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C H A P T E R 2 Speculative Security Patrick Jagoda Cyber ON MAY 22, 2010, the Pentagon launched a new core operation: the US Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM). This command is responsible for protecting American military computer networks from a host of digital threats, including ‘‘foreign actors, terrorists, criminal groups and individual hackers.’’1 The operation, which achieved full readiness later that year, has announced that it seeks to ‘‘direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks,’’ to ‘‘conduct full-spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains,’’ and to ‘‘ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries.’’2 Overall, the organization takes on the difficult task of securing fifteen thousand military computer networks, which are probed and attacked thousands of times each day. My areas of research—digital media studies, contemporary literature, and the history of computing—differ from the primary fields that inform this volume, particularly security studies and international relations. Nevertheless, I find myself intrigued by the formation of the USCYBERCOM, its cultural context, and the growing digital infrastructure that makes such an operation possible, even necessary. In descriptions of USCYBERCOM and similar recent initiatives, two ubiquitous terms require more careful analytical unpacking than they generally receive: ‘‘cyber’’ and ‘‘networks.’’ As we begin the second decade of the twenty-first century, the prefix ‘‘cyber’’ has been attached to countless roots. Writers and journalists frequently invoke concepts such as ‘‘cyberculture,’’ ‘‘cybersex,’’ and ‘‘cyberwar,’’ all of which are linked to the realm of digital media, virtual reality, and the Internet. In popular culture, the prefix similarly imbues various words with a vaguely futuristic sense, as is the case with the literary movement of ‘‘cyberpunk.’’ Similarly, since the advent of the Internet, the word ‘‘network’’ has become a prominent metaphor and has taken center stage in practically every contemporary discipline and major institution. Omnipresent by the 1980s, ‘‘cyber’’ finds its origin several decades earlier in Norbert Wiener’s coinage of the term ‘‘cybernetics’’ in 1948.3 In his popular book The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), Wiener describes cybernetics as ‘‘the study of 21 22 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Speculative Security messages as a means of controlling machinery and society.’’ Fundamentally, the purpose of cybernetics is ‘‘to develop a language and techniques that will enable us indeed to attack the problem of control and communication in general.’’4 Wiener’s selection of this root for the emerging interdisciplinary study of cybernetics, which served as the basis for computing following World War II, makes good sense. Etymologically , ‘‘cybernetics’’ derives from the Greek word ‘‘kybernetes,’’ which means ‘‘steersman’’ and metaphorically describes a ‘‘guide’’ or ‘‘governor.’’5 As the name suggests, cybernetics was not only a theory of communication but also one of control. Given this etymology and Wiener’s application, the establishment of a ‘‘cyber command’’ suggests an imperative to control information networks. In fact, the US Department of Defense announced its explicit intent to secure ‘‘command and control systems.’’6 Admittedly, the pursuit of control, broadly speaking, is far from unique to the rise of cyberwarfare in the twentieth century. It can be traced through a much longer history of information warfare and military strategy.7 Nevertheless, control has taken on new meaning in an era governed by computer software and network protocols. Through an analysis of Internet culture, which turns to both network architecture and technological science fiction, this essay contends that the ‘‘cyber’’ frame that privileges control as a definitive security goal might not be the best way to approach the network era and its emerging threats. To explain this claim I turn more extensively to a second key term of cybersecurity that complicates any straightforward language of control: networks. Networks As with all things cyber, ‘‘network’’ has been, since the middle of the twentieth century , a ubiquitous term that carries rarely interrogated meanings. In an era of globalization in which people around the world are increasingly interconnected via transportation and communication infrastructures, the network is both a material and a metaphorical reality. The language of links and nodes is frequently invoked to describe terrorist organizations, economic systems, disease ecologies, social structures , and of course computer webs. As I have argued elsewhere, understanding networks is not just a matter of studying their physical architecture. To make sense of these complex systems that seem to exceed our capacity to comprehend them, it is also critical to think about the rhetorical and aesthetic...

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