Storm Warning, Part I

What The Weather Experiment can teach us about risk: Edge Work, Edge Computing, Election Security, Everything is National Security

“At Oxford a schism in FitzRoy’s personality was exposed. By nature he was both a devoted progressive and a hardened conservative. He had championed innovation throughout his career - lightning conductors on the Beagle, the weather logs, steam power on the Arrogant, the development of storm warnings. All there were the mark of a pioneer. Yet FitzRoy was wedded to the past, too: through his relationship with Mary, his upbringing, his faith in hierarchy - the inflexibility of rank and station.”

— The Weather Experiment, Peter Moore

Risk Developments this letter:

• Edge Work 

• Edge Computing

• Election Security

• Everything is National Security

The 'Beagle' in Beagle Channel, Conrad Martens

FitzRoy’s Folly

“Admiral Robert Fitzroy, the great prognosticator of the weather has destroyed his life by cutting his throat with a razor,” read the last line of the telegraph that announced Fitzroy’s death. It’s tragically ironic that a man so focused on predicting the future would end up taking his own life, and doubly so because his uncle Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh took his own life with a penknife. 

Why am I telling you this? 

Well, for one, it’s fascinating, and for another, FitzRoy, brilliant, aristocratic and well resourced though he was, failed to understand history; both his family’s own and his place in it. He was a descendant of Charles II, the King in exile during the English Second Civil War. A counter-revolutionary by birth and by nature, FitzRoy should have read the writing on the wall for aristocracy, but he never imagined the world would be reordered, not by violence, but technology.

What can the life of one enigmatic man teach us about the relationship between technology and knowledge? What still resonates today that began during the FitzRoy era of scientific entrepreneurialism? Did the birth of modern globalization promote or preclude innovation?

To answer those questions, let’s put this protagonist of “The Weather Experiment” in context. Born in 1805 to a royal British family, Fitzroy would go on to: 

• Join the Royal Navy at 13

• Captain the HMS Beagle at 26

• Become Governor of New Zealand at 38

• Lead the first Meteorological Organization at 49

• Coin the term “weather forecast” at 54

• Invent the first widely used storm warning system at 55

• Publish his life’s work, The Weather Book, at 58

FitzRoy lived during the first half of the 19th century, a time of enormous scientific, cultural and technological upheaval. Like a British Forrest Gump, FitzRoy seems to have been present at every inflection point for The Empire during his time. As a ten-year old, FitzRoy observed his uncle manage the coalition that defeated Napoleon. Fitzroy joined the British Royal Navy at the height of British hegemony and explored some of the last unmapped places on earth in the last vessels to be powered by wind alone. Upon returning to England, he was swept up in the religious fervor of the Victorian Age. Turning to politics, he managed the farthest flung colony of the British Empire in New Zealand, and created one of the first modern bureaucratic institutions, the Meteorological Organization (known affectionately as The Met). Gathering weather data for The Met provided one of the first practical uses for the electric telegraph, which enabled the creation of the world’s first storm warning system. FitzRoy played a role in each of these major STEM advances during his lifetime:

• The Telegraph

• Steam Ships

• Public Safety

• Natural History

• Thermodynamics

• Professionalization of Science

• Mathematical and Statistical Visualizations

While the story of “The Weather Experiment” is largely a personal tale of the triumphs and tragedies of FitzRoy, it is important to note that it neither begins nor ends with him. Progress in the field of weather forecasting was also made by Beaufort, Constable, Redfield, Espy, Glaisher and Loomis. Perhaps most important were the communications, transportation, and social innovations that combined to allow a virtuous cycle of data production and distribution, enabling innovation in weather prediction.

Technology and knowledge exist in a positive feedback loop. As Carmen Medina says, “Our ability to know is a function of our tools for knowing.” Her favorite example is cosmology, but this is no less true in meteorology or any other field. In the mid 1800’s, the invention and improvements to the thermometer, barometer, anemometer, and hygrometer, made quantitative data gathering possible. The invention of the telegraph revolutionized the ability to share that data quickly. More and better data allowed for the creation of technology like the daily weather forecast, all kinds of new maps and the first storm warning system. This, in turn, led to knowledge necessary for the first hot air balloons, time zones and a Cambrian explosion of markets. Just as it is true that tools can provide better information — leading to new knowledge, creating yet more technology — the tools themselves also constrain our understanding of the world.

For example, FitzRoy was the leading proponent of a device called the storm glass. While the thermometer, barometer, anemometer, and hygrometer all turned out to be scientifically sound and useful, the storm glass was not. Yet FitzRoy’s theory of pressure systems, his weather forecasts, and weather maps were accurate, if not always precise. He endured great derision at the hands of the scientific community for his beliefs. An avid critic of evolutionary theories, FitzRoy lacked the scientific pedigree of Charles Darwin and Francis Galton, who had both attended medical school and graduated from Cambridge University. Instead, Fitzroy was a practical man of faith, at a time when faith was seen to be more pragmatic than science. From our modern perspective, we see science as pragmatic, but for most of history science was speculative and faith was concrete.

He was, in some ways, the quintessential entrepreneur, a man of great undertakings, with a combative personality and a desire to see his ideas implemented in the world. His uncomfortable relationship with the academy and lack of orthodox scientific training allowed him greater latitude for failures, such as the storm glass, but also successes well before his time, such as weather forecasting. He staked his family’s wealth on public expenditures he hoped would be recouped by the government, but left him in financial ruin. 

