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Infowar is a term hyped by the US Department
of Defense (DOD) for defensive and offensive operations in information
space, from everyday surveillance practices to catastrophic attacks
on military, economic, political and social networks. Against
its usual policy of secrecy, the military launched the new strategy
in the media with surprisingly little reserve. The slogan is good
for spectacle and sensation, and you might wonder if you really
want to take Ars Electronica seriously. Since its inception in
1979 the festival has grown into an established player, as a list
of affiliated companies attests: among this year's sponsors were
Hewlett Packard Austria, Microsoft Austria, and Silicon Graphics
Austria. Employees of Disney, Atari, Steven Spielberg's Amblin
Entertainment, and Interval Inc. sat on the Prix Ars Electronica
jury (responsible for the artistic portion of the festival). Why
does Ars Electronica, which can definitely call itself a paragon
of peaceful co-operation, choose war as its theme? During the
InfoWar net symposium, where a reasonably lively discussion
took place in the months around the festival, that question was
repeatedly raised. http://www.aec.at/infowar/NETSYMPOSIUM/ARCH-EN/index.html It seems somewhat facile, outdated and counterproductive to carry out the discussion about technology and society under the threatening, oh-so-imposing standard of the American armed forces.
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| EVERYWHERE OF NOWHERE |
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In our efforts to battle terrorism, cyber-attacks
and biological weapons, all of us must be extremely aggressive,
Bill Clinton said on May 22, 1998. If Washington is concerned
with it, then there must be a case for it. The anthology published
in connection with the InfoWar symposium opens with Cyberwar
is Coming! (1991) ( http://gopher.well.sf.ca.us:70/0/Military/cyberwar ), by John Aquilla and David Ronfeldt, both affiliated with the Pentagon think tank the RAND Corporation. The article serves as a central point of reference for the InfoWar debate, in this collection as well as elsewhere. The goal of InfoWar is the structural disorganisation of enemy communication systems. The target can be a state, but also a non-governmental organisation. The same holds for the aggressor. Thus InfoWar plays out in society. Every point in the network can serve as an attack base or target. A second characteristic of the InfoWar is invisibility: the moment at which information changes into disinformation can pass by completely unnoticed. InfoWar is everywhere, and likely without our knowing it. Fortunately, InfoWar turns out to be an extremely elastic concept. The collection's writers - 26 men, two women - take advantage of its chameleon character and apply the term to the most diverse conflict situations. Governments, multinationals, media and civilian collectives are constantly locked in info-battle. At stake is not so much good old sovereignty, but market shares, organisation principles and worldviews. Everything is InfoWar. And to make things even more complicated, at the same time InfoWar means hardly anything. Aquilla and Ronfeldt declare that the emergence of a new kind of war is convenient for the postponement of looming defence cuts. The InfoWar illusion is further dismantled in a contribution by Chris Gray, author of Postmodern War, The New Politics of Confict (1997), a clear, sharp study of the present, past and future of high-tech warfare. He contends that the American armed forces entered a crisis of legitimacy after the Cold War. And business took over its pioneering role in the field of technological innovation besides. To save military AI research, which was devouring billions but all too often ending in blunders, the DOD set up an advertising campaign: InfoWar Is Coming! Don't believe the hype? The temptation to see InfoWar as nothing more than an empty formula cools with the realisation that doing so strips the opposition, the subversive actions of disobedient citizens, of credibility. The DOD may be hyping InfoWar, but hackers and their supporters have been shouting about something like it for years. On the other hand, believing in InfoWar calls up a vision of a cyber-race based on mistrust in which states, companies and NGOs keep on expanding their arsenals of info-weapons. An impasse? The collection's writers don't buy it. In a company of journalists, theorists, military and activists, everyone expects the enemy to be breathing down one's neck, and everyone feels called upon to take a position. This is decidedly a merit of the editing. But that's not to say that those positions link up with each other either. The collection offers a series of ingredients which in combination can lead to deadly boring stalemates with everyone beating a big drum but no one hearing anything. But they can also lead to tasty confrontations between the competing project developers of cyberspace. How the discussion in Linz went, I cannot say with certainty, but I can envision two scenarios. |