From a Biopolitical ‘Will to Life’ to a Noopolitical Ethos of Death in the Aesthetics of Digital Code

From a Biopolitical ‘Will to Life’ to a Noopolitical Ethos of Death in the Aesthetics of Digital Code Anna Munster Abstract In a range of digital creative productions and digital culture, questions of how to deal with finitude are on the rise. On the one hand, sectors of the digital entertainment industry – specifically computer games developers – are concerned with the question of how to manage ‘death’ digitally. On the other hand, death and suicide have become the impetus for humorous artistic expression. This article tracks the emergence of a digital ethos that is cognizant of consequence, finitude and even death. Rather than pit a 1990s ‘will to life’ against an emerging ‘death drive’ , I argue that the shift to an ethos in which dark consequences ensue from digital actions must be understood by working through digital code’s technicity and unfolding this relation of technics to both ethics and politics. Although Bernard Stiegler’s analysis of technicity goes some way toward unfolding a political analysis of the aesthetics of digital code, his articulation of noopolitics fails to provide us with a way to conduct ourselves digitally in an era of cognitive capitalism. I look to critical software practices and their provisional networked publics, with potential lines of flight for contemporary technoculture via novel digital ‘codings’. Key words art j biopolitics j digitality j noopolitics j technics I N THE latter part of the 20th century digital code was deeply imbricated in an aesthetics and ethics of life or, as Nikolas Rose has put it, ‘life, itself’ (2001). This seemingly implacable entanglement of life and code hit its stride in 2000 when the then US President, Bill Clinton, j Theory, Culture & Society 2011 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore), Vol. 28(6): 67^90 DOI: 10.1177/0263276411417458 68 Theory, Culture & Society 28(6) and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and leaders of the Human Genome Project (HGP) announced a ‘working draft’ of the sequencing of the human genome. Life was declared virtually ‘decoded’. There was, of course, a long march toward the digital decoding of life that began somewhere midcentury. The formal acknowledgement in 1948 by Norbert Weiner that feedback, drawn from information theory, could be measured across both engineered and biological systems is one catalysing event (1965: vii). The period from 1953 to 1961 in which the combined efforts of mathematicians, biophysicists, cryptographers and other researchers led to ‘cracking the genetic code’ of DNA is another brewery for entwining code with the living organism (Kay, 2000: 8). But while these and a number of other 20th-century periods contributed considerably to rendering life digitally, it is in the 1990s and early 2000s that the digital literally came to be seen as the ‘natural’ medium for the living organism. In 2002, for example, Craig Venter, CEO of Celera Genomics, the company that ¢rst announced in 2000 a draft sequence of the entire human genome, announced that: ‘W|thin 10 years, before a baby leaves the hospital, their parents will have the essence of their genetic code on a CD’ (Venter, 2002). During the same period that scientists, genetic companies and politicians declared that human life had been sequenced and therefore decoded, digital artists were busy populating the emerging arena of new media art. Here digital art was spawning experiments in ‘artificial life’ and ‘hybrid nature’ including animations of strange cyborgian plants and robotically watered ‘gardens’: computer simulations with forms that claimed to replicate and hence be ‘alive’. Even electronic musicians were generating tunes using genetic algorithms. The ‘will to life’ coursing through these more experimental digital art projects entered the broader sphere of digital culture by way of virtual pets such as ‘norns’ that could be installed on computer desktops to live, ‘breed’ and evolve over generations.1 Lately, though, this ‘will to life’ seems to have slowed in terms of aesthetic production, at any rate. Indeed, a rather more sombre mood has crept into new media aesthetic production evidenced by the emergence of a preoccupation with digital death. This ‘death drive’ materializes in games such as Sony Playstation 3’s Heavy Rain (Cage, 2010), where the four main characters potentially die and cannot be ‘reloaded’. Instead, the game narrative changes consequentially, rearranging itself around these digital deaths. A preoccupation with the relation between the digital and death materializes elsewhere. In the aftermath of the increased use of online communications by US military during the war in Iraq, a veritable industry has grown up to safeguard and manage ‘digital estates’ (personal online access to content in emails, blogs and social media) in the event of physical death. Could these varied examples hint at a change in mood, a decline in the fanatical quest for growth and ‘life’ that coloured so much artistic production, drove the quest to unravel the secret code of the organic in genomic research, and, indeed, informed the expansionist logic of online networking Munster ^ Biopolitical ‘Will to Life’ to a Noopolitical Ethos of Death 69 as digital lifestyle during the late 1990s and early 2000s? The most brazen example of a shifting ethos could be found in the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, a ‘piece of socio-political net-art’ (McNamara, 2010) created by moddr, a new media laboratory of artists, designers and programmers from Rotterdam.2 The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine is a ‘python script’, a programming language frequently used for web applications, running on moddr’s web server, which launches a browser session and automates the process of disconnecting from social networks. Participants submit their login details for social media sites such as Facebook, MySpace, twitter and LinkedIn, and the session erases online traces of all participants’ content and contacts in their online social networks. Although only recruiting around 900 ‘suiciders’ in its ¢rst iteration between November 2009 and January 2010, the site had such an impact that Facebook brought a ‘cease and desist’ order against it.3 Legal wrangles with Facebook meant a halt for a short period of time for the ‘machine’ while its coders routed around its potential breaches of users’ online ‘rights’ to network life. The beauty of the ‘script machine’ is that rather than simply deleting an account (which in some portals such as Facebook is actually impossible as they are stored in perpetuity on separate servers), the code functions to delete content and cut off online ‘friends’. It thus takes aim at the very heart of social media’s expansionism and its substance; that is, to add more and more, to ‘grow’ one’s personal network. Eric Kluitenberg has suggested that a network society ^ that is, a culture in which ceaseless connectivity is the imperative ^ must also provide a collective mode, a ‘right’, to disconnect from participatory technologies (2008: 272^76). Rather than ‘dropping out’, critical software projects such as Web 2.0 Suicide Machine perhaps ¢t the category of what Kluitenberg calls ‘mindful disconnection’ in which a moment and place is carefully thought through for digital ‘death’ (2008: 272). In this article, I want to track the rise of this emerging digital ethos that is cognizant of finitude, consequence and even death ^ the spread, perhaps, of a sobering digital mood. In a range of digital creative productions and digital life, questions of how to deal with finitude are on the rise. On the one hand, sectors of the digital entertainment industry ^ specifically, computer games developers ^ and new start-up industries are concerned with the question of how to manage the relations between death on a physical and digital level as each level begins to have impact upon the other. On the other hand, death and suicide are also becoming the impetus for humorous creative expression. Geert Lovink has pointed to a nihilistic impulse in contemporary online culture, where ‘meaning’ is erased from media via incessant blogging about ‘nothing’ (Lovink, 2008: 1^38). But the incorporation of a death ethos into digital culture is not at all about erasure and does not necessarily cluster around a homogeneous set of images or ideas as the digital ‘will to life’ consistently clustered around the biosciences. There are a number of heterogeneous £ows that intersect with but also diverge from each other amid this sobering mood and sombre ethos. 