The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

16 Prolegomenon
and activist uses of mobile communications, hacking, and virtual
sit - ins.
In this way, we should point out that the liberation rhetoric of distributed
networks, a rhetoric famously articulated by Hans Magnus
Enzensberger in his writings on the emancipation of media, is a foil
for the real workings of power today. The rhetoric of liberation is
also a foil for the real nature of threats. Whereas in former times,
during the late modern era of the Cold War, for example, connectivity
served to deaden the threat of weaponry and other forms of
conflict—open up channels of communication with the Soviets, engage
with China—today connectivity functions in exactly the opposite
way.
Connectivity is a threat. The network is a weapons system.
The U.S. military classifies networks as weapons systems, mobilizing
them as one would a tank or a missile. Today connectivity is a
weapon. Bomb threats and terror alerts inject intangible anxiety into
the population just as a real bomb might do. Media networks propagate
messages from terrorists to all corners of the globe, just as airline
networks propagate infectious diseases. The U.S. Department of Homeland
Security is a reluctant proxy for al - Qaeda communiqués. Without
connectivity, terrorism would not exist in its current form. It would
be called something else—perhaps “revolt,” “sedition,” “murder,” “treason,”
“assassination,” or, as it was called during the period of the two
world wars, “sabotage.” Terrorism is quite at home in the age of distributed
networks.
In this sense, the West created terrorism during the postmodern era, or
at least created the conditions of possibility for terrorism to emerge.
Certainly the use of terror in ideological struggles predates postmodernity
by decades if not centuries, and it is certainly not the
West’s conscious intent to bring terrorism into existence. So when
we say the West invented terrorism, we mean this in the structural
sense, not in the flimsy political sense of CIA “blowback,” political
resentment, or what have you. We mean that the West created ter-