MADD, Madd & MaDD (pronounced mad)
(1) The
acronym (as MADD) for Mothers Against
Drunk Driving, a non-profit education and lobbying operation founded in
California in 1982 with a remit to campaign against driving while drink or
drug-affected.
(2) The
acronym (as MADD) for Myoadenylate deaminase deficiency or Adenosine
monophosphate deaminase.
(3) The
acronym (as MADD) for multiple acyl-CoA dehydrogenase deficiency (known also as
the genetic disorder Glutaric acidemia type 2).
(4) In computing (as MADD), the acronym for Multiple-Antenna Differential Decoding (a technique used in wireless comms using multiple antennas for both transmit & receive which improves performance by exploiting spatial diversity & multipath propagation of the wireless channel).
(5) As the gene MADD (or MAP kinase), an activating death domain protein.
(7) As madd, a clipping of maddah (from the From Arabic مَدَّة (madda)), the English form of the Arabic diacritic (a distinguishing mark applied to a letter or character) used in both the Arabic & Persian.
(9) The
acronym (as MADD), for mutually assured digital destruction: a theory of cyber-warfare
whereby each participant demonstrates to the other their capacity to inflict
equal or more severe damage in retaliation, thereby deterring a cyber-attack
(based on the earlier MAD (mutually assured destruction), a description of
nuclear warfare deterrence).
From AD to MAD, 1962-1965
The
period between the addition of nuclear weapons to the US arsenal in 1945 and 1949 when the USSR detonated their first atomic bomb
was unique, a brief anomaly in the history of great-power conflict. It's possible to find periods in history when one power has possessed an overwhelming preponderance of military strength that would have enabled them easily to defeat any enemy or possible coalition but never was the imbalance of force so asymmetric as it was between 1945-1949. Once both the US and USSR possessed strategic
nuclear arsenals, the underlying metric of Cold War became the two sides sitting
in their bunkers counting warheads and the centrality of that lasted as long as
the bombs were gravity devices delivered by aircraft which needed to get to a
point above the target. At this point,
the military’s view was that nuclear war was possible and the only deterrent
was to maintain a creditable threat of retaliation and, still in the age of the
“bomber will always get through” doctrine, both sides literally kept squadrons
of nuclear-armed bombers in the air 24/7.
Once ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and (especially)
submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBMs) were deployed, the calculation of
nuclear war changed from damage assessment to an acknowledgement that, in the
worse case scenarios made possible by the preservation of large-scale
second-strike retaliatory capacity, although the "total mutual annihilation" of the popular imagination was never likely, the damage inflicted would have been many times worse and more extensive than in any previous conflict and, although the climatarian implications weren't at the time well-understood, the consequences would have been global and lasted to one degree or another for centuries.
It was thus politically and technologically deterministic that the idea of mutually
assured destruction (MAD) would evolve and it was a modification of a deterrence doctrine known as AD (assured destruction) which appeared in Pentagon documents as early as 1962. AD was intended as a way to deter the USSR from staging a first-strike against the US, the notion being that the engineering and geographical deployment of the US's retaliatory capacity was such that whatever was achieved by a Soviet attack, their territory would suffer something much worse. To the Pentagon planners in their bunker, the internal logic of AD was compelling and was coined as a description of the prevailing situation
rather than a theoretical doctrine. To the general population, it obviously meant MAD (mutually assured destruction) and while as a doctrine of deterrence, the metrics remained the same, after 1966 when the term gained currency, it began to be used as an argument
against the mere possession of nuclear arsenals, the paradox being the same acronym was also used to underpin the standard explanation of the structural
reason nuclear warfare was avoided. Just as paradoxically, while serving to prevent their use, MAD also fueled the arms
race because the stalemate created its own inertia and it would be almost a decade
before the cost and absurdity of maintaining the huge number of useless
warheads was addressed. MAD probably
also contributed to both sides indulging in conflict by proxy, supporting wars
and political movements which served as surrogate battles made too dangerous by the implications of MAD to be contested between the two big protagonists.
Maladaptive
Daydreaming Disorder
There
are those who criticize the existence of MADD (Maladaptive Daydreaming Disorder)
as an example of the trend to “medicalize” aspects of human behaviour which
have for millennia been regarded as “normal”, the implication being the sudden
creation of a cohort of customers for psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical
industry, the suspicion being MADD is of such interest to the medical-industrial
complex because the catchment is of the “worried well”, those with sufficient
disposable income to make the condition worthwhile, the poor too busy working
to ensure food and shelter for their families for there to be much time to
daydream.
Still,
the consequences of MADD are known to be real and while daydreaming is a common
and untroubling experience for many, in cases where it’s intrusive and
frequent, it can cause real problems with everyday activities such as study or
employment as well as being genuinely dangerous if associated with tasks such
as driving or the use of heavy machinery.
The condition was first defined by Professor Eli Somer (b 1951; a former
President of both the International Society for the Study of Trauma and
Dissociation (ISSTD) and the European Society for Trauma and Dissociation
(ESTD)) who described one manifestation as possibly an “escape or coping mechanism from trauma or abuse”, noting it may “involve long periods of structured fantasy”. Specific research into MADD has been limited
but small-scale studies have found some similarities to behavioral addictions,
the commonality being a compulsion to engage in activities despite negative
impacts on a person’s mental or physical health or ability to function various
aspects of life.
Despite
the suggestion of similarities to diagnosable conditions, latest edition of the
American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR, 2022) did not add an
entry for MADD and the debate among those in the profession interested in the
matter is between those arguing it represents an unidentified clinical syndrome
which demands a specific diagnosis and those who think either it fits within
the rubric of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) or is a dissociative
condition. Accordingly, in the absence
of formal recognition of MADD, while a psychiatrist may decline to acknowledge
the condition as a specific syndrome, some may assess the described symptoms and
choose to prescribe the drugs used to treat anxiety or OCD or refer the patient
to sessions of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) or the mysterious mindfulness
meditation.
Mutually
Assured Digital Destruction
Authors
in 2021 suggested MADD (mutually assured digital destruction) as the term to
describe the strategic stalemate achieved by the major powers infecting each
other’s critical (civilian & military) digital infrastructure with crippleware,
logic-bombs and other latent tools of control or destruction. The core the idea was based on old notion of “the bomber
always gets through”, a recognition it’s neither possible to protect these
systems from infiltration nor clean up what’s likely there and still
undiscovered. So, rather than being
entirely covert, MADD instead makes clear to the other side its systems
are also infected and there will be retaliation in kind to any cyber attack
with consequences perhaps even worse than any suffered in the first strike. Like the nuclear submarines with their multiple
For individuals, groups and corporations, there's also the lure of unilateral destruction, something quite common in the social media age. For a variety of reasons, an individual may choose to "delete" their history of postings and while it's true this means what once was viewable no longer is, it does not mean one's thoughts and images are "forever gone" in the sense one can use the phrase as one watches one's diary burn. That was possible (with the right techniques or a power drill) when a PC sat on one's desk and was connected to nothing beyond but as soon as a connection with a network (most obviously the internet) is made and data is transferred, whatever is sent is in some sense "in the wild". That was always true but in the modern age it's now effectively impossible to know where one's data may exist, such are the number of "pass-through" devices which may exist between sender and receiver. On the internet, even if the path of the data packets can be traced and each device identified, there is no way to know where things have been copied (backup tapes, replica servers et al) and that's even before one wonders what copies one's followers have taken. There may often be good reasons to curate one's social media presence to the point of deletion but that shouldn't be thought of as destruction.
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