Virtual tales, Western fantasies vs Fundamentalism

Visiting Washington D.C., Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull adopted a very Australian idea for reducing the influence of ISIS on line.  The suggested solution? Contradict, mock and disprove their ideology. 

Isil may have an archaic and barbaric ideology, but its use of technology and social media, in particular, is very sophisticated... As Isil uses social media for its propaganda, we must respond rapidly and persuasively with the facts. It was clear to me from my recent visit, that the Iraqi government and other anti-Isil forces are not reacting quickly enough to contradict Isil’s online messages, which have been used both to recruit new fighters and demoralise those who oppose them and we should help them with this. Isil claims must be mocked and disproved as soon as they are made ... the cyber sphere demands reactions as rapid as the kinetic battlefield. 

It is hard to take this analysis seriously. Presumably, this Comedy Central approach will take off in cyberspace, when ISIS fighters have some down time. Ridiculous.

The opponents of ISIS believe that rationality informs ISIS and its fighters and that a solution can be found in appealing to that rationality. Such rationality is based on western bourgeois notions of liberalism. It is blind to the way religious belief operates when it becomes fanatical. In other words it is blind to the contradictions: the Islamic faith is highly rational, until like all religions, it moves into the mystical realm, then it is no longer rational. 

As I have argued previously, the combination of religious belief and the Internet offers ideal conditions under which irrationality can operate. The countervailing forces (to quote John Kenneth Galbraith in another context) on which liberalism relies for its survival, are evacuated within fundamentalist belief, then reified (made concrete) through the Internet. Fundamentalism removes every obstacle to singular belief and action. ISIS and the Islamic State are the result of this unsurpassed alchemy.

A rational program of belief gives way to the mysticism of belief.  

The central contradiction of the Internet - social media or any virtual tool - is its ability to take and make a belief system so completely that no questions can be asked. This is nothing new. It is "ideological grooming." This idea, discussed in Uprising and in previous blogs, does not receive adequate discussion because it may be too close to home for some promoters of Internet applications. There is a blind spot among many people, in their inability to reflect on the way ideology is constructed by the Internet.   

The French academic Armand Mattelart in his 2001 book Information Society makes the point that there is "A new ideology that dare not speak its name..."(2). This idea needs much more consideration, not just in light of the way ISIS uses the Internet. 

Meanwhile, Turnbull made some helpfully nuanced comments about ISIS which suggest that the challenges of addressing a fundamentalist minority within the larger streams of Islam will require more detailed analysis. 

We should not be so delicate as to say Isil and its ilk have ‘got nothing to do with Islam’. But equally we should not tag all Muslims or their religion with responsibility for the crimes of a tiny criminal minority. That is precisely what the extremists want us to do

He immediately gets this wrong as well. Fundamentalists are not criminals. They are singular believers with a utopian ideal that is fully realized in three layers: 

• the religious experience 
• virtual remediation  
• the eternal. 

This mix makes a Comedy Central solution pointless.  It requires deliberation on how to address ideology in the context of religion and in relation to ISIS, in the context of the history of the Middle East.  

Annals of Religious Fundamentalism (American version)

Insufficient energy has been dedicated to discussions of fundamentalist belief and action by the Islamic State, ISIS/ISIL, the Sunni and Wahabi sections of Islam and related religious zealots. It is worth remembering that religious fundamentalism is a very big tent. In fact, it is global, color blind and open to all. Once the tent is entered, then it is highly sectarian, as believers split into hard shell insiders, for  whom belief is clear, safe and secure.

Too little is discussed of religious fundamentalism and how it operates.

There are complexities that function at the individual level:
 - weak mindedness resulting from an absence of education, especially the qualities associated with critical thinking and social science's analytical skills, or the empathetic qualities that flow from Humanities and Liberal Arts instruction
- downward pressures at a domestic and social level - family ideals and related social structures, authoritarian processes and power relations
- societal forces best understood through sociology and critique - such as hopelessness, shame and despair through underemployment and unemployment, immiseration and poverty.

