Today's New York Times has a front-page article detailing the competing video wars going on in the aftermath of the recent Israeli raid in international waters on the Turkish-supported aid ships heading towards Gaza. The article does a good job of laying out the competing claims made by videos on each side, the ways in which these videos participate in competing political remediations of the historical event.
But what is made less apparent here is, I think, the more interesting element of this event, the competing premediations of the event by the Israelis and the organizers of the aid mission. How one understands what happened during the raid depends upon how the situation was premediated prior to the Israeli boarding of the lead ship--aggressive attempt to violate a legal blockade or legal attempt to provide humanitarian aid to suffering Palestinians in Gaza.
From a medialogical standpoint, however, what was more interesting is the way these competing premediations were supported by sociotechnical media networks in place to make sure that whatever happened on board the ship would already have been mediated at the very moment that it emerged into the present, if not before.
Thus not only did the Israeli Army make sure the event was premediated before its commandos even dropped down from the helicopters on to the deck of the ship, but the organizers of the aid trip did the same:
"The flotilla’s organizers, from Insani Yardim Vakfi, the Free Gaza Movement and other groups, were Webcasting live from the open seas as the confrontation started, using the services of Livestream, a New York-based company that hosts free Webcasts.
"The organizers 'chose to make their trip to Gaza a media event,' said Max Haot, Livestream’s co-founder. Aboard the ship was a 'full multicamera production,' he said, uplinked to the Internet and to a satellite that allowed news channels to rebroadcast live pictures of the raid in progress."
While we have been accustomed to thinking about the immediacy of live, networked video and the competing political remediations of recent (and not so recent) historical events, we need also to bear in mind the ubiquity of premediated social media networks in our current historical moment and to begin to consider how these premediated networks might serve to impact not only our actions in the present but our understanding of the past.
The front page of today's New York Times presents an important story about a video decrypted by and posted on Wikileaks.org, as well as shared on YouTube. The Times headline, "Airstrike Video Brings Notice to a Web Site," focuses on the ongoing competition between mainstream and socially networked digital media. The article takes up the controversial nature of Wikileaks.org, especially in the eyes of the US military and other governmental agencies. For me, the more powerful impact of the video, posted in greater detail on a Wikileaks website called Collateral Murder, is the way in which it reveals, or perhaps more accurately makes us feel, the continuity of the socially mediated collective affect of our ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with that of the multiplayer online shooter games that my son plays with his friends, and which are played by millions of youth across the globe.
This Wikileaks video is the most powerful documentary video I can remember seeing. For me this is in some sense more powerful even than the Abu Ghraib photos, precisely because of the apparent ordinariness of the experience. In my forthcoming book I argue that the affective force of the Abu Ghraib photos derived in large part from their continuity with our everyday media practices. My argument is that the affective continuity of these socially networked digital photos with our media everyday explains why the incidents at Abu Ghraib, unlike similar incidents at Guantanamo or at dark sites across the globe, became a matter of widespread political concern, a global media news event. I do not know if this event will have a similar impact--the length of time required to watch the video makes me almost certain that it will not. Nonetheless, I want to comment here on the affective and medial affinities between this video (and by extension of course the incident it documents) and the current practices of online video game playing not only on PCs but more powerfully I think on video-game platforms like X-Box Live and PSN (Play Station Network).
Multiplayer shooter games, like other online games, involve teams of players, sharing the same networked space but in different physical spaces, competing against other teams or against the game itself (in this latter scenario teams of 2-4 players can also share the same physical space, playing in a family media room). My son, presumably like many players, sometimes plays against the game, sometimes joins teams randomly on line, but most often plays with a pretty constant team of friends. This last option produces a kind of affective sociality, held together through the networked mediation of online gaming, that bears affinities with, and helps to premediate, the kinds of social interactions that occur among soldiers in the field,
The scenarios in these games, most notably the Modern Warfare series, are remarkably similar to what US soldiers experience, as the Wikileaks video makes clear. Take, for example, a single-player AC-130 sequence from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. In this sequence the individual player interacts with his enemies/targets via video screens with black-and-white images (infrared in the game but remarkably similar in look and feel to the videos in Collateral Murder). The player must wait for permission to engage and is told which targets he must avoid. Targets are vehicles or individuals on foot, just like the Collateral Murder footage. Especially interesting is the dialogue programmed into the mission. After particular kills, one of the characters in the game is programmed to say things like "nice shot" or "way to go"--just like the soldiers say in the video.
