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the widespread introduction of almost silent, pilotless drones with military-standard imaging equipment raises major new questions about the way in which the UK as a ‘surveillance society’. Is the civilian deployment of such drones a justified and proportionate response to civilian policing needs or a thinly-veiled attempt by security corporations to build new and highly profitable markets? Once deployed, what ethical and regulatory guidelines need to be in place to govern drone deployment and the ‘targeting’ of drone sensors? Above all, are transparent regulatory systems in place to prevent law enforcement agencies from abusing radical extensions in their powers to vertically and covertly spy on all aspects of civilian life 24 hours a day?

citizens of What Not are ranked based on their intelligence from A to C3 and can’t marry or procreate with someone of the same rank to ensure that intelligence is evenly distributed

Brave New World is more futuristic and preoccupied with technology than What Not. In Huxley’s world, procreation and education have become completely mechanized and emotions are strictly regulated pharmaceutically. Macaulay’s Britain is just the beginning of this process, and its characters are not yet completely indoctrinated into the new ways of the state—they resist it intellectually and question its endeavors, like the newly-passed Mental Progress Act. She writes:He did not like all this interfering, socialist what-not, which was both upsetting the domestic arrangements of his tenants and trying to put into their heads more learning than was suitable for them to have. For his part he thought every man had a right to be a fool if he chose, yes, and to marry another fool, and to bring up a family of fools too.

Where Huxley pairs dumb but pretty and “pneumatic” ladies with intelligent gentlemen, Macaulay’s work is decidedly less sexist.

We was published in French, Dutch, and German. An English version was printed and sold only in the US. When Orwell wrote about We in 1946, it was only because he’d managed to borrow a hard-to-find French translation.

While Orwell never indicated that he read Macaulay, he shares her subversive and subtle linguistic skills and satirical sense. His protagonist, Winston—like Kitty—works for the government in its Ministry of Truth, or Minitrue in Newspeak, where he rewrites historical records to support whatever Big Brother currently says is good for the regime. Macaulay would no doubt have approved of Orwell’s wit. And his state ministries bear a striking similarity to those she wrote about in What Not.

Orwell was familiar with Huxley’s novel and gave it much thought before writing his own blockbuster. Indeed, in 1946, before the release of 1984, he wrote a review of Zamyatin’s We (pdf), comparing the Russian novel with Huxley’s book. Orwell declared Huxley’s text derivative, writing in his review of We in The Tribune:The first thing anyone would notice about We is the fact—never pointed out, I believe—that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World must be partly derived from it. Both books deal with the rebellion of the primitive human spirit against a rationalised, mechanized, painless world, and both stories are supposed to take place about six hundred years hence. The atmosphere of the two books is similar, and it is roughly speaking the same kind of society that is being described, though Huxley’s book shows less political awareness and is more influenced by recent biological and psychological theories.

In We, the story is told by D-503, a male engineer, while in Brave New World we follow Bernard Marx, a protagonist with a proper name. Both characters live in artificial worlds, separated from nature, and they recoil when they first encounter people who exist outside of the state’s constructed and controlled cities.

Although We is barely known compared to Orwell and Huxley’s later works, I’d argue that it’s among the best literary science fictions of all time, and it’s highly relevant, as it was when first written. Noam Chomsky calls it “more perceptive” than both 1984 and Brave New World. Zamyatin’s futuristic society was so on point, he was exiled from the Soviet Union because it was such an accurate description of life in a totalitarian regime, though he wrote it before Stalin took power.

Macaulay’s work is more subtle and funny than Huxley’s. Despite being a century old, What Not is remarkably relevant and readable, a satire that only highlights how little has changed in the years since its publication and how dangerous and absurd state policies can be. In this sense then, What Not reads more like George Orwell’s 1949 novel 1984 

Orwell was critical of Zamyatin’s technique. “[We] has a rather weak and episodic plot which is too complex to summarize,” he wrote. Still, he admired the work as a whole. “[Its] intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism—human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself, the worship of a Leader who is credited with divine attributes—[…] makes Zamyatin’s book superior to Huxley’s,”

Like our own tech magnates and nations, the United State of We is obsessed with going to space.

Perhaps in 2019 Macaulay’s What Not, a clever and subversive book, will finally get its overdue recognition.

by taking up military history, Gladwell’s half-witted didacticism threatens to convince millions of people that the only solution to American butchery is to continue shelling out for sharper and larger knives

Although the phrase “Bomber Mafia” traditionally refers to the pre-World War II staff and graduates of the Air Corps Tactical School, Gladwell’s book expands the term to include both kooky tinkerers and buttoned-down military men. Wild, far-seeing mavericks, they understood that the possibilities of air power had only just been breached. They were also, as Gladwell insists at various points, typical Gladwellian protagonists: secluded oddballs whose technical zealotry and shared mission gave them a sense of community that propelled them beyond any station they could have achieved on their own.

Gladwell’s narrative is transmitted as seamlessly as the Wall Street or Silicon Valley koans that appear atop LinkedIn profiles, Clubhouse accounts, and Substack missives.

