Sensemaking, systemic competition, and the social compact: Neil Ashdown

Below we hear from third year student Neil Ashdown, who was awarded joint fourth place in a Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) student competition in which students were asked to write an essay about potential threats and opportunities.  

In July last year I submitted an essay to a competition organised by the UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl). The question posed by the competition organisers was: “what do you believe to be the future threats or opportunities facing UK defence and security over the next 25 years?” The results of the competition were announced in December and my essay – ‘Sensemaking, systemic competition, and the social compact’ – was among those chosen for publication by Dstl. You can read the essays here.

Recurrent themes across the papers include the societal impact of disinformation (as in the essays by Edward Holland and Fearghal Hughes) and the potential for cyber-enabled disruption of critical infrastructure (as examined by Richard Brown, Valerie Buckland, and Hughes). The potential security risks of advances in biotechnology also feature prominently. Laurence Legon’s essay on the threat of engineered pandemics is a fascinating read; his thoughts on responsible technological research are highly relevant for work on cyber security. Similarly, Jack Suitor’s article on the security threats posed by academic publishing is a searing analysis of a system that directly affects every academic’s work.

My essay is partly about how governments try to make sense of complex threats and hazards. In the 20th century, this ‘sensemaking’ functions was concentrated in state intelligence agencies. However, in an increasingly complex world, marked by emerging threats and rapid technological change, there is a pressing need to expand this sensemaking apparatus beyond the parts of government that operate in windowless rooms and behind green baize doors. The increasing reliance of government agencies on tech companies for data processing and analysis is one example of this dynamic.

I wrote my essay as a formal brief for a policymaker; you can see that both in the language I used and in the absence of visible theorising in the text. Looking back on the essay now, however, I wonder whether there is a tension between the form and the message. As the essays in the collection show, it is increasingly hard to work out whether genetically engineered viruses, swarms of autonomous weapons systems, and ubiquitous disinformation are alarmist predictions for the future or accurate diagnoses of the present. It is possible to focus too much on the worst-case scenario when thinking about the future, but it’s equally possible to lose focus of just how unfamiliar, how weird, the future looks from our vantage point. And yet I tried to cram that weirdness into a relatively sober, restrained essay.

In 2009 (so roughly 100 years ago) the International Relations scholar James Der Derian wrote that the world was defined by “the increasing acceleration, complexity, and interconnectivity of everything” and highlighted the “resistance of global events … [to being] temporized and theorized into recurrent, predictable and therefore safer patterns of behavior.” In contrast, Der Derian described his career of theoretically and stylistically adventurous work as an attempt to represent the dangers of world politics without “pretending to ‘make sense’” of that subject. I wonder whether, in addition to writing policy briefs on the importance of ‘sensemaking’, it might be worth trying – in quite selective and strategic ways – to stop making sense?