70 Theory, Culture & Society 28(6) As I suggest later in this article, simulation training environments for US military combat, developed by the ‘serious games’ branch of the digital entertainment industry, have had to respond to the real situation of extended Middle East warfare and troop deployment. A new kind of simulation and gaming environment has been recently developed that emphasizes the ‘non-kinetic’ aspects of military combat such as: . . . mentoring host country security forces, intelligence collection, information operations, providing essential services, increasing local employment, capacity-building, respecting local religious, ethnic, and other sensitivities, and so forth. (Brynen, 2009) What kinds of software operations are being deployed to run such a simulation? Furthermore, what kind of embodied dynamic does this circumscribe for the user of this simulation with the digital technics of such an environment? Is digital code’s aesthetics searching for a different mode of conduct that fits life lived under conditions of perpetual war, political and financial crisis ^ an ethos that acknowledges mortality, finitude, consequence and local variability rather than one that treats the digital as merely an opportunity to inconsequentially ‘reload’ and refire? Rather than pit a 1990s ‘will to life’ against an emerging ‘death drive’, I argue that the shift to an ethos in which dark consequences ensue from digital actions must be understood by working through digital code’s technicity and of unfolding this technicity’s relation to both ethics and politics. Technicity and technics, rather than technologies, give us a conceptual horizon for the unfolding of relations between technologies and aesthetic production and of the relation of both to the singular unfolding of a particular ethos or, even more specifically, an ‘ethopolitics’.4 Technicity and/or technics are terms that have circulated in the analysis of digital media in part via the influence of Bernard Stiegler.5 I want to suggest that Stiegler’s analysis of contemporary technicity goes some way toward unfolding a political analysis of the relations between ‘life’ and ‘death’ in the recent and current aesthetics of digital code. Specifically, his more recent work is concerned with the over-reaching of biopower into what he terms ‘psychopower’ in which contemporary technicity systematically captures and modulates not simply bodies but also our entire spectrum of attention: ‘. . . the solicitation of attention has become the fundamental function of the economic system as a whole, meaning that biopower has become a psychopower’ (Stiegler, 2010: 103). This, according to Stiegler, is particularly the case for contemporary ‘youth’, who across an entire generation have lost their attentional capacities. We must move rapidly, according to Stiegler, from elaborating a biopolitics in relation to biopower to inventing a ‘noopolitics’ that critiques the destitution of attention by psychopower and restores an ethics and practice of care for mind. Munster ^ Biopolitical ‘Will to Life’ to a Noopolitical Ethos of Death 71 But I will also argue that this articulation of noopolitics fails to provide us with a way to conduct ourselves digitally in the light of the spread of technologies and cultures of cognitive capitalism. Indeed Stiegler at times tends toward a homogenization of computational culture, railing against its ‘program’: ‘computational psychotechnology always aims at substituting for attention, theorizing and modeling attention and its institutions, destroying them by seeming not even to imagine an attention beyond vigilance’ (2010: 102). Stiegler’s strength lies in the ways he draws us toward the shift in biopower that begins to account for why ‘the living’ or ‘life itself’ may no longer be the sole object of biopolitical capture. But I hope to show that if we are now seeing a shift in the apparatus of biopower toward a more concentrated capture of the cognitive by computational technics, we should remain aware of the differentiating mechanisms and flows that constitute this ‘neural’ turn. The emergence of digital death as trope and ethos across a range of aesthetic practices in computational culture signals that noopolitics can be recuperated by an economy of cognitive capitalism. I will consider this recuperation in the light of a deliberate shift in US military strategies toward the elaboration of ‘noopolitik’ as a new strategy of soft power in the light of failures in recent US initiatives in the Middle East. This shift has been played out as much within the military’s alignment with the gaming branch of the entertainment industry as it has in actual military manoeuvres. Even so, other spheres of aesthetic production point toward the productive and differentiating potential of practices of digital ‘coding’. The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, for instance, declares that one can exit digital ‘life’ humorously and that such disconnecting practices might have a role of differentiation vis-a' -vis generations. As I will suggest toward the end of this article, we need to understand how digital publics and crowds ^ rather than ‘generations’ ^ form in conjunction with such practices. For such indication of the differential conduct of digital coding marks transformations ^ lines of flight ^ for contemporary technoculture. Digital Life Itself The apotheosis of life’s codification was reached when geneticists, flailing in media hype, referred to the sequencing of the human genome as ‘the book of life’. Not long after that millennial announcement, genetic code became more intricately tied to digital encoding, when the final draft of the genome sequencing was described as not only ^ as Venter had suggested ^ storable on, but similar to, a ‘classic CD’ (Noble, 2003). But there are many other instances, especially in the burgeoning ¢eld of digital art in the 1990s, of code’s will to life ^ of its enumeration as ‘life-like’ and of life as ultimately encodable. Projects such as Thomas Ray’s T|erra, a computer simulation of ecologies of arti¢cial life, which was ‘born’ on a PC in 1990; Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignoneau’s 1992 Interactive Plant Growing, which interactively connected the physical stimulation of live 72 Theory, Culture & Society 28(6) plants by participants to the ‘growth’of 3D representations of arti¢cial plants on a computer monitor; and Ken Rinaldo’s robotic network of arms wrapped in organic grapevines, Autopoesis, 2000, carve out a ¢eld of aesthetic practice and research caught in the thrall of a will to life. Looking back at the period, it seems no coincidence that this digital bioaesthetics aligns culturally and socially with the extensive thickening of biopower: that is, the extension of regimes of political and economic control to every area of ‘the living’, including the choices made in how one lives, managing one’s life, urban planning, the management of population movement and so on (Lazzarato, 2002: 102). Research into the rise and dominance of the molecular within the life sciences and the development of techniques for managing the vast £ows of subsequent data (Rabinow, 1992: 241), and the increase in techniques for managing the life of the self (Rose, 2001), especially during the 1990s and early 2000s, has articulated this biopolitical, bioethical hold and spread and its imbrication with digital technologies of information. Digital aesthetics, too, seemed in the grip of a fascination with the molecular level of programming and generating code ^ witness the rise of evolutionary and genetic algorithms in artistic practice. Equally, it was obsessed with interactivity as a de¢ning feature of digital media and art (Popper, 2005) and with the audience/users exercising a kind of management of choice, via interaction (Edmonds et al., 2004: 113^ 114). There is, then, within digital art a bioaesthetics at work during much of its formative period; a bioaesthetics that sees the digital as a code to be extended over all scales of life from choice through to programming. Nikolas Rose has named the form of conduct particular to contemporary biopower by proposing the concept of ‘ethopolitics’ (2001: 2). Ethopolitics signals a shift from dominant forms of 19th and 20th-century biopower that focused upon the management of whole populations via the policies and implementation of, for example, public health. Instead, he argues, biopower in the late 20th century became increasingly molecular, with high-risk individuals being targeted and managed instead of solely the larger aggregate of populations. In turn those individuals, such as people with HIV-positive status, must become managers of their