Fundamentalism takes these and other forces and redirects the energies into self-denying success.

Into this complex of energies, inevitably, are key religious texts (The Bible, Quran) that offer solutions to personal challenges in the context of totalizing lifestyles. In a perfect equation, the personal is fully embraced within literal claims made in those texts. Self and context merge in the otherness of the solution, brought by a suffering (super) human and his agents. The forces are difficult to resist when attached to the myths of redemption in an afterlife.  

These forces contribute to religious fundamentalism all over the world. And there are people more than happy to lay claim to the keys to the kingdom of the supreme being or g/God, if willing souls will sublimate themselves to belief in the text and the main messenger.

A critical analysis informed by a commitment to human dignity, equality, shared ownership of production and resources across society, has to look at every expression of religious fundamentalism in order to recognize its ubiquity and the a-front it is to civil society. This includes western types, of which there are too many.

In fact, the US has a troubling history of its own religious fundamentalism. There is a significant absence of public discussion about this field in mainstream US media, probably because it is considered private and no one's business but your own.

Here is an item from my local newspaper the Newton, Massachusetts Tab, December 23, 2015. Thankfully, most US society has moved far beyond this approach:

The Puritans who founded Massachusetts refused to celebrate Christmas because the Bible does not give a date for the birth of Christ, and a winter solstice holiday came from pagan traditions. Furthermore, they thought British celebrations of the holiday encouraged gluttony and excessive drinking. The Massachusetts Bay Colony actually outlawed Christmas celebrations in 1659, punishing anyone caught feasting or taking a day off work with a fine of five shillings. This law was repealed in 1681. 

These days, Christmas trees, lights and alcohol, fun and merriment are part of the celebrations . yet for millions of people around the world, religious fundamentalism offers little joy.

   
  

The Virtual War is official - US Department of Defense will confront ISIS across all available media = Total War.

"The Secretary of Defense should develop creative and agile concepts, technologies, and strategies across all available media to most effectively reach target audiences, to counter and degrade the ability of adversaries and potential adversaries to persuade, inspire, and recruit inside areas of hostilities or in other areas in direct support of the objectives of commanders."

 Major news, somewhat belated. The hot war against ISIS has been joined by the virtual one with this public announcement, courtesy of the Federation of American Scientists. 

A close read of the document makes it clear that this move to the virtual war front was held off because of the checks and balances in place in Congress and the Constitution. The default has been Public Diplomacy. That moment has passed. The US at least, is now in unchartered waters, as the entire defense edifice (the material and the virtual) is engaged in the effort to defeat ISIS.  

This is Total War - there is no other way to describe this escalation.

The US Department of Defense (DOD) is moving to all out warfare against ISIS, with an agreement and permission to use "all available media."  

The change in circumstances will bring all of the above (courtesy of an anonymous artist at 4chan) to the table, then add those aspects of the Internet about which the public is as yet ignorant.

Combing all aspects of Social Media with Internet and Media generally, makes for a chilling prospect. What will be the impact on social life, on domestic life, on the media and communication landscape? 

As Rhode Island Representative James Langevin noted in a Cyber Operations hearing in Congress in March: 

The 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review stated that, and I quote, "The importance of cyberspace to the American way of life and to the Nation’s security makes cyberspace an attractive target for those seeking to challenge our security and economic order." 

The question is: Will Total War in the sense in which I have defined it above, lead to changes in the democratic structures of society? Has Congress given away countervailing power to the DOD? What will become of the media with DOD so embedded in it? 

As David Silver and Alice Marwick asked in their article "Internet Studies in Times of Terror" (Critical Cybercultural Studies, 2006): "What can we do about it?" 

They respond by encouraging academics to generate active strategies to understand, criticize and resist the militarization of social life.  Is it too late? 

