t byfield on Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:05:16 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> Phil Agre's gone missing |
Very sad. And very strange that he's been missing since "2008/2009": http://sites.google.com/site/philipagre/ On another list, someone pointed out this writing of Agre's, which he described as a cri de coeur, from late '98: I don't normally get emotional about political issues. I don't know why, but I don't. Nonetheless, in October 1997 I heard something that I found so disturbing that I haven't been able to write about it until now. At the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference, the conference organizers put together a plenary panel presentation about so-called cyber war. The presenters were all US military guys, both officers and military academy intellectuals, who have developed what is apparently an entirely new US military doctrine for the cyber world. I judged these guys to be honest about their reasoning, and I was hardly alone in finding everything they said to be astonishing. More: That's bad enough, but it's just the start. In the new world, the military guys said, warfare is no longer conducted along borders and boundaries, with front lines and supply lines and all of that. Warfare, in fact, can no longer be comprehended in spatial terms. To the contrary, in a world where communications infrastructure is everywhere and every element of communications infrastructure is a sensitive military target, war has no spatial limits. And when terrorists can use public communications networks to conduct endless low-level attacks anywhere in the world from anywhere else in the world, war has no temporal limits -- they actually used the phrase "permanent war". And more: War, on these guys' conception, is now conducted in every aspect of society. Foreign manipulation of the content of American news media, for example, is "cultural war". Taken all together, the result is -- and this is their term -- "total war". You might have thought that the Soviet Union had fallen, that the United States was by far the greatest military power on earth, that the heavy cloud of the Cold War had lifted, and that it was time for the United States to stand down from its total mobilization, disband the national security state, end the culture of secrecy, reshape the military in some reasonable proportion to its plausible adversaries, and get to work on the rest of society's problems. You might think all of that, but you would be wrong. In the world of the Internet, it would seem, things have only gotten worse. We are now in a world of permanent, total, omnipresent, pervasive war. Cold War plus plus: all war, all the time. They said this. The military guys' view of the emerging nature of war has numerous consequences, and they spelled some of them out. They stated, for example, that in the event of war it would create no precedent for the government to take control of facilities that are sensitive from a military perspective. But they asserted that war is no longer an event but a permanent state, and they had also asserted that virtually the entire productive infrastructure of the country was relevant to war as it is now defined. During the question period, therefore, I asked them where the boundary between military and non-military facilities could be found, and they answered, with seemingly genuine distress, that the boundary does not exist. The consequence, which they did not spell out, is that the emerging economics of information infrastructure have required the United States government to adopt as official policy an authoritarian variety of communism. The whole thing's well worth reading, as is just about everything Agre wrote: http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/notes/98-12-16.html And that was eleven years ago. For context, it's also worth a glance of what was afoot on this list at the time: http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9812/threads.html Naturally, my eye was drawn to the two messages I sent: http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9812/msg00005.html http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9812/msg00064.html As Vuk used to say: bingo. I've been thinking a lot lately about the relationship between individual biographies and the mood of the broad trends and discourses that people recognize and articulate. I hope that Agre doesn't turn out to be a victim of his own formidable intelligence; he wouldn't be the first, and he certainly won't be the last in the coming years. Not cheers, T # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org