The Geopolitics of the Twitter Attack: Reconsidering “War” in light of Virilio

By now, I’m sure folks have read about the recent attacks (two waves to be exact) on Twitter  (a DDOS attack to boot!). I know many people will think it’s utterly unremarkable to report an attack on a social networking site. I agree. Besides being a great annoyance on a constant Twitter-checker like myself, it’s surely not worth such large-scale coverage…well save for a kind of bizarre angle that has recently come to light. Jenna Wortham and others at the New York Times have been reporting that the attack on Twitter and other social networking sites on Thursday and Friday was the work of hackers who wanted to silence a particular economics professor and blogger in the country of Georgia. (Remember them from the skirmish they had with Russia last year?)

According to the Times:

Giorgi [the Georgian blogger/academic] said his pages were providing a place for refugees from Abkhazia to exchange memories of their home. The Twitter page had a sepia photograph of a palm-lined city street. “It was nostalgia,” he said.

This week, he began posting day-by-day accounts of the run-up to the conflict that drew partly on posts from his readers inside of Abkhazia, who he said had been describing how the Russian army staged its forces in the region in early August 2008.

Basically, the rest of us are collateral damage to Russian nationalist hackers trying to shut him down. Wowzas.

But to dig a little deeper, I wanted to think about how we have been seeing a lot of cyber-geopolitical conflicts as of late. The US and South Korea were the recent object of attack by hackers, if you remember. To me, these are tell-tale signs of what Paul Virilio and others have been calling “info war.” Now to keep Virilio honest, it must be said that his conception of the term is grounded in the type of visual technologies that militaries have employed during “actual” war-time. But in the current political moment, in which “war” is an unbound signifier that can mean any and every thing, it may be worth reconsidering Virilio’s more “instrumental” application of the term to include recent events. What do we do with something like waves of cyberattacks that are clearly geopolitically motivated? Do they fall outside the purview of “war”? I think this is precisely the type of questioning that we need to pursue. In other words, what does “war” really mean? Is it “declared” as such?

I will post another bit of research from the vaults sometime next week before I leave for vacation that is a propos to this post. Until then, keeping trying to log onto Twitter.