#5 Digital Earth Talks x Svitlana Matviyenko
The fifth Digital Earth Talk features Assistant Professor of Critical Media Analysis in the School of Communication, Svitlana Matviyenko.
With consistent questions from the Digital Earth Fellows, Svitlana Matviyenko will discuss her notion of “Communicative Militarism” which describes the merging of commercial and military technologies and strategies. By three contemporary examples of this playing out, Matviyenko conceptualises the struggle of prompting resistance and creating communities in online spaces that thrive off polarisation as an opportunity for data extraction. She describes the difficulty of establishing and imagining humane digital futures, when such futures are not profitable nor commercially viable.
We hosted a live discussion with the Digital Earth Fellows in conversation with Svitlana Matviyenko, moderated by Nora N. Khan, on July 27, 2021.
From “communicative capitalism” to “communicative militarism”
STATEMENT FROM THE SPEAKER, Svitlana Matviyenko
You may not be interested in cyberwar, but cyberwar is interested in you.
In 2005 Jodi Dean asked, “What is the political impact of networked communications technologies?.” She answered that they are profoundly depoliticizing. Dean elaborated on her diagnosis by conceptualizing the current political-economic formation as “communicative capitalism” “animated by fantasies of activity or participation materialized through technology fetishism” when users misrecognize social media communication for democratic exchanges while in reality, “this fantasy prevents the emergence of a clear division between friend and enemy, resulting instead in the more dangerous and profound figuring of the other as a threat to be destroyed.” What may appear as engaged debates on social media are far from enhancing democratic governance or resistance and it results in precisely the opposite. They do not facilitate political resistance but instead become a field for massive data extraction in the information economy.
Recently, Shoshana Zuboff defined ‘surveillance capitalism’ as “a new economic order” where human experience is mined, as if it were raw material, only to be translated into behavioral data and a “parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioural modification.” Drawing on these and other works that analyze the relation between communication, data, and economy, I introduce the notion of “communicative militarism” that registers a convergence of commercial and military technologies, practices, tactics, strategies, and goals that complement each other in the ongoing planetary cyberwar. I will discuss communicative militarism by addressing three cases:
Protasevich and Monetization of Violence
Roman Protasevich, a Belarusian journalist and political activist and the editor-in-chief of the Telegram channel Nexta, was arrested by Belarusian authorities after his flight (Ryanair Flight 4978) was diverted to Minsk on 23 May 2021. This was due to a false bomb threat conveyed by Belarusian Air Traffic Control on the order of President Aleksander Lukashenko. After violent interrogations, the forced interview with Protasevich aired on a pro-government TV channel. While most international media refused to show the clips from this interview, YouTube kept promoting it along with running ads.
Google’s Depiction of Crimean Border
As a commercial platform, Google Maps depicts the border of the occupied Crimea as either non-existent, existent, or contested on the basis of a user’s IP address and by predicting their possible political views.
Wylie between Cambridge Analytica and H&M
H&M recently hired Christopher Wylie, the former Director of Research for Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group. Symptomatically for communicative militarism, the same expertise, skills, and techniques could be applicable for a high-level psychological operations and information warfare and for promotion of commercial goods.
When we envision digital futures, one of the key questions is about the role of users in the complex automated and artificially intelligent communicative assemblage. Rather than feeding the old fears about being displaced by smart machines, let us consider another, perhaps, even more, concerning scenario of deep integration, automation and control of human users, the essential element of the planetary Internet and the source of data for the information economy.
