my mistrust for softened military systems by neil
Risa
Having just composed this, please read on:
I agree with you at the end: we ought to fostering multidirectional communication and accommodating those cut out by monopolized one-directional avenues. Exchange and interface – whether it be friction, fog, tension – is required. It is, most plainly, ethics. Yet, I am suspicious of any move to validate the absorption or incorporation of open source technologies or practices into militarized frameworks. I think is something political and calculated, something for which ethics cannot be substituted.
Note here: Ethics is no surrogate for political change, even if it is in situ, ongiong, enabled through acts of everyday life. I think it’s prior to the political (if I can affix that kind of mechanical temporal measure to it) and that it (what ever ethics is…for Westerners, Spinoza, Deleuze, Levinas, Arrendt, Lingis) can be prior to the political without being reduced to some modular moral program or architechtonic that ought to be put into place. It isn’t a code to militarized and made operational; it’s open. Yet, precisely because of this, we can’t mistake ethics for politics within the state or as a manifestation of the state. It’s like mistaking aesthetics for politics. And while all who read this are saying to themselves that these distinctions are not that cut and dry, that they’re dialectical, that they self-organize themselves and us with them, I think its useful to point out these things because its too easy to remain complacently self-congratulatory, ‘working ethically at the outset’ but with an ear still firmly to oneself ensure that one does just that: act ethically, i.e., See, I am performing my liturgy without recompense, see? (Levinas). That’s self-serving and dangerous.
This is a political problem intersecting with contemporary forms of capital accumulation.
Notably, the research project mentioned above is another (normal, naturalized, depoliticized) instance of military-civilian cross-fertilization and pollination and I would go further in saying that is one more required consolidation by industries and –sadly but increasingly – “knowledge-economy” modeled universities and research centers working in a complicit and provisional relation with military authoritiess. This is perhaps less conspiratorial, less intended, and less explicit that I make it sound, but it certainly not without a prior pattern. Call it neoliberalism, the opening up of things to close them down, penetration with primitive accumulation on the brain. I don’t mean to validate the myth of inevitability or that it is progressive or natural: rather, it’s the heart of the matter.
That this is a harvesting of known, functional ‘things’ (codes, program, software) bother me greatly because people practicing with open source are vulnerable to doing and performing the preliminary research at the outset. After the decline of the emancipatory rhetoric of the web and the internet (free “culture”?), and the rise of gated internet hubs and rather closed systems of access policed and under increased control, open source is important less for what it can actually do (which is pragmatic and admittedly amazing) and more, I think ,(yes, symbolically and rhetorically) how it is in itself an opposition or alternative to monopolization, ownership, and privatization of the commons, digital or otherwise. Of course, that our rituals and allegiances are being played out in relation to how we write code and use programs – as opposed, say, to that notion of public life outside – is of concern. Yet, the open source issue here becomes one more place to consider what is at stake. This is why Concordia, Bell, and Canada’s armed forces getting together makes me cringe. We ought to be slackening the control gap, making it apparent, not tightening it up with prosthetic and instrumental implementation in mind.
Further, the open source research is no doubt intended to augment the revolution in military affairs (RMA), though the jury is still out among experts and elites as to the demands of both the art and science of contemporary state-sponsored war. Nonetheless, state-administered militaries communicate frequently: asymmetrical one-way saturation, full spectrum, with violence itself never outside the context of communication. Weapons delivery, colonizing and dominating territory from a distance: these are all most basically intentional communicative acts, communicating the possibility of communicability itself. Militaries monopolize violence and project force using integrated technical means or messy means that do what networks cannot. One has trouble decoding the saturation of one’s own area of neighbourhood oppositionally, or of shaking off an incursion by a well-networked group of state-nomads raiding your place. If I deploy the image of conquest its because I think these kinds of things are at stake when a whole community is turned on from elsewhere, their DIY gains pulled out from under them.
The warm and fuzzy feeling of all actors sharing the benefits of open source seems rosy. Yet, I acknowledge that genealogies of any kind of emergent object or process – technical or otherwise – would likely reveal that their absorption and taking up into the repertoire of any network or technologies standing reserve is and has been subject to the same recurring kind of historical harvest, beginning with sharing and reciprocal exchange. What bothers me most is that, at its best, open source is open, is malleable and flexible, and yet, conversely and simultaneously (perhaps, dialectically) its indefensible and can never be made ‘safe’ from whatever kinds of intended uses. I have some faith in the prospects for practitioners, ostensible civilians, becoming repeatedly able to stay creatively and inventively ahead of the colonizing curve. However, I’m also choked: open source is now a standard on the menu, ready to be brought up to military specification.
July 28th, 2006 at 12:48 pm
so many good points. here are 2:
“we can’t mistake ethics for politics within the state or as a manifestation of the state. It’s like mistaking aesthetics for politics.”
thanks neil, aside from being powerful prose, this way of putting this totally worked for me. politics is the work of making a working state, and we can’t let it slide whether we’re distracted by art or theory.
“I have some faith in the prospects for (open source) practitioners, ostensible civilians, becoming repeatedly able to stay creatively and inventively ahead of the colonizing curve.”
i just like that you said this. it’s nice.
July 28th, 2006 at 1:27 pm
risa, thanks.
of course, that there **is a curve means we need to consider our actions – no matter how swell we perceive them – and how they function so as to drive and generate the very process of incoporation and containment that they ideally seek -at the outset – to escape. no guarantees, right?
it’s a difficult thing, this kind of feedback, and we could paralyze ourselves to the point of not acting at all. that’s not to be gloomy but is rather a matter of taking some stock of the varying forces in operation across the domains and fields that we traverse and travel. sometimes, opposition – rather than ubiquitous and sufficient “resistance” – is appropriate and necessary. merely proceeding as a consequence is not an attractive strategy.