:: DIFFRACTIONS ::

Combining speculative fiction, Clausewitzian theory and metadisciplinary analysis, this exploratory piece outlines the emergence of a new phenomenon: Xenowar. Xenowar is a feed forward process of alterity, war that simultaneously knows itself and is alienated, an alien process akin to biology and mathematics, that tests the limits of computability and consciousness, and is a future built from the now in returning loops. War is going to get weird.

This piece makes the case that we need to be thinking more, and with more deliberate awareness, about war’s morphogenesis, particularly in this time of recursive computation. This means to understand the future of war, we need to begin engaging with our computational overlords, or ‘machines of loving grace’, on their terms – interrogating non-anthropocentric computation in vivo. I argue for a new ontology and phenomenology of war: an end to the era of Rumsfeld’s cognitive epistemology as DoD doxa. The move from waterboarding to motherboarding. A new cosmology of computational conflict.

Xenowar emerges from a new set of conditions that enable that which was outside war to be incorporated inside – as asymmetric information capital joins the nation state as a combatant; as present recreation seeds future confrontation; as tension flares at the borders of states, bioregions and skulls; as civilian information becomes weapon and target; and all human activity becomes war. Clausewitz’s trinity remains, but is transformed from flat geometry into three dimensions, a topological form of endless transformation but relational stability: the trefoil knot. The dynamo driving this new shape for war is recursion, the generative code of Gödel-Turing-Church placed at the core of computing, and the piece explores how computation has enabled reflexivity within time as well as geography, where ‘temporism’ replaces terrorism, and ‘recurgency’ replaces insurgency.

PROLOGUE: XENOWAR IN THE ‘CHINESE ROOM’

What follows is a speculative, fictional story.

October 1, 2020. Western Sydney, Australia. Still in a semi ‘Rona Iso’ 10-year-old Australian Chloe Yingchao is playing Fortnite. Eliminated, exasperated, she posts an ironic emote parody on TikTok. Her mother turns from her own PC and suggests—in Mandarin/Dialect hybrid—Chloe’s social time is up. Time for homework. Briefly distracted, Chloe’s mum takes a photograph of her daughter and shares it to a chat group in Chinese-owned social media app WeChat.

On the same day, 20-year-old junior engineer Xiang Kairan from Shenzhen is among a group that sits down to tea with Provincial Communications Administration officials and a local leader from the telecom company China Unicom. Ostensibly, the men are meeting to discuss the role of 5G within Tencent intercity mobility predictions for ‘nowcasting’ the epidemiological data for the spread of COVID-19 from Wuhan into Shenzhen since January. But the central concern of their get together involves different forecasting. Xiang is a junior city official from the industry and information technology bureau overseeing the planned installation of 45,000 5G base stations in Shenzhen, achieving full 5G network coverage by October 2020. COVID-19 had impacted the speed of the rollout, and they are behind schedule. The men are talking how fast they can catch up.

Flash forward to the year 2035, Chloe has just crossed over into Shenzhen with the help of the Hong Kong Republican Army (HKRA). A climate-change-induced weather event has helped Chloe slip in undetected via a port. Her arrival coincides with a spiral of geopolitical escalation. 2028 legislation in the EU led the US Congress and the UN to reconsider the nature of sovereignty itself. The unexpected death of Chairman Xi Jinping in 2033 led to a power struggle in the CCP. US President Ivanka Trump continues to affirm a policy of minimal intervention but elevates readiness to a state just below outright declaration of war. Over the previous seven years, critical infrastructure, energy, and logistical organisations required enhanced physical and digital defence from state adversaries and environmental protesters alike. Information has increasingly become central to production, the functions of civic identity and service delivery. A new breed of corporate warriors emerged as a cyber-military services industry to defend the ICT infrastructure and data, and as civil-military relations blurred, investment in the infrastructure of satellites and space and even the law of war began to change. Chloe is one of these operators.

The flow on effects of all these events has resulted in an escalation of the previously grey-zone digital integrations of Taiwan into mainland political systems and destabilisation across the Indo-Pacific. A series of rolling multi-vector, multi-wave, pre-emptive and sustained cyber campaigns across global cities ensues. In response, former state official and tech entrepreneur—now regional warlord—Liu Yongfu has deployed a swarm of robot devices to control the City of Shenzhen. Whether this is to benefit China or himself in an internecine conflict is not clear. But the city is the base for many global cyberstorm events in other parts of the planet.

This cyberstorm generating system is dependent upon the now ageing 5G network backbone that engineer Xiang Kairan has control of as the chief technological official in the city. The global attacks also require the use of submarine cables near to where Chloe has come ashore, and their sabotage is one of the reasons she is there.

Chloe is now a cyber mercenary commanding a four-person team and a small swarm of air and water deployable sensor and offensive capable automated UAVs or ‘Drones’. Jokingly codenamed Operation Above the Neck (脖子以上’改革) the Op has a human target. Chloe’s target is Xiang Kairan. He is now a senior Internet of Things (IoT) engineer in Shenzhen. Xiang Kairan’s biometrics are critical to the team’s objective of sequencing a Cyber Typhoon – an event designed to create friction in the hub of China’s information economy and military power.

