Here is my recommended song for this post.

So, if you haven’t read my post about California then I suggest you do. This post will make a lot more sense if you do.

While we were down in Cali we were learning about a key concept of how the world grows. Not just in the tech sector but in all major and popular areas of the world. Human rights, education, devlopment etc…

So what is Disruption? You may ask. Well disruption can mean a lot of things. It can be negative or positive. It can ruin things but it can also better things. If you look up what disruption is in the dictionary it will say “disturbance or problems that interrupt an event, activity, or process.” Now that is true. It causes a disturbance in an event, activity or process. To put it in English it pretty much means that disruption is a disturbance in the regular flow of things.

I’m sure you can probably think of some examples of disruption. Apple products, computers, Google but if you really look disruption is all around us. We see it everyday, we just might not know it. If you walk down the street and pass by your local restaurant. Think to yourself why have they always been successful? Where I live if I walk down the street past my local restaurant I can say that there isn’t a place that combines the same ingredients in the area. They don’t have the same values or ideas that another restaurant has. That’s not to say that there might be a place in England or Japan that has the same ideas, but in my neck of the woods that’s all there is. It’s the idea of having something different to offer that makes business like a restaurant so successful.

When we went down to California we looked a lot at some examples before hand. Mostly to do with the tech sector, but when we went down there almost every stop we made that place had something to do with disruption. Even as soon as we got off of the plane we went straight to a pretty disruptive place. It was called Torrey Pines State Reserve.

At the reserve is the world’s largest collection of the endangered Torrey Pine Tree. The creation of the reserve was when a person, who had a connection with protecting the pines, bought large pieces of land with large collections of the trees. Later as the years continued more and more land was purchased until the reserve was officially called a state reserve. They continue to buy land today and grow and expand the reaches of the pines.

Now we have done some projects related to the theme of disruption. First we did a video which we filmed down in San Diego and second is a synthesis essay with the theme of how technology has been a disruption throughout history.

 

For the video we were allowed to choose anything that we went to in San Diego and we had to work in pairs. I paired up with Aiden and he and I, along with two other pairs, chose the USS Midway as our topic for disruption. Now to make everyone’s video unique we split up the different aspects of the aircraft carrier. Ethan and Will did the Air technology. Adam and Ryan did the Naval technology. Aiden and I did the political aspect of aircraft carriers, mostly in the US Navy.

I have always had an interest in political/military history so I was pretty happy with our choice.

Before we went to the museum we pitched our general thesis to our teachers. Then when we got to carrier we did a bit of filming, went on some tours and learned about the launch and takeoff mechanisms. Then we were all sent loose. We stuck with the other Midway groups. We first interviewed a WW2 veteran which I thought was really cool.

Then we spent a few more hours going around the ship interviewing other veterans from more recent conflicts or peacetime eras. Most of them served during the Cold War era. Aiden and I got a really good interview with a Navy and Coast Gaurd veteran who served on the Midway. He talked about how the Midway was a beacon of the US Navy and how countries and people paid attention when it went places. He also talked about how the Midway and other Navy ships are a sign of humanitarianism. They will take people in distress and bring them to saftey people fleeing Vietnam and other conflicts can fly to aircraft carriers and seek refuge or go to military base. It was really interesting to hear about all of these different aspects of what an aircraft carrier can do.

 

After gathering footage from Midway we continued on the rest of our trip and when we returned we set to work creating a video. I wrote the script and Aiden did the editing. We put together our first draft without the interview due to some technical difficulties.

Then then after watching a few other groups videos we determined what we needed to change for our final draft. We added some historical footage to add to the message and give visuals to the script and we added the interview.

 

(Coming Soon)

 

While all of the editing was going on we also were doing the synthesis essay.

 

At the very beginning of the unit we were told to read two books Little Brother and a choice book, I chose Insanely Simple. Now after reading the books we were told we would have to write an essay with those books as sources for points we would use.

After returning from California we then started to learn more about what the essay would be all about. The topic would be “How has technology caused disruption throughout history?” I decided to take the history word quite literally and I wanted to focus on the two world wars. They each had some pretty historic technology advancements that caused major chaos and disruption during and after the war, on all fronts. I then also wanted to include what we did in California so I planned on also writing about the current each sector and how phones had revolutionized the social platforms of the world.

 

Then after discussing with Ms. Maxwell I changed up my plan. I decided to stick entirely with military technology. I would keep the world war topics but instead of the tech sector I would write about the current military technology, more specifically the idea that robots are doing everything for us. I focused on drones, ICBM’s and surveillence equipment. For this new topic I decided to do some heavy research as most of the information I knew previously came from a few scattered movies and articles I had watch or read. I learned a lot about the current military situation in the Middle East and how that has affected life here in North America. One really interesting thing I found was that Canada has plans to increase their military budget over the next 5 years and plans in expanding its Air Force with state of the art drones and aerial fighters. This, as said in the article, was because of the ever growing terrorists threat.

 

Now after I was done with all of my research I spent 2 classes writing the essay. It was definetly stressful, not as much as the Fantasy essay last year, but I thought that I produced was pretty good and had some strong points. I need write a little much with over 1300 words but I tend to do that when I’m passionate about something.

 

 

How Military Technology has Caused Disruption Throughout History
By: Alexander Hutchison

When you think of military technology what do you think of? Missiles? Drones?
Those pieces of technology are quite new developments that have changed the idea of warfare, but they were only developed because one country wanted to be better than the rest. Military technology has caused disruption throughout history. In both world wars the world was learning how to deal with new innovations. Now in the modern day the world is learning how to use technology to their advantage. Technology is what is keeping the divide between countries, when one country is on top, others are fighting for better technology to knock it down.