Double power of communication on the Internet: a new theory for terror journalism

At this point it’s our ingrained habit to rush with dizzying speed into hyper-political overdrive and treat any shocking new development as fresh fodder for an old argument. 

 Frank Bruni in the New York Times (14 November), writing about the Paris shootings on Friday, November 13. His Op-Ed was titled "The Exploitation of Paris." The point was to draw attention to the self-serving  nature of Twitter commentators whose reactive approach to news leaves little if anything for broader discourse. I am not interested in exploring these right wing nuts here.

I am concerned to identity the speed with which the Internet makes it possible for the irrational to double the irrationality of acts of terror. The double power of communication technology exploits the immediacy of the news and media in general to report, followed immediately by opinion. Both are defined by the irrational, leaving the global public unsure of what if anything is real, then questions of how to make sense of anything. Then a deepening sense of hopelessness.

Into this vacuum comes what Bruni refers to as "hyper-political  overdrive." And it is precisely this intensified environment that creates the hothouse for actions that trouble media critics.

Commentary should be possible, then welcomed, as an anti-dote to the endless flows of unmanageable news.

We need a new theory for terror journalism. What defines it would be the pause button. In other words, divide the double power of Internet based communication by two and come up with slow coverage. Very slow coverage. (In some cases, silence would be better than anything, while we make sense of the event. I disagree with blogger Sam Kriss, who endorses a politics of tragedy with an immediacy that gives too much away to speed, thereby denying space for strategy.)

A new theory of journalism would push against the grain of the necessity of news as "new," as happening now. It would limit the politicization of events, while making politics actually possible.

The old arguments rely on prejudice and immediacy for their currency. Better arguments rely on knowledge that seek a better way.

The result would be to halt the speeding train of bad politics in its digital (Internet) form. Somewhat like slow food, it would produce progressive responses to challenges whose history will not be understood in the latest news flash.

Larry Lessig drops out: was he misguided?

News that Larry Lessig has given up his bid for the US Presidency because the Democratic Party would not give him a place in televised debates is somewhat disappointing, yet predictable.

Lessig - who I first met in 1997 when we were invited speakers  at a Government conference about the Internet in Grand Cayman Islands - offered a tribute to the cause of a democracy worth fighting for in his video announcement. His campaign looked like getting to 1% of electors to qualify. Then the Democratic Party changed the rules.

Citing his friend Aaron Schwartz - who suicided in January 2013, after an intense criminal proceeding was launched against him by the office of the Boston-based Federal Prosecutor, Carmen Ortiz - Lessig moved away from Internet research and activism towards Federal Government funding reform. Schwartz encouraged Lessig to make the move.

Lessig, in typically fine rhetorical form, offered this explanation in the video announcing his departure from his Presidential campaign. (This is not to implicitly denigrate the value of rhetoric - the art of persuasion - it is to draw attention to Lessig's capacity as a speaker).

We must find a way to get all of America to see now that we  can't solve any of the problems that this nation must address until we fix the crippled and corrupted institution of Congress first.

The question for me as an Internet researcher and media/communication scholar is: Could Lessig have achieved more by staying with Internet research and activism?

My answer is yes!

Moving established institutions like Congress is a massive task, too much to expect even from a Harvard Law Professor. At the risk of being considered unkind, "Harvard Law Professor people" unfortunately believe that they can bring undue individual influence to power.

For example, Barak Obama (a Harvard Law graduate) believed, as did his many of his followers, that he could influence Congress, the American public and others to improve US democracy. The institutions of state did not and will not move for him or anyone.

Communication moves people! The Internet is the key contemporary communication mechanism that offers a more effective mouse trap with which to catch the rats! (Sorry about the metaphor).

Larry knew this as did Aaron Schwartz. And yet they believed that a direct intervention to change campaign financing in the US Congress, would be possible through the ballot box. Sad to say, this was misguided. It reflects the narrowness of the Harvard world view. It also embodies technology geekiness, in the sense that technology geeks operate within a limited algorithmic world view.