PARTICIPANTS
Speaker • Svitlana Matviyenko is an Assistant Professor of Critical Media Analysis in the School of Communication. Her research and teaching are focused on information and cyberwar; political economy of information; media and environment; infrastructure studies; STS. She writes about practices of resistance and mobilization; digital militarism, dis- and misinformation; Internet history; cybernetics; psychoanalysis; posthumanism; the Soviet and the post-Soviet techno-politics; nuclear cultures, including the Chernobyl Zone of Exclusion. She is a co-editor of two collections, The Imaginary App (MIT Press, 2014) and Lacan and the Posthuman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). She is a co-author of Cyberwar and Revolution: Digital Subterfuge in Global Capitalism (Minnesota UP, 2019), a winner of the 2019 book award of the Science Technology and Art in International Relations (STAIR) section of the International Studies Association and of the Canadian Communication Association 2020 Gertrude J. Robinson book prize.
Moderator • Nora N. Khan is a writer of criticism on digital visual culture and philosophy of emerging technology. Her research specifically focuses on experimental art and music practices that make arguments through software, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Khan is a professor at Rhode Island School of Design, in Digital + Media; she teaches graduate students critical theory and artistic research, critical writing both for artists and designers, and history of digital media.
Fellow • Alexandra Anikina is a researcher, media artist, filmmaker, and curator working with the themes of algorithmic culture and critical posthumanities. Anikina uses the history of Soviet media technologies to probe the pervasive Western cosmologies of technological progress and to critique the temporalities of data governance and control.
Fellow • Antonio Macotela is a multidisciplinary artist, exploring the idea of economy as a mediatory device through which social relations are established. Macotela draws a parallel between the Q’aqchas - a group of pirate ore miners in the eighteenth century - and a group of contemporary hackers in Spain. Utilising the figure of the hacker, they explore narratives of resistance and strategies of subversion.
Fellow • Nolan Oswald Dennis is an interdisciplinary artist. They engage with the planet from a position of estrangement, where access to the planet as a spiritual-material object has been denied, and proposes reengineering tools and methods of measuring, monitoring, modelling, and otherwise remotely accessing the world for a project of alternative planetary imagination linking black and indigenous techno-cultures in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Fellow • Sahej Rahal is primarily a storyteller. His performances, installations, and AI programs narrate a mythology that interrogates narratives shaping our present. Rahal will create a mythology that remixes folklore, urban legends, and science fiction to interrogate the mythic narratives that construct our digital reality.
Fellow • Sheila Chukwulozie defines herself as an Igbo Cyborg contending with the state of being simultaneously fixed and fluid, object and subject, matter and spirit, digital and analog, able and unable, native and migrant. They are working with Uzoma Chidumaga Orji. They will explore a paradigm of verbal technology rooted in Igbo cosmology, and specifically in the concept of time. Through storytelling, linguistic excavations, and investigations of perceptual apparatuses, the duo advances the notion of Igbo proverbs as a technology.
Fellow • Uzoma Chidumaga Orji creates visual metaphors, scenography, and interactive digital experiences that interrogate post-colonial identity crises. They are working with Sheila Chukwulozie. They will explore a paradigm of verbal technology rooted in Igbo cosmology, and specifically in the concept of time. Through storytelling, linguistic excavations, and investigations of perceptual apparatuses, the duo advances the notion of Igbo proverbs as a technology.
Fellow • Sondra Perry is an interdisciplinary artist who works with video, computer-based media, and performance. She explores themes of race, identity, family history, and technology. Perry will unpack the relationship between industrial metal minerals and geological time, slavery, and industrialised labour in the United States and beyond. Recently, in response to the Black Lives Matter movement and racial violence, their project questions the role of art and its capacity for causing change.
Fellow • Temitayo Ogunbiyi explores environment, line, and representation. Moving between mediums such as drawing, painting, and installation, her work links current events, anthropological histories, and botanical cultures. Ogunbiyi confronts systems of surveillance and behaviour in digital space through notions of play. By considering the Planetary Sensorium as a monitoring structure birthed from Western constructs, she investigates how play can subvert and highlight its pervasive surveillance systems.
About Digital Earth Talks
How do we imagine a humane Digital Earth to come? Join the discussion and explore the visions of leading voices in art, tech, and philosophy from around the world.
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