Information, Communication & Society

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rics20

Cyberwar and revolution: digital subterfuge in

global capitalism
by N. Dyer-Witheford and S. Matviyenko, Minneapolis and London,
University of Minnesota Press, 2019, 232 pp., $24.95 paper
ISBN:978-1-5179-0411-1, $100.00 cloth ISBN:978-1-5179-0410-4

Scott Timcke

To cite this article: Scott Timcke (2020): Cyberwar and revolution: digital subterfuge in global
capitalism, Information, Communication & Society, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2020.1802503

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1802503

Published online: 06 Aug 2020.

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INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY

BOOK REVIEW

Cyberwar and revolution: digital subterfuge in global capitalism, by N. Dyer-

Witheford and S. Matviyenko, Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press,
2019, 232 pp., $24.95 paper ISBN:978-1-5179-0411-1, $100.00 cloth ISBN:978-1-5179-
0410-4

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Svitlana Matviyenko’s Cyberwar and Revolution argues that wide-
spread datafication shapes the conception and conduct of warfare in the twenty first century.
Organizing their book around the relationship between “cyberwar to capitalism, and to revo-
lution?” (p. 2), they propose that cyberwar constructs populations of interest which can easily
become targets for state action. Such a development alters the relationships between states and
their subjects by reinforcing the power of the former at the expense of the latter. Employing a
‘maximalist optic’ (p. 29), they identify several contemporary components of cyberwar, but the
most important characteristic is the deployment of ‘hyperpersonalized tactics’ to target a state’s
enemies, domestic and foreign. In short, ‘what is new about the cyberwar is that access to the
“datified subject” both expands the scope of such operations across planet-spanning networks
and intensifies the precision with which they can be targeted’ (p. 17). They attribute this devel-
opment to the wider impulses in capitalism like the ‘automation and the expansion of constant
capital’ which marginalizes humans while at the same time the ‘personalization of war depends
on an automated apparatus of completely impersonal scale and speed’ (p. 17). These concerns
are broader than computation in intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnais-
sance in direct combat operations. Rather, like the employment of anthropology by the US
Army in Iraq and Afghanistan, the purpose of cyberwar is to expand the terrain and mode
of conflict.
The theoretical anchoring for this argument arises from a ‘Marxist–Lacanian perspective on
cyberwar’ (p. 28). While recognizing real differences, by Dyer-Witheford and Matviyenko’s
reasoning Marx and Lacan offer a ‘complementary strength’ (p. 30) that positions the contra-
dictory nature of social relations in ‘high-technology capitalism’ as bringing forth ‘fantasies
and imaginary misrecognitions’ which capitalize upon ‘fears’. With origins in the rise of cyber-
netic analysis in the early Cold War, suggesting it sets the pathway for the application of sys-
tem-thinking, information and planning to out-calculate the Soviet Union, ‘the emergence of
cyberwar is a securitization of the ‘capitalist unconscious’ (p. 28). Due to these fantasy fears,
what at first appears as a paradox – the need to secure capitalism notwithstanding the
depletion of Marxism as a material counter-organizing force – is telling about the covert coer-
cion required to maintain exploitation on a global scale as there are fears the system cannot
even be justified on its own terms. Chapter 1 positions cyberwar as ‘a manifestation of a larger
metamorphosis of global capitalism’ which through intensification makes ‘interstate and inter-
class’ conflicts more likely (p. 30). Chapter 2 looks at how code makes citizens and subjects
‘complicit’ in the ‘ahuman logic’ of this system while concurrently marginalizing these same
citizens and subjects (p. 31). Chapter 3 offers some programmatic guidance to help organize
responses to cyberwars.
There are some strong elements to this book. More broadly, Dyer-Witheford and Mat-
viyenko do bring together several sets of literature like the political economy of military com-
munication, critical geopolitics studies, and big data and surveillance studies. This integration
is an important task given how easily disciplinary inquiries can crystalize and thereby limit
total histories. At the same time there is a conspicuous absence of the technology and warfare
2 BOOK REVIEW

literature that has proliferated from the 2000s onwards as American sociologists studied civil-
tech-military relations in real time. Indeed, after two decades of experience with the US mili-
tary, the trend in this literature is to show the gap between ‘promise and practice’ as these scho-
lars themselves have become frustrated with ‘naïve solutionism’ that overlooks how
technological adoption does not overturn an organization’s pre-existing inertia, path depen-
dency, subjective comprehension of value, and enactment of norms.
More generally, Dyer-Witheford and Matviyenko adhere to a unilinear bellocentic con-
ception of capitalist development, this being the thesis that developments in military instru-
ments and organization expands the envelope for capitalist accumulation. For example, they
employ the argument that early industrial warships provided the general template to organize
the factory. As such, ‘war creates cybernetic capitalism’ (p. 36) Their argument is reminiscent
of Charles Tilly’s adage that ‘wars made the state, and the state made war’ (1975, p. 42), a view
from his early scholarship that did not survive his subsequent refinements in Coercion, Capi-
tal, and European States, AD 990–1990 (1990) where he sought to better account for the role of
social-cultural forces in claim-making, resistance, bargaining, and legitimation.
Finally, words of caution are required when considering the implications of Dyer-Withe-
ford and Matviyenko’s axioms, these being the product of their maximalist, expansive con-
ception of cyberwar, one in which ‘proof gets obliterated’ (see p. 7). By subsuming finer
grain distinctions, maximalist positions court severe looping effects, more so when this pos-
ition becomes the default institutional frame. For example, if a state hacks infrastructure
and this is deemed an act of war, it permits a proportional response. But proportionality is
in the eye of the beholder and so there are real risks of escalation. This is one reason why espio-
nage is typically not deemed an act of war and is treated with specific legislation. By contrast,
Dyer-Witheford and Matviyenko consider cyberwar as qualitatively akin to the threat of
nuclear war as both can bring ‘catastrophic conflict’ (p. 23). So, while not yet governed by simi-
lar international agreements, by their logic, instruments of cyberwar are equivalent to weapons
of mass destruction. Given the recent history of kinetic interventions and WMDs, there may be
value in rethinking this muscular posturing because of how it helps justify the logic they
oppose.

References
Tilly, C. (Ed.). (1975). The formation of national states in Western Europe. Princeton University Press.
Tilly, C. (1990). Coercion, capital, and European states, AD 990–1990. Blackwell.

Scott Timcke
stimcke@gmail.com
Independent Scholar http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7125-8306
© 2020 Scott Timcke
https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1802503