Are Twitter Users Agents of US Cyber War?

In an interesting story in this morning's New York Times, Sharon LaFraniere and Jonathan Ansfield describe China's concern about cyber-security threats resulting from the omnipresence of western-based hardware and software among China's networked computing infrastructure. Because of this concern, the authors write, China has become "'absolutely the world leader' in development of Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6)—-the successor to the current Internet." China's leaders seem determined to free themselves from their current reliance on Western IT companies by developing a home-grown Internet infrastructure.

What was most striking about this article, however, was this take on the so-called Iranian Twitter revolution: "'How did the unrest after the Iranian elections come about?' People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official newspaper, asked in a Jan. 24 editorial. 'It was because online warfare launched by America, via YouTube video and Twitter micro-blogging, spread rumors, created splits, stirred up and sowed discord.'" Where print, televisual, and networked media in the Western world celebrated the use of Twitter and YouTube as instances of grass-roots, anti-fascist cyber-democracy, China (and Iran) see these social media networks as weapons of online warfare launched by the US.

In my forthcoming book, I argue that in generating and proliferating pleasurable affects, social media networks encourage people to furnish all sorts of transactional data that help to vitalize our current securitization regime. From this perspective grass-roots netivism does something similar not only for US netizens but for those on the ground in other nations as well. And perhaps even more insidiously, does the promotion of an ideology of grass-roots socially networked activism among print, televisual, and networked media work to transform socially conscious users of Twitter and YouTube into unwitting agents of US cyber war? And how might this connect with the extensive premediation of cyber war under way at the current moment, particularly the February 16 "simulation" of an attack against the US by foreign sources?

Premediating Cyber War

According to a post by the Atlantic's Mark Ambinder, the US government will be war-gaming a cyber attack in public on television on February 16. While some may consider this a form of simulation or rehearsal, it seems clear that its real value is as a premediation of Cyber War. This fictionalization of a cyber attack seems designed less to work out how the US military might defend such an attack or how it might be prevented than to premediate for the American public the likelihood of such an attack.

This premediated war-gaming goes hand in hand with recent Senate testimony by US intelligence and defense officials about the likelihood of such attacks, as well as with related state-based and media premediations in the US, the UK, Israel, and other nations. Given our increasing affective, social, and commercial dependence on information and communication networks, any extended disruption of these networks could cause incalculable damage to our social, affective, and financial exchanges--not to mention other kinds of damage to power networks, transportation networks, water purification and sanitation networks, and so forth.

Premediating such attacks is not likely to have a major effect on our social, technical, and commercial networks, but may help prepare the public affectively for major network disruptions. The aim of these various premediations is less to predict specific attacks or to prepare specific lines of defense than to modulate public affect with an eye toward encouraging us to accept the necessity of increased practices of state and corporate securitization.

US Intelligence Officials Premediate Terrorism and Cyber-Attacks

In an article nearly buried on page 6 of the front section of the New York Times, "Senators Warned of Terror Attack by July," top US intelligence officials are quoted as premediating terrorist attacks on US soil within the next 3 to 6 months.

Dennis C. Blair, who directs the nation's intelligence operations, and Leon Panetta, director of the CIA, both pre-mediated an attack by Al Qaeda or one of its affiliates. Panetta said that "The biggest threat is not so much that we face an attack like 9/11," but "that Al Qaeda is adapting its methods in ways that oftentimes make it difficult to detect." Blair underscored this point, but began his testimony by premediating the possibility of a crippling cyber-attack on US telecommunications and computer networks, contributing to increasing concerns among the intelligence community of a "cyber Pearl Harbor."

The fact that such news does not merit placement on the front page is worth considering, particularly insofar as we are only six weeks or so beyond the failed Christmas Day bombing. Perhaps it is simply a sign of the short attention span of the US public. Perhaps it means that the American public is beginning to take a more mature approach to the inevitability of terrorist attacks. More likely it means that the US media does not yet see such premediation as something that will sell newspapers this week. After all, this is Super Bowl week; the media's premediations seem oriented largely towards the Colts and the Saints.