own ‘bios’ (Rose, 2001: 6^7). Thus ‘ethopolitics’ names an entanglement of force and technique ^ the macro management of life’s £ows with the molecular management of the high-risk self. Although I do not wish to stretch the application of ethopolitics too far, it is this macro-micro entanglement peculiar to the biopolitics of the late 20th century that interests me. As I have suggested above, a strong trajectory within digital aesthetics has been its will to life. Following this, we might call digital art’s primary code of conduct during its emergence as practice and form ^ occurring over the same time span as Rose’s conception of ethopolitics develops ^ an ‘ethoaesthetics’. This ethoaesthetics names the twin obsession with digital life as generative, propelled by a will to life and digital code as something to be manipulated (managed, perhaps) via the individual user’s interactions with computational code.6 Munster ^ Biopolitical ‘Will to Life’ to a Noopolitical Ethos of Death 73 One of the exemplary ‘genetic’ art works of the 1990s, in which life and interaction conjoin in such a manner, is Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignoneau’s 1994 interactive installation A-volve.7 The interface for A-volve is a large horizontally set customized touch screen, which appears to be a floating ‘pool’ of blue water. At another touch screen set to one side of this, users draw out a creature’s form two-dimensionally onto its surface. This is then computationally assigned three-dimensionality and animation, generatively appearing in the ‘pool’ environment. Users thus ‘give life’ to a virtual creature. The parameters of the user’s drawn form (their creative ‘expression’) determine the behaviour of the creature in the pool/monitor below. Here the user’s creative ‘choices’ produce a form, which is then used to map onto and select algorithms that the artists have programmed and are stored in the installation’s database. Depending upon the choice of algorithmic combinations conjugated by the drawn form, the ensuing creature gains ‘fitness’ in the virtual environment. It must then adapt and survive via random interactions with other drawn creatures in the artificial environment. Users can interact together with others and their virtual creatures, moving the creatures toward each other to see if they will ‘mate’ or kill the other one off. As Oliver Grau writes of this work: Each artificial life form, each ‘phenotype’ has a ‘genome’, with ninety variable parameters, so no individual creature is alike. Life, as understood in bioinformatics, is understood as information. Here too, the images of life are based on a type of code, and only through its reiteration, the reproduction of texts, can the creatures reproduce. . . . All the creatures owe their ‘existence’ to the visitors’ interaction and to the random interactions between themselves. (Grau, 2009: 172) The logic of interaction and life in A-volve appears to mimic a ‘natural’ evolutionary movement in which creatures are born (creatively expressed) and then live (are algorithmically supported) according to whether they adapt to the already ‘living’ (already existing algorithmic variations of virtual forms) virtual environment. And yet Sommerer and Mignoneau also promote a suite of interactive actions for the users of the installation once the creatures enter the shared ‘pool’ environment. So, Sommerer (1994) explains, the user can ‘learn’ gestures such as placing their outstretched hand over the top of the creature, which ‘protects’ their creation against a predator. It is not simply a question, then, of art imitating life but rather of a complex co-determination between the user’s interactive gestures and the code that gives and maintains the virtual creatures’ life. The installation therefore depends upon an evolving relationship between embodied action and interaction and digital technologies being produced, grasped and deployed. After the user has creatively generated life, s/he ‘learns’ to manage the life of his/her creature by learning how to interact with it. At the heart of digital life itself lies an assemblage: the management of the human body’s interaction with generative digital code. We cannot 74 Theory, Culture & Society 28(6) understand the aesthetics or ethics of interactive art work such as A-volve unless we deploy a productive and constitutive conception of technics and technicity. From Biopower and Technologies of Life to Psychopower and Technologies of Mind In the work of Bernard Stiegler, technics is ‘organised inorganic matter’ (1998: 17). And although ontologically distinct from either unorganized matter (in the sense of unsystematized phenomena such as minerals in their natural state) or organized organic being such as the human, technics is nonetheless caught up, ontogenetically, with the being of humans. The anthropogenesis of the human is technical and the technogenesis of technical objects is anthropological. Technics produces the human as temporal being; the mnemonic, technical system of language, for example, allows for memory. There is no origin of the technical outside the human or of the human without technics ^ they are co-evolutionary and co-constitutive. Stiegler means this not simply at the level of the production of the human as social but importantly as a meeting of matters that drives this evolving dynamic: The who is nothing without the what, and conversely. . . . The passage is a mirage: the passage of the cortex into flint, like a mirror proto-stage. This proto-stage is the paradoxical and aporetic beginning of ‘exteriorization’. (1998: 141) At the same time, this relation is socio-technical. The organization of inorganic matter does not simply result in the production of aggregates of technical objects but has its own mode and historicity. Both milieu (cultural specificity) and technical materialities impose form upon the technical (1998: 44). Technicity, following on from this, is a way of understanding an historical or contemporary systematization, at both the levels of milieu and material, of techno-anthropogenesis. The generalized concept of technicity is not simply a way of thinking through a particular era’s form of organizing technical objects. Contemporary technicity understood within Stiegler’s Time and Technics project is the historically specific systematizing of technical objects whose organizing principle resides in the acceleration of time (Stiegler, 1998: 23). It is not simply that things are speeding up. Rather, temporality itself is commandeered by this techno-logic such that future thought, life, tendencies must be ‘programmed’, calculated and invested in. In short, the future ^ anticipation as an existential territory ^ is territorialized: Anticipation, at the most global level, is essentially commanded by investment calculation ^ collective decision-making, temporalisation ^ in short, destiny is submitted to the techno-economic imperatives regulating this Munster ^ Biopolitical ‘Will to Life’ to a Noopolitical Ethos of Death 75 calculation. This is as well the domination of a certain understanding of time. (Stiegler, 1998: 42) Tele-technologies, through which online digital games, for example, are increasingly played, are graspable examples of how this dynamic of human-technics both simultaneously engages and generates a temporality and dysfunctional ethico-aesthetic horizon. For Stieger, tele-technologies, which include television, all forms of digitization and the internet, increasingly capture the full spectrum of human attention and in so doing map a shift to what he calls ‘psychopower’ (Stiegler, 2008). We have shifted, then, from biopower understood as simply the control and modulation of life itself or of the power to produce and modify a given population’s bodies. Increasingly we are dealing with technologies that also capture, control and modulate the neuro-informational circuits of human behaviour, especially dominant in the spheres of marketing and education but increasingly inhabiting and imperializing thought conceived as a broad cultural activity. It is worth quoting Stiegler at length here as he details the sweep of these technologies: The technological, industrial, systematic and constant capture of attention that has been called cultural capitalism has been made possible by the emergence of psychotechnologies, and it corresponds to what I call psychopower. The techniques of management and marketing relying on story telling, the quite recent rediscovery, with the publication in French of his book Propaganda, of Edward Bernays, the place of soft power in American geopolitics, the psychological cast, at once affective and drive-base, of the recent