In the early to mid-2020s, China’s cyber security was known to be exceptionally weak. This enabled a beachhead, a foothold for a complex network of well-supported AIs to analyse, store and predict. Chloe is using nine years of surveillance data—especially the IoT feeds on Xiang himself—to target him live.

Right now, Chloe has a more immediate problem—her own ability to see. In the shift to littoral city, Chloe’s facemask fogs up. She is forced to remove the Australian-made mask. A flurry of metabolite creates a sensor wake. She curses, then jokes about PM Penny Wong’s 2028 promise that Lithgow would be Australia’s Shenzhen.

The Australian adversarial AI — named Maratus Vultus — streams in response. Despite her electronic camouflage, facial exposure triggers the Shenzhen (电子对抗旅) Targeting AI – known as ‘Assassin’s Mace’ (AM)/(杀手锏) – which deploys. Archival information is extracted from Chinese-owned data centres. Facial and gait recognition technology identify Chloe. The snapshot her mother uploaded onto WeChat, and the walking gait from the TikTok post in 2020 became part of matched and merged datasets. In 2035 the AI predicts her next tactical move. Assassin’s Mace integrates five years of Fortnite data to predict behaviour, decision-making and mobility in Close Quarter Battle (CQB). Her own sensor swarm picks up the compromise and provides options.

Just as Chloe cognitively pivots into alternatives, a Cyber Force (网军) livestream video is sent to the device she uses for local network comms. The video features her mother being murdered by a Polynesian PLA gang sleeper group in Western Sydney. The video is a deep fake composed from prior live motion data, and algorithmically created in seconds. The video technology was designed to predetermine the behaviour of someone like Chloe, generated just before an attack with the aim to deter and interfere with their decision tree ahead of battle. Trauma floods Chloe. The Elon Musk Neuralink Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) detects the neural explosion in the posterior cerebral cortex. The BCI responds, firing a charge across the electrodes embedded in her parietal cortex, while cannula-delivered dopamine floods Chloe’s prefrontal cortex, recalibrating intrinsic consciousness. In a rush of connectivity, Chloe’s cortical sheet unifies a luminous here-now as a brief nowhen. Reboot. Cognitive clarity.

Instantly she and the team swing into Plan B. They have access to the phones of both Xiang Kairan’s wife, and a mid-level military intelligence commander reporting to the regional warlord Liu Yongfu. A message is inserted on the phone of Xiang’s wife which suggests the IoT engineer is collaborating with the Taiwanese Separatist Movement (TSM) and the Hong Kong Republican Army (HKRA). Simultaneously, a message that appears to be from the warlord himself is planted on the mid-level commander’s phone. The fake message from the warlord suggests the intel commander examine Xiang’s wife’s phone because Xiang is suspected to be a traitor. Data has itself become a pure weapon.

The 天地一体化网络 kill chain of the automated drone system which surveils the city is triggered when, 15 minutes later, a joint MPS, PLA and PAP SWAT team raid the office of Xiang’s wife, and download the data of her phone. The tech billionaire warlord’s drone eliminates Xiang.

Their prime target deleted, but mission compromised, Chloe’s team fight a tactical retreat through 南部战区某海防旅机步营 to an emergency extraction rendezvous with Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUV) controlled from a distant nuclear submarine. Two of the team are killed, and their data permanently wiped, as if they never existed at all. During the extraction, the UUV detonates an explosive charge placed against the Shenzhen submarine cables.

EXEGESIS: WAR IS DREAMING OF ITSELF

In his 2016 documentary Lo and Behold, the filmmaker Werner Herzog asks his interviewees, ranging from Elon Musk to brain scientists: ‘the Prussian war theoretician, Clausewitz–Napoleonic times—once famously said “sometimes war dreams of itself”, could it be that the internet starts to dream of itself?’ His question produced wonder at the brilliance of the provocation and reflective answers from experts (Herzog 2016).

I could not find this phrase anywhere in any of Clausewitz’s writings.

Puzzled, I emailed Herzog to ask him where he found the reference. His producer and brother Lucki Stipetic replied with a one-line answer: ‘This quote is invented by Werner Herzog and contributed [sic] to Clausewitz’ (Stipetic 2017).

Clausewitz is the theoretician most turn to characterise modern war. Clausewitz’s theory, while approaching its bicentenary, offers us a guide to the wicked problems of the planetary present and beyond. Our efforts to capture something of the shifting surface of war over time has led us to keep adding modifiers to explain its changing forms. ‘Digital War’ may well explain war’s latest appearance. But Clausewitz seeks to explain war’s nature, deeper than its surface expression (Clausewitz 1984).

