The Counterrevolution

by Bernard E. Harcourt

  Originally, counterinsurgency and antiterrorism were hard to distinguish. During the Algerian War, the insurgents were in fact referred to as “terrorists.” But gradually, as Grégoire Chamayou shows, with the growth of domestic terrorist groups in the West (like the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, or the Weather Underground in the United States), antiterrorism strategies began to look more and more like domestic policing. These tactics evolved toward the model of incapacitating individual actors. Antiterrorism became more closely aligned with policing and security, rather than the political and military. It oriented itself toward individuals who were seen as “dangerous,” or even “mad,” but not politically contagious. “With these new labels, the targets are no longer political adversaries to be opposed, but criminals to be apprehended or eliminated,” Chamayou writes.36

  As a result, domestic antiterrorism gravitated increasingly toward the imprisonment of criminal individuals. “Its policing logic individualizes the problem and reduces its objectives to neutralizing, on a case-by-case basis, as many suspects as possible,” Chamayou explains.37 So, whereas counterinsurgency is more population focused, the advocates of leaner antiterrorism argue, antiterrorist action should be more individual centered.

  But rather than buy into this dichotomy of counterinsurgency and leaner antiterrorism, what history shows instead is a growing convergence of the two models in the United States since the 1960s. Counterinsurgency and domestic antiterrorism efforts, entwined from the start, have converged over time. The individual incapacitation strategy meshes perfectly into the counterinsurgency approach. And it leads seamlessly from the domestication of the second prong of counterinsurgency to the domestication of the third.

  10

  DISTRACTING AMERICANS

  MANY OF US WILL NOT RECOGNIZE OURSELVES, OR AMERICA for that matter, in these dreadful episodes—in the waterboarding and targeted assassinations abroad or in the militarization of our police forces, in the infiltration of Muslim mosques and student groups or in the constant collection of our personal data at home. Many of us have no firsthand experience of these terrifying practices. Few of us actually read the full Senate torture report, and even fewer track drone strikes. Some of us do not even want to know of their existence. Most of us are blissfully ignorant—at least most of the time—of these counterinsurgency practices at home or abroad, and are consumed instead by the seductive distractions of our digital age.

  And that’s the way it is supposed to be. As counterinsurgency is domesticated, it is our hearts and minds that are daily being assuaged, numbed, pacified—and blissfully satisfied. We, the vast majority of us, are reassured daily: there are threats everywhere and color-coded terror alerts, but counterinsurgency strategies are protecting us. We are made to feel that everything’s under control, that the threat is exterior, that we can continue with our daily existence. Even more, that these counterinsurgency strategies will prevail. That our government is stronger and better equipped, prepared to do everything necessary to win, and will win. That the guardians are protecting us.

  The effort to win the hearts and minds of the passive American majority is the third aspect of the domestication of counterinsurgency practices—perhaps the most crucial component of all. And it is accomplished through a remarkable mixture of distraction, entertainment, pleasure, propaganda, and advertising—now rendered all so much more effective thanks to our rich digital world. In Rome, after the Republic, this was known as “bread and circus” for the masses. Today, it’s more like Facebook and Pokémon GO.

  We saw earlier how the expository society entices us to share all our personal data and how this feeds into the first prong of counterinsurgency—total information awareness. There is a flip side to this phenomenon: keeping us distracted. The exposure is so pleasurable and engaging that we are mostly kept content, with little need for a coordinated top-down effort to do so. We are entranced—absorbed in a fantastic world of digitally enhanced reality that is totally consuming, engrossing, and captivating. We are no longer being rendered docile in a disciplinarian way, as Michel Foucault argued in Discipline and Punish. We are past notions of docility. We are actively entranced—not passively, not in a docile way. We are actively clicking and swiping, jumping from one screen to another, checking one platform then another to find the next fix—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, YouTube, and on and on.

  Winning over and assuaging the passive majority might be accomplished—indeed, has been accomplished in the past—through traditional propaganda, such as broadcast misinformation about the insurgent minority, and through the top-down provision of entertainment to keep us from thinking about politics. The new digital world we live in has rendered these older strategies obsolete. As the counterinsurgency’s mandate to pacify the masses has been turned on the American people, the third prong of modern warfare looks and works differently than it did in previous times and in other places.

  Things have changed. Just a few years ago, our politicians still had to tell us to go shopping and enjoy ourselves. “Get down to Disney World in Florida,” President George W. Bush told the American people a few weeks after 9/11. “Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.”1 A few years later, Bush would reiterate, after discussing the situation in Iraq, “I encourage you all to go shopping more.”2 Now, we no longer need our leaders to tell us that anymore. The entire digital world prompts us to do so.

