Abstract
This chapter proposes another way to think about cyberspace and cyberwarfare. By following the SST, it rejects that cyberspace was constructed out of technological determinism and argues that it should be deconstructed to its materiality and its discourse. Cybernetics theories, the new materialist turn and the social theory of discourse are used to explain how cyber discourse is a new meaningful construction about how to define human life and social activity. Cyber discourse opens up a whole new set of questions. When life is not any more defined in reference to human body but it becomes cyber, i.e. associated to information, then the following questions arise: Who is considered to be powerful For what reasons are societies are ready to fight? And how do they wage their wars?
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Notes
- 1.
In NATO, there is currently an increased interest in how to use cyberspace offensively. The main difficulties highlighted are associated mainly with a change of mind and not with technological difficulties (Lewis 2015).
- 2.
In the 1980s, the approach of the ‘Social Shaping of Technology’ (SST) was developed in Britain in order to counterbalance the technological determinism that was prevailing in the industrialised societies of the 1970s and the early 1980s.
- 3.
Carr (2012) underlines that analyses on IR and ICT follow mainly instrumentalism. Her research brings to the fore the existing lacuna in IR theory concerning the political history of the Internet. She examines the ways in which US politicians conceptualise US power when formulating both domestic and foreign policy on cyber security, global Internet governance and network neutrality and emphasises that although states are substantially dependent on the Internet, ‘the political history of how this technology was initially conceived, developed, governed and managed over time is not adequately understood […] the political forces surrounding those developments are rarely referenced in these accounts and given no substantive place in understanding the progression of the Internet from a military project to an open global network’ (2012, p. 173).
- 4.
The explanation of Tilly about ‘How war made states and vice versa’ is also a perfect testimony of the ‘non-technological deterministic’ premise of the SCOT theory (Tilly 1992, pp. 67–95).
- 5.
Life as a coalescence of possibilities does not have gender. The existing linguistics means actually come from the era when life was conceived in a linear way and was only experienced within a flesh and bones body. In times of cyber discourse, these taxonomies are meaningless.
- 6.
The notion of rhizome is developed by Deleuze and Guattari (2004, pp. 3–28). The rhizomatic theory offers an account of causality and life which is not founded on linear patterns. Rhizome is a term borrowed from botany which refers to the subterranean root system of plants and its function is to exchange with the environment, i.e. the soil, all the nutritional elements needed for the plant to thrive. In Deleuze’s and Guattari’s philosophy, life is understood more as a rhizome having three properties: (i) it does not have a start and end point (labyrinth structure), (ii) it has neither centre nor periphery and iii) it is a system of passages which has shortcuts and detours in such a way that there is not a direct line connecting two points. This account of life is founded on multiplicity, variation and expansion and is not controlled by central agency. It is at odds with arboreal hierarchical structures because the latter work by following the binary philosophy (e.g. YES/NO or ON/OFF). The tree-like structures have a known form defined by the different combinations of binary codes (just like tree organisational charts). Nevertheless, rhizomes expand in innumerable possible ways which remain unknown; they always manage to expand and produce life by inventing new combinations in case some of the links are damaged. In this account of life, survival is no longer the ultimate purpose of a living system but, instead, contingency and resilience become of supreme importance.
- 7.
Connolly describes ‘new materialism’ as ‘the most common name given to a series of movements in several fields that criticize anthropocentrism, rethink subjectivity by playing up the role of inhuman forces within the human, emphasize the self-organizing powers of several nonhuman processes, explore dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practice, rethink the sources of ethics, and comment on the need to fold a planetary dimension more actively and regularly into studies of global, interstate and state politics’ (Connolly 2013, p. 399).
- 8.
The term was introduced in 1947 by MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener. The Oxford English Dictionary explains that the word is derived from the Greek kubernetes meaning ‘steersman’ or ‘ship pilot’ (Simpson and Weiner 1989, p. 188). Plato had used the adjective kubernetiken in the Gorgias to refer to the ‘science of piloting’ and in 1834 the French physicist André Marie Ampère had derived the French word cybernétique directly from the Greek to refer to the science of government in his classification of sciences (Ampère and Thibaud 1834). A comprehensive timeline showing the evolution of cybernetics as a philosophy of science can be found at http://www.asc-cybernetics.org/foundations/timeline.htm. The earliest known feedback control mechanism was recorded in the third century BC and it was manufactured by a Greek named Ktesibios in Alexandria. It was a float regulator for a water clock.
- 9.
Negative feedback occurs when some function of the output of a system, process, or mechanism is fed back in a manner that tends to reduce the fluctuations in the output, whether caused by changes in the input or by other disturbances.
- 10.
- 11.
Macy conferences were an interdisciplinary research effort based on Shannon’s information theory, McCulloch’s model of neural functioning showing how neurons work as information processing systems, von Neumann’s work on computers that process binary code, and that conceivably could reproduce themselves as if they were biological systems and Wiener’s vision of cybernetics as a way of talking about life more in terms of relation than of essence.
- 12.
Tierra was the first effort to develop such a program created by the evolutionary biologist Thomas Ray (researcher at the Santa Fé Institute). The code was written in such a way as to undergo endless processes of emergence and evolution without crashing and it used the Internet as its environment (Ray 1992). Once introduced, it interacted with the other nodes of the net in such a way that a whole new ecology was created (Hayles 1999, pp. 225–231).
- 13.
Sociological theories explain the relationship between ‘structure’ and ‘action’ and how change is produced (voluntarism versus determinism). Archer discusses in-depth the sociological theories of structuration (Anthony Giddens) and morphogenesis (Walter Buckley) which link ‘human agency and social structure’ (Archer 1982, p. 455). Both of them are in direct contrast to the theories that initially seemed to divide sociology (e.g. general functionalists and humanistic Marxists). She discusses the fact that while both structuration and morphogenesis try to unite ‘structure’ and ‘agent’ in a single theory, they differ in terms of conceptualisation.
- 14.
Fairclough negates the linguistic approach according to which language is ‘individually shaped’ (Ferdinand de Saussure) and, instead, he uses the term ‘discourse’ to denote the ‘social shaping’ of language (1992, p. 62). He argues that discourse, apart from having an either verbal or non-verbal practice, also constitutes ‘a mode of political and ideological practice’ (ibid., p. 67). By doing so, Fairclough displaces discourse from the realm of pure linguistics and places it in the realm of politics.
- 15.
For further reading on the definition of discourse and its conception as an element of social practice, see (Fairclough 2010, pp. 230–234, 355–361).
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Tsirigotis, A.A. (2017). Cybernetics, War and Power. In: Cybernetics, Warfare and Discourse . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50847-4_3
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