Clausewitz’s war is an ‘organised complexity’ (Beyerchen 1992, 2007), and the chameleon has a quality of organicist animality. In the last century, war has expressed mutation at each generation: from a syntaxis of modernism’s fusion with total war, through the dystopic parataxis and adjacency of postmodern conflicts after 1990, to our present a-topic metaxis of being ‘both-neither’, but with a resonant oscillation (Vermeulen and van Den Akker 2010). That is, the emergent metamodern war is a platonic non-place where, in this temporal formation, contemporary reality is ‘both-neither’—at once modern and postmodern, and neither of them.

The chimera of current circumstances demands a new meta approach to understanding our situation: analysis that thinks, and dreams, of itself. In this piece, I will deploy insights and knowledges from a range of disciplines and approaches, not with an intention to reconcile or synthesise them, as interdisciplinarity might propose, but to generate a higher, more actively self-reflective, perspective or awareness. This flows from my work on understanding cyber security as a metadiscipline, but is more broadly applicable as we consider the questions posed in this issue about the future of war itself (Sear 2017).

Clausewitz wanted to define war’s essence. To him, war is a trinity of ‘irrationality/non-rationality/rationality’. War is a ‘chameleon’ whose skin reflects firstly violent affect, secondly, creativity and chance, and thirdly, its subordination to ‘pure reason’ as an instrument of policy. The first of these exists in an individual skull, separate from rationality which exists in multiple skulls. The third (not emotion or calculation) exists outside the skull as external reality (Bassford 2007). War, Clausewitz’s analysis suggests, exists as an interstice, a membrane between the experience of consciousness and the world. War is a creation of simultaneous, mutually constituted interactions between selves and societies, adversaries and environments. The trinity is reflexive interplay, a continuous feedback loop.

I argue that digital computation has become the vehicle for these processes between the trinity. Cyber enables meta realisation of war’s essential dynamic forces. A human–machine ensemble organises the relations of the trinity, specifically the interplay between violence, chance and probability, and rational calculation. Computation interacts dynamically with humans and with itself, as explored in the speculative fiction that begins and ends this article.

Turing, Shannon, Weaver, von Neumann, Wiener, and the female computers who developed programming, created the current informational episteme in a previous ‘world’ war. Their ‘worlding’ of ours has helped generate planetary scale recursion conflict. Computational recursion is now integral to the reflexive interplay of war that Clausewitz describes. War has been integrated into human machine individuation, which is ‘constituted by the two poles of interiority and exteriority, which consist of a recursive movement: the interiorization of the exterior and the exteriorization of the interior’ (Hui 2019b).

The computation of information within this new form of sovereignty incorporates individuation and reproduces it through one core component of itself: recursion. Recursion, so central to the development of the Gödel-Turing-Church Thesis, is integral to computability. A recursive function is one which calls on itself as part of its execution, until it reaches a halting state (a goal or the incomputable). As such, it is an automation that is self-realisable. Recursion occurs in computation at all levels, from the function of algorithms to planetary scale communications. Google takes all the data of its users and returns it back, as advertising, and at a meta level thus reproduces itself (Hui 2019b). Philosopher Yuk Hui has described a recursive computational hermeneutics that ‘evaluates the past in order to anticipate the future, which in turn determines the present’ (Hui 2019b). Recursion is now integrated into a new form of the social that is cybernetic. This new relation between human and machine is why Heidegger stated that cybernetics had taken the place of philosophy. Or, as Yuk Hui condenses, in summary of Heidegger’s position: ‘cybernetics is fundamentally a metaphysical project’ (Hui 2019b).

Digital computation’s mature recursion between the membranes of Clausewitz’s trinity has expanded the relationship between the character and nature of war without breaking it. Consider Computational Clausewitz as a three dimensional trefoil knot (Przybyl and Pieranski 2014). Cyberspace is topological: it deforms, distorts and twists war, but many of its properties are preserved (Jordan 2009). Older forms of warfare are not foreclosed, instead the topology is scalar. Legacy warfare forms exist at ‘manifolds’ where vectors intersect in Euclidean geometries and Newtonian thermodynamics of flesh, silicon and steel (Kilcullen 2016).

Military leaders who experienced conflict during a preceding era suggest that technology will change the character of war, but not its nature: war will remain a ‘human activity’ (Langford 2019a, b).

But rather than war being a human activity, all human activity is now war. ‘Users’ are a ‘standing reserve’ for the Gestell. Humans are looped into an assemblage of machine temporalities of daily life as data war whorls in a financialised information society. Just as a ‘derivative’ makes ‘the future actionable in the present’ (Martin 2015), data collected by global entertainment and social media companies will be deployed in future wars. But this is less data war than database war. The Gestell is Otaku (Azuma 2009). Chloe plays Fortnite, appears in TikTok, and this archive provides capacity for the future in the present. Algorithmic, recursive governmentality spawns war Users engaged in a perpetual ‘Battle Royale’ convergence, rushing towards singularity.