It is also worth considering the aim of the intelligence community and the Obama Administration in issuing such premediations. Prior to 9/11 there was very little specific talk of this nature in the media; on the contrary the Bush-Cheney crew wanted to keep such intelligence on the QT, even from the president himself, it seems. After 9/11, however, in the run-up to the Iraq War, the Bush-Cheney administration used massive, widespread premediation to prepare the public affectively to accept (even when it cognitively or politically opposed) the invasion of Iraq. While the decision to invade Iraq, unlike the terrorist attacks premediated by the intelligence community, was in the hands of the US government, something similar nonetheless would seem to be involved here.

By premediating potential terrorist attacks on US soil or US networks before they happened, the Obama administration might be seeking to accomplish at least three related goals. First, such premediations can work to prepare the public affectively for such attacks so that their effects (particularly on the US economy) will not be as devastating as they were in the aftermath of 9/11. Second, by premediating such attacks now, the Republican opposition and their print, televisual, and networked media allies will have a more difficult time blaming the Obama administration for being unprepared (although of course that will not stop them from making such claims). Third, if such premediated attacks do not come off before the next election, say, Obama and the Democrats will be in a position to take credit for having kept the US safe.

Undoubtedly, there are other motivations one might imagine. From my perspective, what is most interesting is the fact that premediation continues to play an important role in US media and political discourse. And, in terms of a new research project that I am just beginning to undertake, it is telling that cyber war is being premediated alongside of terrorist attacks on US soil as an imminent threat to the security of the homeland.

8th Swiss Biennale on Science, Technics, and Aesthetics--Part 2

Held at Lucerne's Swiss Museum of Transport, an interesting, relatively high-tech facility, the 8th Swiss Biennale on Science, Technics, and Aesthetics set out to address some of the big global problems facing humanity at the start of the second decade of the 21st century. The Biennale charged 90 Swiss francs for the weekend and drew an audience of several hundred people. With the notable exception of the first day's intervention by Latour and Stengers (about which I posted an entry last week), the tenor of the papers was mostly non-academic, which was presumably part of the design of Rene Stettler, who has organized these events from their inception. Or perhaps more accurately, the overall tone of the event was something like a self-congratulatory celebration of the possibilities of a socially conscious science to redeem the world. Indeed, for much of the weekend, science and technology were presented as the new religion and the new priesthood, offering an enlightened public a new age, pseudo-ecological theology of the inter-connectedness of humanity, nature, earth, and the cosmos.

Day 1 was devoted mainly to science, beginning with a lecture on Leonardo by Frijof Capra, whose book The Tao of Physics was hugely influential among intellectually inclined seekers in the 1970s and beyond. Capra's thesis, which made virtually no reference to any of the voluminous scholarship on Leonardo, was that Leonardo had anticipated many of the tenets of contemporary non-linear science, including fluid dynamics, organic form, ecological design, the Gaia theory, and so forth. All that was missing was the claim that Leonardo had invented the internet. Margaret Wertheim, an Australian science writer based in California, followed with a critique of the Pythagorean idea that mathematical equations could describe the natural world, ending with a critique of the misplaced priorities of such scientific projects as the Large Hadron Collider. The other lectures included a critique of the idea that humans were inherently warlike by science journalist John Horgan and a defense of systems theory as a way for science to account for conscious experience, by Michel Bitbol, a philosopher of science at the École Polytechnique in Paris, which was the most academic of the four talks. While all of the talks offered what one might characterize as "enlightened" critiques of science, none of them broke any new intellectual ground. Each talk could be seen to participate in the construction of something like a socially conscious scientific theology, belief in which could somehow lead the way to a more humane future.

