Abstract
What kind of global power is the United States? Is it a stabilising factor or a destabilising force? To what extent does the personality of the US President matter? How interested is America in the well-being of other nations or has it always put its interests first? Scott Timcke provides an unequivocal answer to these questions in the very first sentence of his book Capital, State, Empire: The New American Way of Digital Warfare. He writes, ‘The United States presents the greatest source of global geopolitical violence and instability. Much of this comes from the state’s security apparatuses’ (p. xi). He argues that the US actions in the Middle East, including in Syria most recently, have led to destabilisation. Timcke paints a very gloomy picture in the Introduction – of mass surveillance of electronic dossiers by the Central Intelligence Agency; fraudulent bankers; ‘capital concentration and pauperization’ (p. xii); American party politics characterised by ‘wilful ignorance, avoidance, and hawkishness’ (p. xiii) and Silicon Valley producing ‘tools for mystification and oppression’ (p. xiii). He argues that these trends are ‘indicative of the great American tragedy; a society founded on freedom but built on slavery’ (p. xiv). In his book, Timcke focuses on the increased ‘deployment of digital coercion’ defined as ‘the various processes facilitated by digital technologies that greatly enable American rule’ (p. xiv). He discusses America’s military strategy that he labels as the ‘New American Way of War’ (p. xv). Some of its key features are as follows: ‘the quest for minimal democratic oversight, computationally aided global dragnet surveillance, automated attempts to avert internal dissent, internal repression of vulnerable populations, and protracted conflicts abroad’ (p. xv). Timcke argues that investigating military and information technology is ‘one of the most urgent topics for Communication Studies’ (p. xv). The book is divided into an introduction and a conclusion, and six substantive chapters. Chapter 1 offers a material critique of digital society by using radical political economy as a theoretical framework. Chapter 2 provides a brief history of US state formation. Chapter 3 then assesses recent US military budgets and policy statements with a focus on digital technologies such as automated lethal robotics. Chapters 4 and 5 delve into internal and external ‘patterns of subjugation’ (p. xvi), exploring topics such as the alleged ‘war on blacks’, police militarisation and the administration of external ‘zones of violence and zones of pacification’ (p. xvii). The final substantive chapter then critiques the process of ‘digital positivism’ (p. xvii) and cognitive behaviourism as an explanatory framework. Timcke’s damning critique of America’s role serves an additional ideological purpose – it offers the perspective of a scholar from the Global South as ‘an exercise of the South “writing back” identifying some of the very features that oppress almost all of us’ (p. xvii). It is a very strongly worded book, which, while making a range of highly contested claims about the alleged manifestations of American imperialism and ‘the relationship of capital to constraint’ (p. 146), also offers a valuable contribution that tells a wider story about power inequalities and imbalances including within academia itself.