A critical assessment of Aaron Schwartz's perspective would suggest a geekiness removed from an understanding of the institutional processes of power relations. Conversely, he believed in the power of the Internet, yet wrongly believed that encouraging Lessig to attack campaign finance funding would be the solution to the larger questions about US democracy. Meanwhile right in front of him were the tools to mobilize the change. Both men experienced a knowledge deficit, due to the geekiness quotient that blinded them to the centrality of media-communication.

And yet Lessig is on track to continue his important work in the name of his dear friend and in the name of the progressive cause that can define the Internet's communicative capacity. That gesture, that love from Larry to Aaron cannot be denied.  Indeed, it should be welcomed into the comity of discourse, as perhaps the most important aspect of this saga - the loyalty and affection of one person for another.

Progressive politics needs the Lessigs. Not because they are Harvard Law Professors, but because they are true to the dreamed objectives of progressive democracy in the US. As Lessig added in his announcement:

Like the Progressive Movement a century ago, it will be millions working together from every political stripe, who will win this democracy back.

Maybe, or maybe not. In the current conjuncture, it is unlikely that "every political stripe" will turn up in the Progressive camp. They will turn up, in, on and around the Internet, where new theories of political engagement are playing out.

For example, social movements are connecting with political movements, through Social Media of many types. The implications for what can happen will be influenced by a greater understanding of the political forces at work. Lessig has made a significant contribution to that understanding. What remains is to comprehend the complexity of the Internet-politics-funding nexus.

Thank you Larry!



 

Universals, ISIS, sex slavery - confrontation

An endless war? That is almost the only conclusion to be reached as the Islamic state consolidates itself across Syria and Iraq in this epoch's Caliphate. Meanwhile, the liberal west and its global allies react with bombings and pronouncements by politicians that something must be done to stop the realignment of interests against the western liberalism towards fundamentalist Islam.

Two clearly different world views are staring at each other, offering different perspectives on how society can be organized. These opposing models of society are liberal secularism and religious sectarianism. At it most stark, the contrast is between a world view that acknowledges all beliefs within uncertain, changing boundaries of tolerance, and a fundamentalist world view that tolerates few exceptions to literal interpretations of religious texts.

The tolerance that generally defines liberalism has been considered a universal value system since the Enlightenment. In recent human history, tolerance of differences in belief and action is the hegemonic value system, producing as it were, the State that licenses tolerance. This license is increasing, with, for example, legalized gay marriage in the US in 2015. The Civil Rights Act in the US of 1964 marked the move towards legal equality for all US citizens, in a move that overturned the illiberal idea of racist separation of the races.

And so it goes: incremental shifts in opening up the definition of tolerance. The slow movement toward the universality of tolerance impacts previously entrenched intolerance. The old models of regulation of human nature by any other name, have given way to de-regulation of the same previously regulated aspects of human nature.

It is a complex of contrasts that leads to war.

Openness can be seen in the Internet culture of an idealized non-regulated libertarian space, where the state and the system started from a position that said "Do whatever you want."

The other side insists on preserving regulations within its explicitly codified system of belief . This is the fundamentalist insistence on controlling every minutes of life. It gives and it takes in highly orchestrated public acts - from public beheadings and burnings to crucifixions. These acts are intended to discipline the population who see them enacted in the village square. These same acts are recorded and circulated on the unregulated Internet to make is clear that there are rules and regulations that must be obeyed. These horrifying acts for most people are public expressions of explicit codes. The world watches the embodiment of a system of codes.

(In contrast, the Nazis did not allow people to watch the enactment of their ideological killings of minorities, Jews, the disabled and Leftists because they knew it was against the western code of civilization. There were exceptions. Costa Gavras's 2002 film Amen makes a case for the counterpoint to liberalism by a Jesuit priest and a Waffen-SS officer).  