This new religion was most evident on Day 2, which focused on art and science, particularly in the presentations of Kevin Kelley and David McConville. Kevin Kelley, not to be confused with the founder of Wired magazine and former editor and publisher of The Whole Earth Catalog, is "an artist, best-selling author, and entrepeneur," author of a 198 NY Times best-seller, The Home Planet, which featured photographs of earth from space coupled with inspirational prose from scientists, poets, and philosophers, among others. Kelley presented a new digital tool to visualize our place in the evolution of the universe. His hypnotic narrative of the digitally generated images was accompanied by songs and poems by Rachel Bagby, "an arts and social change innovator." The aim of their presentation of this visualization tool, which was received with awe and wonder by most of the audience, was to dramatize how brief humanity's time on earth was and yet how dramatic its impact had been. Kelley claimed that his plan was eventually to make his software into open source media and to make it ubiquitous--on computers, cellphones, watches, and so forth. At no time did he give any indication of the impact that networked digital media might have had on the planet.

The erasure of technical mediation was even more complete in the planetarium presentation by David McConville, a disciple of Buckminster Fuller and "noospheric researcher" at the Elumenati, a full service design and engineering firm specializing in the creation and deployment of immersive environments, located in Ashville, North Carolina. McConville presented a dazzling planetarium show of the observable universe, whose aim was to "invite" the audience members "to imagine stepping outside of their own perspectives to reflexively consider how suspending beliefs can enable new ways of seeing and knowing the world." While the display was impressive, what was most interesting about the planetarium presentation was the way it transformed the museum into something like a 21st-century cathedral, as the priests of a new-age scientific theology dazzled believers with powerful digital visualization technologies of mediation. Reclining in the dark among a crowd of fellow believers, looking up to the digitally projected heavens, the audience was invited to immerse itself in the power of these new technologies, which worked to erase all signs of their mediation in the presentation of a new cosmology. What wasn't reflexively considered was the role of computational and visualization technologies in producing this interactive display or the info-capitalist aims of the Elumenati.

With the exception of the intervention by Latour and Stengers, the weekend's presentations aimed primarily at feel-good solutions to complicated global problems. The 8th Swiss Biennale could be seen to represent a popularization of an interdisciplinary academic conference, one focused more on edu-tainment than education, more on celebrating a shared set of cultural beliefs about science and technology than on contesting and composing the complex interrelations among science, technics, and aesthetics today.

8th Swiss Biennale on Science, Technics, and Aesthetics--Part 1

I don't usually use this blog to report on my travels, but I was recently in Lucerne, Switzerland, in the midst of a two-week lecturing tour in anticipation of the release of Premediation in April, so I thought it would be worth while to report on what proved to be a disappointing but nonetheless interesting event.

My attendance at the Biennale was due to a coincidence of circumstances. First, I found myself with a free weekend between talks at University of Warwick and Anglia Ruskin University last week and a workshop at University of Durham this coming Tuesday, followed by a keynote address I will deliver on January 21st at a conference in Amsterdam on "Futures in Finance and Security." During the months before the conference, I began receiving emails publicizing the Swiss Biennale, which is designed as something like a gathering of public intellectuals--scientists, philosophers, writers, and so forth--to address the question of The Large, The Small, and the Human Mind, a theme based upon a 1997 book by Roger Penrose. Normally I wouldn't find such an event of much interest, but I noticed that the first day of the Biennale featured an "intervention" by Bruno Latour, chaired by Isabelle Stengers. I have great respect for the work of both Latour and Stengers, and I have known Bruno for more than twenty years, since my early days at Georgia Tech (though I don't think I had seen him for more than a decade before this weekend). Given the coincidence of my free weekend and the opportunity to renew an old friendship and perhaps to start a new one, I decided to give the event a go.

The highlight of the Biennale for me was the “intervention” on the first day by Latour and Stengers. Designed as something like a dialogue, with Latour addressing the audience and Stengers interrupting him with questions which helped move the argument along, the intervention represented an early attempt at what Latour is calling his Compositionist Manifesto.

Latour’s lecture was of interest to me for several reasons. First, he framed his talk with a reading of James Cameron’s Avatar. In fact Latour joked that if he had an agent he would sue Cameron for plagiarism as the ending of the film, in which the planet Pandora asserted itself in Gaia-like fashion to repel the colonialist invaders and to transform the crippled Marine into a full-fledged N’avi, could be seen as a cinematic depiction of a possible way forward out of the modern dilemma which Latour sketches out in Pandora’s Hope. Insofar as I have been working on a short piece on Avatar tentatively titled, “We Have Never Been Avatars: The Last Film of the Twentieth Century,” this claim was of interest to me. Latour’s compositionist manifesto was also interesting because of the distinction he invoked at the end between “le future” and “l’avenir,” a distinction that bears some relation to the distinction between the two different understandings of the future entailed in prediction and premediation, respectively, which I develop in some detail in my forthcoming book.

