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- See Spot save lives: fear, humanitarianism, and war in the development of
robot quadrupeds-
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Abstract: Abstract Boston Dynamics’ robotic quadrupeds have achieved infamy and virality through a series of social media videos since 2008. In 2019 Boston Dynamics began commercial sale of ‘Spot’, a moving, sensing, networked robot dog. Spot has been designed to be a platform, which can be augmented with hardware payloads (e.g. sensors, robotic arm) and software to command Spot to conduct specific missions. In this paper we first trace the development of Spot and highlight the interest of the United States military in its development. This is followed by our text analysis of social media reactions to Boston Dynamics’ quadrupeds, revealing public fascination as well as ongoing suspicion and dark humour about ‘killer robots’. We then discuss how humanitarian applications, including in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, have been used as an opportunity to promote Spot and overcome public negativity. This is an example of a more general strategy advocates use to garner acceptance for autonomous robots in both civilian and military roles using humanitarian justifications: the robots ‘save lives.’ We conclude by discussing how Spot and other robot quadrupeds demonstrate the intertwining of humanitarian and military applications in the development, normalization and deployment of autonomous robots.
PubDate: 2021-11-24
DOI: 10.1057/s42984-021-00037-y
- From warrior geek to prototype warrior: entrepreneurialism, future war,
and the emergence of twenty-first century civil-military relations-
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Abstract: Abstract Armed forces are now in a race to exploit the technologies associated with Artificial Intelligence. Viewed as force multipliers, these technologies have the potential to speed up decision making and roboticise warfighting. At the same time, however, these systems disintermediate military roles and functions, creating shifts in the relationships of power in military organizations as different entities vie to shape and control how innovations are implemented. In this article we argue that new innovation processes are sites of emerging forms of public–private interaction and practices. On the one hand this is driving entrepreneurialism into government bureaucracy even as it forges new bonds between defence and industry. On the other, as technologies replace soldiers, a new martial culture is emerging, one that reframes the warrior geek as an elite innovation corps of prototype warrior. We seek to map these relationships and explore the implications for civil-military relations in the twenty-first century.
PubDate: 2021-11-23
DOI: 10.1057/s42984-021-00039-w
- Remember Afghanistan'
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PubDate: 2021-11-18
DOI: 10.1057/s42984-021-00038-x
- Interview with Paolo Cirio
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PubDate: 2021-11-05
DOI: 10.1057/s42984-021-00036-z
- This is how they tell me the world ends: the cyber weapons arms race, by
Nicole Perlroth, 2020. New York: Bloomsbury publishing. ISBN
978-1526629852, 512 pages-
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PubDate: 2021-08-12
DOI: 10.1057/s42984-021-00035-0
- Patrícia Campos Mello (2020), The Hate Machine: notes from a reporter on
fake news and digital violence [A máquina do ódio: notas de uma
repórter sobre fake news e violência digital]. São Paulo: Companhia das
Letras. Language: Portuguese Brazilian. ISBN-10: 853593362X. Pbk, 296
pages-
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PubDate: 2021-07-26
DOI: 10.1057/s42984-021-00034-1
- Sensors, interpreters, analysts: operating the ‘electronic barrier’
during the Vietnam War-
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Abstract: Abstract This article examines a widely cited case study in histories of remote, computer-mediated warfare: the US Air Force’s ‘electronic barrier’, a system designed to detect and destroy communist truck convoys entering South Vietnam via the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Vietnam War. Existing scholarship on the programme has foregrounded the technological novelty of the system, in particular its use of sensors, unmanned aircraft, and the computer centre from which the programme was remotely managed. This article seeks to provide an alternative perspective on the barrier by asking how human operators remained as fixtures in the system. To do so, I focus on ‘embodiment’ and ‘tacit knowledge’ through an analysis of the practices of photograph interpretation and data analysis which persisted despite efforts to successively computerise the barrier. Drawing on internal reports and memoranda gathered following extensive archival research, I show how these practices were required in an effort to manage critical, systemic problems of ambiguity and inaccuracy that could not be resolved by the computer. The effect was a constant drive for expansion in data and bombs, and the construction of a blunt and extraordinarily aggressive instrument which was instrumental in facilitating the unprecedented scale of the bombing campaign waged by the US Air Force on eastern Laos.