French electoral campaign ^ peoplisation, as the word is now used in Franglais, being nothing but a psychopolitics of symbolic misery ^, the incredible dynamism of the new media, the immense effects of the technoindustrial integration through digitalization, Google attempting now to gain control over the cell-phone network and industry, that is, over human motricity, all of that, and so many other phenomena (I could continue the list all night) are concretizations of this psychopower whose paradoxical effect is that the device of the construction of attention is now seriously threatened: its industrial exploitation leads to its destruction. (Stiegler, 2008) The ethico-aesthetic horizon of psychopower is destitute according to Stiegler’s critique because it erases the possibility for care (especially between generations), or for ‘attending to’ outside the reach of the technoindustrial spectrum. Hence for Stiegler we must summon a politics that would counter this contemporary capture of the ‘noosphere’; we must begin to articulate a noopolitics that describes a critical limit to the destitution of attention by psychopower. Although Stiegler’s generalized techno-logic underlies the temporal unfolding and acceleration of our current system of technical objects, he also suggests an indeterminacy that lies at the genesis of human-technology 76 Theory, Culture & Society 28(6) dynamics (1998: 43; 204^238). The genesis of the human is for him a technogenesis occurring temporally rather than spatially (1998: 17, 18). Technics is what produces the human’s relation to time; technical systems such as writing and archiving facilitate memory (a past) and then allow for futures to be invented (Beardsworth, 1998: 78). Yet the supplementary logic of the relation of humans to technics ^ there is no human being without its technical prostheses, that is, without its supplementarity ^ allows a possibility of indeterminacy with respect to techno-logics. The originary deferred relation between human and technics provides the possibility for humans and technical nonhumans to co-define new temporal horizons and additionally events in time.8 The oscillation between a historically unfolding techno-logic and technical indeterminacy extends to Stiegler’s analysis of noopolitics. The latter necessarily unfolds as the limit condition of an exhausted biopower yet must necessarily be cultivated as a potential way out of contemporary culture’s etho-political destitution. The noopolitical is played out in time ^ that is, in the historical unfolding of biopower’s logic which has extended to modulate every sphere of life including the life of the mind ^ precisely because all possible spheres of human cognition are now saturated by psychotechnologies. Hence the very resource, attention, being drawn upon is used up. But it must also be played ‘out of time’ or outside the horizon of the now, by cultivating a different ethopolitics, a noopolitics, through which attention, the affective underpinning of human cognition, is created anew. Perhaps, then, the recent emergence of consequentialism in computer games, the acknowledgement of the limits of digital connectivity and the incorporation of finitude into digital narratives is a result of the exhaustion of ‘life’ and ‘growth’ within techno-aesthetics. Stiegler’s general theory of technicity and his specific analysis of contemporary biopower, as it shifts from the production of life to the construction of consumer markets based upon the mining of cognitive resources such as attention, provides us with one way to chart the political continuity of a techno-aesthetics from life to death. It may also allow us to propose that a new ethos is in fact being cultivated by some recent digital aesthetic forays in digital coding that aim, as the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine does, to reconstitute our attention: Tired of your Social Network? Liberate your newbie friends with a Web2.0 suicide! This machine lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alterego. (moddr, 2009) However, this ethico-aesthetic ‘program’ (perhaps less a program than a deployment of tactical media) remains resolutely encoded by the very tele-technologies ^ that is, processes of digitization ^ which underpin psychopower. Although Stiegler declares that he is not against contemporary technical societies per se (2008), nonetheless his program for movement Munster ^ Biopolitical ‘Will to Life’ to a Noopolitical Ethos of Death 77 away from the reach of cognitive capitalism is via a somewhat conservative call to rethink educational institutions as the milieu in which to re-establish intergenerationalism.9 Noopolitics for Stiegler, then, resides in a resort to an ethics that is wrested from not productively constituted by contemporary technics. In the remainder of this article I want to propose that we rethink a conception of the noopolitical in the light of some of the contemporary trends in digital entertainment, culture and aesthetic creation I listed in my opening paragraphs. What is important about Stiegler’s call for a noopolitics is that his analysis of the relations between biopower and psychopower indicates how a supplementary continuity is at work in their techno-logics. This gives us an understanding of how the decline of aesthetic projects oriented toward ‘life’ and the subsequent growth and the ascent of digital ‘death’ might be less a rupture than a bifurcation of digital aesthetics within a broader regime of cognitive capitalism. But it fails to take account of, first, the extent to which digital aesthetics recuperates noopolitics for psychopower under the aegis of the military-entertainment complex, which has a strong grip over elements of the computer gaming industry; and, second, the potential of the contemporary dynamic of humans^technics to produce digital lines of flight toward a more radical noopolitics. As such, we need to be on the lookout for where the shift to sobriety in digital aesthetics signals a contestation of the biopolitical ethos of digital life or where it supports the extension of soft power and the ongoing normalization of life. In order to take account of both these movements we need to consider not simply the digital’s ‘code of conduct’, its ethopolitics, but also how code conducts itself in the contemporary aesthetic/cultural sphere. From Noopolitik to Noopolitics and Back Again In 1999 John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, better known for their work on information warfare, had already identified an emerging trend in international relations and military strategy that they termed ‘noopolitik’ (1999: 29).10 They saw the necessity of the US government and military fully expanding and running with this emerging trend of conducting strategic and international relations as a result of the growth of the noosphere. This was their preferred term for the then more popular ‘cybersphere’ which, they argued, captured both the latter’s sense of virtual relations and communications and the ideational ‘knowledge-based’ arena in which information had become a field of power and economic relations and contestations. Noopolitik was a strategic move, as opposed to noopolitics, which describes more the widespread exercise, ubiquity and operation of information as a field of power relations at all levels of society: Noopolitik is an approach to statecraft, to be undertaken as much by nonstate as by state actors, that emphasizes the role of soft power in expressing 78 Theory, Culture & Society 28(6) ideas, values, norms, and ethics through all manner of media. (Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 1999: 29) According to Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1999: 35), the last few decades of the 20th century had brought about significant change in the fabric of international relations at the level of players, media and technological infrastructure. The global interconnectivity facilitated by information technologies that allow for the flow of financial, political and media information conjoins with the rise of a ‘new’ civil society in which nonstate actors ^ NGOs ^ play a significant role. NGOs operate less like previous liberal corporate players with a top-down approach to international relations and more like nodes in networks, monitoring, reporting upon and disseminating information about government, military and corporate agencies via their networks. The ‘noosphere’, then, is this active sensing mesh of information networks that collectively exercise a noopolitics. Like it or not, state actors such as the US military and government must learn to adjust to this global information field and shift away