Gladwell has built a career out of making banality seem fresh

Drawing a false distinction between the Bomber Mafia and the British and American military leaders who preceded them allows Gladwell to make the case that a few committed brainiacs developed a humane, “tactical” kind of air power that has built the security of the world we live in today.

By now, the press cycle for every Gladwell book release is familiar: experts and critics identify logical flaws and factual errors, they are ignored, Gladwell sells a zillion books, and the world gets indisputably dumber for it.

“What actually happened?” Gladwell asks of the Blitz. “Not that much! The panic never came,” he answers, before favorably referring to an unnamed “British government film from 1940,” which is in actuality the Academy Award-nominated propaganda short London Can Take It!, now understood to be emblematic of how the myth of the stoic Brit was manufactured.

Gladwell goes to great pains to portray Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay as merely George Patton-like: a prima donna tactician with some masculinity issues. In reality, LeMay bears a closer resemblance to another iconic George C. Scott performance, one that LeMay directly inspired: Dr. Strangelove’s General Buck Turgidson, who at every turn attempts to force World War III and, at the movie’s close, when global annihilation awaits, soberly warns of a “mineshaft gap” between the United States and the Commies. That, as Gladwell might phrase it, was the “real” Curtis LeMay: a violent reactionary who was never killed or tried because he had the luck to wear the brass of the correct country on his uniform. “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal,” LeMay once told an Air Force cadet. “Fortunately, we were on the winning side.”

Why would Malcolm Gladwell, who seems to admire LeMay so much, talk at such great length about the lethality of LeMay’s Japanese firebombing? The answer lies in what this story leaves out. Mentioned only glancingly in Gladwell’s story are the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. The omission allows for a stupid and classically Gladwell argument: that indiscriminate firebombing brought a swift end to the war, and its attendant philosophical innovations continue to envelop us in a blanket of security that has not been adequately appreciated

While LeMay’s 1945 firebombing campaign was certainly excessive—and represented the same base indifference to human life that got Nazis strung up at Nuremberg—it did not end the war. The Japanese were not solely holding out because their military men were fanatical in ways that the Americans weren’t, as Gladwell seems to suggest, citing Conrad Crane, an Army staff historian and hagiographer of LeMay’s[1]; they were holding out because they wanted better terms of surrender—terms they had the prospect of negotiating with the Soviet Union. The United States, having already developed an atomic weapon—and having made the Soviet Union aware of it—decided to drop it as it became clear the Soviet Union was readying to invade Japan. On August 6, the United States dropped a bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, and mere hours after the Soviet Union formally declared war on the morning of August 9, the Americans dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki. An estimated 210,000 people were killed, the majority of them on the days of the bombings. It was the detonation of these bombs that forced the end of the war. The Japanese unconditional surrender to the Americans was announced on August 15 and formalized on the deck of the USS Missouri on September 2. As historians like Martin Sherwin and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa have pointed out, by dropping the bombs, the Truman administration had kept the Communist threat out of Japan. Imperial Japan was staunchly anticommunist, and under American post-war dominion, the country would remain that way. But Gladwell is unequipped to supply the necessary geopolitical context that could meaningfully explain why the American government would force an unconditional surrender when the possibility of negotiation remained totally live.

In 1968, he would join forces with segregationist George Wallace as the vice-presidential candidate on his “American Independent Party” ticket, a fact literally relegated to a footnote in Gladwell’s book. This kind of omission is par for the course in The Bomber Mafia. While Gladwell constantly reminds the reader that the air force leadership was trying to wage more effective wars so as to end all wars, he cannot help but shove under the rug that which is inconvenient

This is truly a lesson for the McKinsey set and passive-income crowd for whom The Bomber Mafia is intended: doing bad things is fine, so long as you privately feel bad about it.

The British advocacy group Action on Armed Violence just this month estimated that between 2016 and 2020 in Afghanistan, there were more than 2,100 civilians killed and 1,800 injured by air strikes; 37 percent of those killed were children.

teaching the software to associate certain kinds of images, text and hashtags with a ‘dangerous’ protest results in politically and racially-biased definitions of what dangerous protests look like. This is because, to make these predictions, the system has to decide whether the event resembles other previous events that were labelled ‘dangerous’ – for example, past BLM protests. 

When in 2016 the ACLU proved that Dataminr’s interventions were contributing to racist policing, the company was subsequently banned from granting fusion centres in the US direct access to Twitter’s API. Fusion centres are state-owned and operated facilities and serve as focal points to gather, analyse and redistribute intelligence among state, local, tribal and territorial (SLTT), federal and private sector partners to detect criminal and terrorist activity.  However, US law enforcement found  a way around these limitations by continuing to receive Dataminr alerts outside of fusion centres.

Use of these technologies have, in the past, not been subject to public consultation and, without basic scrutiny at either a public or legislative level, there remains no solid mechanism for independent oversight of their use by law enforcement.