Echo Chambers of Paranoid Knowledge: On Cyberwar Epistemology

Echo Chambers of Paranoid Knowledge: On Cyberwar Epistemology Svitlana Matviyenko (bio) and Jaime Lee Kirtz (bio) They Are After You The catch-22 for internet users in the post-Snowden era is topological, constituted by a Möbius strip–like network space with two sides, national security and transnational surveillance, that become one twisted surface of continuous data flow disseminated planetarily, insensitive to users' vulnerabilities and risks. Across this Möbius strip, state agencies and corporate entities compete and collaborate, and the incessant flow of data crosses boundaries and blurs divisions between law enforcement and intelligence, national and transnational, domestic and foreign, and public and private actors.1 As such, the resulting network space renders users as both data subjects, whose rights and existence are conditional upon their behavior within digital networks, and as competing cosmopolitan subjects of universal rights.2 As globally distributed and networked users are subject to the "participatory condition" that is often misrecognized as an enactment of digital democracy,3 they are simultaneously subjected to local laws and trials, feeding on and leveraging the user vulnerabilities against them. Situations such as this that an individual cannot escape due to the contradictory rules or systemic arrangements were aptly described by the army psychiatrist Doc Daneeka from [End Page 381] Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22.4 Caught by these nonaccidental arrangements, the users are equally mistreated by corporate cloud sovereigns and nation-states as an essential resource, collectivized data-citizens.5 The competition between corporations, states, and other random powers for this resource has turned into a truly militant confrontation or, indeed, cyberwar that, with its planetary scope and reach, is also extremely scalable: zooming in, not only is it "interested in you," it is very "into you" even if you are ambivalent or skeptical or are in denial about the pervasive hyperpersonalized tactics of its "'knowledge power assemblage,' mobilizing institutional powers, lavish budgets, and lucrative career paths."6 Udo Krautwurst identifies this process as endocolonization, a simultaneous "intensification and extensification of war within and throughout actually existing state forms, an inwardly directed expansion of the principle of the State, manifested in an increasing militarization of the social," that outwardly was already suffering the expansion of the principle of the corporation.7 Cyberwar, or the contestation for superiority between state, nonstate, corporate, and accidental agents and the process by which capital periodically reboots itself, is that "ahuman war, run by malware implantation, bot nets, chatbots, the tweaking of algorithmic filter bubbles, big data scanning surveillance, and the 'kill chains of drone warfare' where humans occupy increasingly interstitial and marginal positions within destructive, as well as productive, systems."8 This essay looks at echo chambers as media environments created by the aggressive platformization of social life, economy, and politics by corporations and states and by the subsequent weaponization of uncertainty and antagonism in users distributed between these environments, which significantly impacts the "regime" of truth in and beyond echo chambers. Defined by Michel Foucault as "a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation of statements,"9 the "regime" of truth is produced by "multiple forms of constraint," that is, platformization. Thus, platformatization not only regulates the regime of truth but also reorders and rewrites it. The "regime" of truth is "linked by a circular relation to systems of power which produce it and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which redirect it," Foucault argues, and as such, it is "a condition of the formation and development of capitalism" and "at the same regime which, subject to certain modifications, operates in the socialist countries." Therefore, during this reordering process, platformization writes into truth, the possibility for uncertainty, and antagonism as well as distortions of them. In doing so, apparatuses of economic and political power also mobilize the nondiscursive [End Page 382] affect and unresolvable antagonisms, leading to implosion or fragmentation of random and fragile solidarities. As a result, the circular reasoning of conspiracy theories and other logical fallacies are often perceived as more convincing and satisfying than the self-corrective discipline of critical thinking. We read echo chambers as nonaccidental manifestations of social media's catch-22 that occurs...