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.