Calling in a Drone Strike on War Games

Illustration from 'Krilof and His Fables', 1869

There is a Russian fable from the 19th century that goes like this: a peasant, at the local market fair, happened upon a fine blade of damascus steel in a pile of otherwise crudely wrought iron.  Congratulating himself on such a bargain purchase, the peasant took the blade home and made use of it in all sorts of base manners- repairing fences, chopping wood- so that it soon became nicked and dull and otherwise a pale shadow of its former self and purpose.  One day a hedgehog found the blade, carelessly discarded, under a bench inside the peasant's hut.  The hedgehog asked the blade, " Are you not ashamed of the ignoble life you have served?"  The blade replied, "The shame is not mine- the shame is borne on he who knew little of the feats I could perform!"

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On 6 March, Rand Paul took the senate floor on a filibuster ride not seen in recent memory.  His purpose was to delay the confirmation of, now, CIA Director John Brennan, due mainly to questions revolving around the possible use of Drones to conduct targeted killings of US citizens on US soil.  In his opening remarks of what would become a 13 hour speech, Paul summoned another 19th century tale for metaphor- Alice in Wonderland:

"They say Lewis Carroll is fiction. Alice never fell down a rabbit hole and the White Queen's caustic judgments are not really a threat to your security. Or has America the beautiful become Alice's wonderland? 'No, no, said the queen. Sentence first; verdict afterwards. Stuff and nonsense, Alice said widely - loudly. The idea of having the sentence first? 'Hold your tongue, said the queen, turning purple. I won't, said Alice. Release the drones, said the Queen, as she shouted at the top of her voice."

Illustration from 'Alice in Wonderland', 1915

The targeted killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, via a Drone launched from a secret base in Saudi Arabia, signaled a new threshold being crossed in the eyes of Paul and others.  Drones are reshaping the way we conduct warfare and surveillance, both at home and on the numerous fronts pervaded by American interests.  Yet beyond the legal and moral issues raised by Drone 'signature' strikes, there are larger questions on how Drones reshape the very notions of war and control, not to mention how the influence of liberalism created an environment where drones could thrive.  In seeking answers to these questions one has to reconcile the rise of drones with the relative decline of war games as tools for conducting war and recognize that in the difference between these two lies the human drama of reconciling rationality and metaphysics.

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But, one may ask, what is the connection between drones and war games?  Here we turn to the Sequester or, rather, what the Sequester portents for the future of war gaming in the US military.  In a recent article by the New York Times, 'Mandatory Cuts Could Open Path to Deeper Defense Trims', the point is made that while various aspects of the military machine under sequestration will be reduced in scope and cost, the savings these cuts produce will be put to greater use in expanding other, more timely programs such as special operations forces, offensive/defensive cyberweapons, and, of course, building more drones.  One area already targeted by sequestration is travel funding available for military personnel to attend war gaming conventions.  Rex Brynen notes the consequences of these cuts at PaxSims:

"As budget sequestration takes a bite out the discretionary spending by the US military, one casualty has been conference and workshop participation—including conferences on professional wargaming. Most military personnel (and other personnel at DoD institutions) have had support for conference participation severely restricted, if not suspended altogether. 

The MORS special meeting on professional gaming that had been scheduled for 26­-28 March, for example, will now be postponed to next fiscal year. Similarly, the Connections 2013 conference, scheduled for July 2013, is also struggling to attract the usual number of US military participants given the absence of government travel funding."

This comes on the heels of a process already underway in which the top war gaming institutions of the military, the National Defense University (NDU) and its nested subsidiary the Center for Applied Strategic Learning (CASL) face reductions amounting to a third or more of their budget.  Michael Peck, in a post for Kotaku on 5 Nov 2012, made this observation re: cuts at NDU and CASL:

"(NDU and CASL's) downfall illustrates what one source told me; that this is an example of the military shunning rigorous strategic thinking and focusing on narrow short-term issues instead. We didn't have enough rigorous political and military thinking in the days before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the results speak for themselves. There is still reason to question whether the U.S. has a clear sense of why and how it will fight the next war…Wargaming can't answer all questions. But it can help us ask the right ones."

Why is the military so keen on cutting war game programs and institutions, whose total budget amounts to less than the cost of a few Predator drones?  Here we need to examine the nature of war as conceived through the use of war games and compare that to the one espoused by drone ideology.  And the best way to do that is to consider how each attempts to create their own 'Borges Map', a 1:1 representation of reality placed on top of lived reality.

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Consider the war game.  Philip von Hilgers, in his history of 'Kriegspiel' in Germany, notes that war games allow one to play with various military hypotheses without being bound by the constraints of time.