There are other striking affinities between the Collateral Murder video and Modern Warfare 2, which help in some sense to illuminate, if not to account for or justify, some of the actions undertaken by the soldiers in the video. For one, it is interesting to note that in MW2, becoming a helicopter gunner is one of the rewards in the game, which a player achieves by sccomplishing eleven "kills." So the position of the helicopter gunner is already something of a privileged position.
A more interesting connection with the Modern Warfare games concerns what is called "last stand" or "final stand," which are perks available to players who reach a certain level of gameplay. In multiplayer games especially, if a character who has this perk is shot and wounded, he is given the ability to crawl away and keep firing, even to stand up if he is not quickly killed. This perk perhaps helps to illuminate the scene in the Wikileaks video where one of the two Reuters photographers is spotted wounded on the ground. The soldiers are eager to kill him, but according to rules of engagement cannot shoot an injured man unless he goes for his weapon, which is the explicit reason you hear them hoping aloud that he will do so (a weapon which is, as we know, only his camera). But their eagerness might also be attributed to the premediated video game scenarios of last or final stands, where wounded enemies have the ability to keep fighting as if they had not been shot before. This unrealistic feature of MW2 could easily contribute to the impulse to use excessive force against already wounded enemy combatants.
One point in comparing Collateral Murder with multiplayer shooters, particularly the Modern Warfare franchise, has been to call attention to their similar video and medial interfaces. Of course I do not mean to understate the significant differences between the experience of playing a video game and fighting in a war--beginning of course with the difference between human and algorithmically generated victims. And certainly the embodiment of flying in a helicopter with its ambient noise and vibration and smells and its sensations of physical movement, is fundamentally different from the experience of playing a video game in the proverbial comforts of your home. But these differences are not between an embodied and a disembodied experience but between two different embodied experiences. With vibrating controllers providing feedback when one "shoots" in a game, these differences, though still profound, are being lessened--and will likely continue to be lessened with technological advances in the gaming experience.
But the point I am most interested in making concerns some of the uncanny similarities between the affectivity and sociality of the two experiences, the ways in which the collective affect of multiplayer gaming simultaneously remediates and premediates the affectivity of soldiers in the field. Not only are video game designers basing the affective and social behavior of their algorithmically generated characters on the behavior of soldiers in the field, but it is undoubtedly the case that soldiers in the field are remediating affective behaviors that they have themselves experienced and participated in while playing video games at home. And when you remember that these games are not only being played by teenagers at home in the US and across the globalized West, but are being played by the soldiers themselves both before they deploy abroad and in between missions back at their base, then the force of Wikileaks' Collateral Murder video is to make the boundaries between these two experiences ever more difficult to secure. By premediating the sociality and affectivity of warfare for American youth, video games like Modern Warfare work not only to prepare a new generation of soldiers for combat but also (given the demographics of our current volunteer military) to modulate the collective affect of an even larger group of US and global citizens to accept modern war as an unexceptional feature of our everyday media landscape.
NB: I want to give a shout-out to my son Sam for his essential insights on the Modern Warfare games.
So this past weekend CNN broadcast its two-hour prime-time special on the recent Shock-Wave exercise. The aim of the exercise was to simulate a catastrophic cyber attack in order to scare the American public so that they would be willing to accept the imposition of even more draconian security powers for the US government. As a one-off, the broadcast will inevitably fail to succeed. As part of a continued premediation campaign distributed across print, televisual, and networked media, a campaign that is in full swing and appears to be heating up, Cyber Shock Wave might have some small effect on modulating individual and collective affect.
