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.

The News and ISIS

Writing in 1980, the Cambridge University-based Welsh Cultural Studies scholar Raymond Williams made the following comment: 

Let us face it then: the news has been very bad lately. But it is very difficult to be sure how much of this badness has been in the events themselves, and how much in their intense and relentless interpretation by the authorities: a one-sided polemic ..." Williams on News

It was, Williams suggested, a style of news which he could not remember being at such a "pitch since the late Forties." 

He was writing about the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, both of whom, in the early days of their international preening, worked to assert UK (The Malvinas/Falklands War) and US dominance around the world (Afghanistan, USSR, Nicaragua). 

Watching media reports of ISIS and the consolidation of the Caliphate across the Syria-Iraq border, the news here too has been "very bad." The urgency of all the reporting has been an inside out litany of puzzlement. 

The news was once open to the following quizzical analysis, suggested Williams:

The fact that certain events have undoubtedly occurred – have happened to people, have been observed, have been reliably reported, have been tested from the evidence of participants and witnesses – has been used to conceal or to override the equally evident fact that as they move from events to news they are being narrated, and that certain long-standing problems of narration – the identity of the narrator, his authority, his point of view, his assumed relationship to his readers or hearers, his possible wider purposes in selecting and narrating these events in this way – come inevitably into question. Williams 

 (Sensitivity to gender bias - his this and his that -  was not yet part of the system of discussion in 1980).

The news in mid-2015  is less "a one-sided polemic" open to questions about the man who was presenting it to the public. Now, it is a multi-leveled series of unstable modal points, data even, whose provenance is perfectly known, down to the millimeter, thanks to Global Positioning Systems!  

The polemic has been replaced by chaotic disbelief in urgent precision. For every news authority, there is an alternative, including the enemy itself. Television news increasingly switches sometimes interchangeably, between ISIS-provided live action footage and Iraqi, Syrian government footage, .

Questions about how to make sense of what ISIS has achieved swirl across time-zones, evacuated then filled with ideological interests that offer less a narration, as Williams suggested, and more a pastiche, a dada-esque patchwork of networked information. The single point around which this story forms is that of the end of historical imperial interests in Iraq and Syria. The Broken Borders  plans which I have written about before, are a key motivation for ISIS and the Caliphate. The colonial borders have been broken, as the borders of Iraq and Syria are patrolled by members of ISIS: this is now an "old" story, (new borders - 2014) yet relevant to the way the official news presents the situation: resolvable with more violence. 

The polemic of the single narrative has been extended with the singular narrative of violence. It is a narrative rooted in the military-industrial complex, and in its singularity it remains a vestige of the single imperial narrative. 


Here is Williams again on this "old" form narrative news.

 But the whole problem is the selection of one interpretation as news. Williams  

The news now happens in the networked environment. News watchers flick between channels, making up their own minds even as the official versions insist on the singularity of the violence narrative, dominated, sad to say, by a US appetite for violence. 

Williams argued in favor of the change in this singular approach in 1980! He saw networked communication as a positive response to the singularity. New communications offered an enlargement of opinions which reflected the social conditions which many people experienced, but which remained unreported:

One notable opportunity for such enlargement now exists in the new communications technology, especially in the conmmon-carrier (sic) and interactive versions of teletext. Williams

Yes, the news remains very bad lately. It is also creating new opportunities for the public to understand the chaos of many voices. Is it possible that out of the new spaces of networked news, better social relations will emerge? 

Resistance to Murdoch and News Corporation

Organized resistance is challenging the taken-for-granted interference in political campaigns by Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation and News International.

The above image indicates how News International and Murdoch is seeking to influence the outcome of the UK election in 2015. It shows the Tory leader, David Cameron, in Mr Murdoch's pocket.  It is part of a long narrative that involves Murdoch in UK politics.

This resistance is welcomed by all democrats who respect the ideal of public discourse in a media environment free of the individual interests of media owners.

On the other hand, media interests run by the state in the interests of national development, security and sovereignty deserve support ... It is a difficult discussion in many countries where state broadcasters have been politicized by limiting interests, like News International working in cooperation with conservative political parties. (Australia is a case in point, with major cut backs to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2014. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has been similarly reduced to a shadow if its former critical, progressive self.)

Having progressive media is a difficult ideal, except in the Internet space. Public media, broadcasting in particular, must not be forgotten, or left to wither, driven by hand-outs and fund raisers. This is the National Public Radio model in the USA these days.

Resistance to Murdoch and vested interests is welcome. There are other emergent issues in media as well - presses that reflect labor and minority concerns. It is a complex environment that is changing, as the photo indicates.

Napoleoni on the Caliphate - new national boundaries

 At a recent event in Seattle, Loretta Napoleoni spoke about her understanding of ISIS/ISIL and the emergence of the Caliphate. The redesign of state borders took place in 2014 with the announcement on June 14 2014, of The Caliphate. Announcement

Her recorded comments were broadcast in Sounds of Dissent, WZBC, 90.3, Boston College Radio, March 28, 2015.