from a strategy of ‘realpolitik’ or the exercise of hard-nosed sovereign power governed by the motto ‘might makes right’. A decade and more on from Arquilla and Ronfeldt’s ‘advice’ to the US government and military, it seems the active adoption of ‘noopolitik’ as a US state-sanctioned strategy has only just caught on. As a result of lessons learnt in the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad city in April 2003 as part of the US invasion of Iraq, on the ground military personnel found themselves untrained for the protracted occupation that ensued. Computer simulation training has long been an element of US military training with the use of computational flight simulators beginning in the 1960s and becoming widespread by the 1980s. However, the widespread use of computer gaming as first a US military public relations exercise and then later a training simulation for military personnel was America’s Army (AA), released in 2002.11 Interestingly, this suggests that the game was perhaps developed in response to the noopolitical climate of the late 1990s ^ the need to use information era means such as gaming to make the norms of military life attractive to a younger population. Legend has it that Colonel Casey Wardynski, a US West Point-based instructor, dreamt up the idea of a recruitment game at a cocktail party targeted at American youth (Davis, 2003: 269). However, the game environment and play is anything but ‘noopolitical’ insofar as this is described by Arquilla and Ronfeldt as relying upon soft power, the appeal of values to set an agenda and persuasively win over opposition, promoting shared values and belief systems and so forth (Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 1999: 40^41). Rather, AA, although not dwelling on blood and gore in quite the same way as, say, the commercially developed games Doom, Quake or World of Warcraft might, is nonetheless a ¢rst-person ‘shoot ’em up’ game based around team play in combat-simulated situations. Noopolitik, then, is a somewhat fraught approach that has not yet completely diverged from Munster ^ Biopolitical ‘Will to Life’ to a Noopolitical Ethos of Death 79 the ‘realpolitik’ of asserting military superiority and will through sheer might. Nonetheless, as Stephen Graham has shown, military theorists and strategists increasingly understand digital media and technologies as synonymous with the contemporary space of battle (2009: 279^8). A new extended and extensive ‘fourth generation’ of warfare is unfolding, in the eyes of US military strategists, in which everyday urban sites become a space for attack by, for example, urban terrorists. Hence city spaces, such as transport infrastructure, come to be understood as ‘soft targets’ and a military response must be galvanized to architecturally reconsider the city as requiring soft military control. On the one hand, war as a noopolitik of soft control extends to capture all urban space as battlespace. On the other hand, actual spaces of military occupation, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, are proving impossible to control. In the last two or three years, the US army and government have changed tack with respect to the design and development of military computer simulation environments, a result of the state, no doubt, in which they find themselves of perpetual war. Although AA is still an active combat ^ or what is now called a ‘kinetic combat’ ^ training and recruitment environment, a new phase of computer simulations is now active and continues development. One of the main gaming/simulation environments now used for the US military is UrbanSim, developed by the Institute of Creative Technologies (ICT) at the University of Southern California and funded largely by the US military (ICT, 2010). UrbanSim, with its echos of the SimCity series developed by Electronic Arts, deals with the ‘non-kinetic’ aspects of military situations: Bosack [project manager at the Institute of Creative Technologies] and his team then built the game’s characters as autonomous agents that react not just to specific actions, but to the climate created by a player’s overall strategy. Members of a tribe, for instance, want jobs, but they won’t work if they don’t feel safe. Instead, they might join the insurgents. Patrolling neighborhoods, meeting with tribal elders, and creating more economic opportunities ^ tactics straight from counterinsurgency manuals ^ can reduce the likelihood of that outcome in the game. (Mockenhaupt, 2010) What is of interest to me is not so much the switch to counterinsurgency tactics within simulation environments as a result of the failure of US military ‘kinetic’ operations or ‘realpolitik’ strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rather, I am interested in the implications this has for digital code’s conduct within this simulation/gaming environment. We need to ask this at the specific level of the relation between human and technics in these environments: that is, what routines or operations must the code/game engine adopt as a result of this new direction and how, accordingly, does a user’s corporeality and cognition become reconfigured? 80 Theory, Culture & Society 28(6) UrbanSim uses what is known in software development as ‘under-thehood’ components. Quite literally, the simulation is a cover-over or umbrella for different information architecture components; in the case of UrbanSim, this component architecture uses several Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. In fact, the environment borrows a previously modelled educational AI tool for simulating social interactions in multi-user environments called PsychSim.12 This component allowed a belief system for the non-player agents or population to be modelled and stored in the game’s engine by creating a reusable library of ‘behaviour entities’ that could be called up and combined variably (McAlinden et al., 2009: 4). The other AI component technology working in tandem with the PsychSim tool is UrbanSim’s story engine, which the developers state was created in order to interject narrative elements into the simulation environment, where events are drawn from a case library of the real-world experiences of military commanders. The use of a data-driven Story Engine allows UrbanSim to generate events in the user experience that would be difficult to model in rulebased simulations, and provides a framework for quickly modifying UrbanSim content to reflect changes in the contemporary operating environment of the U.S. Army. (McAlinden et al., 2009: 4) The two AI technologies, then, amount to exactly the concretizations of the techniques of psychopower that Stiegler elaborates. First, the normalization of a population (in this case a normative ‘Arab’ population) by assigning it behaviours from a‘library’. Second, the conjunction of this normalized population with story-telling elements, which create scenarios for the playing out and then management of these behaviours.To quote Stiegler again: ‘The techniques of management and marketing rely on story telling’ (2008). However, what is slightly different about this concretization is that it is a simulation, an environment designed to train the US army, a sub-section of another population, in a noopolitik of non-kinetic combat. A complex level of recursive or iterative behaviour and operations unfold. A counterinsurgent (in this case Arabic) population’s behaviour is modeled for the gaming market of the US military to ‘consume’. But the ‘consumption’ takes place in a training environment whose aim is to produce a preparedness or readiness in this market: in effect, a biopolitical modulation of the US military market consuming the product. In other words, UrbanSim aims to produce a consumer population of soldiers ‘in readiness’ by creating a set of rehearsed story-telling scenarios that combine with the construction of a normative simulated ‘Arabic’ population. The developers of UrbanSim importantly describe the environment as a ‘learning package’ that will allow military commanders to instruct their staff in complex and dynamic military situations after the offensive and defensive operations of initial combat have concluded (McAlinden et al., 2009: 2). Prior to executing simulated scenarios in the UrbanSim practice Munster ^ Biopolitical ‘Will to Life’ to a Noopolitical Ethos of Death 81 environment, the ‘player’ or ‘learner’ as s/he is at this stage, undertakes the ¢rst part of the training package ^ eight tutorials labelled the ‘UrbanSim Primer’ (McAlinden et al., 2009: 3). The developers call this ‘cognitive preparation’ as, via practice examples and accessing recorded interviews with military commanders, the