Stay tuned for Part II next week, in which I’ll conclude FitzRoy’s story and answer the fundamental questions of “The Weather Experiment”:

Do information networks, big data, capital markets, international trade, the modern nation-state, and hegemonic peace, often referred to in aggregate as globalization, encourage or discourage innovation?

Edge Work        

We’ve spoken before about how the cloud is not new. Cloud has become such a ubiquitous term, it’s almost lost meaning. Everything is in the cloud! As it turns out, that’s even true for labor.

Three big names have made long-term decisions about remote working in the last week. Dropbox announced a permanent work from home policy. Microsoft announced a half remote policy. JPMorgan announced their commitment to building thousands of commercial office space in Manhattan. This shouldn’t come as a shock, seeing as how Dropbox is a company born of the cloud, Microsoft has been straddling centralization and decentralization for decades as the control freak Gates era gave way to the free wheeling “Developers, Developers, Developers” Ballmer era, eventually settling into the refreshing? Nadella era. JPMorgan — a conglomerate of banks — centered on New York City — the global financial hub — is going to invest more money in making New York the stickiest place for finance.

It’s not yet clear whether decentralized labor will win out, but there are at least two big trends working in its favor. The first is housing and the second is workers prefer it. Still, it is not without risks. Both challenges in terms of innovation and security are real costs that may eat away at the benefits over time. There is a third way, the edge. Not The Edge, but edge caching. Distributed working like that of Dropbox requires coordination with the center, but what if there was no center? What if each team was organized into self sufficient cells? In fact, companies organized along a partnership model, already do this to some extent. Consulting, law and finance follow this model, but what about tech? 

Edge Computing

Speaking of tech and the edge, this week has seen big moves in edge computing. American tower is rolling out edge data centers. Cisco and Dell are announcing new products focused on the edge. These moves come as a response to the culmination of some very big cloud trends.

Cloud expectations are sky high, with estimates of a $1T by 2024. This has led to a bonanza of infrastructure and hardware sales. Security costs are mounting as cloud devices require authentication and Public Key Infrastructure on a scale never before imagined. Even Europe is getting into the game with a big move, trying to build a $10B industrial cloud to rival AWS, Azure and GCP. When you see a government backed plan to capture a market, it’s time to look out! The cloud market is saturated, and when clouds supersaturate a cloudburst is imminent. Get ready for the downpour.  

Election Security

In further government cloud news, let’s remember that even voter data is in the cloud. This is not a political newsletter, and I hesitate to discuss election security here, but two articles came across my radar that are a must read in risk. 

First is the news that the combination of two bugs in Fortinet and Microsoft systems allowed attackers access to government networks. This is interesting because the chaining of these two bugs is typical of complex systems and the difficulty of building security as an afterthought. Security is a property of a system, and the system must be evaluated as a whole.

That said, Microsoft has been doing a good job of cleaning up its tarnished security reputation. One such move was the take-down of a cybercrime network running the malware Trickbot. In an interesting twist, ransomware deployment infrastructure, most frequently seen in the financial services industry, started appearing in election systems. Often we see espionage tools focused on the public sector migrate to cyber-crime, but now they are being recycled back to the public sector.

Management Is a Threat to National Security

That brings me to one of my final points, is everything is in the interest of national security? In Matt Levine’s memorable hierarchy of criminal offenses, securities fraud sits at the pinnacle. He makes a good argument for that being the case, so I’ll let him have it, but crime is really just a subset of security in the domestic sphere. Securities fraud may sit on top of one peak, but the mountain range is much bigger.

At least, the Department of Defense seems to think so. The DoD is challenging the FCC’s authority on spectrum, as they attempt to lease spectrum, allocated for military purposes, directly instead of going through the FCC’s auction process. Part of the justification seems to be that the DoD can allocate spectrum in the interests of our national security.

In other national security issues, Berkshire Hathaway was fined $4.1M for violating Iran sanctions. Berkshire has a famously hands off management style. One risk of that is your subsidiaries have to be aligned with your values. A turkish tool manufacturer might not see anything wrong with selling products to Iran. The U.S. Government, on the other hand, might not want companies to sell products to Iran. So a management style becomes a national security threat.

In related management threats to national security, Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO said, “What I’ve learned as an amateur in government bureaucracy is that it really matters how high you are in the organization.” Presumably at Google, they let entry level people make strategic decisions, set pay scales and sign deals. But you know, point taken that technology is important and the Government should have important tech executives. One interesting footnote to this is that the case is framed as a great power competition with China over AI, but there are a number of technologies that threaten national security, from drones to cryptocurrency. The argument for a more direct hierarchy with closer ties to power works especially well for centralizing technologies like AI, not so for distributed ones like cryptocurrency.

Gratitude

That’s all for this week! I wanted to take some time at the end of this letter to thank the many, many people who helped me put it together and inspired some of the ideas. My writing workshop members @Simone Keelah@Reza Saeedi@Roger Farley@SachinMaini@Vinit Shah and @Tom White. In addition the folks who supported this topic, @Kushaan Shah, @Lea Isabella Boreland, @Shiying He, @Louis, @Joey DeBruin. Lastly, those who I bounced ideas off of and borrowed from, @Carmen Medina, @Dan Stern, @Brittany Laughlin, @Paul Orlando, @David Brillembourg, @Tamar Nachmany, and many, many more.