These days, the dominant view is that two contrasting world views cannot inhabit the same space.

On one hand, tolerance for what is considered neo-liberalism is a field of openness primarily for certain State and corporate interests. The organizing logic of neo-liberalism was described by the US Philosopher Wendy Brown nearly a decade ago and she continues to show how liberalism in its "neo" formation, continues to offer apparent licence to enjoy social lifestyles, while reducing options for emancipation, as it was once imagined in liberalism.

The shifting landscape of the universalism of liberalism was noted by French philosopher Michel Foucault:  "My thesis is this: The universality of our knowledge has been acquired at the cost of exclusions, bans, denials, rejections at the price of a kind of cruelty with regard to reality."

Is the conflict between western liberalism and ISIS the result of a perversion of this idea: that liberalism pushed some behavior into private spaces, never allowing them. It is difficult to imagine how a universal becomes a universal if it disallows some actions, except through the hand of State regulation.

ISIS and sex slavery

The big recent story about ISIS has been the official sanction of Sex slavery in the ISIS Caliphate. It is enshrined in a closed system of non-liberal reason.

The story came to light in the New York Times August 13, 2015 article, "Theology of Rape" by Rukmini Callimachi. This comprehensive article was premised on the universality of liberalism's concept of tolerance for the dignity of women not to be treated as objects for sexual pleasure.

The important point about the article is the description of the religious codes that allow the Caliphate's sex trade to occur. Within the Caliphate, the theocratic legal system insists that specific rights can be claimed. Reading the article, one can see that the Caliphate marks the end of the west's insistence on its universals. The hegemony of western universals is over.

There are two reasons why the Caliphate will continue: religion and the Internet.

Religion: The ideological texture of ISIS appears to be increasingly informed by legal structures formed around a theocratic State system. As Callimachi's New York Times article noted, the rationality driving the Caliphate is formally constructed in Sunni Islamic theology. There is almost none of the informality of liberalism, which is where liberalism's tolerance comes from: do no harm.

Internet: The structure of Caliphate life in the areas it controls across Syria and Iraq are consolidating. The west can see that  from the way ISIS tells the world what they are doing. The publicness of the Internet works in combination with religion, horrifying the liberal world view, even as the Caliphate announces itself.

The only solution to the explicit images of theocracy in action is war from the west. But the west will find that it cannot win.

As Patrick Coburn, the most highly regarded journalist reporting on ISIS noted in The Independent  on 30 August, 2015, ISIS says: "You may hate what you are seeing, but there is nothing you can do to stop it."

Entire intellectual maps need to be redrawn along with the Middle East's geographical Broken Borders. The national borders imposed on the Middle East in the nineteenth century by European colonialists are evaporating. The Caliphate is putting an end to them and in so doing has put an end to established ideas of liberalism.

The combination of religion with the Internet - theocracy with communication - allows another set of universals to move into focus. This could mean endless war, or it could mean two coexistent world views.

Caveat
One caveat: the rise of ISIS and the Caliphate is undoubtedly a major site of disinformation and misinformation. The following headline caught my eye:
Turkey Pays Former CIA Director and Lobbyists to Misrepresent Attacks on Kurds and ISIS

Information warfare is intense, with the west and ISIS using the same digital mechanisms to tell their story on the Internet. In this space it is likely that no one is telling the truth.

Then there are the people writing the laws in the Caliphate, where every step is regulated truth...  


    

     

ISIS consolidating as a networked ideological organization

Public commentary about ISIS has persisted in discussing its "horror," to quote Francis Ford Coppola's film about Vietnam, Apocalypse Now, quoting Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899).  All the horror has come to the public through the Internet, whose televisual excess is a study in itself.

To add to the sense of horror, there has been a wave of incomprehensibility. It has gradually yet quickly over the past six months, given way to acceptance that a military campaign by the forces of liberalism can only succeed with a massive invasive effort, or something...  "Something" being a way of getting the conventions of explanatory analysis back to the depiction of chaos of Coppola's Vietnam.