Napoleoni is the author or Terror Incorporated: Tracing the dollars behind the terror networks and The Islamic Pheonix: Islamic State and the Redrawing of the Middle East (2014) among others. Bio

She is an enlivened speaker as a Ted talk indicates: Napoleoni Talk

Her understanding of the Caliphate can be taken at face value if only because the counter argument in circulation amount to denials of the obvious. Any attempt to make the counter argument is flawed by the fact that the Caliphate exists and functions.

Here is Napoleoni on the Caliphate:

None of them (the US President and other world leaders) use that word "Caliphate" because they don't want to admit we are not dealing with an armed organization, we are dealing with a state. The use of ISIL, ISIS is actually to prevent admitting that they have been able to create a nation. So they actually have succeeded in nation building. 

Against this, the dominant media representations of the Caliphate have been of an unhinged group of Internet-recruited terrorists posting horrific videos of violence and murder as part of a direct challenge to western values of civility, decency and liberal sensibility (meaning tolerance for other religions and The Other more generally).

It is in the land claim redefining borders, that the real challenge is playing out, Here Balkanization has taken place - new borders and a self managed state exists and functions outside of the protocols of Enlightenment systems of justice and individual autonomy.  In fact, the collision of values is to be found in the western orientation to individual realization of the self and state sponsored access to knowledge, versus the Caliphate's religious demand for collective agreement of a specific reading and interpretation of the Koran. The individualistic versus collectivist reading of civilization is clearly becoming defined.

The Internet enhances the presence of the Caliphate, allowing it to organize its business, as well as promote recruitment of fighters, wives and supporters, plus expand militant action. Perhaps more important, are the deep historical roots that connect the Khilafat in Pakistan and India, (and potentially Afghanistan and the region generally) to the Caliphate of ISIS / ISIL. This is a powerful history that draws on past injustices to the religious-ethnic nexus. example and Ghandi's interest

The arrangement of borders is taking place marking the realization of long-held dreams for theocratic states. The Internet reinforces the claims, drawing in believers like moths to the flame. Napoleoni is right to make the point that the moment world leaders start referring to the Caliphate, the new state is acknowledged and with it a long held dream...    

Is the US really an advanced country?

"US businesses do not need to give workers any days off whatsoever – for vacation or sick days – under federal law." does liberal democracy = no holidays

As a naturalized citizen, it is sometimes difficult to keep the faith of my citizenship when stories like this emerge. Not having holidays for a native-born Australian like me seems an impossibility. 

Australia, "Land of the long weekend," has, like most countries in Western Europe, been defined by social democracy. The national political economy is historically different, defined by wonderful successes, where the language of business is not the default... although that, sadly, is changing. The default has been a series of compromises between labor and management, where the Labor parties have insisted that the workforce deserves a break.

Not surprisingly, this Guardian article caught my eye.

The US is also the only developed country that doesn’t guarantee paid maternity or parental leave to its citizens. Three states have local policies.

In 2014, 77% of Americans working for privately owned companies got paid vacation days, typically between 10 to 14 days a year. And 74% of full-time workers and 24% of part-time workers in the private sector were offered paid sick leave, according to the US Department of Labor.

 “Today, we are the only advanced country on Earth that doesn’t guarantee paid sick leave or paid maternity leave to our workers. Forty-three million workers have no paid sick leave – 43 million,” Barack Obama said during his State of the Union address in January.

Within the political economy of social versus liberal democracy comes the role of the corporation in US society. 

The Guardian report stated that Microsoft is insisting that its US suppliers give their employees holidays. The privatization of labor operates in this way, where private interests set their own rules, exploit labor however it likes and refuse to engage in humane treatment of workers, until government or a major corporation makes a determination for humane treatment. 

It is tempting to congratulate Microsoft. But the shift here, as in much of the discussion in the technology sector, is of a domain that has been seeking emancipation from public policy. In many contexts the IT sector has actively sought to operate outside of, even refuse a role for government. This is the anti-statist, de-regulationist, all-regulation-is-bad school of political economy, run by people who misread Adam Smith and never intend to get to Marx. This recent article from Der Spiegal lays out the situation: the Germans don't buy it.  Der Spiegal - IT trends 

The operationalization of the libertarian perspective works well within the dominant liberal democratic paradigm. Not being awarded holidays, sick days, humane working conditions, takes society back beyond liberalism to a state barely above feudalism, as workers are considered chattels, owned and used, then thrown out as the emperors of technology decide their fate. 

• Australians, stand up for the dignity of labor - more long weekends! 
• Alternatively, is it time to say? "Put away that computer and the feudal values it represents."    
• Other critics will surely ask, Is the US really an advanced society?   

Reverse history: Distributed ISIS as the global jihad?

Do we have to watch the world get turned upside down by counter-revolutionary religious fervor?

It appears that we have little if any say in it. The fundamentalist religious action of ISIS is there for anyone to see on Internet videos: beheadings, torture, celebratory convoys, martyrs, the works. The media richness of the shift backwards in human history is almost beyond belief.

