Cyberwar Topologies
Data Subjects of Filtration and Deportation during the Russia-Ukraine War
Project led by Svitlana Matviyenko and Daria Hetmanova with Kayla Hilstob
Technologies of Filtration and Deportation
(Summer 2023-)
The project details the techniques, technologies and broader communication and transportation infrastructures that are mobilized for conducting “filtration” or the system of diverse but systemic processes of interrogation as well as forced digital and biometric data collection in so-called “camps” that renders deported Ukrainian civilians as data subjects before they are forcedly moved to the territory of the Russian Federation.
Producing the Subject of Deportation
(Spring 2022-Spring 2023)
The project is focused on the ongoing practices of forced deportation of the Ukrainian citizens to the Russian Federation via filtration camps and their practices of “purification” as conducted in the grey zones of so called DNR and LNR where the principles of international laws and human rights are suspended. We broaden the framework of filtration from a simple interrogation (usually understood as a filtration process) to a longer process or a series of steps during which “the subject of deportation” is produced. We cross-read the practices of search, implemented by the Russian forces, of the bodies of Ukrainian citizens and through their data and communications stored on digital devises, after which citizens are either sent to the RF or detained for further interrogations that often includes torture.
Publications
Daria Getmanova & Svitlana Matviyenko, “Producing the Subject of Deportation: The Process of Filtration during the Russia-Ukraine War,” special issue “Wartime Sociology,” Sociologica: International Journal for Sociological Debate, V.16N.2(2022) eds. Bortolini, M., Esposito, E., Squazzoni, F., and Stark, D. https://sociologica.unibo.it/article/view/15387/14823
Decolonial and Post-Colonial In So-Called Peace and War
Technologies of [Russian] Colonialism
Working group led by Tahmina Inoyatova, Sasha Shestakova and Svitlana Matviyenko
(October 2023-)
We understand Russian colonialism as “multiple and overlapping subempires that … follow substantially different trajectories.” (Parsons 2014). In the context of Russian colonialism, the notion of subempires allows for seeing the overlaps between the surveillance and erasure of multiple occupations, extraction of resources and military invasions. Such an understanding of Russian colonialism reveals conflicting and differentiated positions produced by it. In the words of la paperson, settler colonialism operates through the “set of technologies, required to create and maintain these separations and alienations… Black from Indigenous, human from non-human, land from life.” (la paperson, 2017) Although la paperson writes from the North American settler colonial context, his approach applies to the intersections of colonial warfare, extraction of resources, surveillance and occupations and other technologies of alienation used by the Russian state. Technologies of alienation developed by Russia erase the possibilities to imagine and practice translocal solidarity. Thus, understanding the technologies of Russian colonialism is necessary to “bring about its multiple ends” (Engelhardt, 2022) by developing solidarity and mutual understanding across contexts. In the work of this reading group, we will move from developing an understanding of technologies of Russian colonialism towards thinking about the relationship between Russian and other colonial projects to open the space for thinking solidarity to program and initiate new practices of solidarization. The result of our work will be a collective volume to be published in 2025 on the technologies of Russian colonialism as well as methods of translocal solidarity and resistance.
Parsons Timothy. 2014. The Second British Empire : In the Crucible of the Twentieth Century. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
la paperson. 2017. A Third University Is Possible. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Engelhardt Anna. 2022 – 2023 Hardwired Obsolescence of Russian Colonialism. Performance, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZotujQUfNVA
Perspectives on "Post-Soviet" Space
Working group led by Tahmina Inoyatova, Sasha Shestakova and Svitlana Matviyenko
(Winter-Summer 2023)
This group focused on the discussions of imperialism, colonialism and decoloniality in “post-Soviet” space. We addressed the importance of positioning Central Asia, Russia and other “post-Soviet” locales in the post-colonial and decolonial scholarship. The group will look for new ways to address the ongoing transformations and violence in the region and beyond, including but not limited to the context of the war in Ukraine, Russian imperialism and the weaponization of race in the post-Soviet context.
The Soviet Technological Pasts in the East-European Computer Networks
Led by Taras Nazaruk (Center for Urban Studies, Ukraine), Miglė Bareikytė (Europa-Universität Viadrina), and Svitlana Matviyenko
(December 2023 – Winter 2026)
In his history of the unsuccessful USSR large computer network project, Benjamin Peters argues that “the Soviet OGAS figured out the ‘why?’ (socialist utopia) but not the ‘how?’ for their large computer network projects.” (Peters, 2016: p. 200) While the missing “how” remained the insurmountable challenge for the Soviet project, it doesn’t mean it left emptiness behind. The USSR established a widespread network of scientific centres and technological endeavors across all Soviet republics, which were constrained by the restricted information culture and the lack of technological resources. Dozens of research institutes and constructing bureaus from several Soviet republics developed multipurpose computer networks, aimed at facilitating the management of production enterprises, railway infrastructures or universities and cities. Although the Soviet nationwide computer network never succeeded, its infrastructural remnants still shape the physical spaces and social settings of the countries that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union.
