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Philip Cunliffe
posted 14 February 2007

Reading Strategy of Deception, one gets the feeling that Paul Virilio is the kind of person who would have been paid gross sums of money to give seminars and talks to management consultants and techies at the height of the dotcom boom. Virilio excels in spattering out ideas and language redolent of the New Age techno-mysticism that prevailed before the crash, when society was supposedly being digitised and reconstituted in the ether of cyberspace.

But if Virilio could be a Silicon Valley guru, this is not to say that Strategy of Deception provides us with a snapshot of cyber-theory in the heady days before the crash. Instead, it is mostly a series of newspaper articles that Virilio wrote during and after NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 - a war that was notorious for the grandiloquent claims made for a new era of frictionless information warfare that would minimise 'collateral damage'. Shiny new technologies would result in bloodless warfare to match a pristine new war effort based on values, not national interests. There is much to be said about these claims, and the way in which new military technologies and strategies have been developed to meet new political imperatives.

But instead of telling us anything profound about information technology or warfare, this short book itself reads like the gibberish spat out by frazzled printers, with little more coherence or intelligence than a meaningless morass of ones and zeros. There is no consistent argument in any article, let alone any broader theme developed across the collection as a whole. Instead, it is a jumble of categories and neologisms ('globalitarian') with no analytical heft, mixed in with portentous quasi-mystical rambling about technology, and embarrassingly absurd predictions about the outcome of the war and its impact on international politics. Words and sentences are arbitrarily italicised and bolded, presumably to compensate for the absence of any argument by giving the impression that something important and meaningful is being conveyed. As there is nothing in this extended blog-post that makes sense beyond the occasional sentence, it would be pointless bothering to criticise - whatever I wrote would simply be my own argument, as there is no argument of Virilio's to engage with.

This new edition of Strategy of Deception is the 22nd publication in Verso's series of books by leading radical thinkers. Judging by the contents of Strategy of Deception, it is impossible to see what claim Virilio has to be included in a such a series alongside the likes of Raymond Williams and Slavoj Žižek.