The term ‘cyberspace,’ popularised in the early 1980s by Vancouver cyberpunk sci-fi author William Gibson, conjures a number of images, emotions and preconceptions, many of which were formed as the general public grappled with the idea of communicating and creating ‘online’. The concept of ‘cyberwar’ has a more intricate construction, evoking those initial meanings, but in a militarized context of often unrecognized or displaced battlefields. Initially, the concept was almost exclusively used by military and security specialists; but lately it has drawn the attention of researchers of disinformation, propaganda, digital militarism, Internet governance, and political economy of communication. They have redefined cyberwar as the manifestation of technological revolutions, such as the microelectronic revolution or information revolution, by which capital regularly reboots itself. Cyberwar is networked and distributed; therefore, it is often conceived as ‘global.’ This spherical metaphor is misleading as it overrides the complexities of cyberwar’s spacetime as well as the accidental and non-accidental twists, deadlocks, bottlenecks and pockets of the Internet infrastructure, its legacies and its futures. Topology offers a more appropriate lens for exploring how spatial formations might simultaneously change but also retain their core properties. By moving beyond the global imaginary of cyberspace, this approach is useful for analyzing the continuous reconfiguration of cyberwar that avoids recognition in order to invade and consume lands and bodies.
‘Cyberwar Topologies’ is a research stream aligned with the Digital Democracies Institute (DDI), led by its Associate Director Dr. Svitlana Matviyenko. You can find out more about the research on the website here. The research builds from her recent book, co-written with Dr. Nick Dyer-Witheford of Western University, Cyberwar and Revolution: Digital Subterfuge in Global Capitalism which won the 2019 book award of the Science Technology and Art in International Relations (STAIR) section of the International Studies Association and the 2020 Gertrude J. Robinson book prize of the Canadian Communication Association. Dr. Matviyenko and PhD student Kayla Hilstob recently presented their work to the DDI, including an overview of the research stream, and one of its main projects, an edited collection titled Cyberwar Topologies: In Struggle for a post-American Internet that explores what comes instead of the “global Internet” after the utopian concept of the “network of networks” as a unifying apparatus has imploded.
This collection is focused on the case studies that reveal the existence of secure gated enclaves or other folds of cyberspace that escape visibility in contrast to the forced transparency set by unprecedented military-grade surveillance, to which regular users are currently subjected and reinforces radical asymmetries across social strata despite the illusion of global citizens equally dealing with viral threats in the context of ongoing convergence of commercial technologies and military interest. In this way, it links to all the research streams within the DDI; Beyond Verification as a battlefield for authenticity; From Hate to Agonism combatting the weapons of hate speech; and Desegregating Network Neighbourhoods where the field of combat is the networks created online.
Dr. Matviyenko discussed how topology can help in interpreting the work of scholars such as Laura DeNardis and Milton Mueller on Internet governance and on fragmentation of the Internet in new, complex ways. The forthcoming work also draws on Benjamin Bratton’s exploration of software, sovereignty, and shifting power relations in the time when the globalists’ imaginary is no longer possible. To explore the complex relationality of cyber realm expressed in the dynamics of many struggles prior to, simultaneously with or after they are formalized as policies, this project will employ a topological perspective to argue that cyberwar is without a clear-cut division between the inside and the outside, but instead, it has forced its subjects in a paradoxical, curved and traversed realm of ruptures, folds, gaps, chambers, bubbles and other panopticons that erect invisible walls between the user’s eye and the gaze of power. This is where this research is exciting and innovative in its exploration of a new way of thinking and analysing these existing structures.
In discussing just some of the fascinating content of the forthcoming book, there will be a section on undermining sovereignty, where one chapter by contributor Dr. Karrmen Crey examines events at Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, where insurgency surveillance was deployed against Indigenous peoples and demonstrators by private military contractors. Other sections will include technological control, imaginaries and realities, infrastructural continuities and discontinuities, and the planetary view of infrastructure and beyond.
The book that Dr. Matviyenko and Hilstob are working on along with contributors is scheduled to be completed in summer 2021.
Joining Dr. Matviyenko and Kayla Hilstob on the Cyberwar Topologies research stream as a first year PhD student is D.W. Kamish, who also recently presented their work to the DDI on ‘Infrastructure and the Black Panther Party: Toward an Infrastructural Politics,’ some themes from which will be shaped into a chapter in the book presented above.
D.W. posits that while the Black Panther Party is seen as one of the most important organizations of the 1960s, few have looked at it as a political party in terms of its infrastructure, which was the subject of their Master’s research. They are interested in the Black Panther Party in the wider cultural context of postmodernism and its cognate problem of cognitive mapping, touching on links between politics and affect. Here D.W refers to the work of Zizi Papacharissi and Jodi Dean on affective publics and the vanguard party as an affective infrastructure, respectively.
Their goal is to use the case of the Black Panther Party (BPP) to articulate a concept of infrastructural politics, as a framework for looking at other political parties and struggles, both historical and contemporary. In their presentation, D.W pointed to the history of the BPP as activating the “welfare-warfare state” — imposing unwanted infrastructure, in the form of brutal police, and insufficient infrastructure, in the form of anti-poverty programs — as the site of political struggle. Global anticolonial struggles inflected the BPP’s analysis of police brutality, in particular, which understood police as an infrastructure of state colonial and imperial violence. Relatedly, in 1969 the BPP started providing their own anti-poverty programs because the state’s were insufficient. D.W. emphasized the significance of these failures of the state to improve black lives in the history of the BPP.
So far, D.W. has completed a discourse analysis of the newspapers published by the BPP from 1967 to early 1971, which they analyze as the main communicational infrastructure of the party, used to mediate its affective functions, reflecting the power of collectivity back on its members. They have also looked at and will continue to consider themes of technologized surveillance and mass-incarceration, such as the FBI’s National Crime Information Center; thinking topologically about the BPP’s spatial politics; and the possibility of post-American infrastructures.
We look forward to D.W.’s work contributing to the Cyberwar Topologies book and research stream, and also to the central ideas of the DDI as a whole.
In addition to the Cyberwar Topologies edited collection, as part of the research stream Dr. Matviyenko leads an international working group titled “Infrastructure is Not a Thing”, which alludes to the work of ethnographer Susan Leigh Star, who emphasised infrastructure’s relationality. The group examines the connections between infrastructure, imperialism, colonialism and new forms of digital militarism. The group meets weekly and includes Niels ten Oever (Texas A&M University and University of Amsterdam), Anna Engelhardt (Queen Mary University of London), Asia Bazdyrieva (Geocinema), Solveig Qu Suess (University of Applied Sciences & Arts Northewestern Switzerland / Geocinema), D. W. Kamish (Simon Fraser University) and Kayla Hilstob (Simon Fraser University).