[p2p-research] Drone hacking

[Andy Robinson]

Waltzer on dirty hands: the argument that unethical action in pursuit of a
supposed greater good is somehow a virtue.  A crude attempt to portray
ethical limitation as self-indulgence.  This kind of hypocrisy - ethics is
for everyone else, not statists, whose actions are immeasurably 'higher' -
is typical of the statist way of seeing and is a clear effect of the ways
'sovereignty' distorts perception.  From an ethical point of view, it can be
simply discarded either as performative contradiction or as crude
utilitarianism (before its rule-consequentialist modifications).  Not a new
argument either I have to say.  It is identical to certain aspects of the
doctrines of Carl Schmitt (card-carrying Nazi) and early act-utilitarians
such as Bentham, founder of the Panopticon (utilitarianism being the model
for dystopias such as *Brave New World*).

Let us be clear.  Statists (not only politicians but generals, soldiers,
bureaucrats, cops) like to imagine they have an incomparably hard job
because in their pursuit of 'order' at any cost, they commit acts they know
are terrible evils.  They pretend this is in the service of some greater
good which amounts more often than not, simply to the existence of the state
itself (or occasionally to the teleology of the state's project - the
realisation of communism, the maximisation of the general welfare, the glory
of the nation or whatever it may be).  It is their case for not only legal
but ethical impunity - they have a "hard job", they should be left alone.
Actually they don't face any more serious dilemmas than anyone else, and
most of their dilemmas are no such thing, simply pathological motives to cut
corners for personal or statist-group gain.  Compare these statists, smugly
confident of their own rightness, to networked activists facing tremendous
risks to achieve a better world, or poor people facing agonising choices at
the borders of survival.  I have seen mobs of armoured police, tooled-up
with the latest high-tech weapons, shielded from prosecution and backed up
by weight of numbers and by support in high places, take on people fighting
desperately to defend their homes, taking tremendous risks of being beaten
unconscious or jailed for years to rescue a comrade from a truncheon blow,
only for the police to be lauded for how brave they are, how many risks they
take and how their brutality can be forgiven as a result - while people
defending themselves with nothing but their bare hands are condemned as
thugs and thrown to the wolves.  No, the statists don't have a "hard job".
They don't have greater temptations to cut ethical corners than other kinds
of agents.  They just pretend they do to cover up the impunity they build
for themselves with raw power.  And while making themselves immune to the
most vital ethical precepts - while finding excuses for murder, torture, the
corrosion of human rights - these statists are the first to enforce vicious
'moral' prohibitions on everyone else, under the guise of 'law and order'.
Their contempt for real mitigating circumstances and really difficult
choices is proof that their own claims to mitigation for their persistent
unethical actions is simply an assertion of privilege and power.

Doubtless pretty much everyone undergoes temptations to act unethically for
the special goods embedded in their own subject-position, their own
doctrine, their own special social roles.  Statists get away with far too
much special pleading on this account, through the distorting effect of the
master-signifier on the coherence of the symbolic.  Because of this
pathological special pleading by statists, I insist on the absolute
comparability of the ethics of state action to the ethics of similar
networked action or similar individual action.  To do any less is to make
oneself complicit in the collective 'racism' of the state-caste's conception
of itself as a race apart, bound by different rules, by a 'civilizing
mission'.

By these standards, of course, it quickly emerges that states are
responsible for far more evil than any comparable network or group, that
they persistently refuse to propose or accept ethical principles which apply
equally to themselves and others, that they constantly claim mitigation
which they do not allow in others, and that the fallacious plausibility of
their claims comes down to the naturalisation of irrational caste-like
privilege and/or the irrational assertion that the existence of the state is
such an overwhelming good that it justifies suspending everything else.
Since this overwhelming ethical primacy is indefensible and is simply an
article of faith (introduced most often through the *distortion* of
otherwise defensible doctrines such as liberalism, conservatism and
Marxism), the boundary at root between a regular state and a totalitarian
state, or between a theocratic and a non-theocratic state, becomes
persistently blurred.  One sees statists perpetually deploying arguments
which push it towards the totalitarian or theocratic pole to the extent that
they are widely accepted.

Now, to possible futures.  The best possible worlds are without question
worlds without states.  This is shown by comparing life in state-dominated
and stateless societies.  The more I see the state arrogating power to
itself - the more I hear of RFIDs in cars, infinitely trackable electronic
money, misuse of mobile phone records and the rest - the more I come to see
a statist future in totalitarian terms.  The other possibilities arise from
the power of networks.  At the moment it might not look a great hope.  My
heart often despairs at the current state of social movements.  But my head
says that networks have great power, and that the state is lashing out
because of its *loss* of power (this is especially clear in the asymmetrical
warfare literature).  Vast swathes of humanity live outside effective
day-to-day regulation.  On the whole, this is the global poor, who have
great power to throw spanners in the works by means such as blocking
transport infrastructure and making areas 'ungovernable'.  The future I work
towards is a world of interlinked networks in which the excluded claim back
the resources grabbed on a global scale by states and corporations, impose
costs on state retaliation which prevent the state from exercising power,
gradually reduce state control to a few core nodes, and create different
worlds in the resultant spaces beyond control.

But if we assume a society with a state, there are nevertheless many
different kinds of states, many different articulations between the state
and society.  I have reached the conclusion that the least-worst forms of
state-society are those which the state's 'social logic' (what Kropotkin
terms the 'political principle') is most effectively contained and
channelled.  Not only the kinds of states which I find least-worst myself,
but pretty much all of those which have been politically advocated, are
examples of variations of this phenomenon.  It can happen in various ways.