Chloe’s—and our—civilian data today will be used in war in the future. Not only will data be a military objective in the future, it already is. The Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC), Article 52, states that all attacks must be limited to military objectives (ICRC 1977). The Tallinn Manual 2.0 (Rule 100) argues that data is not a military objective because Tallinn does not consider data to be an ‘object’ within ‘ordinary meaning’. The manual suggests data is ‘intangible’ and therefore an ‘attack on data per se does not qualify as an attack’ (Schmitt 2017; McLaughlin 2018).

Clearly something like weapons system software could be a military target. But digital information might also be used in a deception operation to have kinetic effects—like the data Chloe uses to have her target killed. Cyber influence/information operations (CI/O) with lethal effects, Chloe’s ‘Plan B’, injecting a message on the phone of the target’s wife, is one such example. How Chloe is targeted, and how she targeted her adversary, deploys data from civilian systems. Both Chloe and her adversaries exploit past exfiltration and encryption as part of cyber interference. This data was and is civilian—but how it is used and where it is held makes it both a military object and an objective. But for data to be targetable as a military attack the LOAC requires combatants to mitigate the effect of collateral damage on civilians and infrastructure in targeting through the LOAC. This will be challenging, given cyber measures are likely to target or use that very data (McLaughlin 2018).

In Cyber War Will Not Take Place, Thomas Rid argues that cyber measures do not constitute war, claiming computation has accelerated older forms of conflict like sabotage, espionage and subversion, but not war in a Clausewitzian sense because the effects are not violent or kinetic (Rid 2013). However, the cyber information and interference operations described in the speculative story have effects which are kinetic. Differentiating non-targetable espionage data from data that has lethal effect means cyber Information Operations (IO) will be considered a normal part of war. Civilian data destruction will replace the gore capitalism of border biopolitics.

Operations in the Information Environment (OIE) will expand contest further into the civilian interface globally (Morgan and Thompson 2018). Engelbart’s interface has swept through us like a Fortnite storm circle. We are now ‘free-to-play’ first-person shooters in multiplayer mode. Digital computation bootstraps political economy at a planetary scale. Information has become a commodity. Data infrastructure—vectors, not capital—control and extract information as surplus value (Wark 2019). Such vectors are what Benjamin Bratton describes as ‘Stacks’. The Stack is a new form of planetary megastructure, a computational apparatus of exchange layers Bratton calls User, Interface, Address, City, Cloud and Earth. Stacks create a form of geopolitics that blurs the boundaries of previous Westphalian national sovereignty and territory, instituting a new Schmittian nomos (Bratton 2015).

In the speculative opening story, war has spun into the Stack infrastructure. The symbiosis of private corporations controlling such cyberspace vectors and their innovation has reflexively contributed to the decay of traditional nation-state borders, just as vectoralist ‘recurgents’ hack older states. Cyber mercenary Chloe’s employers and her adversaries, vectoralists in the United States and Big Tech of the West (Wark 2019) and the CCP, are creating competing internet territories. Conflict will take place in the vertical interstitial layers of the Stack itself as much as on horizontal geographies, perhaps as Stack vs Stack. Large internet entities will come into conflict as States begin to look more like platforms and vice versa: Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (BAT) vs Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon (GAFA) (Bratton 2017). Firewalls will enclose IP territories. Negotiating these hemispherical Stack borders, citizens will be forever crossing the Seven Bridges of Königsberg, in network circuits of graph theory waiting for the death knock of the travelling salesman problem in the ultimate mid-century CryptoJack. Each Stack and State seeking first strike decryption capability, there will be an arms race towards mutually assured deduction: a cryptographic prisoner’s dilemma.

Asymmetry will be expressed as inhuman scales. Asymmetry in a spiral is expressed as chirality. In nation-state adversarial Stacks, these Stacks are chiral: enantiomorphic forms which are not superimposable on their mirror image despite their similarity. In this way, a US-centric hemispherical Stack opposes a PRC/CCP Stack in cyberspace empires of metaxis.

Suspended in a web of polarity, feedback loops define politics globally. Post-colonial cyberspace since 1990 has collapsed physical space. The result is a politics of time. The post-1989 Fukuyama futurist ‘politics of inevitability’ has disintegrated, to be replaced by the ‘politics of eternity’ (Snyder 2018). Eternity politics places a legacy nation at the centre of a ‘cyclical story of victimhood’. The future is a drained swamp in an eternal present. Time is no longer linear but instead is a ‘circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past’ (Snyder 2018). War has a future, but there is no future in war. The future is cancelled. (Fisher 2014). The future has become obsolescent and evaporated like vapourware. The ‘bit rot’ of historicity and floating gates of flash memory have reduced temporality to racks of non-volatile solid-state storage. Time is encoded and stored as memory which activates networks of reflexive vigilance. Server ramparts of persistent data storage requires both continuous, intrinsic security as well as the persistent cyber engagement of the extrinsic through the strategy of ‘Defend Forward.’ Empires are now measured in memory units and speed: Xenottabytes and petaFLOPS.

