Our interventions offer an exploration of the grey zones created by grey
media, where the jubilant exercise of power takes the form of
technoscientific, technosocial manipulation of data, and where the
ambiguities of behaviour and of meaning in the shadowy world of covert
operations have become systemic, machinic, encompassing human and nonhumans
alike.
Drawn from a work-in-progress that aims both to capture the changing nature
of power in contemporary media, especially in its increasingly technosocial
aspects, and to distill them into a series of useful ploys or tactics, our
interventions take the form of stratagems that are practically and formally
inspired by the writings of Machiavelli, Gracian, and Schopenhauer (amongst
others). As media increasingly become directly operational - as control
systems - and biological - in their closer correlation with the triggering
and monitoring of affect and information - whilst also growing more
distributed, autonomous and integrated both amongst themselves and across
multiple scales of reality, a stratagematic approach to the new
opportunities this situation presents points towards a new pragmatics of
power. By placing expert systems, databases, decision support mechanisms,
HCI, along with the sub-media world of leaks, permission structures, and
networks into the loose continuum between the crude mind games of military
PsyOps and the stupidly intelligent capacities of contemporary computing
science, where neutral technicity gearshifts into the a-moral calculus of
strategy, our interventions and the Evil Media project more generally offer
a practical exploration of Machiavelli’s claim that "Entrepreneurs are
simply those who understand that there is little difference between
obstacle and opportunity and are able to turn both to their advantage".