Polygon war, a war with many sides

I've had in mind a quote that suggests that war is a continuation of politics by other means. And by politics I have in mind any source of power normally circulating in groups of people and used asymmetrically by some factions of a group to enforce meaning and shift a course of action to a faction's preferred end.

These are not necessarily new ideas, nor is the notion of 'everyday politics' that much outside the ken of anyone who has spent time with other people and bore witness to or participated in a conflict, no matter how petty, over the meaning of things and how to act upon that meaning.

Let us fast forward a bit from some generic context to a specific context in the near future, which is just beginning to dawn upon us. We see this kind of crisis as it is a consequence of our brand of modernization, which leads to a greater reliance upon technical expertise, centralized control, and a robust infrastructure. Heat, light, water, food, shelter--these are the petri dish basics, which are gussied up into so many lifestyle products offered to everyday consumers at varying prices. But behind all that, having unbroken access to these basics helps to anchor an existence, which contributes to a person's view of one's self.

As we move forward what I am witnessing is a sophistication of this infrastructure for providing people with their petri dish basics. For this reason I will fashion a term 'petristructure' to describe those elements of modernity, which are provided for the sake of sustaining a life. Heat, light, water, food, and shelter are the basics. The sophistication of our society also adds more petristructure, such as transportation and communication technologies to alleviate the problems resulting from a shattered village and family system whereby most any member of a family of working age is doing so, or compelled to do so in order to maintain a comfortable life with some lifestyle amenities to it.

Now war, as we all know, is a method of politics in that groups of people decide for salient reasons to obliterate each other due to a belief in the threat they pose to one group's 'way of life' or to the depletion of resources and so on. But a war in a fully sophisticated modern society need not pick sides or require groups to organize in order to conduct it. No, in the sophisticated modern society the very infrastructure of modernity is used to wage individualized war against individualized consumers suckling upon its stainless steel teat. Cutting power, water, internet, and communications are effective means of punishing and vanquishing individuals who have very little means to interact with others outside of a software environment that is available on a pay-to-use basis. As noted components of our petristructure without power, water, internet, and communications the individual's self-concept is challenged and changed by forced changes in the environment. As the absence of a sustained and secure environment continues the individual's self-concept languishes. Polygon warfare doesn't always require the death of the body but the destruction of that body's will and its means to act meaningfully for itself. And those meaningful actions as they're more closely and pervasively intertwined with the petristructure of modern society almost always consist of economic actions. As we move further we can expect a few more specific cases of this kind of warfare.

As we move deeper into the information society, computing is being used to drive cars. These smart cars can and will kill their drivers or take them to a predefined Auschwitz if an entity powerful enough to access the car's computer overrides its orders. The level of centralization and the cession of agency to computation that drivers of modern automobiles have begun submit provides us with a specific template for a loss of control over one's basic needs for agency. They are sold as 'amenities' that 'free' us from worrying about specific dangers attendant to automobile travel, and basically now they're being used to parallel park for us. By finding a prevalent weakness or insecurity in the driver's habit the manufacturers are finding purchase for selling greater computer-control to the automobile. With the trickiness of the DMCA's language and the expansive definitions of 'intellectual copyright' drivers are beginning to pay a company, not to own, but to lease its services, which have a greater and greater control over the vehicle. The owner is beginning to own more of a legal concept of a car such that while the services it runs are wholly owned by the company that built the car, the owner or driver of the car simply has the material components, which are increasingly useless without the intellectual copyright controlled computing power and software support that allows it to function as a vehicle.