player/learner gains the conceptual knowledge for the complex tasks in the simulation environment proper. There is also an AI component incorporated here as the player’s practice examples are evaluated and s/he is given feedback. The primer sets the stage for the simulation as ‘educational’, literally separating cognition as learning from the ‘action’ of the game. This does not mean that UrbanSim gameplay is disembodied. As Alex Galloway (2006: 83^4) has argued, gaming is an active medium in which the player is constantly doing, physically moving, pushing the game console interface and inputting data into the game’s engine. But what is different about UrbanSim is that the gamer’s action and body is first ‘primed’, made ‘ready’ for the game play. Far from being disembodied and merely cognitive, the primer provides an environment which trains the player in ‘readiness’, in being alert ^ both a corporeal and cognitive state ^ to the playing out of scenarios and of their modulation in the light of their play. Jordan Crandall has described ‘readiness’ as a state that has become a contemporary political and military ideal insofar as it shapes the body’s tendency to act and its willingness to organize action in a more structured way: Readiness shapes tendency, structures disposition. Again, it is always en route, always emerging. Yet it is not only internal: it works laterally across bodies and environments. As provisional as they might be, its objects are group constructions, hybrid compositions: identifiable within the formula, yet interchangeable. We might say that readiness is the lived, embodied dimension of vigilance. (Crandall, 2006) A number of analyses of biopower have also noted the ways in which global military strategies such as bioweapons stockpiling and public health policy produced out of speculation and planning for pandemic outbreaks preempt the future. Biopower has a securitizing arm not simply over life, bodies and population but over temporality, calculating and anticipating its threat potential (and investing in coordinated programs) in order to shore up the present as readiness for the future (Cooper, 2008: 74^5; Shukin, 2009: 184^9). What UrbanSim realizes is a new kind of embodied dynamic for interacting with computational environments in which one does not ‘manage’ the population of virtual actors or creatures via interactive gesture, as was the case in earlier bioaesthetic interactive art installations such as A-volve. Rather, the dynamic is one which deploys an affective potentiality, which preps for future action. The ‘under-the-hood’ task of the UrbanSim package is to embody the current political and military ideal of perpetual vigilance. 82 Theory, Culture & Society 28(6) Toward a Transversal Noopolitics? What the development of a serious gaming package such as UrbanSim signals in its relays between production and consumption of markets and populations, embodied readiness for, and cognitive analysis of, non-kinetic operations is that bio- and psychopower operate in tandem. There is no succession of biopower by psychopower in other words, as if these followed some implicit evolutionary schema. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari remind us, ‘There is no biosphere or noosphere, but everywhere the same Mechanosphere’ (1988: 69). We must, then, focus again upon the question of technicity and decide whether this can lead us toward a different conception of the noopolitical that is less regulatory and more transversal. This will involve paying attention to how technics are taken up within an overall organizing schema of technicity. This is not to suggest that technics can simply be used outside the social but rather to recover the potential of indeterminacy at the level of the human^technics dynamic. Stiegler’s critique of Foucauldian biopower lies in his reflection that Foucault concentrated on the productive rather than consumptive or market driven aspects of the biopolitical: ‘But today the question of biopower is less one of ‘‘utilizing the population’’ for production than of establishing markets for consumption’ (2010: 128). Stiegler’s contribution to an understanding of the logic of contemporary technical systems is to demonstrate just how insidious a control society, operating at the level of cognitive capture, has become in the latter part of the 20th century as the forces of psychotechnologies and consumer-oriented strategies such as user profiling and neuromarketing combine. But, as I have suggested, regimes of attentional capture might also require a certain production of embodiment which combines with models or simulations ^ effectively normalizations ^ of populations. Both of these are realized biopolitically and psycho- or noopolitically. But what of the possibility for escape or the deterritorialization of attention from such capturing regimes? One of the problems with not only Stiegler’s but others’ such as Katherine Hayles’ critiques of contemporary technicity’s capture of attention is that it is too hegemonic. Hayles, for example, identifies a generational cognitive change in 8 to 18 -year-olds happening now, which she terms the shift from deep to hyper attention (2007: 187). Deep attention is characterized by solely focusing upon one media object ^ for example, reading a book ^ whereas hyper attention typically involves shifting one’s attention around multiple media: listening to the iPod while doing email while submitting a homework assignment and texting one’s friends. Somehow, according to Hayles, who bases her evidence for such a cognitive shift on both anecdotal observations from older academic professors and the Kaiser Family Foundation’s report Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8^18 Year Olds, this is both typical of the ‘younger’ generation and intricately connected to learning and cognitive disorders such as Attention Deficit Disorder and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (2007: 188ff.). Munster ^ Biopolitical ‘Will to Life’ to a Noopolitical Ethos of Death 83 To be fair to Hayles, her tone is not a moralizing or nostalgic one, bemoaning the complete loss of attention in the younger generation or the evils of modern media. She certainly makes a case for the possibility that, for example, computer games also engage their users in long periods of ‘deep’ attention and absorption. Ultimately, she argues, digital media and culture can and often do exemplify interactions between both modes of cognitive attention (2007: 98). And yet sweeping characterizations of generations or populations are implicit in both Stiegler’s and Hayles’ critiques of contemporary psychopolitical regimes and systems of technical objects or media. What is problematic about these characterizations is that they are out of step with the actual logic of the media themselves. And we should remember this logic is not simply technical but also economic ^ one in which, as Stiegler suggests, the market and marketing play a key structuring role. But contemporary digital techno-logic does not just function to create ‘markets’ and hence consumers but rather multiplies ‘the’ market excessively so that it extends throughout the entire spectrum of life from the corporeal to the cognitive. This produces a constant segregating effect upon populations of consumers, dividing ‘the’ market into ever increasing pockets or niches of customization. Chris Anderson identified this as the emerging business model of networked market economies, calling it ‘the long tail’: This is the difference between push and pull, between broadcast and personalized taste. Long Tail business can treat consumers as individuals, offering mass customization as an alternative to mass-market fare. (Anderson, 2004) Although much has been made of the economics of the long tail and of the networked technics that co-constitute it, less has been said about its subjectivations. That is to say, if markets are becoming more ubiquitous and yet more differentiated, might not this differentiating tendency also have heterogenizing effects on its populace? Tiziana Terranova has argued that the segregating, dissociative logic and affect of tele-technologies, which perform and facilitate action at a distance, may also be generative of new kinds of publics who could resist such attention-grabbing manoeuvres (2007: 140^ 1). Drawing on the notion of the public articulated in the work of Maurizio Lazzarato, Terranova considers the formation of publics as ‘events’ (2007: 142). This is quite a di¡erent characterization of contemporary crowds than that of the somewhat homogenizing concept of population found in, for example, Rose’s analysis of biopower or of the