"The war games and map exercises did not simply dissolve temporal references through a symbolic system, but allowed a temporal extension to occur that seemed to correspond to the hypothetical situation. It was precisely because war games granted time unlimited space that what was not planned could occur."

Image from H.G. Wells' 'Little Wars'

Essentially, war games facilitate construction of a Borges Map through unlimited extension of time.  Running various scenarios and potentials, the military mind can better map out all possible outcomes and create appropriate responses that will minimize casualties while inflicting maximum possible damage to the enemy.  Compared to other military technologies, the war game allowed planners to layer multiple representations of reality on top of the actual reality of battle.  The uncertainty of conflict, what many term the 'fog of war', becomes less obscure when one can eliminate the constraints of time.  Despite its pursuit of rationalistic modeling, the war game nonetheless creates a space where metaphysical thought can mingle with the rational and produce a synthesis that not only affirms the humanity of the players but also places that humanity at the center of decision making.  Descartes famous maxim, 'I think, therefore I am', could easily become, 'I think, therefore I (war) game'.

Compare this to the ideology of Drones.

Image courtesy of Mr_CRO

Frederik Rosen, in his preliminary draft of 'Extremely Stealthy and Incredible Close', argues that drones raise the stakes in seeing and knowing, which in turn raises questions on moral and legal obligations with regards to their use.  Drones become, "a medium for proximity" made manifest through their extended flight times, arrays of surveillance gear, and numerical, even exponential, growth in use.  Instead of placing the drone along a historical trajectory of tools that kill from a distance, Rosen suggests its proper role should be seen in the historical trajectory of "seeing the enemy in war: a history moving from hilltops and watchtowers to the use of binoculars, balloons and airplanes and then on to radar, night vision, satellites."  

If we accept Rosen's placement of the drone in terms of a way to 'see' the enemy, then the conflict between war games and drones becomes much sharper.  Whereas the war game achieved its Borges Map through the unbinding of time and hypothesis, the drone eliminates this distinction through its marriage of time and surveillance and creates a Borges Map made up of a single layer- the drone's gaze- instead of the multiple layers brought about through war gaming.

So even though war games grant time unlimited space, drones, bound by the laws of physics, cannot make such grand bargains with time and, in fact, have no need to bargain at all.  With drone ideology, how could something not planned occur?  The constant surveillance aspect of the drone eliminates this need to bargain with time and ushers in a 'just in time' delivery system for political and military officials.  When a viable target appears, you fire a missile at them.  Suspicious targets can be surveilled for days, and if their behavior fits a terrorist profile then it's a snap to carry out a 'signature' strike. We know the American government has gone great lengths to legally justify drone use, a move that, supposedly, marks our regime as a rule of law society and exemplar of liberalism writ large.  Combined with the market-like ability granted by drones to target and deliver explosive payloads with maximum efficiency and minimal downtime, the drone becomes just another extension of technology that would be as comfortable in an Amazon warehouse as it is in the deserts of Saudi Arabia, or the vastness of North Africa.

This makes the drone the greatest champion of neoliberal practices, even as it calls into question the liberal regimes that foster its use.

Yet beyond this fusion of market principles in drone design, there are other, deeper factors to consider when comparing these perpetual skyrim death dealers to war games. War Games are for planning the future; with drones, the future is now.  War Games allowed a healthy mix of the rational and the metaphysical to coexist; drones have no such affinity for the metaphysical, as their entire purpose is clothed in rational, panglossian hues.  A drone heaves off the metaphysical impact of a missile strike onto the operator in a room, far away from the scene of rationalistic discourse the drone embodies.  No wonder that drone pilots feel stressed- they are running a machine that is devoid of metaphysics, the soul of humanity, by design.  Whereas the war game allowed the rational and metaphysical to interact, the drone, with its supra-rational operation, cleaves this union in two and leaves metaphysical questioning solely to the operators, who more often than not find their soul torn asunder under the strain.

The Kill List, through its very existence, obfuscates the purpose of war games even as it makes the role of drone ideology perfectly clear.

Perhaps Paul was right.  Maybe America has become more like the Wonderland depicted in Lewis Carroll's fanciful tale.  Drone ideology certainly made 'sentence first, verdict later' a plausible doctrine.  Yet in all the bluster and filibuster about the impact of drones on our way of life, we should be mindful, like the hedgehog above, of the discarded damascus blade and ask ourselves, "is the shame borne on those who knew little of the feats war games could perform?"

Idea for a Reading Group

(Update: I've created both a website and a discussion forum for this project.  I hope to start around March 18th, so stop by and take a look! - JA)

There's one thing I've noticed recently: my research efforts increasingly turn towards questions of the self and the way we relate to reality and ourselves through the observation of others.  This was one of the points touched upon by David Lyon in his keynote speech at Theorizing the Web, but it has also come up in my recent analysis of Snapchat and my larger dissertation work on the immigration of Russian Old Believers to Oregon in the 1960's.

