Yeah- we know. It is really 103 days to the next general election, but these images of weather masquerade as something else. They are about forecasting for an event that isn’t a single day anymore, but rather a season of activity. Since you have shared this long to approach the opening of the season, we know you appreciate the discomfort associated with the noise and confusion on this historic journey. The last week only demonstrates the challenge.

We cannot even get through a single news cycle without another- or several others- sweeping over them, combining fact and fiction into narratives that diverge as quickly as they appeared.

We were going to talk about the abrupt resignation of the Director of the United States Secret Service after some remarkable and acrimonious testimony on The Hill. A couple of us have been summoned there to make presentations and it is a daunting experience. Forthright, accurate and honest testimony was the criteria for how we performed in the interest of whoever sent us there. This session was a defiant and frankly astonishing failure. It was swiftly overcome by other massive changes in leadership, campaigns to capture it, and disassociated but related topics involving domestic and foreign relations.

Razor is one of the old-school fighter pilots who occasionally zooms through the morning production meeting, and he killed a discussion of the three-letter hiring description that is currently used either as a standard of progress or a demonstration of intentional mediocrity. He summed up an experience with an older version of the USSS, putting his lukewarm mug of Chock Full O’ Nuts down with a ceramic thump.

“I ran into the first George Bush’s Presidential Security Detail during one of his visits down to Norfolk after the Berlin Wall fell. The lead on the Detail was a fellow with a shaved head, dark skin, about 6-5, had to be every bit of 275 pounds. He was surrounded by guys similar in appearance, the smallest of them perhaps 6-1.” He took a quick sip of coffee and looked up. “The agents all looked hard-nosed, all of them kept heads on a swivel, they had a distinct feel about them. They were not to be trifled with…”

There was some general nodding arouund the table. We understand the nature of a changing demographic in the people who need protection, and that should be accommodated by by people who have a basic appreciation for it. But we would prefer potential assailants are aware that trifling with them will cause swift- and painful- retribution.

That is not the criteria in use today, and it cloaked with other narratives. Discussion of them results in immediate castigation of bias or stupidity, so Legal and Marketing are in a tussle about “sensational click bait” and “potential liability.” Section Lead DeMille suggested we simply highlight the issues in a non-emotive fashion and keep the real opinions at the picnic table where it is safe to say what we think.

Or at least it used to be safe. That is another matter under discussion about messaging, messages and messengers. The tech aspect of this is colliding in a profound generational manner. As a group, our sea stories were exactly that, normally shared over a beer and a smoke on a veranda with a view of the water. Some of us wrote letters that captured some of them, and the places where the stories were told. That evolved into something that became known as “blogging,” which were just electronic letters with a lot less postage.

That of course led to other issues. About a year ago, someone pointed out the impact of automation on what had become our trade. We are old enough to think of that as something that would help with an automated “spelling” or “grammatical” check to minimize the typos that reveal we are imperfect humans just like you. Now, of course, the red lines and blue screens are just part of everyday life. But we discovered there is much more.

You don’t have to accept this as true, but we promise that we discuss, write and mash. our own buttons before we talk to the machine that lives within the machines on the tables on the picnic table. It started as a curiosity, where we would take our transmitted text and paste it into a block at the machine’s site. Processing of our text is usually accomplished in less than a second and a revised version appears. It is usually more concise, correctly spelled, and presented as a more effective means of communicating what the machine thinks we should have said, without any inadvertent aspersions.

We did not know, at first, that the digital algorithm that was responding to our post would attempt to interact with us. It was a little startling at first, and only by limiting ourselves to a couple exchanges did we realizing how captivating the new technology could be. Some casual investigation revealed how profound the change actually is.

Apparently a sample of “style” could be submitted to a machine, not necessarily related to a topic, with a simple one-line request ot produce something coherent. That would make a research paper that once took a semester to produce a matter of milliseconds and with only brief human interaction.

You can see the sort of change that is bringing to everything, and how even casual interactions with machines could mimic the appearance of all sorts of things. Like imaginary but imposing figures of security.

Like testifying to Congress or something. Anyway, that is a larger matter beyond the scope of the morning meeting. Now that we are done, we will poke a few buttons and then ask the machine what it thinks about it.

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com