Nations of empire, starved of space for growth, look backwards to frame the future. In 2013 Xi Jinping launched ‘China Dream’, the US Presidential campaign of 2016 promised a recursive destiny to ‘Make America Great Again’, and the UK sought a halting state of #Brexit (Sear 2020). Nations pursue recurring dreams. Nation states will seek to control the turbulent wake of time’s arrow with data. Hybrid, asymmetrical warfare, will morph into ‘recurgency’ and ‘counterecurgency’ as non-state actors target the Global Value Chains (GVCs) of Transnational Corporations (TNCs) and asymmetries of data control and Intellectual Property (IP) become the key determinants of geopolitical security, strategic objectives and deployment of the military instrument. Asymmetrical warfare is about using unconventional tactics against a superior force.  Informational contests are now about time, where, in an era of post-scarcity, advantages are either short-lived, or decisions entropic. Recurgent activities are about using asymmetrical tactics of temporality. Whether you are cyber or psyops – Shadow Brokers, or the Internet Research Agency – all operations are about influence: compelling an enemy to your will. Or, more precisely: shaping their decisions (Sear and Lieber, 2019). War and warfare are increasingly about shape and shaping. The shapes are topological and recursive. Recurring dream (nation)state narratives of eternal loops are Möbius strips where a military objective is no longer victory but vector: the continuation of politik by Other dreams.

While the temporal horizon recedes, data accretion fills time’s vacuum. The ‘exosomatic deterritorialization’ (Stiegler 2018) of data provides an archive and a cloud interface for a future AI Ragnarök.

AI diagonalizes war as an eigenvector of inhuman, alien cognition. Extreme recursive Otherness will spiral into the start of the Xenowars of the mid to late 21st century. Xenowar is the Clausewitzian trinity in recursive loops of alterity, where conflict will close on the uncanny (Sear 2016). From this event horizon of computational war’s future black hole of Malament–Hogarth (M-H) spacetime supertasks will pulse another type of Un-War, where at the edges of the incomputable, a matrix decomposition into the canon of Non-Turing mathematics takes place. As quantum topological computers reinforce their enclosures, Non-Turing computation will question first conditions. Such axiomatic bifurcation may affect higher order change in the Clausewitzian trinity. Symmetry breaks – as limits – at the reflexive crossings of Xenowar’s topological knot – composed as the Xenowar object is, of stable and unstable manifolds – might evolve war chaotically at the strange attractor of recursions.

Consciousness is one such limit, a strange attractor for Xenowar. Consciousness may even be a limit cycle for war. Consciousness is experience, the phenomenological. It is informational, integrated, definite and a perspective in time (Koch 2019). Being conscious is a special type of information experience arising from ‘intrinsic causal powers.’ Integrated Information Theory (IIT) suggests consciousness is a cause-effect power arising from a reentrant system (Koch 2019). Reentrant architecture is an information feedback loop of integration with a cause and effect power on itself, distinguishable from Shannon information (Fallon 2018). Recursion can be reentrant but not all reentrant systems are recursive. Recursion, also key to digital computation, has been considered a comparator process to animal awareness. Computation has held sway for 75 years as the basis for understandings of the human mind and consciousness. The exact opposite may be true. IIT suggests that consciousness is non-computable. Yet, if consciousness is non-computable, it is possible that scalars of computational war will seek to intervene into the experience of consciousness itself. AI Attenuated Augmented Reality Zersetzung (AIAARZ) deceptions will introject gaslit glitches, to hack the unhackable.

The reflexive separation between computation and consciousness reveals the role of recursion at higher dimensionality. War combines the intrinsic causal power of consciousness upon ourselves and, through violence, deploys extrinsic powers to effect that experience of will onto other humans. As Clausewitz noted, ‘violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will’ drives the trinity’s function (Clausewitz, 1984). This information is subjective, an affective form. Information is integral. Computation as information processing interpolates the layers of the Clausewitz trinity as a topological form—a trefoil knot—distorting war’s properties while preserving its form. As it does, the process loops individuation into a new kind of epistemology. War’s adversarial accelerationism, in its trefoil knot armature, extenuates as it exposes the category of the human, through endless loops of ‘Turing Trauma.’

The ‘Turing Trauma’ of a so-called ‘Artificial’ Intelligence (AI) has triggered a perceived displacement of the human form of cognition itself. Emergent is a ‘mechano-organicism’ explanation or representation, where ‘digitalization’ has become shorthand for computation ‘becoming organic’, seeking to heal the wound of alienation in the inhuman (Hui 2019a). But just as Clausewitz’s theory interpolates the layers of the trinity, computation is now a layer which accelerates the recursive spirals of the trinity. All these further reflexively twist back into a reentrant information integration that is a natural force equivalence to causal power laws in the physics of human consciousness.

