effort expended” (55).

This is a clearly economic argument, and an apparent rejection of the labor theory of value. (I think. Other perspectives?) Do I agree with it? Well, it’s law, so it doesn’t really matter whether I agree or not–but it strikes me as interesting that the rationale inheres in an emphasis on the consumer rather than on the supplier of information; on the appropriation rather than on the production. Part of my project for this CCCC presentation, then, should be to come up with a basic and rudimentary rhetoric of the process of production, appropriation, distribution, and reproduction of value in writing. (Which might help me compose an answer to Jenn’s important question.)

How Not to Teach with Portfolios

preterite Composition Pedagogy

Steve Krause nails it yet again: “Shari Wilson’s” attempt at a critique of portfolio pedagogy in first-year writing courses offers little more than an indictment of her own intellectual and pedagogical laziness. It’s a genre essay, in fact, of a species that writing teachers know quite well; the reactionary kick against process-based pedagogies we’ve been venturing and evaluating for a while now because such pedagogies take us out of our safe zones and don’t match up with the way we’ve always done things. “Wilson” implies a predetermined syllabus, a predetermined evaluation scheme and weighting, and most curiously a predetermined practice of keeping students in suspense and not reading and evaluating their written work and offering suggestions on how to improve outside of “rubrics” and “due dates.” One wishes “Wilson” might acquaint herself with some of the basics of process pedagogy and how to fundamentally engage student writing beyond “rubrics” and “due dates,” and wishes that “Wilson” might as well figure out how to compose a syllabus that states exactly and precisely her expectations of students. As she admits, though, precision of language in a syllabus is something at which she arrives unfortunately late. Such late arrival seems, I’d suggest, to be not so much a shortcoming of portfolio pedagogy as a shortcoming in other areas. So, too, with the indictment of “loopholes”: this seems to be a teacher who has scant idea how to assign and evaluate writing, and blames her failures on a system she’s failed to adequately implement.

The later portion of the essay bears this out, with anecdotal support offered by the picture of peers drinking in bars after norming sessions, and by the use of the word “suffered” that Steve picks up on: what are the standards of evidence here? How do they correspond to the standards of evidence expected from students by the teacher?

Are “Wilson’s” complaints evidence of the failure of the exhaustive and compelling rationales offered for portfolio pedagogies by Pat Belanoff, Kathi Yancey, and others in composition’s canonical pedagogical literature? Hardly. And, in fact, “Wilson’s” complaints offer zero evidence of any awareness of such literature. Lazy and uncritical teaching and failure to base one’s pedagogy in established scholarship does not indicate that a discipline’s long-standing and well-founded attention to various aspects of pedagogy is lazy and uncritical. It stands, rather, as evidence of nothing more than its own lazy and uncritical nature, and blames the student for the inadequacies and shortcomings of the teacher.

Most of us, “Shari,” try not to do that.

Ice Station Zeugma

preterite Asides

With reports in from Ice Station Echo, Ice Station Delta, Ice Station Sierra, Ice Station Alpha, Ice Station Hotel, Ice Station Bravo, and Ice Station Juliet, I figure I’d best add mine. Here at Ice Station Zebra Zeugma, the snow started late Tuesday night, and I was Staff Duty Officer the next day, which meant I had to be in early. Highland Falls did a wretched job of plowing, so I put on the Matterhorns and went in on foot at about 6:40 Wednesday morning. The snow kept going all day, alternating with some sleet and freezing rain, and I made it home around 4:30 yesterday afternoon with work to do.

