I have said many times before, interactivity is the equivalent of radioactivity. For interactivity effects a kind of disintegration, a kind of rupture.
I always write with images. I cannot write a book if I don't have images.
Indeed, the truth, the reality of the Kosovo War, was actually hidden behind all the 'humanitarian' faces.
The globally constituted accident can be compared to what people who work at the stock exchange call 'systemic risk'.
'Cyberwar' has nothing to do with the destruction brought about by bombs and grenades and so on.
I am always concerned with ideas of territory and movement. Indeed, my first book after Bunker Archeology was entitled L'insecurite du territoire (1976).
As I have said many times before, I was among the first people to experience the German Occupation of France during the Second World War. I was 7-13 years old during the War and did not really internalise its significance.
As I have been arguing for a long time now, there is a real need not simply for a political economy of wealth but also for a political economy of speed.
It was a total and absolute surprise to find out that what was inside the concentration camps was a sea of skeletons. What is clear to me, therefore, is that while the tragedy of war grinds on, the contemporary aesthetics of the tragedy seem not only confused but, in some way, suspicious.
What is going on now, or should happen in one or two generations, is the disintegration of the world. Real time 'live' technologies, cyberreality, will permit the incorporation of the world within oneself. One will be able to read the entire world, just like during the Gulf War. And I will have become the world. The body of the world and my body will be one.
For the strategies of deception are concerned with deceiving an opponent through the logistics of perception. But these strategies are not merely aimed at the Serbs or the Iraqis but also at all those who might support [Slobodan] Milosevic or Saddam Hussein.
Even among the elite, in government circles, technological culture is somewhat deficient.
However, the Kosovo War took place in orbital space. In other words, war now takes place in 'aero-electro-magnetic space'. It is equivalent to the birth of a new type of flotilla, a home fleet, of a new type of naval power, but in orbital space!
For the US, the Kosovo War was a success because it encouraged the development of the Pentagon's 'Revolution in Military Affairs' (RMA). The war provided a test site for experimentation, and paved the way for emergence of what I call in Strategie de la deception 'the second deterrence'.
It will no longer be war that is the continuation of politics by other means, it will be what I have dubbed 'the integral accident' that is the continuation of politics by other means.
Concepts are mental images.
If we look at the Gulf War, the same is also true. Indeed, my work on the logistics of perception and the Gulf War was so accurate that I was even asked to discuss it with high-ranking French military officers. They asked me: 'how is it that you wrote that book in 1984 and now it's happening for real?' My answer was: 'the problem is not mine but yours: you have not been doing your job properly!'
For me, Sun Tzu's statement that military force is based upon deception is an extraordinary statement.
Newshounds are people with mini-video cameras, people who are continually taking pictures in the street and sending the tapes in to CNN. These Newshounds are a sort of pack of wolves, continually looking for quarry, but quarry in the form of images.
Hence not only the crisis of geopolitics and geostrategy but also the shift towards the emergence and dominance of chronostrategy.
Let us start with the title of War and Cinema. The important part of the title is not War and Cinema.
If we turn to the war in Kosovo, what do we find? We find the manipulation of the audience's emotions by the mass media.
I am very interested in and that is what Sun Tzu in his ancient Chinese text calls The Art of War.
Look at the US, look at Russia. Both of these countries are immense geographical territories. But, nowadays, immense territories amount to nothing!
Globalization cannot take shape without the speed of light.
