Introduction: Virtual Weaponry

Abstract

The introduction gives a very brief history of the military Internet, starting with the Macy Conferences immediately post-WWII, before focusing on the periods that overlap with my films of interest (1980–present). From this history, the introduction contextualizes the project within the genre of the war film, focusing on Internet-enabled technologies’ roles within the genre as a whole, using scholars such as Steve Neale, Robert Eberwein, Jeanine Basinger and Rick Altman, before beginning to sketch out how the specific digitally networked automatisms represented in the films fit within the history of the genre. The introduction also establishes key terms from Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Donna Haraway, Paul Virilio, Slavoj Žižek, Susan Jeffords and Manuel De Landa, among others, all culminating in the call for a contemporary machinic audience to watch the discussed films as critical posthumans and recognize their own role, enhanced/created by Internet-enabled technologies, within the Total War Machine around them.