When we shift the attention on Soviet technological pasts away from the Moscow-focused perspective and look at what happened in diverse Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact countries, we might see the situated entanglement of the failed Soviet computer all-state network with the networking projects within various Soviet republics, and their remnants during the post-Soviet transformations. This project participants explore the ruptures and continuities of the Soviet technological legacy in the post-Soviet republics and the Warsaw block countries. The project ponders how this legacy affected postsocialist developments of the Internet infrastructure in the region and globally. It traces the diversity of the trajectories of its developments across the countries and localities in East-Central Europe (ECE). The work to be workshopped at the Internet Histories symposium organized by the Center for Urban Histories in Lviv, Ukraine in October 2024 and published as the special issue (vol. 10, issue 1, 2026) of Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Society.
War Diary: Dispatches from the Place of Imminence
An autoethnographic book project by Svitlana Matviyenko
(February 2022-December 2023)
Drawing on the on-ground observations during the months prior the full-scale Russian invasion, Svitlana Matviyenko started documenting the process of fast militarization of everyday life in Ukraine. After February 24th 2022, these observations turned into a war diary, an autoethnographic book reflecting on producing war-time subjectivities, War Diary: Dispatches from the Place of Imminence (commissioned by the Practices Series, Duke UP), that documents her first-hand experience as the subject of war in Ukraine and reflects on the meaning and labour of bearing witness. The initial drafts of Matviyenko’s dispatches were published online by the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam) and became part of several international art exhibitions such as “War in Ukraine” (May 2022, Podium Gallery, Oslo); “Home” (Summer 2022, Phil Collins and Oleksiy Radynski, Manchester); and “Tracing the Geometry of Cyberwar” (Fall-Winter 2023, curator Tereza Havlíková, Prater Galerry, Berlin).
Past Projects
Project led by Kayla Hilstob, Dalton Kamish, Matthew Canute & Svitlana Matviyenko
This project explores the spread of “ethical oil” discourse on social media in the context of global geopolitical conflict, Canadian nationalism, and petrocultures. The infrastructure of oil and gas in Canada is being challenged both materially and ideologically in the face of growing Indigenous and environmentalist movements. In response, the “ethical oil” argument first articulated by Ezra Levant (2010) has been quickly taken up from far-right echo chambers by conservative politicians and mainstream media (Gutstein 2011) and continues to manifest in dynamic ways. Proponents argue that oil producing states like Saudi Arabia and Russia are authoritarian and warlike, therefore it is unethical for liberal democracies like Canada to purchase their oil; instead, Canada should produce more oil for export as an ethical alternative to such “conflict oil.”
Narratives of Canada as an ethical producer of oil and gas have been increasingly propagated in mainstream media and social media discourse since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. To investigate this, we collected 787,000 tweets geo-tagged in Canada by 149,000 users from January 2010 to October 2022 containing keywords related to oil and gas and the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, and 98,000 tweets by 34,000 users during the same time period related to ethical oil discourse. We then performed a social network analysis with time-series cross-correlations and found simultaneous and unprecedented spikes in tweets mentioning keywords related to oil and gas as well as keywords related to the Russia-Ukraine war. This finding suggests the presence of framing effects in discourse about oil and the war. Moreover, network similarity analysis reveals significant overlap between users tweeting about oil and users tweeting about this war. These procedures, along with community detection, were performed at one-year intervals throughout the twelve-year period to track the ways in which these discourse communities change over time to produce insights on the spread of “ethical oil” discourse from far-right and conservative echo chambers to the mainstream, particularly in relation to global geopolitical conflicts.
Overall, we suggest that the Russia-Ukraine war is being discursively leveraged to legitimize the expansion of the oil and gas industry in Canada with noted success evidenced by increased uptake on social media. The Russia-Ukraine war has presented itself as an opportunity for fossil capital (Malm 2016) to reboot itself (Dyer-Witheford and Matviyenko 2019) both materially and ideologically by appealing to longstanding petrocultural imaginaries of Canadian nationalism and freedom (Szeman, Wilson and Carlson 2017). Ultimately, this analysis reveals the contradictions in “ethical” consumption discourses that are often associated with more liberal-minded communities. “Ethical oil” narratives expose the shortcomings of the premise that social change happens at the level of “ethical” production and consumption; instead, we examine deeper capitalist logics of extraction to problematize the oil and gas industry on a global scale.
Presentations
Hilstob, K, Kamish, D.W., Canute, M. (2024). “Wartime Petrocultures: Mainstreaming “Ethical Oil” on Twitter.” Petrocultures 2024 Los Angeles (May 15 – 18, 2024). [Forthcoming].
Hilstob, K. (2023). “Wartime Petrocultures: Energy, Nationalism, and Media.” Canadian Communication Association: Reckonings & Re-Imaginings.” Toronto, ON: York University. May 30-June 2, 2023. [Panel Chair].
