Sanctuary and the Techno-Social

The open conversation on sanctuaries, sparked by Andrew Exum’s ‘No Place to Hide‘, has become entwined with CTlab’s excellent and ongoing symposium revolving around P.W. Singer’s Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century. Mike Innes – whose book, Denial of Sanctuary, is currently the authority on the issue – has responded in typically detailed fashion to Ex’s piece in a new post at CTlab, ‘Rewired for War: Militant Operating Environments‘. Mike makes a series of good points, most of which I’m ill-equipped to comment upon, but two passages were of most interest to me. This is the first:

Although terrorists plan and train in the real world, Exum writes, the “common denominator that has emerged from domestic terror threats in places like the United Kingdom is that their staging ground was actually on the internet rather than in a physical ‘safe haven’.” I’m pretty confident he wasn’t trying to paint a picture of wetwired ji-hackers uploading themselves into the net to wreak digital havoc in ethereal form, and he later redressed the editorial misstep that led him referencing the internet per se, rather than web-based propaganda. It’s important to acknowledge the role of web technologies and social media as idea-sharing platforms,  but the point is frequently – and easily – overstated or miscommunicated. Thomas Hegghammer, for example, in response to No Place to Hide, noted that “at the end of the day, the Internet is just the messenger.” Well, no, no it’s not. It’s a vehicle, nothing more, unless you consider the stratcom implications of the message being in the medium – but even so, the messenger as active agent is a third party to all this. Perhaps, in a rewired-for-war robotics sense, the Internet could become the messenger at some point down the road, but that’s a distracted aside.

I’m having problems understanding why the internet is not the messenger, especially as I concluded my response to Ex, “Thomas finishes his post with the phrase, ‘at the end of the day the Internet is just the messenger.’ Wise words.” My understanding of Thomas’ intention when he wrote this was exactly as Mike says – the internet is a vehicle, and ‘messenger’ implies this in its suggestion of neutrality. Don’t shoot the internet, if you will. I can’t actually see where Thomas and Mike differ on this. I don’t think Thomas was suggesting the internet itself has agency in this (yet), and I guess Mike just doesn’t like the connotations of the ‘messenger’ metaphor.

Having said that, it’s worth considering, as Mike knows, that technology is not quite as neutral as one might commonly think. There’s a massive body of literature on technology and society that I’ve only scratched the surface of but it’s evident that technology is constructed through society, and vice versa; it is therefore inherently non-neutral once one moves past the point of perceiving technology as pure objects (dang, I should read Latour, methinks). Even as artefact, technology has meaning beyond its physical form, as do all artefacts. All artefacts imply agency, whether geological, biological or cultural, and technology – as it largely defines Homo sapiens – is possibly the least neutral artefact one can imagine. I’ve been banging on about cyberspace being a techno-social assemblage (after Deleuze and Guattari) for a while now, physical and virtual, and it’s this that informs a lot of how I think about the internet and cyberspace generally.

Mike goes on to say:

The point about terrorist use of the internet that’s consistently glossed over is that it’s just as “physical” a resource as training camps in Waziristan, cave complexes in Tora Bora, or safe houses in London. It’s anchored in real world hardware and it takes real people to interface with it – but it’s organized, distributed, and accessed in ways that don’t look anything like the macro territorial havens we’re used to thinking about. The distributed internet is, essentially, a reflection of the transnational networks that exploit the medium. To borrow from Hegghammer, they are the messengers, riding its ruby rails.

That’s the difference: physical space can be organized in many different ways, and different kinds of organizations have differing requirements. Guerrilla field armies need controllable territory to go about their business, but transnational networks made of up of linked individuals don’t. They need physical space, to be sure; that’s not the same thing as territory, in its political sense. So when Ex argues that the new White House policy “betrays an obsession with physical space at the expense of virtual space,” it’s a fair point, but it misses a more important one: destroy a guerrilla sanctuary, and you may soon have to contend with the networked kind – small, scattered, more of them, harder to find.

This follows on from what I was saying. Just as I have been trying to re-insert the social into the technological, so it is important to consider the physical when talking about the virtual. Infrastructure doesn’t just appear; a virtual life requires a physical presence. As Albert Borgmann has written, cyberspace will always in a sense be ‘parasitic on reality’. Technology-mediated communication requires technology, a priori, whether it’s the telegraph, the radio, or the internet. But to understand the environment – and the threat – you need to consider both the social and the technological, and the complex interactions therein. Mike quotes me when I wrote that there’s a “rather insidious tendency amonst the security establishment to parse the virtual/physical relationship clumsily, many people preferring to focus on one at the expense of the other.” This has been seen repeatedly in US formulations of cybersecurity, and has been seen recently on this side of the Atlantic in a new Chatham House report on the subject.

At present, machines are not the terrorists or insurgents, although the possibilities are hinted at in Singer’s new book, I would guess (I haven’t read it yet) and are the stuff of sci-fi dystopias. People are the subjective agents of violence and likely to be so for the entire future history of mankind. They use the internet for the same reasons as the rest of us, and a few more besides. We need to understand all facets of the complex equation before we can begin to solve it effectively. Mike, Thomas, Ex and I would all agree that there is no such thing as a purely virtual sanctuary or haven (aside: Mike brilliantly reminds us of how the term ‘safe haven’ has been doubly and differentially expropriated by the state). What we need at a basic level is for the state to understand what’s actually going on, and to act positively and sensitively in response. What are the chances of that?

Note: the new issue of Foreign Affairs has an article by Daniel Byman, ‘Taliban vs. Predator‘, which should be of interest to readers and participants in the CTlab symposium.