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10 weeks of furlough straight into a layoff
my dms are open and I'm available for freelance. I don't have a ton of illusions about the sustainability of journalism beset by private equity on one side and a pandemic on the other, but expect me to try some form of direct reader-supported newsletter at some point in June.
The thing I will miss most about C4ISRNET, besides my colleagues, is the "Tomorrow Wars" newsletter, 6 issues shy of a full year https://www.c4isrnet.com/artificial-intelligence/tomorrow-wars/ It was a privilege to get to dive into the big-picture military tech questions every other week, informed by beat coverage.
The thing I will not miss is trying to explain "Command, Control, Communications, Cyber*, Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance, Networks" to strangers in plain, grokkable language.
*Computers? look, there's also C5 and C6 ISR, it's a whole mess
*Computers? look, there's also C5 and C6 ISR, it's a whole mess
Here's the freelance I'd already been doing in furlough: for @inkstickmedia, a look at the long history of plagues being exploited as a military tool https://inkstickmedia.com/the-plague-and-the-long-war/
For @FutureTenseNow at @Slate, I looked into how the deliberate political choices of the ~neoliberal turn~ in the 1980s were extrapolated into cyberpunk and now also shape the present world of unresponsive politics and the untouchable power of wealth https://slate.com/technology/2020/04/coronavirus-cyberpunk-science-fiction-government-politics.html
Also at @Slate @FutureTenseNow, I used the recent release of UFO (sorry, UAP) footage to explain how the post-1947 tradition of national security secrecy makes space for conspiracy theories and alien rumors https://slate.com/technology/2020/05/ufo-videos-pentagon-disclosures-national-security.html
Over at @ForeignPolicy, I wrote about how the drone war, subject to only the mildest of voluntary accountability late in Obama's second term, is now deliberately made opaque by the Trump admin, despite a little congressional action otherwise https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/22/obama-drones-trump-killings-count/
I've also been doing a bit of beat coverage at @Forbes, on everything from blood drones... https://www.forbes.com/sites/kelseyatherton/2020/05/27/drones-will-continuously-drop-supplies-to-hospital-in-north-carolina/#343b69d43183
...to grenade drones https://www.forbes.com/sites/kelseyatherton/2020/05/18/farming-drone-goes-from-plowshares-to-grenade-launcher/#7fba8148b572
to even more grenade drones https://www.forbes.com/sites/kelseyatherton/2020/05/07/grenade-drone-promises-an-end-to-cover-forever/#680a9b5a41ea
to how Russian robot doctrine will shape future war https://www.forbes.com/sites/kelseyatherton/2020/04/30/robots-will-replace-soldiers-in-combat-says-russia/#6c1ab3fd3c71
if you're an editor and interested in any coverage of the sort, feel free to reach out. And if you're someone who just likes reading what I write, so long as I can scrape by writing in some capacity, expect it to exist online in some form. Just, not at C4ISRNET any more.