 

World War 1 is a pretty common example of warring nations fighting for the best technology. When the war started soldiers streamed into Europe to fight on the muddy battlefields. No one had any idea what lay in store for them. Before WW1 people thought going to war was a courageous adventure and whoever went would return home, safe and a hero. World War One changed that. The tactics used sent millions to their deaths. The commanders didn’t understand the capabilities of machine guns. They wrecked havoc on the oncoming forces. According to the Horizons textbook the “new technology was so powerful and deadly that it was suicidal to charge across open ground.” Men started deserting because they didn’t want to leave the trench and go running to their inevitable death of a bursting shell or spray of bullets. The development of airplanes also contributed heavily to the number of casualties of the war. At the beginning of the war their purpose was to scout out enemy locations. Then they started to drop bombs on enemy encampments and later machine guns were mounted and planes started to have aerial battles, later dubbed “dog fights.” The term of fighter ace was also developed. If you shot down 5 planes than you became an ace. The skies were just as dangerous if not more than the battlefield. According to the Horizons textbook “the average life expectancy of a pilot was 3 weeks.” Mustard gas was also a new development that wrecked havoc on the battlefields of the western front. The Germans would release canisters of chlorine gas that burned soldiers lungs. There were one of two ways to have an attempt of withstanding it, gas masks or urinating into a rag and covering your mouth with it. The world learned a valuable lesson during this war. They learned that technology is the key to winning or loosing the war. Technology defines the outcome of the war. If you are up against an opponent with better technology than you need to understand how to get around it and develop your own technology to fight against it.

 

Then in World War 2 tactics and technology had both grown exponentially. There were now more sophisticated submarines, coded communications and atomic bombs. WW2 was a more complex war. Soldiers had to undergo fighting in all sorts of terrain with shells coming from ships across an island or a mortar encampment 2 miles away. Millions of soldiers and civilians died because of this conflict. The majority of which were the results of new technology advancements from either side. In the Atlantic Ocean, German submarines, U-boats, cut off all convoys headed to and from the British isles. They owned the Atlantic Ocean. It made people scared to go back and forth from Europe to North America. Germans used a complex coding machine, called Enigma, to transmit orders and coordinates. It stumped the allied forces and no one had a way of cracking it consistently and in enough time for it to make a difference. It wasn’t until Alan Turing developed one of the first computers was the code cracked. Enigma was officially cracked in 1945 and Alan Turing was said to have shortened the war by 2 years and saved millions of lives. As said in Little Brother by: Cory Doctorow “Once Turing looked hard at it, he figured out that the Nazi cryptographers had made a mathematical mistake.”Sadly, all of it was destroyed after the war for national security. He is thought of as the hidden father of modern day computers and spent the rest of his life developing another computer that was a lot more advanced than the one he built during the war. Near the end of the war the USA had created a nuclear bomb. They had gotten together a team of scientists that developed a bomb that could destroy a whole city. In the final year of the war in the Pacific, American planes dropped 2 nuclear bombs. One on Hiroshima and the other on Nagasaki. The two cities were completely obliterated and the both cities became a collection of ash and destruction. Millions of civilians died because of those bombs. Although tactics and technology had both become somewhat equal it still resulted in millions of deaths and many countries fighting to have the best technology. It lead to the increased development of military arms that became known as the Cold War and has also lead to the modern day arms race between major countries.

 

Nowadays, Technology has grown exponentially. There are ICBM’s, highly advanced surveillance equipment and remote controlled drones. Military operations have started to become done by robots more and more over the years. ICBM’s or Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles were mass produced in the last few decades and some countries have over 2000 stored in compounds across the globe. The way an ICBM works is that it is launched from a silo and sent into the highest reaches of the atmosphere. Then using thrusters that are remote controlled it navigates itself towards its target and comes down to blow up on the selected target. In most cases it would be a city. ICBM’s are also similar to drone strikes. Drones are launched from a military base and can be sent across the world. It has fuel capabilities for approximately 17 hours of flight. Most drone operations are used for surveillance or used as “eyes in the sky” for ground missions. But there are some drone mission that result in bombings or aerial strikes. According to an article from the Bureau of International Journalism In 2017 there were over 2000 drone missions just in Afghanistan. Over 1000 resulted in weapons being discharged from the aircraft. Drones allow no friendly casualties and usually result with confirmed kills of terrorists or whoever the target is. Drones a hands off and dehumanized way of doing operations, it makes waging a war on terror an easier and less costly battle. Now surveillance is a big part of drone usage and it shows just how far cameras and audio equipment have gone. There are lots of different designs for pinhole cameras and most can also transmit to any location away from where it’s placed. It has provided intelligence agencies with “eyes” everywhere. They can get into most traffic cameras from halfway across the world to find one suspicious character. The modern day technology has pretty much created a world where someone will see what your doing, especially if it’s illegal, and be able to respond in minutes. It has created the sense that the government will see whatever you are doing wherever you are.

In most cases of military conflict they have come about for political reasons but they end up becoming a huge arms race with very active testing that result in mass casualties. But nowadays every country is fighting to get on top and when someone gets on top other countries get scared. This forces them to increase their efforts to get the same technology or get something better and result in a huge mass production of technology. The modern world has become an arms race with no victor in sight.

 

 

I felt that this unit kinda opened my eyes when it came to looking at how the world functions. There is that underlying theme of being the best and that’s what drives the devlopment of technology. In military fields but also in corporate fields. Businesses in Silicon Valley and elsewhere are fighting to have the next big thing. Whether that’s the coolest app or the next popular toy. Technology has always been a competition. It’s what drives the world forward and to do that technology needs to be disruptive, it needs to change the world.