Ninety feet of driveway by a swath eight feet wide, plus forty feet by three feet of sidewalk, front and back and porch. Roughly an area of 840 feet. Multiply by maybe six inches of accumulation, not all that much, but it was ugly because it was big dry flaky powder followed by a layer of ice and sleet followed by more powder and then more ice. It’s aggravating wedding-cake snow; each shovelful at somewhere between 3.5 and 4 square feet weighing around 7 pounds-ish, but often more like 9 with the effort of breaking the ice crust. Call it 8 pounds average, with 2 shovelfuls per 6 inches of depth, sometimes 3 because of the crust. And then there’s the stuff the village of Highland Falls plowed up onto my driveway and front walk, roughly 60 square feet of wet and heavy snow at 12 pounds and 4 square feet for every shovelful, but requiring 4 shovelfuls for every 4 square feet. Practically a berm. Overall, 60 square feet of heavy snow plus 780 square feet of light snow, at varying shovelable volumes. All told, a conservatively estimated total of something like 3720 pounds of snow moved via shovel in a bit less than two hours last night.

I’m anticipating some serious Motrin-munching today.

Outsider’s Hubris

preterite Composition Theory, Computers, Economics

At the moment, I’m trying to get a handle on Sraffian economics and I’m recognizing the deep poverty of my economic self-education. I’m struggling with stuff that’s beyond me, and feeling quite foolish. For a while, I’ve carried the outsider’s hubris of telling myself how smart I am for trying to import into my discipline concerns I see as hitherto ignored. I told myself I’d take a graduate course in heterodox economics, with a couple semesters of independent study as an introduction and a graduate directed study as a follow-up, and I’d be OK.

Well, not so much.

I can read some of the articles in the economics collections and journals, especially the ones that apply cultural studies or rhetorical perspectives to economic problems, like Timothy Mitchell’s excellent “The Object of Development: America’s Egypt” or Duncan Ironmonger’s “Counting Outputs, Capital Inputs and Caring Labor: Estimating Gross Household Product.” But I’m not so good with the equations, even the simple ones, until I read back through a couple times and see what’s being parsed, and even then I don’t often get it, and have to read further for context. Case in point: I’ve got Stiglitz’s 1974 review article on the Cambridge capital controversy in front of me, and it’s killing me. I know what it’s about, and I recognize the assertions, but I can’t parse the proofs. Even some of the recent evaluations of Piero Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, which I want to use to help me get beyond the notion of marginality that neoclassical economics poses as an alternative to the labor theory of value, are giving me a hard time.

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In the Clickstream, Part 2

preterite Friday Fun

(This is part of a piece of serial speculative fiction attempting to imagine what digital writing instruction might look like twenty minutes into the future. Part 1 is here.)

The clickstream in question — the one out of the nineteen geolocated here at the Academy that has to have gotten her the board — is on the CTC subnet: the Combating Terrorism Center. They’re in the same building as us, two floors down, and while they’re widely recognized for their research and their professionalism as global leaders in their cutting-edge approach to counterterrism studies and interagency joint efforts with the FBI and others, their name isn’t the only thing that’s an anachronism. At a place as bound by tradition as this one, they take pride in accentuating the second syllable, and Mala couldn’t stand them when I sent her to talk to them about a senior thesis project. They’re soldiers and civilians, like us, but the civilians are mostly retired military, working on scholarly studies of terrist organizations and networks. They’ve put together monographs and white papers and book chapters on the economics of terrism, histories of terrist philosophy, entrepreneurial terrism, terrist poetics, all that you can imagine, and last fall they hosted the seventh annual International Terrorism Studies conference. Mala said they should’ve put the “or” in bold to show their old-school cred.

They are in some ways as old-school as this Academy gets. Even now, years since the Pentagon took the Army’s advice from TRADOC and raised holy hell by incorporating the points of view of an Italian Marxist and a Duke University literature scholar into its strategic vision, the CTC constitutes the only group on campus who still want to refer to themselves exclusively as warfighters rather than peacekeepers. Training and Doctrine Command read Hardt and Negri and said: yeah. That’s what we do. Under the realities of terrism and distributed combat — under a regime of ongoing war — we need to train peacekeepers. But the CTC wasn’t having it, not a bit of it: we’re warfighters and warfighters only, they said, just on a new field of battle; and nothing less than victory, complete annihilation of our many and diverse enemies, is acceptable. When Mala went to talk to them, that was the perspective they offered, and in a shop heavy with males from the Army’s combat arms branches, they also made it quite clear exactly how much they might value what she had to contribute.

