GWOT fossilization

Bryan Finoki at Subtopia gives us his usual brilliant take on architecture and control in “Block D” Enters the Pantheon of GWOT Space:

Thinking a bit more about the legacy of war measured in terms of the structural remains it leaves behind – maybe even through a specific material like concrete (as if the Bremer Wall were the architectural currency of the Global War on Terror) – not only has GWOT laid the foundations for its own inevitable fossilization with hundreds of miles of barricade (sharing an ironic resemblance to some sort of linear cemetery with a wall composed of thousands of tombstones), but this war is also expanding a whole other pantheon of spooky transient spaces that over time keeps emerging from these furtive corners of the world only to duck below the surface and reappear again at a later date, in some other squatting nomadic form. I guess the War on Terror leads one to wonder if it will even leave a visible footprint at all, say, a few hundred years from now.

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I wonder, what will be left of the War on Terror a thousand years from now, what spatial shells might litter the earth, what geopolitical patterns of cracks will expose what we cannot see today of this extralegal landscape? I imagine measuring secret space then to be intimately connected with time and morphology.

But, if our observations of the politics surrounding and supporting this infrastructure of secrecy can help us to infer anything about the physical dimensions of secret space – how it is politically created, articulated, hidden, how secrecy is politically encoded into space – then maybe we can actually make some sorts of measurements today. And perhaps the opposite is also true – say we do manage to glimpse these discrete spaces, then what can we make of the fuzzy political logic, or spatial politics of the War on Terror?

Go read.