PubDate: 2021-07-08
DOI: 10.1057/s42984-021-00033-2
- The hidden hierarchy of far-right digital guerrilla warfare
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Abstract: Abstract The polarizing tendency of politically leaned social media is usually claimed to be spontaneous, or a by-product of underlying platform algorithms. This contribution revisits both claims by articulating the digital world of social media and rules derived from capitalist accumulation in the post-Fordist age, from a transdisciplinary perspective articulating the human and exact sciences. Behind claims of individual freedom, there is a rigid pyramidal hierarchy of power heavily using military techniques developed in the late years of the cold war, namely Russia Reflexive Control and the Boyd’s decision cycle in the USA. This hierarchy is not the old-style “command-and-control” from Fordist times, but an “emergent” one, whereby individual agents respond to informational stimuli, coordinated to move as a swarm. Such a post-Fordist organizational structure resembles guerrilla warfare. In this new world, it is the far right who plays the revolutionaries by deploying avant-garde guerrilla methods, while the so-called left paradoxically appears as conservatives defending the existing structure of exploitation. Although the tactical goal is unclear, the strategic objective of far-right guerrillas is to hold on to power and benefit particular groups to accumulate more capital. We draw examples from the Brazilian far right to support our claims.
PubDate: 2021-06-09
DOI: 10.1057/s42984-021-00032-3
- It came from something awful: how a toxic troll army accidentally memed
Donald Trump into office, by Dale Beran, 2019. St. Martin’s Publishing
Group. ISBN: 9781250189745, 304 Pages-
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PubDate: 2021-06-08
DOI: 10.1057/s42984-021-00030-5
- Philip Di Salvo (2020): Digital Whistleblowing Platforms in Journalism:
Encrypting Leaks. Palgrave Macmillan. 188 pages-
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PubDate: 2021-06-08
DOI: 10.1057/s42984-021-00031-4
- How did Russian and Iranian trolls’ disinformation toward Canadian
issues diverge and converge'-
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Abstract: Abstract The study analyzes Russian and Iranian trolls’ intervention in Canadian politics focusing on the 2015 election, revealing a wide spectrum of disinformation. Russian trolls showed some support for then prime minister Stephen Harper and were very critical of the current prime minister, Justin Trudeau. Also, they closely aligned themselves with conservative and far-right figures, while Iranian trolls supported the far left as well as the Palestinian cause. Iranian trolls frequently attacked the former prime minister, Harper, falsely accusing him of being a CIA agent and an ISIS supporter. However, Russian and Iranian trolls converged around the issue of the conflict in Syria with both showing support for Bashar Assad’s regime and animosity toward the Syrian White Helmets group.
PubDate: 2021-02-12
DOI: 10.1057/s42984-020-00029-4
- Notes on the role of the camera within a (virtual) war: the case of
Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait-
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Abstract: Abstract Since the outbreak of uprisings in Syria in 2011, which later became the ongoing armed conflict, the Syrian population has been using small digital cameras and personal mobile phones to produce a vast number of images as graphic testimonies of the crucial events taking place in the country. The documentary essay Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait (2014), co-directed by Ossama Mohammed and Wiam Simav Bedirxan, was partly made remixing these vernacular videos found online. This article is an aesthetic and sociocultural analysis of the film with the aim of remarking on the role of cameras and the power of images and cinema in a conflict such as the Syrian war, defined by a deep intermingling of actual and virtual struggle. How can the use of vernacular video of the Syrian conflict in film works influence the shaping of public perceptions of the conflict and launch a truly political reflection about it' To what extent can images be used as a political weapon in a hyper-mediatized era where, having proliferated to infinity, images have lost their strength' I argue that the political capacity of images is not only limited, it also depends to a great extent on mediations, gatekeepers and the material conditions of their production and dissemination, their motivations, creators and propagators, and on the aesthetical strategy used to (re)contextualize them and (re)shape the dominant representations of the conflict given by the mass media and by the authorities.
PubDate: 2021-01-12
DOI: 10.1057/s42984-020-00026-7
- The geography of our geography: counter-mapping infrastructures of power
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Abstract: Abstract This artistic work sets out to devise a set of critical and artistic strategies to sense the ways in which the sky is structured under a fusion of state and corporate power. By placing the military drone as a central actor, I argue the atmosphere is enveloped within a topography of enclosure, reconfigured in the service of military and corporate technologies. By using an artistic strategy of what I term counter-reconnaissance, a necessary inversion of the satellite’s gaze, we may conceive of, and value, the atmosphere as a material entity; a parallel sky that is vivid and tangible, political and aesthetic. Counter-reconnaissance utilizes the narrative terrain of Google Earth, where its open and accessible data can be used to help map the shadow states—and invisible rules—that structures and encloses space all around us. This method counter-maps global American military drone infrastructure and makes it palpable to the viewer, creating a constellation of violent geographies.
