"When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war", General McChrystal.
larger version
I actually tested software that the developers admitted was spaghetti code, so this one's interesting.
Quoting from We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint...
The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"PowerPoint makes us stupid," Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina.
But I like this comment at Mapping NASA's Current Dysfunctionality:
...the "it" you need to "get" is relational knowledge in a dynamic operating environment.
Which brings to mind Bruno Latour and Actor-network theory:
Actor-network theory tries to explain how material–semiotic networks come together to act as a whole (for example, a bank is both a network and an actor that hangs together, and for certain purposes acts as a single entity).
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According to actor-network theory, such actor-networks are potentially transient, existing in a constant making and re-making. This means that relations need to be repeatedly "performed" or the network will dissolve. (The bank clerks need to come to work each day, and the computers need to keep on running.)
Watching space shuttle launches since 2005, I've always liked this quote from Latour's (which seems more pertinent with the New Space Policy), How To Write 'The Prince' For Machines As Well As For Machinations. Describing The longitude and the latitude of our projection system:
The new Princes are free to chose human or non-human resources to weave their ways around the many confrontations they are engaged in. The Prince is like Plato's royal Weaver that he portrays as the ideal statesman. He never stops weaving, but what he weaves together is sometimes soft, sometimes hard, sometimes human, sometimes non-human. His only concern is to decide which tie is weaker and which one stronger in a given encounter. Pusillanimous observers will see either new social ties being redefined, or new technical associations being introduced, and will then marvel at how the two might be related, interconnected, reflected, influenced... If we wish to be a bit more audacious and follow the new Princes as closely as Machiavelli did with the older ones, we should be able to define the woof and the warp of the seamless web.
Following the cartographic metaphor, we will define the longitude and the latitude of the projection system, in such a way that every socio-technical imbroglio may be defined by two dimensions: how many people are convinced and take it as an uncontrovertible black box; if it is interrupted by people who doubt it and wish to open the box, what sort of transformations has the project to undergo in order to convince more people, that is what sort of fresh non-human allies have to be fetched?