Discussion - War Machines: Military Technologies between Civility and Authority

The liberatory possibilities of our networked systems of digital culture get continually emphasised with the rhetorics of improvisation, openness and new possibilities for social life. Yet, in many cases, these very technologies find their genesis in the most repressive systems of command and control – birthed in the closed world of military institutions and strategies. This panel focuses on the supposedly incompatible links between global neo-liberalism and war machines. Using the strange confluence of military technological development and private tech start ups in Israel as a case study, experts excavate the ways in which the improvisational nature of combat and the split second creative decision making taking place in the “fog of war” get embedded into the very tools we claim liberate us from the societies of control.

More...