  Andrew Sullivan captures well this frenzied digital life we now lead. Sullivan recounts, in a brilliant article in New York magazine titled “Put Down Your Phone,” his own journey through the digital age, starting with his gradual addiction, his eventual recovery in a rehab program, and his ultimate relapse:

  For a decade and a half, I’d been a web obsessive, publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week, and ultimately corralling a team that curated the web every 20 minutes during peak hours. Each morning began with a full immersion in the stream of internet consciousness and news, jumping from site to site, tweet to tweet, breaking news story to hottest take, scanning countless images and videos, catching up with multiple memes. Throughout the day, I’d cough up an insight or an argument or a joke about what had just occurred or what was happening right now. And at times, as events took over, I’d spend weeks manically grabbing every tiny scrap of a developing story in order to fuse them into a narrative in real time. I was in an unending dialogue with readers who were caviling, praising, booing, correcting. My brain had never been so occupied so insistently by so many different subjects and in so public a way for so long.3

  This is our new existence, fueled and enhanced by all the digital media, apps, and devices. Not all of us are producers or creators like Sullivan, but practically all of us are consumers. We participate actively. We read, click, like, share. We play. We interact. And we derive extraordinary benefits and enjoyments from this. “The rewards,” Andrew Sullivan notes, are “many”: “a constant stream of things to annoy, enlighten, or infuriate me; a niche in the nerve center of the exploding global conversation; and a way to measure success—in big and beautiful data—that was a constant dopamine bath for the writerly ego. If you had to reinvent yourself as a writer in the internet age, I reassured myself, then I was ahead of the curve.”

  To be sure, this frenzy may at times fuel political activity. Groups of Facebook friends are politicizing each other every day, sharing satirical political commentary, forming new alliances on the web. Social media can galvanize real-world protest. The Occupy Wall Street movement and the Arab Spring were, in part, facilitated by social media and Internet networks—regardless of whether you ultimately believe, with Evgeny Morozov, that the Internet does not effectively promote democratic values.4 Presidential candidates like Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump have built entire political followings on the Internet. There is no doubt that the digital age has important political dimensions and implications—not to be minimized.

  But for the mos
t part, the entertainment and the spectacle comes first. Spectacle especially: the gladiator sport at which a politician like Donald Trump excelled. President Trump’s middle-of-the-night Twitter screeds drew our attention. His lewd words and extreme statements on social media caused a frenzy. We were practically mesmerized. For the younger generations, especially, the digital activity is primarily geared toward entertainment and pleasure: the YouTube videos, Facebook news feeds, and snapchats. Selfies on Instagram. Dating applications for all tastes, iPhone apps of all kinds.5 Even meditation apps, like Sattva, Buddhify, or Headspace, to help us deal now with our digital addictions.

  The paradigm of these new digital distractions—and of the myriad ways they then feed back into the surveillance apparatus—is Pokémon GO. An enhanced reality game, Pokémon GO went online at the start of summer 2016 and immediately went viral. For a few weeks or months, millions of young people around the globe started chasing virtual Pikachus in the streets and alleys, museums and national monuments, even in their own bedrooms across the world. Players became completely absorbed and obsessed with the game, spending all their free time—and even some class time, I noticed—trying to track down and catch Pokémons, or walking around or riding their bike slowly to make their Pokémon eggs hatch.

  Pokémon GO became a viral obsession. A recurring image from the summer of 2016—one that I saw in New York, but also in Leiden and Paris—is of a young couple on a Vespa or motorcycle, the young man driving slowly and following the directions of the young woman, behind, both of her hands cradling an iPhone. She is looking back and forth, from one screen to the other, while giving driving instructions to her partner. They are meandering, perhaps waiting for a Pokémon to hatch or to appear on the screen to snatch. The couple stops every so often, discusses and conspires, looks at the screens, and then they take off again, cautiously at times, or fast enough to catch another—or catch them all!

  Pokémon GO has already run its course, but that is to be expected. Another digital obsession will follow. These platforms are supposed to capture all of our attention for a while, to captivate us, to distract us—and simultaneously to make us expose ourselves and everything around us. This is the symbiosis between the third and first prongs of the domesticated counterinsurgency: while it pacifies us, a game like Pokémon GO taps into all our personal information and captures all our data. At first, the game required that players share all their personal contacts. Although that was eventually dropped, the game collects all our GPS locations, captures all the video of our surroundings in perfectly GPS-coded data, and tracks us wherever we are. Plus, even though it is free, many players are buying add-ons and in the process sharing their consumption and financial data. The more we play, the more we are distracted and pacified, and the more we reveal about ourselves.

  A new powerful form of distraction—for many, an addiction—has taken hold of us, and in the process, fuels our own exposure and feeds the surveillance mechanisms of the NSA, Google, Facebook, etc. And what is so remarkable is how rapidly it has all emerged. There is a new temporality to the digital age, one that mimics the viral nature of memes. Like wildfire, these new addictions catch and spread at lightning speed. As Andrew Sullivan reminds us:

  We almost forget that ten years ago, there were no smartphones, and as recently as 2011, only a third of Americans owned one. Now nearly two-thirds do. That figure reaches 85 percent when you’re only counting young adults. And 46 percent of Americans told Pew surveyors last year a simple but remarkable thing: They could not live without one. The device went from unknown to indispensable in less than a decade. The handful of spaces where it was once impossible to be connected—the airplane, the subway, the wilderness are dwindling fast. Even hiker backpacks now come fitted with battery power for smartphones. Perhaps the only “safe space” that still exists is the shower.6