Mala came back and said she thought that misogyny and xenophobia might not be the most productive ways to engage in theorizing counterterrism, and she’d look elsewhere for folks to partner with.

After that, I didn’t hear from her for a while, until Lieutenant Colonel Fensis told me she’d joined his AIAD. AIADs are Academic Individual Advanced Development Opportunities, DoD-funded opportunities for Cadets to get out of the Academy and work on projects in the field, and in the English department, they’re usually tied to service learning and community literacies, particularly in countries in the developing world. LTC Fensis, with his interest in postcolonialist literatures, was taking his group of Cadets to Sri Lanka for ten days over winter break, and I immediately knew what Mala wanted to do.

Database composition isn’t just a junior-level composition course. It’s an overarching method the Academy’s adopted, a way of helping Cadet knowledge circulate, a way of publicizing to the broader academic community and the world the knowledge our Cadets are creating, a way of asking Cadets to value on their own the composing that they and their peers perform in and outside the classroom, and a way of evaluating Cadets’ integrity and public responsibility and overall suitability for officership. For all these reasons, faculty follow clickstreams just as closely as Cadets, watching the strackbacks and spingbacks, who aggregates whose essays from their SNS and scholarly homepages. Cadets take it for granted, but as a member of an older generation, I admit I find it breathtaking to trace a link back from a viral Cadet spirit video to a homepage to a peer shout-out to a course feed to a four-star “chk him on Said — wishn i nu that b4 my thesis” comment to an instructor’s syllabus to a student’s public tagcloud for an engineering project to a “might help u w hist209 rdngs” strackback to a plebe composition essay, and to realize that this is how Cadets are aggregating and recycling knowledge and offering it out to the world on a regular basis. And here’s the thing: if you mean-rank the Academy’s top ten most-populated clickstreams, they’re all firsties — all seniors — with one exception. That exception is Mala. In three years, Cadet Casey’s writing has climbed up from plebe obscurity to the number four slot in the top clickstreams. She’s still a junior — a cow, so nicknamed after a plebe asked a firstie when he could go on pass while the juniors were on leave, and the firstie replied, “When the cows come home” — and an English major, but nearly all of the Corps of Cadets regularly read and sping and cite her work. And the two most-cited and highest-rated essays she’s written are her yearling sociology and political science work on Ilankai Tamils and the LTTE.

Which is why, with the clickstream from the CTC, I’m worried. The AIAD led by LTC Fensis was an adjunct to JSOC counter-terrism exercises conducted hand-in-hand with the largely Sinhalese Sri Lankan military and input from the CTC. And I know Mala, and I know how stubborn and contrary she can be. So I thumb down the connection and the power button, and I turn and make sure the office door’s closed, and then I say:

“You know what this is about, right?”

She looks at the floor. Nods.

I ask: “What happened in Sri Lanka?”

She looks back up. Her face brightens for the first time this morning, and I’m happy to see it.

“Sir,” she says. “I met a boy.”

(To be continued)

Acknowledgments: The ideas about what database composition might look like are directly derived from the stuff Derek Mueller’s been working on and talking about for a long time before I came to them, and of course the idea of deploying strackbacks and spingbacks — secure trackbacks, secure pingbacks — in student writing come from Derek’s amazing CCCC presentation a couple years back. And beyond Derek’s contribution, much of the fun I’m having inheres in taking real Army stuff here at the Academy and projecting it 20 minutes into the future: believe it or not, there are high-level Army policymakers who have read or are reading Hardt and Negri. AIADs and the CTC are real, and the CTC is indeed in the same building where I work. However, I want to emphasize that they’re extraordinarily good, smart, talented people, and certainly not the trolls I fictionalize them as here. At the same time, though, I feel it’s important to acknowledge the fact that xenophobia and misogyny can also sometimes be an unfortunate working reality in the military.