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......@@ -1260,3 +1260,318 @@ Counterinsurgency goes domestic:
well as the specific NSA surveillance programs, makes domestic total
information awareness possible, and in turn lays the groundwork for the other
two prongs of counterinsurgency in the domestic context.
[...]
This idea of an occupied territory, of a colony within a nation, resonates
perfectly with what we have witnessed in terms of the domestication of the
counterinsurgency. I would just push the logic further: we have not simply
created an internal colony, we have turned the nation itself into a colony. We
govern ourselves through modern counterinsurgency warfare as if the entire
United States was now a colonial dominion like Algeria, Malaya, or Vietnam.
[...]
These incidents—large and small, but all devastating for those targeted—also
serve another objective of the domesticated counterinsurgency: to make the rest
of us feel safe and secure, to allow us to continue our lives unaffected, to avoid
disrupting our consumption and enjoyment. They serve to reassure, and also, in
demonizing a phantom minority, to bring us all together against the specter of
the frightening and dangerous other. It makes us believe that there would be,
lurking in the quiet suburbs of Dallas or Miami, dangerous insurgents—were it
not for our government. And these effects feed into the third prong of a
[...]
We had seen earlier, within counterinsurgency theory, similar debates
between population-centric and enemy-centric theorists. The enemy-centric
approach tended to be the more brutal, but more focused. The population-centric
favored the more legal and social-investment approaches. I argued then that they
were just two facets of the same paradigm.
Here the debate is between population-and/or-enemy-centric theories versus
individual-centric theory. But here too, I would argue, this is a false dichotomy.
Again, these are just two facets of the same thing: a counterinsurgency paradigm
of warfare with three core strategies. Like the population-and/or-enemy-centric
theories, individual-centric theory naturally entails both incapacitating the
individual terrorist or insurgent—eliminating him and all of the active minority
—and preventing or deterring his substitution or replacement.
[...]
But rather than buy into this dichotomy of counterinsurgency and leaner
antiterrorism, what history shows instead is a growing convergence of the two
models in the United States since the 1960s. Counterinsurgency and domestic
antiterrorism efforts, entwined from the start, have converged over time. The
individual incapacitation strategy meshes perfectly into the counterinsurgency
approach. And it leads seamlessly from the domestication of the second prong of
counterinsurgency to the domestication of the third.
### Distraction and diversion
MANY OF US WILL NOT RECOGNIZE OURSELVES, OR A MERICA for that matter, in
these dreadful episodes—in the waterboarding and targeted assassinations
abroad or in the militarization of our police forces, in the infiltration of Muslim
mosques and student groups or in the constant collection of our personal data at
home. Many of us have no firsthand experience of these terrifying practices. Few
of us actually read the full Senate torture report, and even fewer track drone
strikes. Some of us do not even want to know of their existence. Most of us are
blissfully ignorant—at least most of the time—of these counterinsurgency
practices at home or abroad, and are consumed instead by the seductive
distractions of our digital age.
And that’s the way it is supposed to be. As counterinsurgency is
domesticated, it is our hearts and minds that are daily being assuaged, numbed,
pacified—and blissfully satisfied. We, the vast majority of us, are reassured
daily: there are threats everywhere and color-coded terror alerts, but
counterinsurgency strategies are protecting us. We are made to feel that
everything’s under control, that the threat is exterior, that we can continue with
our daily existence. Even more, that these counterinsurgency strategies will
prevail. That our government is stronger and better equipped, prepared to do
everything necessary to win, and will win. That the guardians are protecting us.
The effort to win the hearts and minds of the passive American majority is
the third aspect of the domestication of counterinsurgency practices—perhaps
the most crucial component of all. And it is accomplished through a remarkable
mixture of distraction, entertainment, pleasure, propaganda, and advertising—
now rendered all so much more effective thanks to our rich digital world. In
Rome, after the Republic, this was known as “bread and circus” for the masses.
Today, it’s more like Facebook and Pokémon GO.
We saw earlier how the expository society entices us to share all our personal
data and how this feeds into the first prong of counterinsurgency—total
information awareness. There is a flip side to this phenomenon: keeping us
distracted. The exposure is so pleasurable and engaging that we are mostly kept
content, with little need for a coordinated top-down effort to do so. We are
entranced—absorbed in a fantastic world of digitally enhanced reality that is
totally consuming, engrossing, and captivating. We are no longer being rendered
docile in a disciplinarian way, as Michel Foucault argued in Discipline and
Punish. We are past notions of docility. We are actively entranced—not
passively, not in a docile way. We are actively clicking and swiping, jumping
from one screen to another, checking one platform then another to find the next
fix—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, YouTube, and on and on.
Winning over and assuaging the passive majority might be accomplished—
indeed, has been accomplished in the past—through traditional propaganda, such
as broadcast misinformation about the insurgent minority, and through the top-
down provision of entertainment to keep us from thinking about politics. The
new digital world we live in has rendered these older strategies obsolete. As the
counterinsurgency’s mandate to pacify the masses has been turned on the
American people, the third prong of modern warfare looks and works differently
than it did in previous times and in other places.