Deploying the Clausewitz rubric, militaries tend to agree what separates the ‘character’ of war from its ‘nature’. The character describes how war is fought and its subjective experience. Nature describes what it ‘is’—an essence—that is immutable and inherently human. These categories, of ‘nature’, ‘essence’, ‘eternal’, ‘rational’, ‘willpower’, ‘human’ and the ‘universal’, are rarely interrogated as being in flux within these arguments and their assumptions. Recent analyses suggest AI squares the trilogy as autonomous calculation that varies the speed and complexities of elements, but just tweaks the components (Hoffman 2019). Traditional military conceptions consider Clausewitz’s trinity as a two-dimensional isosceles triangle. Instead, Computational Clausewitz has transformed conflict into three dimensions in a way that emphasises connection and shape, not geometry. I suggest the trinity remains, but computational recursion has added more than speed—reconstituting the relationship between the subjective and objective in conflict, as it constitutes a new mathematical shape of war. Rather than enclosure, contingency is incorporated via recursion’s loops. Another of war’s chameleon skins emerges—Xenowar.

Xenowar is topological. Xenowar is an abstraction of connections, independent of its representation, appearance and form: it is ‘geometry without distance or angle’ (Jordan 2009). Intrinsic recursions of causal powers which form integrated information, such as consciousness and the will to compel another consciousness to that will, whorls into the knot of war. Meanwhile, extrinsic computational recursion spirals into the chirality of emergent alien cognition.

Computational agency as alternate cognition will introduce other-than-human agents to war (Dwyer 2019). Such cognitive political agents might perform in a non-linear fashion like rogue malware or adversarial like AI agonists. AI move ‘37 s’ will replicate, and human move 78s will counter in geopolitics (David et al. 2016). AI accelerationism will create cognitions that are alien (Parisi 2019). Climate change will incorporate the in/nonhuman as both a force and subject of ecological governance, and a necessary condition of war. The planet will introduce causal force as turbulence into the trefoil knot, compelling militaries to defend ecologies, even tearing social democracy’s 100 year tenure with human sacrificial civic participation, to include ecosystems, animals and molecules (@Bratton @TomSear 2020). Equally, a recognition that artificial intelligence is not artificial but something inhuman still generated by the planet, will inversely refuse the ‘naturalness’ of sectionalising human bodies as gender (Hester 2018). Cybernetics as metaphysics may spiral Stacks into a conflict-seeking singularity, or cosmotechnics (Hui 2016) that emerge as Stack enantiomers. Singularity is unlikely to be a teleology in one fundamental manifold. The armature of computational recursion will continue to spiral towards an event horizon of the incomputable: consciousness itself. At this horizon, the feedback loops of causal power that compose the experience of consciousness will confront those that are alien. Then at its zenith, Xenowar will discover whether intrinsic and extrinsic causal powers are homeomorphic dreams of itself - dreams it has dreamt before.

INCOMPLETENESS AND ENTSCHEIDUNGSPROBLEM: XENOWAR HALTING STATES

The game of war’s theory in the transition from finite to infinite contest stretches disciplinary structures beyond breaking points. The disciplinary prefixes of multi/inter/trans have the medicinal aromatic of carbolic acids: Band-Aids and antiseptics for an epidemiological epistemology. Here, this argument has applied the meta-Cresol of neo-rationalism as a solvent. I assert that cyber is a metadiscipline.

While metaphysics has been a focus here, so too I have tried to examine the role of posthuman algorithmic automation (for example AI) in the reproduction of self-awareness, not bodies. The use of data for military targeting is integral to the disintegration of the relationality between subject and object – grey zones, grey matter, grey goo. If war is considered genetically ‘natural’ to humans and is an intraspecies phenomena, the role of machine ecologies and the category ‘nature’ as a universal nonhuman requires consideration.

While not shying from the reflexive role of Stacks and States, of politics in the instrumentality of war, the discussion here seeks to investigate whether cyber(netic) war – and machines – are points in topological nomos as a smooth continuity or an Outside, exteriority. Implicit in the techne of dominant digital war schema are monotechnological militaries converging in an arms race to singularity. The argument here has been an attempt to explore a prometheanist, political imaginary project of posthumanism acceleration, in which nature universals are reconfigured without kicking the can of racialised othered essences down the totalist postcolonial road. This is done ultimately aiming towards the development of an effective transformative ontology that is beyond both metaphor and neoreactionary folk politics. We need to be conscious that where war targets temporality, an algorithmic politics of time follows the arrow’s flight. Even the postdigital moment may have already passed. If anything, specific, contemporary presentism is a kind of prequel.

At 2020, precisely 75 years since the Trinity nuclear detonation, war is a ground xeno for zeros. Since 1990, Earth has experienced an era of postmodern conflicts. Emergent is — Xenowar. ‘Xeno’ because this war incorporates the alien and the Other into a new, dynamic, trefoil knot. Xenowar is the Clausewitzian trinity spun in recursive loops of alterity, where conflict diagonalizes into an inhuman, alien cognition. War persists, but Clausewitz’s wunderliche Dreifaltigkeit morphs to become topological. Combatants emerge from corporations and nations as the understanding of war as human activity evolves into the realisation that all human activity is now war. Simultaneously, the technological and biological merge, transforming conflict into three dimensions in a way that emphasises connection and shape, not geometry. This deforms war’s properties while preserving its form: asymmetry will be expressed as inhuman scales, and feedback loops will redefine geopolitics. Topological equivalence will mean the continuous mapping of States within Stack homeomorphism via oscillations of stretching and contraction. Westphalian deformations will increase turbulence at higher manifolds and dimensions – old wine in new Klein bottles. Equally, an inability to cut and paste geographical borders into Stack topology will accentuate disconnection. Some Stacks may become enantiotopic to each other, mirror images but not superimposable. 