But what does Latour’s Compositionist Manifesto consist of? He begins with a definition of what he sees as the new spirit of our time, in which the modern belief in time as an inevitable forward progression has begun to give way to a recognition among non-moderns that progress is fully reversible. Compositionism transforms what it means to progress or to go forward, issuing a warning or call for attention so that we will stop going further in the same way as before, the way in which moderns have tried to do ever since the great divide instituted by Descartes and fortified by Kant.

Compositionism distinguishes between progress and progressiveness, taking up the search for universality without believing that universality is already there in the future waiting to be discovered by the progress of modern science. Composition conceives of universality as composed of utterly heterogeneous parts that will never make a complete, uniform whole, but at best a fragile, barely held together whole.

Stengers replied at this point, contending that the fact that this universality will never make a whole means that it will never be at rest, but must be continually maintained, must be composed and constantly kept together through activity and motion. Any composition must always be maintained and attended to. Different kinds of care or physical attention are always required.

Latour then explained that composition is the opposite of critique, which depends upon the fundamental opposition between illusion or delusion and reality. In so doing, Latour maintained, critique creates a massive gap between what is felt and what is real and must depend upon a belief in a world beyond this world on which to base critique. Composition, on the other hand, is completely mundane, and entails a question of having the right tools for the right jobs. So while a hammer may be a good tool for destroying idols it is less good at stitching together heterogeneous elements that make up a composition. Iconoclasm depends upon a sturdy or juvenile belief in the beyond, which can only be reached by destroying the idols that stand between the critic, the iconoclast, and reality. We must leave the 20th century behind, Latour proclaimed, let the dead bury the dead.

But what of Nature, Stengers asked? What about the 19th century idea of the natural as a foundation for narratives of the modern of the 20th century. Even life, if it is composition, is not natural ini this 19th-century sense. Latour replied that while “post-natural” has some currency as a term to address the end of nature, compositionism is perhaps more comfortable with the term pre-naturalism. Nobody has ever lived in nature, Latour maintained. Ever since the bifurcation of Descartes between the cogitating mind and the objective world, nature has always been something made, constructed, composed. How, then, can we move forward without the engine of progress? Perhaps by recognizing that we are closer to the 16th century than we are to the 20th. We’re now more familiar with the time before the modern bifurcation. Everything is now in some sense post-natural.

Stengers then suggested that we need to take seriously the idea of breaks, of a succession of breaks in the 20th century, so that we can see that each time an old alliance was broken it was taken by the moderns as a sign of progress or science. We were beyond the break—breaking science is beyond the break. If we are closer to the 16th century, it is a different 16th century, a different point. To return to the animated cosmos of the 16th century we must take advantage of this idea of animation without thinking about intention. Lovelock’s idea of the revenge of Gaia is a problem if it’s understood that Gaia is intentional. It’s better, Stengers said, if Gaia doesn’t know us. Agency only operates within assemblages. There is no agency without composition, no anime without connection.

Latour picked up on Stengers’ point, claiming that the invention of the inanimate was more remarkable than the invention of the animate. The inanimate is not to be taken as the given state, with the animate developing or evolving out of it, but rather is the more interesting phenomenon, which can only be invented or composed by animate agents. In practice all agency has to be distributed at each step, in theory this is not necessarily the case. Realism is dependent upon the contradictory, irrational idea of action without agency in which inanimate objects act on their own—nature is already assembled. For Latour (and for Stengers) the agency of the natural world is distributed among animate and inanimate, human and non-human agents.

