The DoD weaponizes cyber-defense systems intended for the public---risks normalizing forms of violence and plays into the cybernetic episteme

Examining the practices of antipolitics and reassembly in this context reveal a new form for the Military-Technological Complex. Bridging the divide between the material power of the DoD and social power of civil society, a new breed of “defence-tech” companies like Anduril have carved out a niche as bespoke contractors. Having drawn engineering talent from both traditional defence companies and Silicon Valley, they exclusively but openly court defence contracts, invoking a discourse of patriotism without risking the alienation of a wider consumer market. The ease and speed with which they began providing this work speaks to the significant power of the DoD and, in turn, the resilience of the Military-Technological Complex as an assemblage. Underlying this entire process is a constant tension between the predominantly compulsory power of the DoD and the predominantly productive power of civil society. Sizeable contracts provide a compelling material incentive for many tech companies to provide the technologies sought by the DoD, but are in conflict with the ethical pitfalls publicised by civil society. In some ways, each mimics the other. As the DoD has adopted a discourse of patriotism to assuage ethical concerns, civil society has underlined the material risk to businesses with large consumer markets seen to be enabling these developments in warfare. As a result, the civil-military industrial divide appears more porous than ever, raising valuable questions about contemporary warfare. Project Maven exemplifies a certain fluidity, in that its technologies were originally developed for the consumer market, weaponised by the DoD for drone footage analysis, and are now being “re-legitimised” through their transfer back into the civilian sphere for humanitarian and public health purposes. Such a process arguably reflects a late-modern - or liquid modern - blurring of the boundaries between war and peace, military and civilian, public and private. A blurring civil-military distinction in this regard must be understood in the context of a geographically and temporally expanding militarism observed in the rise of “unending” and “everywhere” wars. Similarly, in Graham’s conceptualisation of the “battlespace” of cities, he observes it “has no front and no back and no start or end… the concept… thus works by collapsing convention al military-civilian binaries.” Common to these suggestions that conventional ties between war, space and time are coming undone, however, is a focus on their practice. The ascendancy of the Military-Technological Complex suggests that the nebulous expansion of warfare across space and time not only pertains to how it is practiced but also how its means are developed and procured. It is not a stretch to suggest that this expansion, in turn, risks normalising new imaginations of violence. And given that “violence needs to be imagined in order to be carried out,” one wonders where this normalisation may lead. Conceptualising the Military-Technological Complex as an assemblage is particularly appropriate in the context of liquid modernity. Absent of rigid, ‘arboretic’ structures, it takes shape in a manner consistent with Bauman’s interpretation of sociality, “spreading rhizomically and sprouting formations of varying degree of durability, but invariably unstable, hotly contested and devoid of foundation to rely on.”