Follow The Ho Chi Minh Trail: Analyzing the Media History of the Electronic Battlefield
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
is set in an alternative history in which the United States wins the Vietnam War. The HBO miniseries Watchmen (2019) updates the original graphic novel's thought-experiment, asking its viewers to question how American imperial power yoked with white supremacist tendencies operationalizes itself in the contemporary world. In the text, upon President Richard Nixon's request, the godlike superhero Dr. Manhattan intervenes in Vietnam on behalf of the US government. Through the militarization of Dr. Manhattan's superpowers, the US defeats the Viet Cong and colonizes Vietnam, turning the nation into the 51st state of the United States. Dr. Manhattan's powers enable the US to win the Vietnam War and, by extension, control the outcome of the Cold War in the Watchmen superhero universe. Dr. Manhattan is the personification of scientism and cybernetic thinking, symbolizing how technological innovation born out of Cold War science was always-already radicalized, politicized, and weaponized by the United States. The Vietnam War refracted through the Watchmen series sheds light on the bruised ego of the American psyche and the political gut-punch that multiple US presidents received at the hands of the Viet Cong. The defining logic driving the American war effort in Vietnam was that, with the most advanced military in the world, the United States should be able to effortlessly bring down the Viet Cong with technological solutions to the problems of war. In this essay, I suggest that contemporary conversations about digital battlefields and autonomous weapons can be enriched by a better understanding of the history of media technologies whose development was supported by military concerns in the quarter-century after the Second World War. Specifically, I examine the media history of one such technological solution: an electronic sensor network along the Ho Chi Minh trail, described in the study "Air Supported Anti-Infiltration Barrier" by the Institute for Defense Analyses' JASON division, a group of scientists that advised the US government (Deitchman et al.).
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it