This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Cyber security and the politics of time Stevens, Timothy Charles Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 25. Sep. 2021 1 ] Cyber Security and the Politics of Time Timothy Charles Stevens Thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy King’s College London Department of War Studies November 2013 2 Abstract Time is an under-represented topic in security studies and International Relations (IR). The development and implementation of security measures are often justified as necessary responses to the contemporary rate of global change yet little attention is granted time and temporality as factors influencing the politics and practices of security. This thesis proposes that security can be understood within the framework of a ‘politics of time’ (chronopolitics), in which collective perceptions of time and temporality are constitutive of security politics and practices. Its principal object is cyber security, which aims to regulate and exploit complex sociotechnical systems of networked and interdependent information technologies. The thesis examines how cyber security actors imagine time and temporality in (post)modernity and the implications of these temporal biases for the politics of cyber security. It explores how cyber security actors imagine the accelerating present and the relative deceleration of political decision-making; how apocalyptic narratives of imminent catastrophe illustrate concerns about the immanent dangers of technology; how the past is mobilised through historical analogies to understand dystopian futures; how the future is metaphorically inhabited through preparedness exercises and simulations, and literally populated through education, training and recruitment. These ‘chronotypes’ inform the cyber security imaginary and disclose a manifold of deeper chronopolitical tendencies, theorised here as the logics of assemblage, real time, event, and eschaton. The thesis makes an original contribution to IR by promoting the interdisciplinary analysis of time to help understand the politics and practices of contemporary security. Declaration The copyright of this dissertation rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. 3 Contents Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………………………………….……... 5 1 Introduction ………………………………………………..…………………………………………………….. 6 1.1 Cyber Security ………………………………………………….……………………………….…………. 8 1.2 Imagination and Community ………………………………………………………………….……. 15 1.3 Time in International Relations ……………………….………………………………….……….. 22 1.4 Approach and Methods ………………………………….………………………….………………… 25 1.5 Thesis Structure ……………………………………..………..………….………..……………………. 30 2 Towards a Politics of Time 2.1 Introduction: From Time to Temporality …………………………………………….……..… 35 2.2 Emergent Sociotemporality ……………………………………………….……………….……….. 40 2.3 Knowing Nonhuman Temporalities …………………………………………….…….……….. 45 2.4 Now and the Present ………………………………………………………………….……….………. 50 2.5 Temporality and Narrative ………………………………………….………………………..…….. 57 2.6 The Time of Politics ………………………………………………………………….…………….……. 62 2.7 Towards a Politics of Time ………………………………………………………………….…….…. 70 3 Diagnosing the Present 3.1 Introduction: The Revolutionary Present ……………………………….……………….…… 76 3.2 Speed and Acceleration ………………………………………….…………………..……..……….. 84 3.3 Netspeed I: Acceleration ………………………………………….……………………………….…. 91 3.4 Netspeed II: Deceleration ………………………………………….…………………..……………. 101 3.5 Diagnosing the Present …………………………………………….…………….……….………….. 112 4 Imagining the Future 4.1 Introduction: Future and Futurity …………………………….………………………….………. 115 4.2 Imagination and Dystopia …………………………………………..……………………………….. 120 4.3 Catastrophe and Apocalypse ………………………………………..……………………….…….. 126 4.4 Immanence and Accident ………………………………………….…………………………….….. 135 4.5 Revelation, Transformation and Desire ………………………….………………………….… 145 4.6 Imagining the Future …………………………………………….………………………………….…. 153 4 5 Arguing Through the Past 5.1 Introduction: Past, Present and the Appeal to History ………….……………………... 157 5.2 Provocative Politics ………………………………………………….………….………………………. 167 5.3 Memory and Identity …………………………………………….………………….…………………. 178 5.4 Arguing Through the Past ………………………………….………………………….…………….. 189 6 Inhabiting the Future 6.1 Introduction: Anticipation and Preparation ……………………….…………………........ 197 6.2 Exercise and Simulation …………………………………………..………………………………….. 204 6.3 The Public Sensorium …………………………………………….………………….………………… 213 6.4 Recruitment and Education ……………………………………….……………………….……….. 223 6.5 Inhabiting the Future …………………………………………….………………………….…………. 236 7 Cyber Security and the Politics of Time 7.1 Introduction: Logics and Chronopolitics ………………………….………….…………..…… 241 7.2 The Logic of Assemblage ………………………………….…….……………………………………. 243 7.3 The Logic of Real Time ……………………………..…………………….……………………………. 249 7.4 The Logic of Event ……………………………………….……………….……………………………… 257 7.5 The Logic of Eschaton …………………………………….………………………….………………… 264 7.6 Cyber Security and the Politics of Time ………………………………………….……………. 271 8 Conclusion ………………..……………………………………………………………………….………………. 278 Reference List ………………………………………………………………………………………….………… 286 5 Acknowledgements I would like to thank David Bhowmik, Daniel Cordle, Kathryn Marie Fisher, Chris Fryer, Mike Innes, Jo Kovacik, Sean Lawson, Sam Liles and Jan Nederveen Pieterse for sharing ideas and research materials. I have benefited greatly from the collegiality and wisdom of my colleagues at King’s College London, particularly Neville Bolt, Peter McBurney, Nick Michelsen, Richard Overill, Thomas Rid and John Stone. My supervisors deserve particular gratitude: David Betz marshalled this project to completion and my debt to him is immeasurable; Theo Farrell has long been an encouraging voice without whom this thesis would not have been possible. My examiners, Christopher Coker and Andrew Hoskins, provided comments and insights I am fortunate to be able to incorporate into this work. I acknowledge the financial support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/H022678/1) and Charles Wolfson Townsley. I cannot thank my parents and family enough for their support and encouragement. To Lu, who makes all things possible, and Stanley, from whom I have already learnt more than he will ever know, my eternal love, thanks and appreciation. 6 1 INTRODUCTION For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.1 Security is an inherently temporal proposition. In the modern political philosophical tradition, security is an essential bulwark against the exigencies of an unknowable future. For Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan (1651) is a foundation of Western political theory, security is the antidote to a situation in which man, ‘in the care of future time, hath his heart all day long, gnawed on by feare of death, poverty, or other calamity; and has no repose, nor pause of his anxiety, but in sleep’.2 Security arises as a central feature of the social contract between people and the state, in which the pursuit and practices of security are invoked to calm the jittery present by the imposition of order on times yet to come. As Hobbes states elsewhere, diligence is always required: ‘For we cannot tell the good and bad apart, hence even if there were fewer evil men than good men, good, decent people would still be saddled with the constant need to watch, distrust, anticipate and get the better of others, and to protect themselves by all possible means’.3 Security is always an exercise in futurity, a perpetual search for ways to mitigate uncertainty and the potentialities of fear, conflict and violence, even as each living moment fades immediately into the past. Security is always political, whether we believe security to be epiphenomenal to politics or foundational of politics.4 Like security, politics is perennially concerned with time. Every political act is always a ‘process in time’, oriented towards a particular end, the conception of 1 Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2002/1951), 85. 2 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck, rev. edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University