The only certainty about ISIS is that it exists and is likely to continue to exist. My theory is that the Internet will guarantee this survival outcome because this particular jihad is a networked ideological organization.

In contrast, the forces arrayed against it are also networked, yet in a mirror image metaphor of the Internet, distributed in such a way that there is no single pathway of comprehension to the singularity of the networked ideological organization that is ISIS. More importantly, unlike ISIS, the opposition organization is chaotic and consequently feckless, conflicted by divergent interests.

In Uprising, I argued that "ideological grooming" was was way of understanding how the Internet "creates" jihadists. The networked ideological organization driving ISIS has a singular focus which reinforces its success. This is, the "singular focus" is a key characteristic of the fundamentalism that makes ISIS a success.

ISIS jihadists are constructed in ways that have recently been referred to as "persuasion profiling" by Maurit Kaptein.

While persuasion profiling has the glowing aura of capitalist confidence about it - how to sell more stuff to consumers - the unfortunate insight to accept is that the same communication technology that makes it possible to sell consumerism through profiling to weak minded consumers everywhere, is selling jihadist ideas over the Internet as well. This convergence of "ideological grooming" sees the Internet providing the machinery of communication for anything - consumerism or jihad. This is a critically essential perspective. It also makes one uncomfortable, because it is not possible to merely point the finger at jihadists and their singularity, when westernized consumers are using the same Internet-based communication tools to achieve their personal singular goals.

Important research from Sherry Turkle at the MIT initiative on technology and self reported in her 2012 book Alone Together, offers concrete support for the ideological grooming of young people who are "always on." It is from within this global community of young people that jihadists are being recruited for fight for ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Few if any researchers are making this connection because it is distressing to accept: the global Internet goes both ways! (It could be the Internet's AC/DC effect).

In this situation, different, new, alternative or contradictory ideas are excluded in an endless feedback loop of ideological reinforcement. Ideas are conveyed over the Internet through the unmediated power of visual stimuli on the monitor. (There is a lot of useful research to be conducted on youth and Internet influence in decision making.)

Increasingly, psychological aspects of human behavior are being used to attract attention to sites - and keep users on line. While this is not the place to engage in that discussion, the value propositions of Google, Facebook and most other Internet behemoths are founded on reconstituting the human eye-ball as the essential access point for action. It is entirely appropriate to recognize this contradictory characteristic of the Internet: that the intensification of visual stimuli through higher quality pixelation generates ideological encasement.

"Persuasion" is hardly needed in this context. Once the science of keeping the eye engaged is perfected, the story has a beginning and an end, a start and a finish that is determined once the eye is fully engaged. (I have written about technological determinism before on this blog. My argument about ISIS is an extension of the case for technological determinism.)

That many liberal critics do not want to accept the closed or encased nature of the Internet's ideological construction is a serious limitation.The enthusiasm for the pleasures / potential of the Internet has produced its counter, a refusal to shut down that pleasure. Alternatively, there is a naive belief in the capacity of communication to offer a public, even revolutionary good that reproduces emancipation in a liberal utopia.

 I am thinking here of Andrew Feenberg, who is not so much a liberal as a Marxist theoretician (and a very good one). The closing criticism by William Rehg of Feenberg's book Between Reason and Experience makes the point:

Feenberg's oeuvre reveals an enduring confidence that local exercises of agency and resistance, aided by participatory forms of administration, can gather enough momentum to redirect technology and society in surprising ways. Although there may be wisdom in that confidence, it assumes we have not all been thoroughly seduced -- or imprisoned -- by the profitable comforts of consumption.

Frankly, we are at the point where the redirection of technology and society has indeed been redirected in "surprising ways," as the Internet and ISIS connection makes clear: talk about local exercises of agency! For ISIS, Feenberg's hoped for ambitions of localized activism are inverted, within a negative view of his aspirations.