The notion of the Stack arises from computation, and there is self-similarity between the functional implications of Stacks at planetary scales, and the way computers work at digital scales. Digital states are discrete, defined territories in the same way nation states are. Computation enables the smooth, continuous functions of variable states, whereby the ambiguity of ‘states’ – both at a semiconductor binary level and the Westphalian nation-state level – can be integrated at vastly different scales. Algorithms define the ‘states’ of computation, and algorithmic governance increasingly defines the rules of geopolitics and the sovereignty of states.

Algorithms are defined by recursion. Recursion is essential to all processes of digital computation and essential to the function of the Stack. Recursion is also the concept that incorporates computation and culture in the current epoch. Recursive function is integral to computability. Recursive algorithmic instructions interacting with memory defines an information processing system. As Yuk Hui demonstrates, recursion provides us with a way to observe the technosphere as conflict converges towards an eschatological singularity of totalized inhuman determinism, just as it may also offer a way through to cosmotechnic diversity. As stacks, and cyberstates expand and the possibility of ‘states’ as levels of abstraction within computation amplify and expand Xenowar – how might cosmotechnical diversity be trefoil knot crossings which might elude accelerationist war and its ethics?

Certainly, there is a convergence between Hegel and Clausewitz in the latter’s war theory. Following Hegel, the gap between real and absolute might intercede with metaphysics where the phenomenological is defined as the experience of consciousness. Perhaps at that topological crossing, the reflexive role of Stacks and States, of politics and the instrumentality of war might enable moral interventions into the homogeneity of computational Clausewitz, and into Just War Theory and the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC). If they are circumscribed, how might cosmotechnical intervention or morphology be exterior to or constrained by the state between real and absolute war?

The Herzogian thought experiment of asking whether the ‘internet starts to dream of itself?’ may be a clue. Recursive computation uploads Clausewitz’s war trinity into a topology of self-reference. Computational Clausewitz is not only Gödel-Turing-Church recursion, but the logos and telos of their work was expressed in the role of information in Wiener-Heideggerian cybernetics. It continues in loops of von Neumann algorithmic automation seeking the reproduction of self-awareness via Shannon’s quantification of information relative to time. Gödel and Turing understood Hegelian notions of temporality, generating recursive computational hermeneutics that ‘evaluates the past in order to anticipate the future, which in turn determines the present.’ (Hui 2019a). Clausewitz and Hegel’s ideas converged, and so time is also tied into war’s cyberknot. Recursivity now drives an algorithmic politics of time where the future is a ‘cancel culture’. Again, ‘temporism’ replaces terrorism, and ‘recurgency’ will replace insurgency.

The informationally recursive, it is not a closed system. Schrödinger considered What is Life?, Turing the Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis and for Oppenheimer, Tatlock’s inspired “three person’d God”. General recursive functions have spun up the interiority of war. Accelerations of classical Computational Clausewitz loop algorithmic automation of a politics of human-machine time into the trinity of trefoil. Eternity war has replaced Forever war.

The First Xenowar (FX1) is happening now. Civilian data is sovereign substrate, simultaneously military object, objective, and collateral. Xenowar relationality will likewise incorporate more-than-human Others within Clausewitzian molecular mutations. Anthropogenic climate change will accelerate terraforming Earth, just as AI, robotics and quantum will necessarily spiral away from anthropic intelligence and everyday atoms, towards the Alien entanglements; and as exponential cycles and large-scale (nation)states will compete to compute data compression in the life sciences. War’s contest will expand across these spatiotemporal scales. Curve governance and cosmotechnics will become the Law of Armature Conflict, replacing the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC). Militaries will pivot from the nature of war to the war of nature.

Xenowar’s trefoil knot is wrapped over the planetary torus, where Stack and sovereign borders are surfaces at crossings of torsional elasticity, friction, and stability. When civilian information (data + meaning) becomes simultaneously sovereign weapon and target, so subject and object dissolve. Computational politics and sociality follow patterns of non-linear fluid dynamics, as strange attractors across stack borders and self-similar vortices within turbulent social media become recombinant with the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT will no longer be a chain of connected digital objects, as all objects are become digital, and exist in an ontological superposition. Entanglement effects will scale as spooky actions at a distance spin down into decoherence. Quantum superposition computation will implode conflict limits to states of vectors at supertask scales. What may emerge in the future as the real revolution in military affairs will be the quantum computational Clausewitzian trinity of continuous functions. Xenowar topological space X is then a Clausewitzian 3-manifold. War thus expands into higher dimensions: X is continuous. But the inverse is of X is also continuous. Simultaneously, at other scales, surface friction of the trefoil knot crossing will spin up recursions of homotopic functionalities across Stack infrastructures and diastereotopic data planes of invertible war. 