Latour then took up the question of the continuity of cause and consequences. Compositionists, he maintained, cannot rely upon continuity, which is a given to realists or naturalists, but which for a compositionist must be composed slowly and progressively from discontinuous pieces. The concept of matter, Latour claimed, is too anthropocentric and especially too idealistic. We need a more mundane, materialistic definition of matter, if we are to compose the material world.

Stengers then responded that consequence always overflows the material cause (much as affect overflows intention or cognition). For Stengers, everything we do must be disputed, discussed, imagined, and reimagined. We must slow down, but to do so is seen as a betrayal of modern ideas of progress in which we must feel this imperative to go quickly, to advance—and feel this deep anxiety if we slow down. Rationality ignored consequences—don’t worry about them, let them take care of themselves.

Latour then introduced the idea that modernists never actually run to the future, but only run from the past. Benjamin’s Angel of History looks behind, not ahead. Modernity, Latour claimed, flies backwards from the past. At this point, Latour began moving humorously backwards across the stage, demonstrating how the modernists move into the future while facing the past.



Only recently by a sudden conversion have moderns finally realized how much catastrophe has been left behind by the progress of science, technology, and society, because for the past century or so moderns have never looked to the future because they have been so busy fleeing from the pat and now begin to realize that they have in fact been creating the destruction they have been fleeing in the first place. Moderns have never contemplated their future until a few years back, that is, their future of fleeing their past backwards.

Here, Latour introduced the distinction in the French language between two kinds of futurity, le future” and “l’avenir.” “Le future” is like the English term and denotes a predictable determined future into which one is moving in a linear, progressive way. “L’avenir” means something more like prospects, which are not determined, and which have to be composed from many potential future directions or paths. The moderns had “le future” but did not have “l’avenir.” But now they have begun to have one—the future and the prospect of things to come have really no connection with each other. The moderns, Latour now seems to hope, have no future, but many prospects—but prospects very different from the future teleological development of progress that they had imagined while they were moving forward while facing behind.

Stengers ended her remarks by asking about the relation between the Communist Manifesto and the Compositionist Manifesto. Both she and Latour agreed that the search for the common is what the two have in common, though they insisted that this search had to be slowly composed rather than taken for granted, or revealed in a sudden revolutionary action.

Latour ended by returning to Avatar as a sign of Pandora’s Hope, the hope for a new prospect, for the composition of a fragile assemblage of humans, technologies, and nature in a heterogeneous network of animate and inanimate actants.

What was perhaps most astounding about this intervention was how at odds it was with every other presentation over the course of the weekend. I hope in the next couple of days to post the second part of this report, on the ways in which the Bienniale's mystification of science, coupled with the erasure of practices of technical mediation, not only served as a 21st-century version of the cathedral but also suggested a different reading of James Cameron's Avatar, one less hopeful than that offered by Latour.

NCTC's Failure to Premediate Terrorism

This morning the Grey Lady featured two front-page stories on the failure of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) to uncover and prevent the plot, sponsored by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), to blow up Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day. The first, "Spy Agencies Failed to Collate Clues on Terror," detailed the failure of the NSA and other affiliated organizations to "connect the dots" about the plot. The second, "Shadow of 9/11 Is Cast Again," analyzed the way in which the NCTC, described as "the crown jewel of intelligence reform after the September 11, 2001, attacks," repeated the mistakes made before 9/11, mistakes which the NCTC had been established precisely to avoid.

The categories with which the Times analyzed this failure, which most likely mirror those with which the NSA approaches the problem of preventing terrorist attacks, were by now familiar and were focused predictably on treating the problem as one of data and information and detection: the NCTC didn't "connect the dots"; they hadn't "assembled the clues"; they failed in their "mission to unite every scrap of data"; they didn't "put the pieces of the puzzle together." Unfortunately, the problem with this approach, like the problem with pre-9/11 security, is that it focuses on the future in terms of probability not potentiality, as a problem of prediction rather than premediation. In other words the thinking of the NSA seems focused on identifying and disrupting plots that already exist rather than premediating potential plots that could, but might never, materialize. Sadly this posture bears a tragic similarity to the way in which the US military seems always to be fighting the last war against Al Qaeda, while Al Qaeda has already moved on to the next one or the one after that.