IS has used the Internet for its own purposes - organizing its business, its campaigns and management and religious, economic and social programs. The model for this combination of political media is considered Leni Riefenstahl's documentary film from 1932 Triumph of the Will. As Nazi propaganda, it worked as a feel-good tool to convey to the masses the message of the new Germany under Hitler. Seen in terms of Walter Benjamin's definition of proletarianization, in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," it took an otherwise uplifting art form - cinema - and used it as propaganda to speak to the lowest  - the immature and irrational - instincts of the proletariat.

On 7 October 2014, The Guardian published a story by Steve Rose, "The ISIS propaganda war:a high tech media jihad," which took this line of argument. Nearly a year later there is less public discussion of this matter and more recognition that ISIS is here to stay. Certainly it is well researched, as  indicated in Ben Taub's article "Journey to Jihad" in The New Yorker  June 1, 2015.  

Furthermore, the "So-called Islamic state" was referred to as "IS" in July 2015 (short for Islamic State) by National Public Radio in the US. This implicit change in reference was presumably not welcomed. The earlier nomenclature of the "So-called Islamic State" has reappeared. To speak of "IS" is to give it legitimacy.

Nevertheless, on July 21 2015, The New York Times called it. The connection between the Internet and the state is clear from the article. A close read indicates - as has been the case for some time - that the IS does not rule by terror alone. In fact it rules by the Internet.

In Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate, Abdel Bari Atwan argues for the centrality of all things digital. As the preferred apparatus by which the ISIS message is offered, the Internet carries the media of video atrocities and speeches, recruitment appeals and politics. As a working example of a networked ideological organization, this application of all things digital cannot be dismissed. As Malise Ruthven wrote in reviewing Atwan's book in the July issue of the New York Review of Books: "... ISIS terror is a systematically applied policy that follows the ideas put forward in jihadist literature, notably in an on-line tract, The management of Savagery, by the al-Qaeda ideologue Abu Bakr Naji." (emphasis added)

To counter the consolidation of ISIS and thus the public view that the US and its allies cannot control the entire geo-political world, another point is gaining ground in some quarters. This is the head in the sand and "protect the homeland approach:" as long as citizens in the US / NATO don't experience ISIS directly, then let it go. Why the ISIS threat is totally overblown by John Mueller makes this point, as a kind of colonial reaction to going to war: as long as the war is over there it can stay there.

There is great difficulty in making sense of the rise of ISIS. Jacques, a reader commentating on the above New York Times story made the point very well:

 The question the West needs to ask is, if not ISIS, who? Who will promise more sustainable stability in the future? How could ISIS ever be defeated? Already it's a minuscule army - less than 100,000 - controlling an area with a population of almost 9 million. The regions sunnis would prefer ISIS to the Iranian based militias who fight in the name of Iraq these days (a gift of the Blair-Bush-Cheney junta). (21 July)

In the August edition of the New York Review of Books an anonymous analyst suggested that "It is not clear whether our culture can ever develop sufficient knowledge, rigor, imagination or humility to grasp the phenomenon of ISIS."

The same analyst indicated the presence of Twitter as part of the ISIS success strategy:

 In ISIS: The State of Terror, Stern and Berger provide a fascinating analysis of the movement’s use of video and social media. They have tracked individual Twitter accounts, showing how users kept changing their Twitter handles, piggybacked on the World Cup by inserting images of beheadings into the soccer chat, and created new apps and automated bots to boost their numbers. Stern and Berger show that at least 45,000 pro-movement accounts were online in late 2014, and describe how their users attempted to circumvent Twitter administrators by changing their profile pictures from the movement’s flags to kittens. But this simply raises the more fundamental question of why the movement’s ideology and actions—however slickly produced and communicated—have had popular appeal in the first place.

As a networked ideological organization, IS could prove to be the ultimate case study in what western liberalism will see as the horror of Internet smartness.