Recap #5 Digital Earth Talks x Svitlana Matviyenko

written by Nora N. Khan and Digital Earth

Opening with the alluring statement, “You may not be interested in cyberwar, but cyberwar is interested in you,” Svitlana Matviyenko introduced the Digital Earth Fellows to the term ‘Communicative Militarism.’ As Matviyenko argued in detail, the merging of military and commercial strategies towards online communication as a resource means that our speech and contributions online are, as we know, harvested for data by states and companies alike, fuelling conflict and violent polarisation on social media platforms in ways that have real world consequences. These real world outbursts and overflows of political energy should clue us into the psychosocial warfare waged in the digital space as itself, more real than real.

As Matviyenko explained, cyberwar can no longer be conceived in the framework of the Cold War or a single, isolated, and highly visible attack on online national security. Today’s cyberwar is deeply integrated in the systemic operations of online spaces. It constantly upholds a feeling of ‘crisis’ as an affective and financial motor for the economy. And so, cyberwar expands our very notion of warfare; it is a war with no end and no common enemy everyone can agree on. It is also often waged hidden in plain sight, and it operates on platforms that supposedly are supporting democratic debate. Commercial companies are utilising actual military strategies, and the collapse of democratic engagement is simply collateral damage. While users of online space believe that they are engaging in open debates, the data they reveal by their participation is mined for profit. Through this process, users become soldiers of none, battling other users with their weapons of likes, reactions, and comments. They are exploited the moment they express themselves, and are trained, further to exploit themselves, volunteering ever more information to be extracted. 

When cyberwar works behind a veneer of citizen engagement, what responsibility do artists and scholars have to outline its grimy consequences?

Matviyenko describes this process by the term ‘Communicative Militarism,’ wherein capitalism cruelly treats its data-subjects as chess pieces in an unwinnable match. While obvious strategies of resistance against the infrastructure of the information economy includes leaving such platforms behind, the Covid-19 pandemic rendered little room to ‘opt-out’, as the dependency on online communities to maintain social networks and organise activism increased. This raises crucial juristic questions of human rights of data-subjects, which should be upheld even in virtual spaces.

As such, Matviyenko embarked with the Fellows on this question of how we can imagine a humane digital future when commercial and military strategies are determining our digital life. Important to this discussion was the term ‘endocolonialism,’ describing the process of a state turning against its ‘own’, and particularly in the space of technology, against the bodies and minds of its human citizens. This became a lens to further analyse Communicative Militarism as a process of colonising human behaviour, treating the human mind as a resource to be extracted and overstepping every notion of basic universal rights. Matviyenko and the Fellows discussed resisting these infrastructures as a decolonial struggle.

When imagining exit routes, the Fellows questioned these suggested ways of resistance and imagined what ‘neutral technologies’ might even look like. When cyberwar works behind a veneer of citizen engagement, what responsibility do artists and scholars have to outline its grimy consequences? Moreover, how is this information disseminated without taking further part in this warfare and making this act of resistance part of the information economy? It was obvious from the discussion that it is no longer enough to hold companies accountable. Platforms which serve capitalist structures are inherently violent. In the face of this dire situation, the group agreed: creating user-owned and user-serving online spaces is a strong possible strategy for resistance.

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