The Doomsday Equation by Matt Richtel Read Free Book Online Page A

shipments insofar as they can be inferred by production and profit from companies in the military-industrial complex, and, powerfully, a “rhetoric” measure. It looks at changing use of language by politicians and media around the world but, with more emphasis, in hot zones. How are powerful “entities,” whether people or media outlets, describing their relationship to the rest of the world? Internet spiders can easily comb through mountains of publicly accessible commentary to look for phrases like “we will never surrender” or “vanquish the enemy” or “date which will live in infamy.” Algorithms Jeremy has developed and forfeited many nights of sleep perfecting can compare them with previous utterances by those politicians or outlets, looking to see if the rhetoric had been more conciliatory, and so forth.
    Those are the key variables for understanding more conventional war. But predicting and understanding localized terror attacks, insurrection, jihad, guerrilla warfare that has, in effect, become war in the 21st century, that’s even tougher. It relies on narrowing the search to a region in question, even a city or mountainous area, to the spot where a group of insurgents are focused. It relies on looking at an additional key variable: the formation and concentration of small groups capable of carrying out attacks and creating instability. These are, in fact,mini-armies, the modern analogue to the massive buildup of troops and a war machine before the outbreak of World War II. What, the Soviets never saw it coming?
    And Jeremy’s been monkeying around with other ideas, ways to refine the conflict algorithm. Over the last several months, since everyone severed ties with him, he’s been playing with a particularly wild-eyed effort. It’s an attempt to identify a specific person whose actions, or words, are singularly important in igniting conflict. The program measures the relevance of a person’s influence to potential hostility based on that person’s network of connections. It aims to mine the mountains of data on the Internet to connect people to one another, a version of what Facebook does when it draws connections between potential friends.
    Jeremy calls it “Program Princip.” It’s named after Gavrilo Princip, the nineteen-year-old who shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, igniting World War I. Jeremy’s idea is that he’ll go beyond being able to identify someone like Ferdinand as a potential influence in an impending conflict, to identifying the tiny needles that will ignite the conflict haystack. In some ways, it’s not so far-fetched. A handful of startups have gotten big venture capital to develop software aimed at combing the Internet to determine who is most influential in, say, business or art. So why not conflict? But so far, Jeremy has only beta-tested it, showed no one, only really muttered about it to Emily.
    Jeremy finishes his latest iPad query in about twice the time it ordinarily would’ve taken, because he’s got to type so carefully in order not to make mistakes and because he’s tired. He hits “enter” on his command.
    Is the data accurate?
    If so, what data set changed? When?
    He should know in the next six hours. It’s well past 1 a.m. He pulls the iPad to his chest, folds his arms around it. Pulls it back off his chest. He opens a browser. Googles: Evan Tigeson.
    Lots of hits. He clicks on the web site for SEER, Evan’s latest thing. And then a mission statement about not merely predicting but driving global trends using proven, patented algorithmic technologies. Yeah, Jeremy thinks, my fucking technologies. He clicks on Evan’s bio. Sees the picture, a black-and-white photo, square features, an almost seductive eyebrow raise undercut with a geeky subtext that Evan can’t bury. To Jeremy, he’s a “51 percenter”; just on the other side of slick. Like so many in the Valley, he’s just shy of fully slick, geeky enough to come across as authentic. This type of