Dark Tower Digression

Mapping the familiar for practice.

There have been a couple of pieces in Tool Time about the benefits of Maltego, Maltego Intro - 32 Minutes and Actual Maltego Link Analysis. I had the benefit of first sitting down to do some link analysis a decade after I finished the Cisco Network & Design Professional ratings, and I had a lot of hands on with TDM, microwave data, and other network oriented stuff. I was already used to thinking in terms of nodes and flows.

I also had the fantastic benefit for discovering Lada Adamic’s Social Network Analysis class on Coursera. I passed it the very first time through but the quality of the class combined with the evolving content caused me to complete it three additional times. This is where I got my Gephi skills. She finished a book, changed jobs, and this class is no longer offered.

There are probably other classes out there, somewhere, but I’m not paying attention at that introduction to tools level any more. I have swung and missed on Matt Jackson’s Social and Economic Networks: Models and Analysis and grand total of FIVE TIMES, but this is graduate level stuff that presumes you already got data handling and visualization prior to arriving.

So what are YOU gonna do to get up to speed? You should consider something fun and familiar rather than trying a complex, conflict oriented problem first.

Attention Conservation Notice:

The YouTube algo stopped pushing RWNJBS for a minute and gave me a video about Stephen King’s The Dark Tower and the role this 4,250 page magnum opus plays in his overall fiction universe. If you’re already good on network stuff, pass this one by.

The Dark Tower:

In the spring of 2009 I was firmly in the clutches of Lyme disease, living alone in the middle of an abandoned air force base in the middle of nowhere, and bored to death. I got all eight novels from the series and read them end to end without doing anything else. I knew there were ties between the story and several of king’s other works, but I just saw this nice seven minute exposition on ALL of the connections and it includes a graph with temporal as well as logical aspects to it.

Here’s the final graph itself.

The graphic design angle to this really impressed me, as well as the clockwise fill of nodes, with adjustments made due to the meandering, messy nature of things. This would be a lot better if there was some attention to contrast, but you get the picture.

Your World:

Counter-insurgency focuses on understanding an opponent’s network with an eye on breaking it but there are generative applications as well. I spent a lot of time from spring of 2022 through winter of 2023 on Ukraine related issues. I wrote North Atlantic Fellas Organization three months ago, but I didn’t mention that I’d kept a graph of the various groups I had contact with during that time. This is a normal thing for sociologists involved in organizational development to do, either for the sake of diagnosis, or for construction.

If you’re going to get into the business of interdicting malign networks there’s no better first exercise than doing something like this for your own team. I’d make this a quiet endeavor at first. If you’ve got a grassroots group you’ll have usual clutch of personality disorders that I first described in What Hunts You? and if the group is now or has been effective in the past, you’ll have infiltrators. And they’ll snitch jacket you.

So what you want to do is to look at the group(s) you’re involved in, you want one(s) engaged in conflict, and you need to be able to see at least some of the back room dealings that occur. There are too many lone gun analysts who are conspiracy nuts, or LARPers, or both, and they make the twin mistakes of connecting everything they see, then assuming that they can see everything. Any problem larger than three over tired tweens picking at each other in the back seat on the drive to grandma’s house will have hidden features; get used to only being able to see the part of the iceberg that’s above water, so you can look for clues as to what’s underneath.

Conclusion:

I should apologize to those of you who are new readers. This Substack is about conflict tradecraft, but I roam far afield in search of the cultural inputs that are playing a role, and I don’t often mention that.

I find myself in one of those moods where I’m looking for something, but I have no idea precisely what it might be. I am profoundly frustrated that both The Peripheral and Penny Dreadful:City of Angels were pandemic casualties. Carnivàle was a much earlier and to my mind similar loss - a marvelous world laid low by economic realities.

I guess on the good news front, A Voyage To Arcturus was just $0.49 on Amazon. Going back to obscure foundations is always a good way to pick up a trail that one has lost.