Bioviolence Summarised

Aylan, Isis, Jihadi John, Grenfell, Trump. It has been quite a half-decade hasn’t it?

Harambe, Guantanamo, Syria, Brexit, Trump. A lustrum of conflict and vitriol that feels unparalleled.

The War on Terror, keyboard warriors, decapitation videos, memewarfare, drones. The way we war now, for example, is not as it used to be. A digitised non-engagement with an almost fictitious enemy.

Tagging, surveillance, data-harvesting, Cambridge Analytica, hacking democracy, the return of the Russians. On the home front our privacy has become monetised, politicised, weaponised and compromised. We have become dupes of a digital draft.

Hate speech, Twitterstorms, life-ruins, clicktivism, trolls. When did we get so angry?

Mass migration, the Jungle, the swarm, fortress Europe, child-migrant scandals, Build that Wall! A neo-liberal imperialism of exclusion has replaced the old imperialism of invasion. And we are too selfish and just a little bit too racist to care.

Post-truth, click-baiting, fake news, factobesity, fact-checking, Facebook. What future is there for evidence-based governance in a post-truth, post-fact age?

Brexit, Trump, Alt-right, Trump, demagocracies, Trump, memeweaving, Trump, trial by Twitter, Trump. WTF?! How did that happen?

What does it all, if anything, mean? I can sum it up in one word: bioviolence.

The last five years have seen a flurry of political, social and technological events that have spewed out of the global body politic with such velocity and force we’ve been left bloated, breathless and a tad worse for wear. Used as we are to the effects of digitisation and globalisation, it is tempting to simply accept this evanescent, diverse experience, hang on for the ride, and leave analysis for the experts of the future. If there are any experts by then. If there will be a future.

How can we begin to venture what all this means, hard enough as it is to even keep up with the next Twitterstorm, White House Scandal or Brexitised double-speak? Sorry I can’t answer that, I need to check by Facebook feed, Tweet the latest on the mid-terms, then troll Trump a little. How can we put together the facts of our peculiar and challenging case, and come up with a portable handful of truths that allow us to make sense of it all, when we are suffering from a factobesity that has led to our rejection of the very idea of truth based on the testimony of ‘experts’?

It has all gotten a bit too much I fear. Yet could there be something that unites the myriad of mini-disasters that seems to typify our Age of Terror, a single term that encapsulates the unique way in which our millennium has fallen to its knees in a swamp of b*llsh*t, rather than soared to the heights o

n the waxen wings of technology? Look again at our list if you can bear it, and you might notice it is mainly composed of novel modes of force and coercion in the technological endgame of what has come to be called, by many political thinkers, biopower.

Biopower is the active protection, enhancement and prolongation of the universal right to life, rather than just rule by some bully, up on high, telling you to do stuff or otherwise deal with the consequences. Most Western democracies are defined as biopolitical. They manage your life for you, thanks to the advice of experts, gleaned from the data they constantly harvest, without your clear consent, so that you can go about your neo-liberal, digitised business, occasionally moaning about your privacy and sharing a slacktivist hashtag or two.

If our democracies are basically biopolitical then, as those so-called experts say, could we corral all the rabble-rousers and miscreants of the past lustrum into a single makeshift camp of similarities, and call that basket of deplorables, after biopower, something like bioviolence? Let’s give it a go and see, ‘cos that’s the best I’ve got to offer given the circumstances.