From this black hole of Xenowar will pulse another type of Un-War, fought at the edges of the incomputable, an axiomatic reboot of Non-Turing mathematics and non-Abelian anyons of topological quantum computing. Sovereignty will be defined in the ontology of mathematical alterity, and borders will be topological, biological, ecological. Digital War will not take place. Molecular knots of DNA Assisted Evolution (AE) will, with the inanimate, be identified with IPv6 Stateless Address Autoconfiguration (SLAAC) to become substrates in the Information Environment (IE). Adversarial relations will multiply via biological processes of mutation, while digital war’s front lines will recede to reflexive, recursive interstices. One paradox of Xenowar’s black hole of information will become a horizon in computational Clausewitzian cosmology: consciousness will prove non-computable. Consciousness is a special kind of integrated information – the product of a reentrant system not a processing one. Xperience: this is Xenowar’s true ‘information’ war. As computational scalars accelerate, consciousness is the limit case upon which the knot of total war will bind. Once war has hacked consciousness what will we do—or even be? Rather than the computational inhuman proving alien to future war, consciousness will prove itself the alien in-human Xenowar.

EPILOGUE: XENOWAR IN THE SWARM

Chloe returned to Australia. The Mutawintji (非战争军事行动)™ experimental pre-deployment of Pre-Traumatic Stress Injury via N-methyl-d-aspartate-type glutamate (NMDA) receptor stimulus triggered before her Operation didn’t quite work as planned. Chloe began showing signs of condition now called ‘PowerShellshock’, an echo of the mysterious ‘Shellshock’ of the First World War. The shell of this post combat malady referred to was not canisters of artillery but of computer ‘shells’, the outer-most layer of a kernel. But unlike those of the First World War, the veterans of the first Xenowars exhibited strange non-PTSD-like symptoms. Whereas PTSD psychopathology sustained neurobiological effects, or environmental matrices like Gulf War Illness (GWI), returned soldiers of the first Xenowars exhibited symptoms more closely associated with prior germline gene editing, and alien epigenetic effects in offspring. Vets often referred to this as, the ‘D-Bus’ or more wryly as ‘Hitting Enter’. In the PRC, PowerShell effects were sardonically referred to as the ‘Peace Disease’ (和平病). The inner voice of conspiracy theorists on Neurabook whispered of hushed up quantum teleportation experiments gone awry.

Intravenous infusion of ketamine hydrochloride (0.5 mg/kg) had no therapeutic effect. Previous positive trials of combatants in the Spratly sWARm 2029 Electro-Magnetic Spectrum Operations (SSEMSO), and the Amazonia Biome Battles, ingesting 1ml/kg of placebo or ayahuasca adjusted to contain 0.36 mg/kg of N,N-DMT, even in Shipibo-Conibo -shaman-managed environments, had no effect throughout the early thirties.

In response, the Amazon Department of Veterans Affairs (AVA) created a new future for the Undead returning from the First Xenowar (FXW). Building on conjecture that consciousness could be shared across being, standard contracts for PowerShelled global Amazon Yanomami® Corps (AYC) allowed the experimental isolation of their consciousness genetics to be transducted via Sars-CoV-5 gene therapy into other life forms, expressed in milder forms across future generations of multiple species. Arlington and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) inspired the fusion of soldier DNA with the DNA of species extant in the wild exclusion zones. Chloe returned to the Wollemi Pine Park, a remote location that Amazon purchased after the seven remaining examples of the eponymous Gondwanaland remnant species became extinct in the bushfires of 2027.

The park was renamed ‘Lin Bai-lo’— ‘Forest of Incandescent Bliss’. Here, Chloe lived in proximity to swarms of Tetragonula carbonaria, the native honeybee, colloquially known as ‘sugarbag’. Chloe and the hive were part of the new experimental program for returned soldiers. Bees have associative geospatial memory, can remember faces and understand the concept of zero. With a brain marked by components similar to humans but in a smaller package, they share our geospatial awareness/tracking, memory, capacity for communication, potential for sentience, dopamine reward circuitry, and some similar social infrastructure. The bee body is closely, recurrently connected to support density 10x that of the human neocortex.

Being free from input–output cognition but wired into intrinsic cause-effect power puts the feeling of experience well beyond any computation, possibly ever. Consciousness between humans and animals is a spectrum, and bees with their similar collective life and scaled brain wiring have a glow and meta state correlatable with hominids. When it was experimentally proven that consciousness is a state that could be shared, this new project began. Chloe’s consciousness was fused with this bee colony. Her integrated information experience spun with the algorithm tending to the spiral/chiral structure of the T. carbonaria brood comb.

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