analysis of noo/psychopower a¡ecting ‘generations’ in Stiegler and Hayles. In the aftermath of Anderson’s analysis of networked media as long tail or ‘pull’ media, Terranova notes that in actuality the internet produces phenomena of both massification and segregation: certain blogs or YouTube videos garner exponential ‘hits’ while other sites produce differentiated and segregated audiences. This ‘push/pull’ combination is in fact much more typical of online media publics, which form and disperse 84 Theory, Culture & Society 28(6) temporarily around networked phenomena. For Terranova, this suggests the potential for a differentiating line of flight away from the normalizing forces of mass communications and toward what she names as a ‘creolization’ of networked subjectivities: Rather than being a limit of the internet, it could be argued that this dispersion allows for a process of further segmentation and proliferation of publics, which could potentially operate as a site of further creolization of subjectivities ^ subjectivities whose relation to the whole does not involve the neutralization of a singularity into an identity or a norm. (2007: 140) The noopolitical capture of attention and affect by tele-technologies can, on the one hand, create publics that might appear more like the ‘masses’ of broadcast media. But, on the other hand, these dispersed, forming and reforming publics can also capture media. This emerging noopolitics charts a differentiating will to power that is immanent to the techno-logic of contemporary systems of technical objects. As Terranova has suggested, networked publics might just as well temporarily constitute new kinds of ‘collectivities’ or, as she puts it, ‘counter-weapons’ of resistance to the implicitly militarized, noopolitik of digital communications packages such as UrbanSim (2007: 142). We see this kind of provisional collectivity forming around a public who wish to exit their online social media networks by using the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine and the programmers, artists and designers who create such phenomena. Moddr approach technical objects as reusable and repurposable: ‘a large part of our practice involves the modification (modding) and re-creation of already existing technology’ (2010). Rather than assign this kind of messing with code the moniker of ‘remix’, projects such as Web 2.0 Suicide Machine can be seen more in terms of what Matthew Fuller has termed ‘critical software’ (2003: 23). Critical software exposes the normative forces that operate across software’s multiple scales, as, for example, the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine does by exposing social media’s biopolitical grip on networking at a molar level and on personal data at a molecular level. But it also gestures, as Fuller has argued, toward new modes of collective aesthetic creation. Critical software, then, suggests an inventive or transformative noopolitics that is all the while digital. It undoes the synchronization of digital technologies with a digital ‘program’ that subtends Stiegler’s noopolitics. What I want to suggest is that such critical software practices escape the normalizing processes of software not simply because of what the code itself writes and unwrites. Early examples of critical software practices in digital aesthetics worked to deconstruct the core of a games engine or interface only to remain largely confined to the domain of experimental art. This can be seen in the work of the online duo jodi.org, for example, arguably the most aesthetically experimental form of early software art in works such as www.jodi.org from 1993. The home page of this website Munster ^ Biopolitical ‘Will to Life’ to a Noopolitical Ethos of Death 85 displayed a garbled screen of nonsensical green code. Those in the know about the HTML source code page view available in web browsers could choose the ‘Page Source’ option in the ‘View’ menu and see revealed within the HTML script an embedded ASCII diagram of a hydrogen bomb. The implication was that the origins or ‘source’ of scripts that allowed us to visually display networked information was in fact post-Second World War military weapons research. This early ‘codework’ that aesthetically mined the relations between code and visualization in data aesthetics was extremely important but it has remained just that: aesthetic experimentation encoded for an audience that already knew what it was looking for. Such practices become productive of new modes of collective aesthetic creation only if they also transversally assemble, and assemble with, provisional publics. This may simply be a question of the right timing but it may also be because networked media have reached both mass proportions and have maintained their segmenting logic. In the case of the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine the code assembles with a small ^ in comparison to usual web ‘hit’ statistics, for example ^ ‘public’of around 4500 social network ‘suiciders’. Yet recently the site featured in an episode of the global cult animation series South Park, in which the character Stan Marsh joins Facebook but then uses the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine to ‘unfriend’ himself.13 Following the nonlinear logic of publics and media that comprise networked assemblages, the relatively small provisional public of suicide machine users transversally assembles with a different and much larger public assembled around a television series, via a relatively ‘small’ python script. This assembling may very well hint at the transformative possibilities of networked and broadcast media assemblages. This public then blogs, tweets and chats about the episode and the ‘suicide machine’, sending other publics to the website. New collectivities form that meld push-and-pull media, hackers and fans, artists and audiences. It is in this transversality of contemporary digital media that the differentiating aesthetic potential for the noopolitical lies. Rather than a readiness that embodies a technics oriented toward vigilance, the ‘suicide machine’ literally embodies a letting go ^ a surrender to the code ‘machine’ and, consequently, walking away from the molecular and molar management of data, life and bodies now invested in by online corporations such as Facebook and Google. More than simply surrendering one’s online ‘life’, though, such projects beckon toward a different constitution of digital life inflected by digital ‘death’, disconnection and finitude ^ an aesthesia that finds humour and joy in the unlikely assemblage of provisional networked events, media and publics. Notes 1. ‘Norns’ were first released in 1996 by the entertainment company Mindscape through the game Creatures. It had a large following and an online community that supported game development of unique ‘norns’. Creatures was then taken 86 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Theory, Culture & Society 28(6) over by the Cyberlife company in 1998 and had several iterations until 2003. Development on the game finished in 2003. Moddr is a media laboratory that runs out of WORM, a Rotterdam artist collective (see their website at: http://moddr.net/moddr_/). As alumni from the renowned Media Design Masters degree at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, their express aim is to modify and re-engineer existing media and technologies. Their aesthetic thus comes from a DIY hacker perspective but with an express desire to reformulate within the context of Web 2.0 logics and technologies. On 6 January 2010, Facebook’s lawyers sent moddr a ‘cease and desist’ letter, claiming that the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine’s operations were violating the social media site’s ‘Statement of Rights and Responsibilities’ for its members (see the link to a downloadable pdf version of this letter on the Machine’s website at http://suicidemachine.org/) Moddr responded by ‘ceasing’ to claim that Facebook had partnered with them on its site but argued that it did not violate other member rights. The Machine site was out of action for a short period of time while moddr modified aspects of the code’s operations to route around any seeming violations. For comments by Gordon Savivic from moddr about the ‘cease and desist’ letter, see McNamara (2010). I borrow the term ‘ethopolitics’ from Nikolas Rose (2001: 2), but I borrow it aware that he uses it to describe the risk politics of managing the self that become the hallmark of contemporary biopower. The point I want to develop throughout this article is that biopower, thought in terms of both the ‘life’ management of population and self, misses