In other words, the NSA and NCTC have failed to approach the problem of preventing terrorism as a problem of premediation. What this means on the one hand is that they continue to approach the problem as one of trying to identify connections that already exist among the terabytes of data they possess rather than trying to generate from that data as many possible future scenarios as they can. But what it means more sigificantly is that they continue to pursue the problem in terms of data or information rather than in terms of affectivity or structures of feeling. For what seems most telling about the report that the father of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the accused bomber, visited the US Embassy in Nigeria to express concerns about his son’s radicalization, is not that he came with specific data about a possible plot, but with an affectivity of concern over his son's recently radicalized affect. Taken as data or information, this report failed to trigger a security alert. Taken for what it was, an affective premediation, it might have.

Of course, as we now know so well, profiling of all sorts is a regular tool of governmental and private security organizations, which would seem to make this failure to premediate even more curious. After all, the aim of profiling (what Ryan Bingham jokingly trivializes as "stereotyping" in Up in the Air) is to predict future behavior on the basis of demographic and other personal characteristics. But like connecting the dots or assembling the clues, profiling relies largely on a model of data and information, which imagines the future as inevitably knowable and always on the verge of being fixed or determined. Such an approach is focused chiefly on using the past to predict the future. What premediation provides is an alternative model in which the potentiality of the future is used to impact the present. If the affective potentiality reported by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's father had somehow been deployed to premediate potential futures, the NCTC and the NSA might have been in a much better position to have prevented his son from ever having boarded NWA flight 253.

Al Qaeda, Cancer, and the Obama Doctrine of Preemption

I have seen surprisingly little discussion in the print, televisual, and networked media of President Obama's rhetorical decision to characterize the Al Qaeda threat in Pakistan and Afghanistan in terms of the metaphor of cancer, which he introduced just past the half-way point of the speech:

"We're in Afghanistan to prevent a cancer from once again spreading through that country. But this same cancer has also taken root in the border region of Pakistan. That's why we need a strategy that works on both sides of the border."

This metaphor is troubling for any number of reasons. It participates in the long human history of characterizing one's enemies as threats to the health of one's own nation or state--such terms as vermin, parasites, and plagues have historically been employed to unite a nation against its enemies and to make it easier for soldiers to kill other humans. This kind of dehumanization is often coupled with racism or xenophobia, as was the case in Nazi Germany, in Vietnam, and in recent and ongoing military campaigns against Islamic nations. In characterizing Al Qaeda and the Taliban as cancers, Obama sadly opens the door for increased Islamophobia.

The cancer metaphor is also of concern for the way in which it medicalizes the threat of terrorism in order to naturalize or take for granted the need to eradicate it. I mean, who would simply let a cancer spread or metastasize if we could contain it through radiation, chemotherapy, or surgical removal? Choosing to characterize the threat as a cancer presumes one set of approaches to the problem and precludes many others. For example, it undercuts the possibility of seeing either Al Qaeda or the Taliban as having any legitimate concerns and it rules out the possibility of making an argument about the culpability of the US or the West in the development of these different, but at this point interrelated, organizations.

It is perhaps ironic in light of the current administration's focus on health care reform at home that Obama chooses to justify his deployment of additional troops as a form of preventive health care aimed at saving not only lives but billions of dollars in future medical expenses. Painting himself as the good physician, Obama sees no choice but to remove this cancerous invader in order to prevent it from spreading even further. Indeed it might not be going too far to say that the discourse of health care reform serves in some non-trivial sense as a premediation of Obama’s Afghanistan strategy.

Perhaps the most disheartening aspect of Obama's cancer metaphor, however, is that it seeks to provide rhetorical cover for the disturbing fact, pointed out by The American Conservative, that the Obama Administration has endorsed and continues to perpetuate the Bush Doctrine of preemptive warfare, which the Bush-Cheney administration used to justify the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, a military action that initiated the war that Obama has only intensified in the past year. Although rhetorically different from its manifestation during the Bush-Cheney Administration, premediation will continue to furnish the dominant media logic of the Obama Doctrine of preemptive military care.