STEVE JOHNSON recommends a protest album with a harder edge than many in the genre
When the smartphone replaces the rifle
GAVIN O’TOOLE recommends a book that analyses how a smartphone is creating combatants of us all, at least in terms of how wars are understood and represented
RELENTLESS VISUAL ASSAULT: An image of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is projected onto Edinburgh Castle during the finale at this year's Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo
DENNIS BROE finds much to praise in the new South African Netflix series, but wonders why it feels forced to sell out its heroine
CARL DEATH introduces a new book which explores how African science fiction is addressing climate change
In his second round-up, EWAN CAMERON picks excellent solo shows that deal with Scottishness, Englishness and race as highlights
Fiery words from the Bard in Blackpool and Edinburgh, and Evidence Based Punk Rock from The Protest Family
MATTHEW HAWKINS is mesmerised by a performance that dissolves the line between audience and performer
MATTHEW SHARPE recommends the essays of a Renaissance politician that instruct and unnerve after 400 years
Radical War: Data, Attention and Control in the 21st Century
Matthew Ford and Andrew Hoskins
Hurst £20
THERE is no doubt that digital technology with all its open-ended potential is changing war — but less acknowledgement that it is changing the meaning of war.
That matters, because wars as classically understood were prosecuted with purpose, never in a vacuum, by tradition-bound military institutions of nation-states, reinforced by mass-media sappers to ensure public legitimacy around an assembled consensus.
The smartphone, however, has changed everything. Mass connectivity, led not by states but corporations leveraging globalisation, is creating combatants of us all, at least in terms of how wars are understood and represented, and leaving the military behind.
This is the underlying argument of Radical War, a complex and at times dense set of reflections on the undeniably disturbing interactions between technological change and political violence.
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