This book examines the digital explosion that has ripped across the battlefield, weaponizing our attention and making everyone a participant in wars without end. "Smart" devices, apps, archives and algorithms remove the bystander from war, collapsing the distinctions between audience and actor, soldier and civilian, media and weapon. This has ruptured our capacity to make sense of war. Now we are all either victims or perpetrators. In Radical War, Ford and Hoskins reveal how contemporary war is legitimized, planned, fought, experienced, remembered and forgotten in a continuous and connected way, through digitally saturated fields of perception. Plotting the emerging relationship between data, attention and the power to control war, the authors chart the complex digital and human interdependencies that sustain political violence today. Through a unique, interdisciplinary lens, they map our disjointed experiences of conflict and illuminate this dystopian new ecology of war.
Authors
Andrew is a software engineer and author whose mission is to live in a society that is empathetic and connected. That mission has threaded through his past work at Facebook, as well as his current work at Oculus VR and his book, Amnesium. He wrote Amnesium, in part, as a reaction the heavily partisan and politicized national discourse in America today. He drew up several interesting, far-flung characters who would be ideologically opposed, gave them a gripping situation that brought them together, and saw what happened. Virtual Reality also has the potential to bring far-flung people together in deep, surprising ways. Enabling people to have consistently good experiences with strangers online, and in some cases form lasting connections with them, is one of the biggest challenges facing the VR industry. He’s excited to be pursuing this goal at Oculus VR. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he hones his storytelling skills playing pen-and-paper role-playing games. You can follow him at www.facebook.com/AndrewHoskinsAuthor.
