“Fighting the New War”: Weaponization and the Essence of Technology

This article employs Rene ́ Girard’s anthropology of violence and the sacred in order to elucidate the evolution of an emerging planetary sacramental framework that Neil Postman refers to as ‘Technopoly’. Involving the divinisation of technology, this phenomenon—like all forms of what Girard identifies as the archaic sacred— simultaneously entails the ongoing sanctification of collective violence. Just as there is a tendency in myth for violence to be veiled or hidden in Girard’s analysis, a similarly disturbing propensity exists today, specifically in relation to both certain tenets associated with the so-called ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ and the development of what we have come to know as ‘militainment’. Here I demonstrate how these developments threaten to integrate the member nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) into this perturbing American development and how they may bode ill for future world peace or even long-term human survival.

Journal of Security and Strategic Analyses, 2023

n this book, Galeotti has discussed modern warfare and has suggested that non-military conflicts, whether in the form of structured crime, law, business, culture, technology and politics are becoming the ‘new normal’ now.

From the standpoint of critical social theory, the themes of reification and technology have often been connected with the question of the continuing relevance of Marx's conception of capitalism and of his corresponding critique of political economy. In particular, theorists have debated whether the evolution of technology undermines the fruitfulness of such a key Marxian idea as the relations of production for understanding the interplay of evolving technical capacity and the conflictual social relations that organize the control of production and the distribution of its outcomes. For Marx, the dynamics of technologyboth oppressive and potentially emancipatorywere inseparable from the capitalist relations of production. But the persistence of technological change, accompanied by a relative decline of industrial production and a weakening of working class politics, has long put the Marxian analysis in question. Nonetheless, the persisting financial crisis of recent years in the context of a highly conflictual globalization process has brought the reading of Marx back into intellectual debate. The relentless demands of the commodification process, persisting patterns of inequality, and blockages in social reflection and political initiative make the commodity form and associated patterns of reification important objects of intellectual examination. My paper will not focus directly on the complicated problem of the interconnections of commodified relations of production and the structure and rationality of modern technology, but this problem provides the context in which my argument may have some resonance. My theme is one that often haunts debates about technology and capitalism, but is usually not addressed directly by them.

Changing Societies & Personalities, 2020

In "Counter-History of the Present," Gabriel Rockhill contests, dismantles, and displaces one of the most widespread understandings of the contemporary world: that we are all living in a democratized and globalized era intimately connected by a single, overarching economic and technological network. Noting how such a narrative fails to account for the experiences of the billions of people who lack economic security, digital access, and real political power, Rockhill interrogates the ways in which this grand narrative has emerged in the same historical, economic, and cultural context as the fervid expansion of neoliberalism. He also critiques the concurrent valorization of democracy, which is often used to justify U.S. military interventions on the behalf of capital. Developing an alternative account of the current conjuncture that acknowledges the plurality of lived experiences around the globe and in different social strata, he shifts the foundations upon which debates about the contemporary world can be staged. Rockhill's counter-history thereby offers a new grammar for historical narratives, creating space for the articulation of futures no longer engulfed in the perpetuation of the present. "A high level polemic attacking the current enthusiasm for the notion of globalization—which Gabriel Rockhill regards as a feature of the political imaginary of our time—Counter-History of the Present will be discussed alongside work by Jameson, Harvey, and Lyotard." — Andrew Feenberg, author of "The Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Lukács, and the Frankfurt School" "In an era that, according to Lyotard, was supposed to have seen the end of the grand narratives, a grand narrative is spreading according to which globalization, technological development, and democracy are irresistibly marching forward in step. Gabriel Rockhill refutes this apologetic discourse not simply by appealing to growing social polarization, to shantytowns condemned to backwardness, to the toppling of democratically elected governments established by self-styled champions of democracy. 'Counter-History of the Present' is also an occasion for critical reflection on a series of theoretical categories (beginning with that of history) that dominant contemporary thought employs in an apologetic and often Eurocentric sense. In this way, Rockhill’s book is thus an important reference point for understanding and transforming the present." — Domenico Losurdo, author of "War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century"

parallax, 2018

In order to escape from the hierarchical dichotomy of civilization vs barbarism, in this article I will develop a postcolonial critique of technology building upon Walter Mignolo’s concept of ‘barbaric theorizing’. In this way, I want to propose a way of thinking about technology that disassociates technology from the self-conceptualization of civilization by the West, i.e. by imperialist powers. Such a way of thinking will also open up a space in which the barbarians will have the opportunity to imagine new uses of technology which have been constantly repressed by imperialist/capitalist narratives of progress and development. Indeed, by breaking through the binary opposition of civilization vs barbarism, I will argue that these concepts are deeply inscribed in a linear narrative that takes the exploitation of human labour and natural resources as inevitable. In order to develop this postcolonial critique of technology, I will adopt Walter Benjamin’s ‘new, positive concept of barbarism’. Although Benjamin can hardly be considered a postcolonial author, his writings on technology and his critique of the concept of progress will prove valuable to such a criticism, as well as for opening up new avenues for thinking about technology. I will thus explore Benjamin’s concept of barbarism to dislodge technology from its imperialist associations with various aspects of the civilizing process and its concomitant idea of progress. Then, I will compare Benjamin’s definition of technology and his concept of barbarism with Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s, who also thought that humanity was stepping into a new stage of barbarism. Finally, I will propose a barbaric, postcolonial conception of technology in order to extricate it from its dangerous and ultimately self-annihilating interdependence with the concepts of progress and capitalist development.

Science, Politics and the Agricultural Revolution in Asia …, 1981

The aim of this paper is to present some thoughts on the political meaning of technology and technological change within contemporary societal development. "Political meaning" here refers to the implications of technology for the full set of power relations between social classes within our present capitalist society. This paper will first present a series of general arguments about this question and then illustrate them by examining the case of those agricultural technologies generally grouped under the rubric of the Green Revolution.