Cyberwars: Espionage on the Internet by Jean Guisnel (review)

70 Reviews ages of technology, so that it offers not only useful analyses of theories of representation in the digital age, but also contributions to a social and technological history of contemporary (visual) culture. On the whole, Druckrey is more interested in the art, science and technology complex than in popular culture, and his greatest achievement might lie in making available a series of theoretical media texts that show that there is a significant tradition of thought in this field that does not need Marshall McLuhan as its patron saint. It is worth noticing that more than half of the authors in this book are Europeans. In practice, this means that there is very little MIT-style techno-positivism and a lot of historical and theoretical scrutiny. Two minor complaints: an alphabetical index would have been useful, as would have been citations of each essay’s original publication date—the latter not least because they would have created a stronger sense of the chronological parameters of this most recent development in the history of visual culture. However, the book still communicates a clear sense of the historical depth of thinking about the impact of digital technologies in the twentieth century and—unlike many of the hypedriven compilations that are hardly more than thematic special issues of art and culture magazines—looks beyond the immediate interests of 1996. It also makes us curious to read on, to follow certain thematic currents and authors and to pay more attention to the interrelations between technology, culture and visual representation in an historical perspective. Slowing us down in this way could be a useful, humbling exercise which, if practiced more widely, would probably save us from a lot of the intellectual redundancy created due to a lack of historical consciousness. CYBERWARS: ESPIONAGE ON THE INTERNET by Jean Guisnel. Plenum Publishing Corporation, 1997. 250 pp. $26.95. ISBN: 0-306-45636-2. Reviewed by Axel Mulder, Graphics and Multimedia Research Lab and Human Motor Systems Lab, School of Kinesiology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., V5A 1S6 Canada. E-mail: . To write about espionage is difficult, because the nature of espionage is stealth—to remain unnoticed and, at the very least, unintelligible. How believable can your writings be when there is always the possibility of a hidden plot, a secret plan behind the “facts” as portrayed by the media or even would-be insiders ? Jean Guisnel’s book is subject to this phenomenon and hence many of his anecdotes could simply be fiction; this despite a reasonable 20 pages of references and notes, many of which are newspaper articles and Web addresses. But there is more than ample proof of the lack of substance in newspaper articles —we have seen newspapers in the U.S.A. flatly publishing phony leads on the investigation into President Clinton’s private life. And it is well known that the Web is still brimming with nonsense (although it can be extremely entertaining!). Guisnel’s book is very readable—I am definitely not a fast reader and it really took me no effort to finish it. This is due to the light tone of his writings and the speed at which he crosses from cyberwarriors to cryptology to the legion of doom and the CIA, never wasting the reader’s energy on elaborate details. I read a sense of pride when he could “let the reader in” on some information given to him exclusively by some of his contacts in the French secret service. Well, sorry, but I am not impressed, given my remarks above. Even more annoying was his respect for governmental authority, displayed through his admiration for those hackers who joined the nation’s forces to battle the net’s anarchists and cyberthiefs . Regardless of the fact that we are all better off in a world without serial killers, Mafia and Yakuza, I have yet to discover any evidence of the national secret services of the world being any different, let alone demanding respect. Unfortunately, Cyberwars includes a lot of trivial material about how the Internet began and more of its current hypes and hopes. This, together with the anecdotal writing style, makes the book rather superficial , though...