  The speed with which these new devices and applications are coming online, and the amount of time that we are spending on them, is stunning. A thorough study published in 2015 revealed that the young adults surveilled were spending at least five hours using their phones every day, with about eighty-five separate interactions per day. The individual interactions may be short, but added together, they represent about a third of these young adults’ waking hours. What is also striking is that, according to the research, these young adults are not aware of the extent of their consumption: “Young adults use their smartphones roughly twice as much as they estimate that they do.”7

  The distractions are everywhere: e-mail notifications, texts, bings and pings, new snapchats and instagrams. The entertainment is everywhere as well: free Wi-Fi at Starbucks and McDonald’s, and now on New York City streets, that allow us to stream music videos and watch YouTube videos. And of course, the advertising is everywhere, trying to make us consume more, buy online, subscribe, and believe. Believe not only that we need to buy the recommended book or watch the suggested Netflix, but also believe that we are secure and safe, protected by the most powerful intelligence agencies and most tenacious military force. Believe that we can continue to mind our own business—and remain distracted and absorbed in the digital world—because our government is watching out for us.

  The fact is, the domestication of counterinsurgency has coincided with the explosion of this digital world and its distractions. There is a real qualitative difference between the immediate post–9/11 period and today. One that is feeding directly into the third strategy of modern warfare.

  Meanwhile, for the more vulnerable—those who are more likely to veer astray and perhaps sympathize with the purported internal enemy—the same digital technologies target them for enhanced propaganda. The Global Engagement Center, or its equivalents, will profile them and send improved content from more moderate voices. The very same methods developed by the most tech-savvy retailers and digital advertisers—by Google and Amazon—are deployed to predict, identify, enhance, and target our own citizens.

  The third stage of the domestication of counterinsurgency warfare piggybacks off these new digital technologies and distractions that render the vast majority of us docile consumers glued in front of the plasma screen. It is a connected life in which the privileged move from their iPhones to their iPads, wear their Apple Watches, text and snapchat each other constantly, post selfies and narrate their thrilling, vibrant lives, putting out of their minds the risk to their privacy and personal data. And when this new mode of existence is particularly threatened and directly attacked, it becomes even more sacrosanct. The Paris attacks made many young Westerners newly aware of the threat that terrorists pose to people like them. The Orlando attack similarly actualized the danger to the tolerant liberal way of life that now embraces queer sexualities. With each such attack, this new way of living is under threat. And to protect this new mode of existence, many buy into the idea—subliminally or half-consciously—that a small minority of guardians must safeguard our security, while the rest of us must carry on, continue to shop, consume again as before, or even more.

  My point is not that our fellow citizens are becoming more docile than they were before or that we are experiencing a waning of civil and political engagement. While I agree that the growing capacity of the state and corporations to monitor citizens may well threaten the private sphere, I am not convinced that this is producing new apathy or passivity or docility among citizens, so much as a new form of entrancement. The point is, we were once kept apathetic through other means, but are now kept apathetic through digital distractions.

  The voting patterns of American registered voters has remained constant—and apathetic—for at least fifty years. Even in the most important presidential elections, voter turnout in this country over the past fifty years or more has pretty much fluctuated between 50 percent and 63 percent. By any measure, American democracy has been pretty docile for a long time. In fact, if you look over the longer term, turnout has been essentially constant since the 1920s and the extension of the suffrage to women. Of course, turnout to vote is n
ot the only measure of democratic participation, but it is one quantifiable measure. And electoral voting is one of the more reliable longitudinal measures of civic participation. But our record, in the United States, is not impressive.

  Elsewhere, I have argued that ours is not a democracy of voters, but of potential voters. It is not an actual democracy, so much as a potential or virtual democracy.8 It has a potentiality, a capacity to democratic rule. And it is precisely through the democratic potentiality that the benefits of democracy are achieved. This is not new. But what is new is the method: rather than being rendered docile as we were in earlier times, in more disciplinarian societies, we are being digitally entranced by all the new technology. And this entrancement does not quash politics, it turns it into spectacle. If anything, there is growing interest in politics—but as entertainment. In fact, the first presidential debate of the 2016 election, the September 26, 2016, debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, set a record for TV viewership of presidential debates. As the Los Angeles Times reported, the debate drew the largest TV audience ever for a presidential debate, reaching up to eighty-four million according to Nielsen numbers.9

  Why such numbers? Because Donald Trump turned the presidential election and subsequently his administration into a spectacle; because, in effect, Trump was a master of reality TV, then of digital media, and now of spectacle presidency—as, for instance, when he dealt with an international diplomatic crisis in public, on the dining-room terrace of his Mar-a-Lago resort alongside the prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, with club members taking snapshots and posting them on social media. Trump succeeded in drawing attention precisely because he became one of social media’s great communicators. The cable news network CNN captured this best in a pithy lead to a story titled “Trump: The Social Media President?”: “FDR was the first ‘radio’ president. JFK emerged as the first ‘television’ president. Barack Obama broke through as the first ‘Internet’ president. Next up? Prepare to meet Donald Trump, possibly the first ‘social media’ and ‘reality TV’ president.”10