Let us move on to an earlier iteration of the hardware platform, which supports an essential function of daily life, which we buy in order to further purchase access to a communications network, buy data by the lot, and accept the continuous 'improvement' and imminent obsolescence of that platform by continuous software updates. That is what is today's smart phone. We are already at the cusp of the cellular phone with a powerful enough battery to classify it as a bomb. In a near future phone users can be irradiated by a stuxnet-type of virus that causes the phone to produce overly strong radio frequencies that may cauterize neurons and brain tissue or slowly mutate neural DNA, resulting in cancerous tissue. Finally, as battery power becomes powerful enough, that stuxnet-type virus can also trigger a battery overload resulting in its explosion. This will be made worse if the virus triggers this attack while a user has the phone pressed to his or her ear, causing skull and brain damage. These sound more like the old war model from which this polygon war borrows its metaphor. But like the car example above, a component of computing, computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, and the behavior-shaping reward structures that define much of how we participate in computing today is there with the smart phone. Therefore, any number of very subtle attacks can lead to a person thinking that he or she has 'complete' internet access while still being systematically left out of communication or adequate information retrieval. What is unfettered access to a collection of information that dwarfs the capacity to comprehend it? Few can provide an adequate answer to that. But we do rely upon our favored search engines and the algorithms that shape our social networking experience. Millions of computations shape how our online experience evolves. As that is controlled for specific ends that are inimical to the individual the result will be anomie and a systematically distorted view of the world.

This final scenario has already come to pass in our contemporary world. People can and do go to self-defined ghettos with makeshift perimeters cobbled out of programmable algorithms that administer to our 'tastes.' People can and do enter social worlds completely abstracted from any real living situation where they can and do discuss, in a rarified context, 'items of great import.' In doing so, they associate with people without any moderating influences of different opinion and so act without the attendant need to at least practice decorum. As a result the influences of group polarization take a person who was once a gun owner into now becoming a gun zealot who stockpiles guns and survival supplies. Another confessed vegetarian and member of the animal rights community finds that fluoridation of the water supply makes people more psychologically malleable and so this person buys an expensive and completely hokey water purification system and after it breaks down, subscribes to a water delivery service, going so far as to water this person's garden with that water when needed.

Warfare like this, as with its classical form carries a heavy psychological component. Classical warfare needed a strong form of identification through clan, village, and eventually citizenship structures in order to make the desire for defense strong in the individual soldier. Warfare outcomes like defeats and victories move beyond mere quantities of loss and destruction. The will of each side must be strong enough in order for it to continue, and that will is a measure of one's psychological fortitude. In today's warfare some purely cognitive methods are in place in order to achieve a similar form of identification and will, and most of these are purchased literally as a result of consumer choices. Gun owners go to war, for now metaphorically, with gun safety or gun control advocates. Christians go to war with aspects of our 'godless society.' Carefully edited videos add substance to an already keyed up Christian phantasm of a baby holocaust happening in their midst. Media portrayals amplify the threat of teenage Muslim men joining a cause that reinvigorates their sense of belonging and purpose in a society that has modernized them into various forms of inequity and unemployment. An anti-terrorism behemoth profits from immediately labeling anyone using the words 'ISIS' in social media as a threat to a 'way of life.' These purely cognitive modes of warfare happen mostly in the minds of the participants, spill out into their consumer choices, and end in explosions perpetrated for or against its participants. This willy-nilly call to arms is a social media and global communications phenomenon, and as long it is idealized in the minds of the 'soldiers' of this war those fires burn oh so bright.

And the one sad entry that breaks from this set is the day when the sky is darkened by armed drones launched from several hundred countries. Each country conspired to launch millions of drones coordinated to strike a mutual target, the White House. Many crash or stray of course. Others are downed. Others simply are duds. But of the hundreds of thousands that still make it within the vicinity all release their weapon upon a target. And when even ten thousand drones strike at once the effect creates a small firestorm at the target site. The first drones test the defenses but the successful ones raise the threat of attack by striking with effective force. The next waves, lightly armed, simply help to deplete the defensive batteries in and around Washington. These waves are staggered to test the readiness and deplete the readiness of military air response. The final waves, consisting of two thirds of the total assault contingent dedicated to this attack, strikes with depleted uranium projectiles that pierce targets and poison the area with radioactivity.