Things have changed. Just a few years ago, our politicians still had to tell us
[...]
Pokémon GO has already run its course, but that is to be expected. Another
digital obsession will follow. These platforms are supposed to capture all of our
attention for a while, to captivate us, to distract us—and simultaneously to make
us expose ourselves and everything around us. This is the symbiosis between the
third and first prongs of the domesticated counterinsurgency: while it pacifies us,
a game like Pokémon GO taps into all our personal information and captures all
our data. At first, the game required that players share all their personal contacts.
Although that was eventually dropped, the game collects all our GPS locations,
captures all the video of our surroundings in perfectly GPS-coded data, and
tracks us wherever we are. Plus, even though it is free, many players are buying
add-ons and in the process sharing their consumption and financial data. The
more we play, the more we are distracted and pacified, and the more we reveal
about ourselves.
[...]
The distractions are everywhere: e-mail notifications, texts, bings and pings,
new snapchats and instagrams. The entertainment is everywhere as well: free
Wi-Fi at Starbucks and McDonald’s, and now on New York City streets, that
allow us to stream music videos and watch YouTube videos. And of course, the
advertising is everywhere, trying to make us consume more, buy online,
subscribe, and believe. Believe not only that we need to buy the recommended
book or watch the suggested Netflix, but also believe that we are secure and safe,
protected by the most powerful intelligence agencies and most tenacious military
force. Believe that we can continue to mind our own business—and remain
distracted and absorbed in the digital world—because our government is
watching out for us.
The fact is, the domestication of counterinsurgency has coincided with the
explosion of this digital world and its distractions. There is a real qualitative
difference between the immediate post–9/11 period and today. One that is
feeding directly into the third strategy of modern warfare.
Meanwhile, for the more vulnerable—those who are more likely to veer
astray and perhaps sympathize with the purported internal enemy—the same
digital technologies target them for enhanced propaganda. The Global
Engagement Center, or its equivalents, will profile them and send improved
content from more moderate voices. The very same methods developed by the
most tech-savvy retailers and digital advertisers—by Google and Amazon—are
deployed to predict, identify, enhance, and target our own citizens.
were before or that we are experiencing a waning of civil and political
engagement. While I agree that the growing capacity of the state and
corporations to monitor citizens may well threaten the private sphere, I am not
convinced that this is producing new apathy or passivity or docility among
citizens, so much as a new form of entrancement. The point is, we were once
kept apathetic through other means, but are now kept apathetic through digital
distractions.
Voting turnout and Trump election:
The voting patterns of American registered voters has remained constant—
and apathetic—for at least fifty years. Even in the most important presidential
elections, voter turnout in this country over the past fifty years or more has
pretty much fluctuated between 50 percent and 63 percent. By any measure,
American democracy has been pretty docile for a long time. In fact, if you look
over the longer term, turnout has been essentially constant since the 1920s and
the extension of the suffrage to women. Of course, turnout to vote is not the only
measure of democratic participation, but it is one quantifiable measure. And
electoral voting is one of the more reliable longitudinal measures of civic
participation. But our record, in the United States, is not impressive.
[...]
Despite all this, over 62 million people voted for Donald Trump, resulting in
his Electoral College victory. And it was by no means an unusual election. Voter
turnout in 2016 was typical for this country. About 60.2 percent of the
approximately 231 million eligible voters turned out to vote, representing about
139 million votes case. That number is consonant with historical turnout in this
country, almost squarely between voter turnout in 2012 (58.6 percent) and in
2008 (61.6 percent), but still above most presidential election year turnouts since
1972. 16 In all categories of white voters, Trump prevailed.
[...]
The cable news network CNN captured this best in a pithy lead to a story titled
“Trump: The Social Media President?”: “FDR was the first ‘radio’ president.
JFK emerged as the first ‘television’ president. Barack Obama broke through as
the first ‘Internet’ president. Next up? Prepare to meet Donald Trump, possibly
the first ‘social media’ and ‘reality TV’ president.” 10
[...]
This new mode of existence and digital consumption pleases and distracts the
majority of Americans. The old-fashioned TV has now been enhanced and
augmented, displaced by social media on digital devices of all sorts and sizes—
from the Apple Watch and tablet, through the MacBook Air and Mac Pro, to the
giant screen TV and even the Jumbotron. And all of it serves to pacify the
masses and ensure that they do not have the time or attention span to question
the domestication of the counterinsurgency.
And, then, it all feeds back into total information awareness. Hand in hand,
government agencies, social media, Silicon Valley, and large retailers and
corporations have created a mesmerizing new digital age that simultaneously
makes us expose ourselves and everything we do to government surveillance and
that serves to distract and entertain us. All kinds of social media and reality TV
consume and divert our attention, making us give our data away for free. A
profusion of addictive digital platforms—from Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter, to
YouTube and Netflix, Amazon Prime, Instagram, and Snapchat, and now
Pokémon GO—distract us into exposing all our most private information, in
order to feed the new algorithms of commerce and intelligence services: to
profile us for both watch lists and commercial advertising.