PubDate: 2020-12-01
DOI: 10.1057/s42984-020-00024-9
- Editorial: finding war in the present
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PubDate: 2020-12-01
DOI: 10.1057/s42984-020-00027-6
- Micro-cyberwar vs. macro-cyberwar: towards the beginning of a taxonomy
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Abstract: Abstract This essay proposes and begins a taxonomy of cyberwar, with a fundamental dichotomy between micro-cyberwar, as in attacks on individual email and automobiles, and macro-cyberwar, defined as all-out attacks on the infra-structure of society, such as hospital systems and air-traffic control. Although both can be deadly, the scale of death and destruction is usually much greater in macro-cyberwar, and it would be useful for public figures to address this dichotomy when discussing cyberwar.
PubDate: 2020-12-01
DOI: 10.1057/s42984-020-00020-z
- Atmospheric politics: protest drones and the ambiguity of airspace
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Abstract: Abstract This article addresses the emergence of a particular assemblage—the adoption of sUAS or small drones by subjects with different interests grouped in the same location: journalists, protestors, and police. Considering the use of sUAS by protestors in the USA during the occupy movement, the rebellion at Ferguson, Missouri, and at the #NoDAPL protests at Standing Rock, I argue for an expanded notion of airspace that does not reinforce the state violence of no-fly zones and regulatory restrictions. Once we situate drones as productive of atmospheric politics, spaces, and temporalities, we can account for their incorporation into military and governmental as well as beneficial or humanitarian uses and thereby develop a better understanding of the relational dynamics of the assemblage of airspaces, aerial vehicles, and their creators and operators.
PubDate: 2020-12-01
DOI: 10.1057/s42984-020-00005-y
- The easy weaponization of social media: why profit has trumped security
for U.S. companies-
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Abstract: Abstract American-based social media companies have become active players in digital war, both by accident of design and a subsequent failure to address the threat due to concerns over profits. Discussions about the negative role of social media in society generally address the myriad problems wrought by social media, including electoral manipulation, foreign disinformation, trolling, and deepfakes, as unfortunate side effects of a democratizing technology. This article argues that the design of social media fosters information warfare. With its current composition and lack of regulation, social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are active agents of disinformation, their destructive force in society outweighing their contributions to democracy. While this is not by deliberate design, the twin forces of capitalism and a lack of regulation of the world’s largest social media platforms have led to a situation in which social media are a key component of information war around the globe. This means that scholarly discussions should shift away from questions of ethics or actions (or lack thereof) on the part of social media companies to a frank focus on the security risk posed to democracy by social media.
PubDate: 2020-12-01
DOI: 10.1057/s42984-020-00012-z
- Digital warfighting temporalities and drone discourse
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Abstract: Abstract As drones have emerged as icons of contemporary warfare so too have drone operators become symbols of contemporary warfighting. While drone scholarship to date has predominantly centred upon exploring the drone’s “functioning” and “implications”, including interrogating the ‘in-theatre’ experiences of operators, this article responds to calls for further attentiveness to the “making of” the drone (Klauser and Pedrozo in Geogr Helv 70:285-293, 2015). In empirically examining the ‘making of’ the drone operator, it turns to their training, and in particular the use of simulators therein. This focus, it argues, offers an alternative accounting of the drone operator, one that both revisits and complicates existing and enduring narratives of drone operation and/as videogaming, and one that offers an alternative temporality and ‘site’ through which to explore how drones come to ‘function’.
PubDate: 2020-12-01
DOI: 10.1057/s42984-020-00003-0
- Are those real people' Memory and creative activism
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Abstract: Abstract In this essay, the author will describe a personal narrative history as experimental digital artist and the transformation of his creative practice toward the full embrace of an activist creative stance in responses to militarism, violence and the war or terror. Using an autobiographical structure to trace the lineage of works utilizing digital media and public engagement/interventionist or hacktivist strategies to engage the social and political present.
PubDate: 2020-12-01
DOI: 10.1057/s42984-020-00017-8
- Towards a third image of war: post-digital war
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Abstract: Abstract To see war as post-digital is to see how digital innovations have already been integrated into how militaries, media and societies wage, resist and understand war. Digital war is already historical. The logics of digital technologies have been integrated into the logics of pre-existing, traditional media and into long-standing geopolitical and military logics that drive war. The field of war and media is stuck between two images: continued efforts to document non-digital war and its established questions concerning legitimacy, authority and war’s lessons, and startled claims of novelty, rupture and transformation so total that they inhibit efforts to explain how war is changing. Post-digital war offers a third image, but how to see post-digital war' I propose specific approaches to seeing that can allow us to address its scale, heterogeneity and locality as well as the ethics of human and posthuman behaviours; to see more but retain the ability to ask the most important, long-standing questions about why and how war occurs or does not. This is an unashamedly extensionist view of historical, technological and disciplinary change. Post-digital war may not be the term the field arrives at, but it indicates a third image and perspective that prevents war escaping explanation.
PubDate: 2020-12-01
DOI: 10.1057/s42984-020-00015-w
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