the question of death as both ‘limit’ to be managed and as potentially generative of counter-weapon to Rose’s articulation of biopower. See, for example, the journal issue devoted to Stiegler and technics of Transformations (2009). It should be noted that others have deployed the concept of technicity in relation to the analysis of digital media, such as Adrian Mackenzie (2006: 22). Mackenzie draws on Gilbert Simondon’s conception of a system of technical objects. I am restricting myself to the in£uence of Stiegler here because of his particular analysis of the shift from the biopolitical to the noopolitical in relation to the supplemental logic of technicity, which I elaborate later in this article. Lev Manovich named this obsession with interactive interfaces as part of the ‘myth of interactivity’ that accompanied 1990s analyses of digital artwork (see Manovich, 2001: 55^57). A-volve was awarded the highest prize, The Golden Nica, in the category of ‘interactive art’ at Ars Electronica: Intelligent Design in Linz, Austria, in 1994. For an application of Stiegler that is decidedly radical with respect to the possibilities of electronic or digital technologies coupling with the human in inventive rather than destructive ways, see Andrew Murphie (2003). Murphie argues that networked electronic music constitutes a proliferating event and world in which humans and technical nonhumans open up relations of Munster ^ Biopolitical ‘Will to Life’ to a Noopolitical Ethos of Death 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 87 intensive di¡erentiations that challenge the production of both music and listeners in market-driven terms. However, Stiegler has also been criticized for closing the indeterminacy between humans and technics in his analysis of the overarching reach of, especially, contemporary technicity. Andres Vaccari (2009), for example, argues that the encroachment of the human by an overarching industrialized ‘Technology’ leaves little room except to retreat into an ethics of humanism. This tendency certainly comes to the fore in Stiegler’s recent homogenization of ‘psychotechnologies’, which must be countered by re-education. The full articulation of the role of education in delivering a collective re-individuation via techniques of care (as opposed to technics of psychopower) takes place in the just translated to English text by Stiegler: Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (2010). For their better known work on netwars, see John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt (2001). Arquilla and Ronfeldt publish solely with RAND in research funded and prepared by the O⁄ce of the Secretary of Defense, National Defense Research Institute, USA. See comments from both developers and US officers about the development of America’s Army from a recruitment to a high-level immersive environment for combat training in Grace Jean (2006). The America’s Army website remains active, from which the game can be launched for online play or downloaded. PsychSim was developed in 2003/4 by the Center for Advanced Research in Technology for Education, also at the University of Southern California, no doubt a budget and labour-saving coup for the Creative Technologies Institute! This occurs in the ‘You have 0 friends’ episode 1404 of the South Park series originally aired in the US on 7 April 2010. For further information about this episode, see the South Park Studios website. References America’s Army (n.d.) Available at: http://www.americasarmy.com/ (consulted 1 March 2010). Anderson, C. (2004) ‘The Long Tail’, Wired. Available at: http://www.wired.com/ wired/archive/12.10/tail.html?pg=4&topic=tail&topic_set= (consulted 31 May 2010). Arquilla, J. and D. Ronfeldt (1999) The Emergence of Noopolitik: Toward an American Information Strategy. Santa Monica: Rand Corporation. Arquilla, J. and D. Ronfeldt (eds) (2001) Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime and Militancy. Santa Monica: Rand Corporation. Beardsworth, R. (1998) ‘Thinking Technicity’, Journal of Cultural Research 2(1): 70^86. Brynen, R. (2009) ‘SimCity Meets Urban COIN Operations’, PaxSims weblog. Available at: http://paxsims.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/simcity-meets-urban-coinoperations/ (consulted 5 May 2010) 88 Theory, Culture & Society 28(6) Cage, D. (2010) Heavy Rain [DISC] PlayStation 3. Paris: Quantic Dream. Cooper, M. (2008) Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Crandell, J. 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Vienna and New York: Springer. Hayles, N.K. (2007) ‘Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes’, Profession 1: 187^199. Institute for Creative Technologies [ICN] (2010 and ongoing) UrbanSim [software application] PC. Playa Vista: Institute for Creative Technologies. Jean, G. (2006) ‘Game Branches Out Into Real Combat Training’, National Defense Magazine. Available at: http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/archive/2006/February/Pages/games_brance3042.aspx (consulted 24 May 2010). Kay, L.E. (2000) Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kluitenberg, E. (2008) Delusive Spaces: Essays on Culture Media and Technology. Amsterdam: NAi. Lazzarato, M. (2002) ‘From Biopower to Biopolitics’, Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 13: 99^113. Lovink, G. (2008) Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture. New York: Routledge. McAlinden, R. et al. 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Available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/simcity-baghdad/7830/ (consulted 1 May 2010). Moddr (2009) ‘Web 2.0 Suicide Machine Promotion’, online video. Available at: http://vimeo.com/8223187 (consulted 28 May 2010). Moddr (2010) ‘Moddr?’ Available at: http://moddr.net/moddr/ URL (consulted 4 June 2010). Murphie, A. (2003) ‘Electronicas: Differential Media and Proliferating, Transient Worlds.’ Paper delivered at Digital Arts and Culture Conference, Melbourne, November. Available at: http://www.andrewmurphie.org/docs/electronicas.pdf (consulted 30 May 2010). Noble, I. (2003) ‘Human Genome Finally Complete’, BBC News Online, 14 April. Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2940601.stm (consulted April 2010). Popper, F. (2005) From Technological to Virtual Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rabinow, P. (1992) ‘Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality’, in Incorporations, ed. J. Crary and S. Kwinter. New York: Zone Books. Rose, N. (2001) ‘‘The Politics of Life Itself’’, Theory, Culture & Society 18(3): 1^30. Shukin, N. (2009) Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sommerer, C. (1994) Prix Ars Electronica. ORF-Documentary. Austrian Broadcasting Company and Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria. South Park Studios (n.d.) Available at: http://www.southparkstudios.com/guide/ 1404 (consulted 4 June 2010). Stiegler, B. (1998) Time and Technics 1: The Fault of Epimethus. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Stiegler, B. (2008) ‘Biopower, Psychopower and the Logic of the Scapegoat.’ Paper delivered at ‘The Philosophy of Technology: A Colloquium with Bernard Stiegler’, Manchester Metropolitan University, 8 March. Also available at: http:// www.arsindustrialis.org/node/2924 (consulted May 2010). Stiegler, B. (2010) Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, trans. S. Barker. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Terranova, T. (2007) ‘Futurepublic: On Information Warfare, Bio-racism and Hegemony as Noopolitics’, Theory, Culture & Society 24(3): 125^145. 90 Theory, Culture & Society 28(6) Transformations (2009) Special issue on Stiegler and technics. Available at: http:// www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_17/editorial.shtml (consulted 30 April 2010). Vaccari, A. (2009) ‘Unweaving the Program: Stiegler and the Hegemony of Technics’, Transformations 17. Available at: http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_17/article_08.shtml. Venter, C. (2002) ‘Gene Pioneer’s Next Goal’, BBC News Science/Nature. Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2289991.stm (consulted January 2011). Wiener, N. (1965 [1948]) Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Anna Munster is a writer, artist and Associate Professor at the School of Art History and Art Education, University of New South Wales, Australia. She has published Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (2006) and is currently writing a book (forthcoming 2012) on networks and experience, using the work of William James to re-examine the technics, culture and aesthetics of connectivity and conjunction. [email: A.Munster@unsw.edu.au]