What was most striking about this simulation was its simplistic model of how the government might respond to such a catastrophe. The largest problem was that the simulation began from an assumption of nearly autonomous, separate spheres of action. So the whole event involved discussions among various government officials, responding to breaking news of the cyber attack received from GNN, a faux-CNN news outlet, in preparation for advising the President on what he should say to the American people and how he should deal with it.
The model of power deployed here was so one-dimensional as to be hysterical. There was no sense, for example, that such an attack would immediately, and in some sense always already, invoke massive distributed technical responses from government hackers and cyber-security personnel (both human and more importantly non-human). Any deliberation about response would inevitably have to incorporate and address the massive data flow that would be coming in about source, nature of the attack, possible counter-attacks, and so forth. Undoubtedly millions of bots and other network crawlers and scrapers would already have been deployed in anticipation of and response to such an attack. The idea that the government response would consist of a bunch of mostly card-carrying AARP-member white guys sitting around a room responding to cable news reports imagines a model of government already outmoded when Kubrick released Dr. Strangelove.
Nor was there any sense that such an attack (carried out via cellphones, which the President apparently had no authority to "quarantine") would also be met immediately by millions of netizens, who would undoubtedly circulate via social media both the need to avoid using these phones to spread the "virus" and possible ways to resist such a virus or to work around it. Participatory media would undoubtedly play a significant, if not quite calculable, role in responding to any such attack.
By failing to recognize the intermingling of the technical and the social realms (among others), this "simulation" did not simulate anything but a fantasy of white male governmental power seeking to reinforce or recover a sphere of influence that has been rapidly diminishing in an age of socially mediated networks. Cyber Shock Wave was nothing but a bald-faced attempt to scare the American public away from its increased reliance on, and involvement with, socially networked media and back into the arms of cable television and pasty-faced government officials.
On Saturday and Sunday at 8 PM ET, CNN will televise the results of the Bipartisan Policy Center's Cyber.Shockwave, the simulation of a major cyber-attack on the United States staged today, February 16. For now, here is a video from CNN's American Morning news show featuring an interview by John Roberts with former CIA Director General Michael Hayden and Fran Townsend, CNN reporter and former Homeland Security Advisor for the Bush-Cheney administration, two of the principals in today's simulation. This interview premediates the scenario that will unfold in Tuesday's simulation, which itself is a premediation of possible cyber attacks on the US.
Both Hayden and Townsend underscore their belief that the US is not prepared for a potential attack. In describing the possible consequences of such an attack, they paint any number of potentially terrifying scenarios, like the breakdown of transportation networks, the loss of electrical power, the shutdown of ATMs, or the disruption of the nation's cellphone networks--all intended to frighten the public. Roberts plays into this fear-mongering throughout the interview, repeating on more than one occasion how what they are telling him makes him and the audience anxious or terrified or frightened. At no point does he or his guests note that any such disruptions would undoubtedly prove temporary. While there may be vulnerabilities in the nation's cyber-defense system, the damage from such attacks would most likely be quickly repaired. It's not as if the entire nation will lose electrical power or internet service or cellphone connectivity for an extended period of time.
In the interview Hayden makes it clear that the simulation is not an attempt to predict a particular future scenario but to impact policy decisions today, including front and center questions of privacy, the relation between government and the private sector, or the question of chain of command. What seems clear from this preview of today's event is that the aim of those staging and participating in this "shock wave" is precisely to shock or scare the American public into accepting further incursions on individual and collective liberties by premediating the most frightening possible implications of a cyber attack on the US.
CNN's weekend report on today's scenario will undoubtedly prove to be the US media's most extensive premediation of cyber war to date--or perhaps more accurately its premediation of a premediated cyber war. In any event, this special report will bear watching. Check it out. You've been warned!
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?
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.
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.
Richard Grusin is the former Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he is a Professor of English. He is co-author of Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT 1999). His newest book is Premediation: Affect and Mediality in America after 9/11 (Palgrave 2010).