Kamish, D.W., Canute, M., Hilstob, K., Matviyenko, S. (2023). “Instrumentalizing War: Mainstreaming ‘Ethical Oil’ On Twitter.” Canadian Communication Association: Reckonings & Re-Imaginings.” Toronto, ON: York University. May 30-June 2, 2023.
A collection edited by Svitlana Matviyenko and Kayla Hilstob (sent to press)
What will come instead of the “global Internet” after the utopian concept of the “network of networks” as a unifying apparatus has imploded? While US-based monopolies have accumulated unprecedented amounts of wealth and power, the ‘centre of gravity’ of the Internet infrastructure has been shifting away from the United States toward Asia Pacific, BRICS countries and the Global South since the dot-com crash. The notion of “post-American” has been employed to describe the redistribution of power. We problematize this notion by asking: 1) whether this shift reproduces existing (“American”) models of governance and monopoly? 2) what is the condition of possibility for alternative models to emerge? and 3) what conceptual frameworks are needed for timely recognition of these models when they emerge? We approach these questions through the interdisciplinary and intersectional microanalysis of cases that demonstrate how contestation and negotiation of governing regimes occur in the form of cyberwar tensions and practices between state, non-state, corporate, and random actors.
Contributors:
Nick Dyer-Witheford (University of Western Ontario); Tim Stevens (King’s CL); Svitlana Matviyenko (SFU); D. W. Kamish (SFU); Micky Lee (Suffolk University); Anna Engelhardt (Queen Mary University of London); Justin Joque (University of Michigan); Niels ten Oever (Texas A&M University and Amsterdam University); Kayla Hilstob (SFU); Sean Willett (University of Calgary), Mél Hogan (University of Calgary) & Ted McCoy (University of Calgary); Renée Ridgway (Copenhagen Business School); Asia Bazdyrieva (Geocinema) & Solveig Qu Suess (Geocinema / Critical Media Lab Basel); Linda Dawson (University of Washington).
Past working groups
Led by Svitlana Matviyenko & Alberto Toscano
(Aug 2022 – June 2023)
The past decade has witnessed a worldwide debate on the pertinence or otherwise of ‘fascism’ as a designator for a disparate but growing host of authoritarian, discriminatory, reactionary, and violent forms of political behaviour and discourse – from ‘lone wolves’ to groupuscules, militias to state governments. Sometimes monopolised by a focus on US trends, much of this debate and the associated scholarly and activist research has wrestled with the usefulness of analogies with the dynamics that led to the rise of historical fascisms in Europe in the interwar period, while devoting much of its empirical work to the fauna of racist, revanchist, and misogynist agitation online (the so-called ‘alt-right’), drawing attention, for instance, to the dense links between internet subcultures and acts of brutality (most recently, the circulation of rhetoric about the ‘Great Replacement’ and mass shootings in the US and New Zealand).
An increasing number of commentators and analysts have become dissatisfied with the narrowness and US or Euro-centrism of much of this discussion. Important work has been done on the historical and ongoing bonds between colonial and settler-colonial practices and ideologies and the emergence of fascists movements, leading to an understanding of fascism not as a static political form but as a process taking place across the longue durée and complexly entangled with the histories of European imperialism and its racial frameworks. Against diffusionist prejudices, there has also been a comparative effort to think of the rise of fascisms in the non-West as something other than imitations of European models (for instance, by returning to Japanese debates on ‘emperor-fascism’ or tracking the genealogy of Hindu ethnonationalist politics in India).
In the wake of Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine, the contemporary debate on fascism has gained new prominence. In part this has involved genealogies of Great Russian chauvinist ideologies (for instance, in Timothy Snyder’s writings on Ivan Ilyin, as well as in exposés of Aleksandr Dugin and others), which have in turn been met by arguments for the weakness of the fascist analogy (for example, in the writings of Marianne Laruelle). The terms of this debate are considerably complicated by the instrumental rhetoric of ‘denazification’ with which Russian authorities have shored up their assaults, and by the weaponization of historical memory. Is it possible to bracket the analogical mode and approach the fascist problematic, in the context of this war and other contemporary conflicts, from a different vantage point? If historical fascism was born of (colonial and inter-imperialist) war, what is the role of contemporary forms of warfare in its return? Is it possible in this context too to learn from critical and comparative theories of fascism that foreground histories of settler-colonialism and internal colonisation? Can we draw on studies of the entanglements between processes of ‘fascisation’ and media technologies to map contemporary phenomena beyond the frame of analogies and check-lists? What are the modalities and apparatuses of power through which new variants of fascism might be seen to operate? What are the virtues and limitations of thinking the present through the optic of fascism?
We would like to consider this working group as a collective forum to work through some of these problems from historical, theoretical, and contemporary perspectives, combining critical reflection on theoretical frameworks for the analysis of fascism with investigations into its present afterlives and new modalities.
Fall 2021