There is the social- or liberal-democratic state, in which the state is
hemmed in by strong procedural constraints which retain their force through
the power of the 'included stratum', the professions and quasi-state bodies,
through checks and balances which hamstring the state from inside, and by
popular sentiments and movements which the state is afraid to annoy too
much.  There is the conservative state in which the state fuses with an
informal power-elite outside the state in such a way that the power of the
societal elite overrides and constrains the power of the state.  There are
various democratic and republican models in which the separation of the
state from society is constrained through participation.  Then there are
various kinds of 'weak' states in which the power of the state is kept to a
minimal level relative to social forces, the shadow states and rhizo-states
of the periphery, the ideal states of left and right libertarianisms, etc.

All these kinds of states have two things in common: they are
*required*(firstly by the balance of social power, and secondly by
their discourses of
legitimation which matter because the balance of social power prevents them
from ignoring certain social groups) to provide services to certain forces
within society and not simply to arrogate power to themselves; and they are
externally *constrained* in their capacity to invade and control social
spaces - it would be far too costly to invade the spaces associated with
those social groups.  Usually this boundary is marked by the recognition of
certain basic rights (or in the more elite-dominated forms, certain
privileges or traditions) which the state is forced to respect and which
form the outer limit to its legitimacy.

The problem with totalitarian states, which is reproduced in moves afoot in
many core states today, is that the state no longer recognises any such
requirements or constraints, that 'rights' while still mouthed are in
practice permanently suspended or reinterpreted at statist whim, and that
the result is a situation where 'everyone is dispensable' and there is no
'right to have rights' (the terminology is Arendt's).  When does this
situation arise?  It arises when the state *no longer needs* to articulate
itself with society, either because it is accepted as unconditionally
legitimate or because its apparent illegitimacy to large strata of the
population is rendered irrelevant to its effectiveness and its exercise of
power.  (Notice that it tends to behave similarly even in its more
constrained forms, when dealing with population sectors who are excluded in
various ways - for instance, a liberal state might behave this way in its
colonies).

Hence the overwhelming danger posed by creeping social control - a danger
inherent both in the technologies which render the state able to rule by
coercion without legitimation, and in the discourses which portray the state
as unconditionally justified without regard for its actions.

Hence, if you are looking for a tolerable or 'least-worst' future which is
not that of a stateless society, if you are looking for *a better
state*(which is not at all a more efficient or powerful state), your
best hope
lies in the extension of constraint of the state so as to produce effects of
state dependence on society which force the state both to recognise general
obligations and to recognise limits in its control over spaces.  Since the
current tendency is for the state to arrogate power, this necessitates
balancing against it.  In effect, a revived liberalism, or social-democracy,
or any other kind of tolerable state-society, would require a
quasi-revolutionary assertion of power against the actually-existing state
which either overthrows it or pushes it back within its bounds.  This is how
*a better state* (from an ethical point of view) might come about.  If the
aim is that there be no remaining black-holes of state violence in which
human rights violations are tolerated as 'exceptional', it is necessary that
this rebalancing be such as to give a strong discursive claim to every
person regardless of status - in other words, that the state be hedged in by
strong assertions of rights, and that these assertions not permit exceptions
the state can exploit.  This kind of movement to constrain the state and
hence produce a 'better' state would necessarily make use of the networked
modalities of autonomous movements, but there is no reason it would have to
be in any way anarchistic.  It could in theory be a pan-liberal,
non-factional, or even in some circumstances a conservative kind of
movement.  What is important is that it exercise power located in society
and in networks outside the state to constrain the power of the state and
push back the statist hubris we see today.  I see the recurring popular
movements which ultimately brought down the eastern European dictatorships
and which have been a thorn in the side of so many one-party regimes of
whatever faction as indicative of the range of potentials.

But I think when you say 'better state' you mean more efficient, more
effective, more powerful state.  This is dangerous.  Granted, you may create
a state which *can* end world hunger or avert environmental catastrophe, but
this doesn't mean that this state *will* do such things.

Actually, state discourse seems to be rather split.  There is the arrogance
of states which no longer accept conventional constraints, which can ignore
or neutralise established discourses of rights, which are no longer held
back by the party system, which can increasingly ignore the 'included
stratum'.  But on the other hand, there is a constant sense that states are
*terrified* - and this is how they articulate the *motives* for ever-greater
measures of social control.  States feel their power breaking down
disastrously, and are desperate to avert the flows of power to networks
(which in statist discourse is metaphorised as crime, failed states,
terrorism, porous borders, etc).  This provides opportunities to use this
growing network power either to move beyond or to push back the state.

The only danger of a dystopian future in this scenario is if the state is
able to hoard to itself enough concentrated power to eliminate the existence
of open spaces and carry out a day-to-day violence so intrusive as to
decompose potentially disruptive networks before they can form.  *This is
the future which needs to be prevented*.  And you don't have to be an
anarchist to see how such a future is both deeply terrifying and quite
probably preventable.  You also don't have to be an anarchist to act against
it.  The means to prevent it is to act wherever possible to strengthen the
power of networks and to weaken the power of states.  There are a million
ways that a liberal for example can usefully help constrain states - though
sadly, too few liberals today see the necessity to do so.  In the American
case, one of the most crucial is to try to reconstruct a discourse in which
rights are effective limits on state power by reconstructing rights
discursively as an outer limit to state legitimacy.  In practice, this means
liberals will have to be prepared to take destabilising actions in order to
constrain the state within liberal bounds.  Liberals will have to act
something like they would have acted in eastern Europe or in various other
dictatorships.  Not as comforting as imagining that a state left to its own
devices, or aided technocratically, will continue to be liberal in spite of
having no need for 'citizens'.  But a thousand times more realistic.
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