Suicides by prisoners as with bobby sands and the

military actions. Suicides by prisoners, as with Bobby Sands and the other IRA politicals and with Guantanamo
detainees is asymmetrical war in one sense, but it is better seen as an act that takes the conflict to a level beyond war.
It moves the struggle, for just treatment in both cases, into the purely political realm nullifying the massive military power
of the incarcerators.
When the political situation is favorable, as with the US war against the hated (by the Afghans most of all) Taliban or the
degraded and disgraced regime of Saddam Hussein, easy victories are possible for high tech militaries. But the same
opponent, in a different situation, can be deadly. Or one’s opponents can morph, from anti-Shah students into Islamist
mullahs in Iran or from Bathists to Iraqi nationalists. War is never simple and it never stays still – to forget this lesson is
to court disaster.

State Control
Support for Technological War Apparatus Encourages the Information State to Enhance its
Mechanisms of Control
Lucas
Walsh and
Julien
Barbara
, Institute for Citizenship & Globalization, Deakin University, Melbourne, “Speed,
International Security, and ‘‘NewWar’’ Coverage in Cyberspace,” Journal of Computer-Media Communication, Spring
2006
(JSTOR)
Virilio argues that the kind of politics to emerge from a reliance on technology amounts to a cathodic democracy, in which
there is a shift of representation to the ‘‘virtual theatricalization of the real world’’ (Virilio, 1995a, p. 33). Virilio warns of ‘‘de-
realization’’ involving a generalized breakdown of individual and social relationships to time, space, and movement (Wilson,
1994) . Technologies promoting instantaneous transmission, such as satellites, may actually restrict mobility by recasting
the scale of human environment and human perception of reality itself. The consequence, Virilio argues, is a ‘‘catastrophic
sense of incarceration now that humanity is literally deprived of horizon’’ (Virilio, 1997, p. 41). What emerges is a ‘‘montage
of temporalities which are the product not only of the powers that be but of the technologies that organize time.’’
(Virilio, cited in Wark, 1988) . Elsewhere, Virilio writes that ‘‘[w]here the polis once inaugurated a political theater, with
the agora and the forum, today there remains nothing but the cathode ray screen, with its shadows and specters of a
community in the process of disappearing’’ (Virilio, 1987, p. 23).
Warning of a ‘‘loss of orientation in matters political,’’ Virilio (1999) suggests that this shift has vast implications for the way
that we relate to our environments and each other. Recent developments in telecommunications and other technological
breakthroughs thus impose simultaneity, immediacy, and ubiquity upon everyone in a way that Virilio likens to an
‘‘information bomb, just about to explode’’ (Oliveira, 1996).