“Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year? Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

From 1984, by George Orwell. Published 1949.

When PRISM was leaked to the Washington Post and the Guardian, it was not in the form of a 3,000 page study like the ‘Pentagon Papers’. In a true sign of the times it was a 41-slide Powerpoint presentation. That the method and justification for the indiscriminate monitoring of the world’s internet traffic – probably the largest operation of its type ever conceived – can be summarised so simply is a marvel of 21st century science. Regardless of your opinion on PRISM’s importance (or non-importance), it is astonishing that such a project can be condensed in so small a document. With this unholy coupling of Powerpoint, acronyms and infographics one can neatly sidestep ethical and legal considerations by making the primacy of the mission axiomatic – the presentation exists in its own universe, crafted with its own language, a bastard child of statistics, visual mapping and animation. I have taken to calling this practice ‘slidespeak’.

Criticism of Powerpoint as a briefing tool is not new – in a review of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster of 2003, NASA concluded that reliance on Powerpoint for briefing was to blame for fatal negligence, particularly how Powerpoint slides promote the usage of compressed phrases and acronyms[1]. Several high ranking US Officers have lamented the increased use of slides in place of ordinary prose in military management throughout the War on Terror. When Brigadier General McMaster ‘pacified’ the Iraqi city Tal Afar in 2005 he outright banned the use of Powerpoint as it “created false illusions of control” in the chaos of war. The military moniker of “no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy” still had meaning for McRaster. Other Officers including Marine General Mattis put bluntly that “Powerpoint makes us stupid”[2]. Opposition to slidespeak was not fringe, and in August 2010 61-year old US Army Colonel Lawrence Sellin published a bitter polemic against Powerpoint and FLAs (“four letter acronyms”), depicting the ISAF HQ as bloated and top-heavy, interpreting the carnage of the ongoing conflict by flicking through Powerpoint presentations unable to see the woods from the trees. Actual “progress in the war”, he commented, “is optional”[3].

He was sacked two days later.

The warnings of these figures were ignored by Pentagon management, and the day of total victory for Powerpoint came upon General Petraeus’ succession to ISAF commander after the resignation of General McChrystal. While McChrystal loathed Powerpoint, Petraeus was enamoured with it and since his premiership, projects and programs throughout the US military networks have unfailingly been drafted on the lines of the click-through documents.

Petraeus resigned control over the US forces in Afghanistan in July 2011, but his dependence on Powerpoint was here to stay and ‘death by Powerpoint’ is now a stock phrase among the Officer corps. Petraeus next took his career to Langley as the director of the CIA (being directly appointed by the White House). The CIA don’t often publish their documents and so knowing if Petraeus’ acted as a Powerpoint typhoid Mary is impossible, but the leak of these PRISM and Boundless Informant slides suggests that Powerpoint has been adopted with gusto by Intelligence executives.

This is concerning for the same reasons that Officers gave throughout the war on terror. Firstly, reliance on the software alienates staff from the real world. The unending rhythm of presentation after presentation (some Officers were subjected to over three every day) melts the sense of energy and purpose, as Colonel Sellin described the ISAF HQ in 2011. The NSA might outwardly commit to acting within the laws and constitution of the United States but what guarantee is there that its staff will have time to even take them into consideration if the means of dialectic are confined to tile-sized slides? Although the Powerpoint slides are yet to be published in their entirety, I doubt whether ethics and legality will have much coverage. Immersion in slidespeak increases the chance that intelligence staff may begin to inhabit a different reality.

There is of course more to PRISM and its associate programmes than the influence of Powerpoint-influenced groupthink but while our government offer reassurances that we have “nothing to fear”, this is a good moment to review exactly how responsibility and leadership are safeguarded in our most secretive institutes. The rise of slidespeak allows powerful groups alienated from wider society to live in their own worlds, with the consequences being felt in ours. It is only right that their projects get more oversight and explanation than some clumsily drawn graphs and acronyms that go ‘swoosh’.