Cyberwar and revolution: digital subterfuge in global capitalism

236 Pages·2019·3.949 MB·English

by  Dyer-Witheford, Nick;Matviyenko, Svitlana

CYBERWAR AND REVOLUTION
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Cyberwar and
Revolution
Digital Subterfuge in
Global Capitalism
Nick Dyer- Witheford and
Svitlana Matviyenko
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
Copyright 2019 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
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Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
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Contents
INTRODUCTION: YOU MAY NOT BE INTERESTED IN CYBERWAR . . . 1
1. THE GEOPOLITICAL AND CLASS RELATIONS OF CYBERWAR 33
2. CYBERWAR’S SUBJECTS 73
3. WHAT IS TO BE DONE? 117
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 163
NOTES 165
BIBLIOGRAPHY 175
INDEX 211
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Introduction: You May Not Be
Interested in Cyberwar . . .
GRIM EPIGRAM
War, already distributed around the world by invasions, terrorist attacks,
and drone strikes, insurgency and counterinsurgency, civil strife and
foreign intervention, is today widening and intensifying in a new form
waged across digital networks: cyberwar. Within capitalist democracies,
warnings from national security agencies about Kremlin hackers, Chinese
digital espionage, and jihadi virtual recruiters, not to mention networked
leakers and whistleblowers, challenging said democracies from within,
have been mounting for years; alarm rose to a fever pitch around Rus-
sian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, then went yet higher with the
Cambridge Analytica scandal, and may ascend even further, exposing new
actors or directing public attention, again, toward the usual suspects. So it
is that in an era when the maxims of Marxist masters have fallen into deep
disrepute, one at least seems to have escaped the oblivion of capitalism’s
memory hole. “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in
you,” an aphorism ascribed to Leon Trotsky— first commander of the Red
Army, no less!— is today not only widely cited but often, by emendation
or implication, given a new, high-t ech, exhortatory gloss: “You may not be
interested in cyberwar, but cyberwar is interested in you” (Hoffman 2013;
Schrage 2013; Dunlap 2014; Yong- Soo and Aßmann 2016). Like so much
about cyberwar, however, the phrase suffers an “attribution problem”
(Rid and Buchanan 2015), that is to say, an uncertainty as to authorship.
For Trotsky never actually said or wrote “you may not be interested in
1
2 INTRODUCTION
war”; the words were assigned to him in a spy novel, Alan Furst’s (1991)
Dark Star.1 Yet despite, or perhaps because of, this grim epigram’s status
as a piece of viral misinformation, a digitally circulated non-T rotskyism,
this book takes “you may not be interested in cyberwar, but cyberwar is
interested in you” as a point of departure. We do so not because there
is insufficient interest in cyberwar—t here is now no shortage of com-
mentary on the topic— but rather because so little of it is written from a
politically critical perspective, committed to contesting the logic of the
social system that daily draws the world closer to catastrophe. It is from
such a position that we ask three introductory questions derived from
non- Trotsky’s cryptic proposition. First, what is “cyberwar”? Second, what
could it mean to say that “cyberwar” is “interested in you”? And third— the
issue that would surely have informed Trotsky’s original observation, had
he actually made it— what is the relation, today, of cyberwar to capital-
ism, and to revolution?
WHAT IS CYBERWAR?
Cyberwar, a neologism that asserts war has left the armored train from
which Trotsky directed revolutionary troops far, far behind, is a term
that has abruptly risen in prominence in recent years but that possesses
more than a quarter century of genealogy (Healey 2013; Rid 2016). As we
discuss later, cybernetics originated in the American and British military
research of the Second World War, setting a path for the development
of computers and networks that continued throughout the Cold War.
However, the contemporary use of cyberwar, with specific reference to
attacks in and on digital networks, did not emerge until the 1980s. Fred
Kaplan (2016) suggests that U.S. military concern about this possibility
was sparked by President Reagan’s viewing of the film WarGames (1983),
about computer-g aming teenagers breaking into the networks of U.S.
Strategic Air Command. This anxiety- inducing event purportedly set in
motion the first of what would become a long series of invariably urgent
reports about the vulnerabilities of the United States (and its foes) to digital
attack, produced by competing defense agencies and departments, only to
be shelved, then rediscovered and repeated by successive administrations.
The actual conjoining of cyber with war was, however, the work of
INTRODUCTION 3
popular culture, reflecting the rapid uptake of science fiction author Wil-
liam Gibson’s (1984) cyberspace to designate the increasingly widespread
experience of internet use. According to Thomas Rid (2016), cyberwar first
appeared in the digital avant- garde magazine Omni in a 1987 article about
giant military robots. It was taken up more seriously in a 1992 essay by
Eric H. Arnett in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that declared, “The
leading military concept of the new era might be called cyberwar” and
applied it to a range of computerized “autonomous weapons,” including
crewless tanks, cruise missiles, advanced air- defense missiles, and anti-
missile satellites. This probably inspired the Chicago Sun- Times news report
of the same year, titled “Cyberwar Debate,” about an alleged dispute
between “scientists and the military” as to “who should wage war, man
or machine,” which the Oxford English Dictionary records as the earliest
usage of the phrase.
In U.S. policy discourse, an early public salvo on “cyberwar” was the
1993 report by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt for the RAND Corpo-
ration, the U.S. Air Force think tank. Dramatically titled “Cyberwar Is
Coming!,” it acknowledged the immediate influence of the U.S. forces’
lightning Operation Desert Storm victory over Iraq in the Gulf War,
in which Arquilla had been a consultant serving General Schwarzkopf.
However, it reached back further into history to Mongol cavalry and Nazi
Blitzkrieg to emphasize the importance of communication to gather
knowledge crucial to military operations and overwhelm an enemy. From
these instances, it extrapolated dramatic consequences from the informa-
tion revolution and the growing use of computers and networks, suggest-
ing that in the future, various forms of irregular warfare aided by such
technologies would outmatch more heavily armed conventional forces.
The authors developed this thesis in a series of subsequent publications,
seizing on examples from the Zapatista uprising of Mayan peasants to the
increasing powers of drug cartels to conduct the “swarming” operations
characteristic of what they variously termed netwar or cyberwar (Arquilla
and Ronfeldt 1996, 1997, 2000). At the time, their hypothesis seemed futur-
ist provocation riding the coattails of fashionable discussions of digital
smart weapons, but over the next decades, events would make “Cyberwar
Is Coming!” prophetic (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 1993).
These included, first and foremost, the 9/11 destruction of the World