This is compatible with Shoshana Zuboff's Dispossession Cycle:
This third aspect of counterinsurgency’s domestication is perhaps the most
important, because it targets the most prized military and political objective: the
general masses. And today, in the expository society, the new algorithms and
digital-advertising methods have propelled the manipulation and propaganda to
new heights. We are being encouraged by government and enticed by
multination corporations and social media to expose and express ourselves as
much as possible, leaving digital traces that permit both government and
corporations to profile us and then try to shape us accordingly. To make model
citizens out of us all—which means docile, entranced consumers. The governing
paradigm here is to frenetically encourage digital activity—which in one sense is
the opposite of docility—in order to then channel that activity in the right
direction: consumption, political passivity, and avoiding the radical extremes.
What we are witnessing is a new form of digital entrancement that shapes us
as subjects, blunts our criticality, distracts us, and pacifies us. We spend so much
time on our phones and devices, we barely have any time left for school or work,
let alone political activism. In the end, the proper way to think about this all is
not through the lens of docility, but through the framework of entrancement. It is
crucial to understand this in the proper way, because breaking this very
entrancement is key to seeing how counterinsurgency governance operates more
broadly. Also, because the focus on docility—along an older register of
discipline—is likely to lead us into an outdated focus on top-down propaganda.
### Counterrevolution
The paradigm was refined
and systematized, and has now reached a new stage: the complete and systematic
domestication of counterinsurgency against a home population where there is no
real insurgency or active minority. This new stage is what I call “The
Counterrevolution.”
The Counterrevolution is a new paradigm of governing our own citizens at
home, modeled on colonial counterinsurgency warfare, despite the absence of
any domestic uprising. It is aimed not against a rebel minority—since none
really exists in the United States—but instead it creates the illusion of an active
minority which it can then deploy to target particular groups and communities,
and govern the entire American population on the basis of a counterinsurgency
warfare model. It operates through the three main strategies at the heart of
modern warfare, which, as applied to the American people, can be recapitulated
as follows:
1. Total information awareness of the entire American population…: [by the]
[...] “counterrevolutionary minority.”
[...]
2. … in order to extract an active minority at home…
Shock and Awe:
3. … and win the hearts and minds of Americans: Meanwhile, the
counterrevolutionary minority works to pacify and assuage the general
population in order to ensure that the vast majority of Americans remain
just that: ordinary consuming Americans. They encourage and promote a
rich new digital environment filled with YouTube, Netflix, Amazon
Prime, tweets, Facebook posts, instagrams, snapchats, and reality TV that
consume attention while digitally gathering personal data—and at times,
pushing enhanced content. They direct digital propaganda to susceptible
users. And they shock and awe the masses with their willingness to
torture suspected terrorists or kill their own citizens abroad. In the end,
entertaining, distracting, entrancing, and assuaging the general population
is the key to success—our new form of bread and circus.
The "new shape" of the State (and it's partners), as a "loose network":
These three key strategies now guide governance at home, as they do military
and foreign affairs abroad. What has emerged today is a new and different art of
governing. It forms a coherent whole with, at its center, a security apparatus
composed of White House, Pentagon, and intelligence officials, high-ranking
congressional members, FISC judges, security and Internet leaders, police
intelligence divisions, social-media companies, Silicon Valley executives, and
multinational corporations. This loose network, which collaborates at times and
competes at others, exerts control by collecting and mining our digital data. Data
control has become the primary battlefield, and data, the primary resource—
perhaps the most important primary resource in the United States today.
[...]
This new mode of governing has no time horizon. It has no sunset provision. And it is
marked by a tyrannous logic of violence. [...] It is part and parcel of the new
paradigm of governing that reconciles brutality with legality.
The unprecedented, self-fulfilling profecy:
We govern ourselves
differently in the United States now: no longer through sweeping social
programs like the New Deal or the War on Poverty, but through surgical
counterinsurgency strategies against a phantom opponent. The intensity of the
domestication now is unprecedented.
[...]
Counterinsurgency, with its tripartite scheme (active minority, passive masses,
counterrevolutionary minority) and its tripartite strategy (total awareness,
eliminate the active minority, pacify the masses) is a deeply counterproductive
self-fulfilling prophecy that radicalizes individuals against the United States.
[...]
“The Islamic State has called it ‘the blessed ban’ because it
supports the Islamic State’s position that America hates Islam. The clause in the
order that gives Christians preferential treatment will be seen as confirming the
Islamic State’s apocalyptic narrative that Islam is in a fight to the death against
the Christian crusaders. The images of Muslim visitors being turned away at
American airports will only inflame those who seek to do us harm.” 6
[...]
We are headed not, as Kant would have it, toward perpetual peace, but
instead, sounding the refrain of Nietzsche’s eternal return, toward an endless
state of counterinsurgency warfare.
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