In Radical Warfare: Data, Attention and Control in the 21st Century, matthew ford Y Andrew Hoskins Explore how digital technologies, datafication, and related media practices have transformed warfare today. This timely book invites readers to reconsider the changing relationship between media and conflict that has given rise to ‘radical warfare’, writes Scott Timcke.
Radical Warfare: Data, Attention and Control in the 21st Century. Matthew Ford and Andrew Hoskins. Editorial Hurst. 2022.
Find this book (affiliate link):
Amid recent changes in networked consumer technologies and media practices, Matthew Ford and Andrew Hoskins ask how these developments are altering warfare. Capitalizing on the claim that “there can be no political violence without its digital representation” (15), the central concern of radical war it is with the reconfiguration of how citizens, security policy makers, technologists, users and audiences pay attention to and understand war. Going beyond state-centric, and even combat-centric, interpretations (10), Ford and Hoskins ask readers to reconsider the relationship between war and media in light of the production of global computing infrastructure in The 21st century. They call this broad development ‘radical warfare’.
In their examination of “the new ecology of war” (xix), Ford and Hoskins propose that the above cumulative effects “decenter[s] the battlefield’ (20). Overall, Ford and Hoskins argue that most participants understand digital connectivity to be one aspect of the conflict, but few grasp the ramifications of this connection. In a disturbing addition to the last two decades of eternal wars‘now war is everywhere’ (7), write Ford and Hoskins.
Thinking about war, Ford and Hoskins want to avoid giving undue credence to the hype cycles created by Silicon Valley about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. They also seek to avoid the useful alarmism about cybersecurity disseminated by think tanks. Broadly speaking, the ecology they describe is quite mundane. It relies less on fancy technologies and more on ‘usual smartphone use’ (163). Through datafication, these devices help populate vast archives from which kill strings, for example, can be mounted. The effect of these social and technical changes is “both a clarification and a distortion of our appreciation of war” (23).
Image credit: Image by Markus Winkler from Pixabay
Ford and Hoskins draw attention to “a connective turn” that, in my view, affects “the entire epistemological framework for understanding the world” (75). These changes in the creation of meaning are highlighted when media and war are compared in modernity.
First detectable in journalistic coverage of the Crimean War (1853-1856), there has been a consistent “Western way of perceiving war” for some 150 years (60). Stabilized by television and mass audiences more recently, this mode understands the causes and action of war as remote, separate and distinct from everyday life.
However, these assumptions do not coincide with the current ecology of the media, where the elements of war are at hand in the metropolises. Western states no longer simply fight ‘over there’. Corporate technologists play a decisive role in this new ecology of war, if only because they develop and control the key infrastructure and platforms on which the data, attention and control of images of war circulate. But states are also struggling to maintain control over those same companies.
In Ford and Hopkins’ thinking, smartphones, platforms, and the broader ecology of networks mean that audiences will always be fragmented. Grand narratives are absolutely relics of the past, they imply. There are no central struggles that define the story. What remains is micropolitics around particular issues, which at its zenith is wholly individual, idiosyncratic, and unchangeable. It may also be an opportunity for radical self-framing, but datafication reinforces distancing as ‘digital clutter’ repeatedly collapses context. We may be neighbors, but what you and I see on Twitter is so different, we might as well be oceans apart.
As images and information do not reach audiences in chronological order, the plurality of data has narrative implications for the causes and evaluation of acts of conflict. r/CombatFootage on Reddit is a good example of war videos posted for attention. In radical warfare, state conquest is an afterthought, perhaps also combat operations: ‘War now is mainly about managing the attention of populations and different audiences’ (11). Given this ‘media spectacle’ (33), Ford and Hoskins urge readers to ‘rewrite how we come to know and understand war’ (10), because ‘it is not possible to place these emerging forms of war within existing models of warfare’. representation and ways of seeing the world’ (70).
Some of these changes were detectable in the US occupation of Iraq when smartphones entered the battlefield beginning in 2008. Files are an important component in the ecology that Ford and Hoskins identify, as the data they contain can be used to the identification of objectives. There are real possibilities that automated network analysis could link discrete data sets to generate patterns. When these conditions are met, ‘the result is an infinite capacity to produce targets’ (9). Since smartphones generate so much data, these devices may also become part of a chain of destruction. There is considerable merit to this argument, although I think the authors overstate it rhetorically when they write that the smartphone is ‘replacing the rifle as the weapon of choice for those involved in mass participation in warfare’ (10).
Sensing that there is a gap between the conditions for war and combat doctrines, Western military bureaucracies have changed, albeit reluctantly, with respect to some elements of the command structure. For example, the US military tried to make itself sensitive to local concerns by encouraging brigade combat to cultivate a ethnographic imagination To help with counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, Ford and Hoskins insist, the new digital ecology means that narratives and counternarratives about war are too fractured for institutions to have even a modicum of control. There is a risk of war being deinstitutionalized, where even institutions designed specifically to focus on war become useless.
As an example of this fracture, Ford and Hoskins point to memories. In a very astute observation, Ford and Hoskins explain how ‘our shared understanding of the past’ is tied to a ‘sedimented appreciation of war in history framed by analog archives versus the digital turmoil of a present framed by social media’ ( 117-18). Digital rotation can simultaneously use disengaged images of the past to support present grievances, while embedding these images in the “perpetual present” that Fredric Jameson wrote about in Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism.
Detailing the changing relationship between how wars are fought and how they are understood is a tall order for any field of inquiry, let alone the work of two established scholars. Those who seek to rebuke them for their arrogance should pause, as Ford and Hoskins admit that they do not wish to present ‘a complete theory of warfare in the 21st century’ (10). Yes, the book is written in an declarative tone. But the text is more suggestive than it seems at first glance. The point on which the authors insist the most is that the circulation of the media disrupts axioms that remained firm during most of the 20th century.
Yet, radical war it was written before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but much of what is happening in that war validates the writing of Ford and Hoskins. Social media audiences can easily find footage of combat operations from helmet-mounted cameras and follow famous soldiers posting selfies. Smartphone photos allow fans to count equipment losses while revealing Russian war crimes in Mariupol. So this line of research is very promising. But it raises several questions, some of which are worth raising here.
To begin with, what is the probability that Ford and Hoskins’ framework of social technical changes could lead to a “war without spectators” (47)? I can’t help but shake the feeling that this kind of language helps'[collapse] the boundary between those who observe the war and those who participate in it’ (47). Surely the reluctant ‘participating combatants’ (47) deserve finer distinctions.
And second, war involves duress and construction. The latter involves efforts to make peace, which is complicated enough. If one consequence of the collapse of a common frame of reference is that the participants may have very different conceptions of the causes of the war, how does ‘radical war’ end when the participants do not have a broad consensus for an armistice? Related to this, if war is partially deinstitutionalized, how does this new ecology of war reshape the prospects for peacebuilding, to find ways in which war is nowhere? Ford and Hoskins do not say. For me, this is where future research could begin.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.
Note: This article offers the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, or the London School of Economics.
Short URL for this post: https://bit.ly/3z0e971
About the reviewer
Scott Timcke – University of Johannesburg
Scott Timcke is the author of Capital, State, Empire: America’s New Form of Digital Warfare Y Algorithms and the End of Politics: Shaping Technology in 21st-Century American Life. He is a Research Associate at the Center for Social Change at the University of Johannesburg and affiliated with the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has been a Fellow of the Center for African Studies at the University of Leeds and the Center for Advanced Internet Studies.