Networked Risk: Anxiety and Everyday Infrastructure Stephen Graham Newcastle University
Nov 01, 2014
Networked Risk:
Anxiety and Everyday Infrastructure
Stephen Graham Newcastle University
• "If you want to destroy someone nowadays, you go after their infrastructure" (Phil Agre 2001)
• "There is nothing in the world today that cannot become a weapon" (Liang and Xiangsui, 1999)
• "Real security cannot be cordoned off. It is woven into our most basic social fabric. From the post office to the emergency room, from the subway to the water reservoir" (Naomi Klein, 2001)
Networked Risks: Starting Points • Socio-technical ‘hybrids’ through which Nature is continually
metabolized into Culture to literally produce the City • Many scales and scapes of simultaneous and interacting
flows and connectivities • Often taken for granted, ubiquitous, banalised. • Revealed when they fail, are disrupted or deliberately
destroyed. "The normally invisible quality of working infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks: the server is down, the bridge washes out, there is a power blackout" (Star, 1999).
• In urbanising ‘network societies’ crucial in mediating construction and experience of hazards and risks
Hazards, Risks and Networked Urbanism • Urbanites "are particularly at risk when their complex and
sophisticated infrastructure systems are destroyed and rendered inoperable, or when they become isolated from external contacts" (Barakat1998)
• ‘Natural’ hazard events distributed in space and time via networked disruptions. Multiple orders of impacts caused by disruption
• Current changes: privatisation/liberalisation? Just in Time flows: tightly coupled systems
• Soon "people won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide" (Joy,2000).
“War in the Weirdly Pervious World” I: Infrastructural Insurgencies
• ”Today, wars are fought not in trenches and fields, but in living r o o m s , s c h o o l s a n d supermarkets" (Barakat, 1998).
• War and geopolitical struggle are increasingly being fought through the infrastructures of everyday urban life
• "The world struggle against terrorists will continue because our global economy simultaneously creates many possible weapons and angers many poss ib le enemies" (Luke, 2003)
‘Homeland Security’ : Networked Infrastructures as Sources of
Boundless Threat
“War in the Weirdly Pervious World” II: State Infrastructural Warfare
• “It should be lights out in Belgrade : every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted. We will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950 ? We can do 1950. You want 1389 ? We can do that, too!” (New York Times Columnist, Thomas Friedman, April 23rd, 1999)
“We have not run out of targets. Afghanistan has!” Donald Rumsfeld
• "We need to study how to degrade and destroy our adversaries' abilities to transmit their military, political, and economic goods, s e r v i c e s a n d i n f o r m a t i o n . Infrastructures, defining both traditional and emerging lines of c o m m u n i c a t i o n , p r e s e n t increasingly lucrative targets for airpower [The vision of] airmen s h o u l d f o c u s o n l i n e s o f c o m m u n i c a t i o n s t h a t w i l l i nc reas ing ly de f ine modern societies" (Felker, 1998).
First Order Effects Second Order Effects Third Order Effects
No light after dark or in
building interiors
Erosion of command and
control capabilities
Greater logistics complexity
No refrigeration Increased requirement for
power generating equipment
Decreased mobility
Some stoves/ovens non
operable
Increased requirement for
night vision devices
Decreased Situational
Awareness
Inoperable hospital electronic
equipment
Increased reliance on battery-
powered items for news,
broadcasts, etc.
Rising disease rates
No electronic access to bank
accounts/money
Shortage of clean water for
drinking, cleaning and
preparing food
Rising rates of malnutrition
Disruption in some
transportation and
communications services
Hygiene problems Increased numbers of non-
combatants requiring
assistance
Disruption to water supply,
treatment facilities, and
sanitation
Inability to prepare and
process some foods
Difficulty in communicating
with non-combatants
Iraq 1991-2003: ‘Bomb Now, Die Later’
"Perhaps the real answer is that by declaring dual-use targets legitimate military objectives, the Air Force can directly target civilian morale. In sum, so long as the Air Force includes civilian morale as a legitimate military target, it will aggressively maintain a right to attack dual-use targets" (Rizer, 1998).
Towards State ‘Computer Network Attack’
• ”Adversary military forces are ultimately an output or peripheral of a weapon system and its sustaining, often civil, infrastructure. Corrupt the sustaining systems and, like a driver deprived on his oxygen supply, the adversary
military force may be ineffective. Once the pattern of information-dependent human activities is identified, the information target can be detected and
identified, and the data on which the activity is dependent could be intercepted, destroyed, or corrupted by appropriate replacement
in peace and war" (Kelly, 1996).
Conclusions • Must integrate networked infrastructures and networked
risks fully into conceptualisations of hazards, risks and security
• Challenge many conventional understandings of hazards
• Socio-technical and socio-natural perspectives blend with critical geopolitics
• All networked connections provisional; require continuous work; can easily shift to disconnection which mediate and distribute hazards and risks; can easily be manipulated or used as weapons of political violence
• Just the sort of innovative/ interdisciplinary agenda for IHR squared?