What is stunning is the way the clock that applied to European, then western and human civilization through the agency of the Enlightenment has been stopped. Then wound back. The reversal of history is achieving a perverse universality through ISIS. The universality of liberalism and its ideals was the revolution that emanated from France. Now the universality of non-liberalism exists as an alternative.

ISIS began as a local Islamic uprising against imperially-imposed national borders. The revolt is rapidly moving to a new phase, stretching itself and its influence largely through media memes, to anyone with an axe to grind and the pathology to apply the axe.

That amounts to a lot of people with an interest in sharia law, the Caliphate and Apocalyptic Islamic theology, as Graeme Wood helpfully documented in "What ISIS really wants," in The Atlantic, February, 2015. What ISIS really wants The other side of this coin is becoming clear - as the Caliphate consolidates in parts of the Middle East, a number of interest groups express support in other geographical areas of the planet.

Distributed revolt has a model in play (in the Caliphate) plus a network of activist agents. Or to put is another way, many thousands of ISIS supporters now have agency in areas remote from Syria, Iraq and Turkey.  
   
The news that Nigeria's Boko Haram has recognized ISIS consolidates a bad week or two. Islamist militants with ISIS orientations have been appearing in Pakistan, Afghanistan and, well, everywhere.  Boko Haram goes global This is in addition to recruits attempting to move to Syria then into the Caliphate, prompted by ISIS evangelists on the Internet. Indeed, as the travel associated with the recruits is madeillegal and halted, the connections and activism is translated to localized activity. Through on-line sites, they can plan remote dedication.

(The model here is closing down a heroin distribution site - it pops up on the other side of town).

The question is where to go to find solutions to the emergence of this movement?

What is the value in arming fighters and placing them in designated war zones? ISIS has become a distributed struggle. It is virtual and material.

In the 1990's there there was an "end of history" movement, prompted by Francis Fukuyama's book of the same name. Is it time to rethink the idea that global forward momentum is over and with it assumed history? There is plenty to think about here, even years after the original claims by Fukuyama: end of history

Somewhere, the pieces will need to be brought together in a new global governance theory that acknowledges that the ways of "being enlightened" are no longer a universal ideal. What then?

Block and filter Internet information in India - How culture and speech rights collide

The Internet was pretty much invented by the American belief in free speech. As an unregulated communication technology, it has been promoted as a vehicle in which anything can be uttered. The libertarian impulse driving this approach has been codified in US Constitutional Rights, most commonly the First Amendment of The Bill of Rights:

.Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Rights and related documents

The claims therein are barely contestable for Americans. The free flow of information on the Internet seems to approach the realization of this "code." In the US, entire enterprises are built around the free exercise of speech.

What happens when those same rights move off-shore? If the US Constitution applies strictly to US citizens on US soil, What happens when US citizens and their enterprises promote speech rights outside the United States? Such an act would surely qualify as improper, because the US Constitution is not the same as the European Union's, or India's or China's.. any other nation.

To make the story more complex, what happens when US speech rights are embodied in the Internet? As a global phenomena, does this amount to the imposition US speech values on all Internet users? In such an instance, is the Internet a means of extending US Constitutional ideals everywhere?  

There are increasing instances where US speech rights operating within US Internet firms are merely taken up in the system regardless of their suitability for other cultures. Informational Free Speech is assumed as a global good.

There are several areas for discussion: Constitutional Law, International Law, Jurisprudence - the theory of law itself and its application, United States Government ideals, Culture, Internet Studies, Media Studies, History, Theology and Heritage. The list can be extended of course. It illustrates the importance of interdisciplinary research.

Imagine the surprise Speech Rights advocates and libertarian political activists had when the Indian Supreme Court ordered three major US Internet firms to stop carrying information. The information was culturally specific and sensitive to India.

It is information that gives Indian parents details about the gender of a fetus. Acting on that information has meant aborting a female fetus in favor of keeping a male one.

Here is the report.    

Foreign Policy South Asia Daily, January 29.

The Indian Supreme Court ordered companies including Google Inc., Yahoo! Inc., and Microsoft Corp. not to advertise sex determination tests that reveal a child's sex, according to news reports on Wednesday (BBC, Livemint).

The interim court order came after the central government said the three search engines have "relevant technology and deep-domain knowledge and expertise to block/filter the words/phrases/expressions and sponsored links" (NDTV).

The Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act, 1994, prohibits advertisements related to prenatal determination of sex due to the widespread practice of aborting female fetuses in India.

According to the 2011 census, there has been a decline in the number of girls under the age of seven. Activists claim that as many as eight million female fetuses in India may have been aborted in the last decade.

-- Neeli Shah

The agreement among Indian legislators is that female abortions, should be stopped, by stopping information about it in that country. US Internet firms are thereby drawn into this cultural collusion.

A great research project would be to list all the informational exceptions to Internet Free Speech such as this one, by nations outside the US. what speech is not allowed that collides with US ideals. The list in the US is extensive as well...