In the past couple of months, I read through Foucault's last two College de France lecture series- The Government of Self and Others and The Courage of Truth- both of which deal with the notion of parrhesia (frankness, a sense of truth-telling) and how it has evolved over time to suit different needs for different truth regimes.  I think there is a lot of good material here to discuss, not only for the selfish reasons listed above but also for anyone interested in larger questions of how digital technology- through all of its manifestations and infiltrations- affect notions of the self and methods of veridiction of the self sourced through observation/reflection of others.

To that end, I would like to propose forming a reading group to analyze these two lectures-series delivered by Foucault.

I'm still thinking about how it would work, so nothing is set as of yet.  I've used Google Groups before, so that would be my default platform to host a discussion board, but I'm open to any other alternatives.  I would like to take between three to six months to read both books, with my preference being to the latter if only to promote deep, rather than surface, reading.  The larger goal would be to simply discuss the ideas of the lecture and hopefully make some meaningful connections to the diverse disciplines we all study.

For those of you without ready access to these books, I have a workaround that should help anyone out.  Right now I'm gauging interest, so if this sounds like something you would be willing to do let me know either via Twitter (@jsantley) or leave a comment below.

My Theorizing the Web 2013 Presentation

Here are the slides I used for my Theorizing the Web 2013 presentation: "Creating a Modern Feudal Order".  Feel free to download the slides and listen to the audio track, explaining these slides in greater detail, found below.  If you want to download these slides, you'll need to visit the Slideshare page and click on the 'save' button just above the slides.  There is some ghost writing on slides 3 and 4, which I cannot solve via re-uploading, so if you would like an uncorrupted copy of these slides, get ahold of me on Twitter (@jsantley) or leave a comment below.  The audio track can be downloaded as well.

Data Serfdom in the Modern Age from Jeremy Antley

Update: Below is the rough cut of the Theorizing the Web 'Room B' recording.  Cue up to 43:05 to see my presentation.

Also, the Slideshare above does not include a video clip on slide 20 that I intended to show during my presentation.  Because I was rushed for time, I didn't play it.  However, you can find the clip below.  My point in showing it was to demonstrate how a scene played for pure hilarity in 2003 now has a more sobering meaning for 2013, when one considers the data serf situation.  But it's also still very funny.

Pin the Modern on Old Belief

Consider the image above.

I discovered this image while reading the recent Smithsonian.com article, widely circulated on Twitter and Facebook, about a Russian family that fled deep into the Siberian wilderness in the late-1930's, only to be 'discovered' by Soviet geologists in the 1970's conducting aerial surveys in the remote, Soviet hinterland.  It's a fascinating story, and what especially appealed to me was that the family discussed were Old Believers, a religious group that split off from Russian Orthodoxy in the 17th century over doctrinal and ritual changes made by, then, Patriarch Nikon.  Old Believers are often marked by their sometimes strict adherence to the traditional means, rituals, and accouterments of Orthodox worship.

Yet even that description of Old Belief is rather cursory, as the raskol (translated into English as 'schism') of the Russian Orthodox church was about more than making a three-fingered sign of the cross or changing the religious books used for the services; it was about the changing nature of the state, the increasingly centralized trend of concentrating power under the Tsar and the corresponding decline of local authority that steadily occurred after rule by the Golden Horde had been forcibly cast off by the Grand Princes of Moscow.  Old Belief is a tough subject for many to comprehend, its incarnation in historical and contemporary sources alike often relying on cliched or simplistic understandings in order to convey meaning about this religious group to modern audiences.  The Smithsonian article is no exception, and that's why the image above struck me with such poignancy.

It's not so much that the image, or the caption contained underneath, is wrong or misleading.  If you read the article, you understand that 40 years in the wilderness left this Old Believer family with little more than handmade hemp cloth for use in making clothes.  What is striking about the image is that you, the reader, can choose to 'Pin It', or add it to your Pintrest wall of images.  In a subtle way, the Smithsonian's use of the 'Pin it' button on these images helps reinforce the notion that Old Believers are stuck in time and full of a sort of noble backwardness that both grotesquely fascinates and reinforces the primacy of the modern viewer.  As is so often the case with documentary sources on Old Belief, there is a tendency of the contemporary viewpoint to see these religious practitioners as a sort of distant mirror of the modern, a distance whose measurement soothes the modern psyche in affirmation that the progress of life is truly that- progress.  The very fact these religious practitioners appear to be outside the modern makes them an intense focus of the modern.

For Imperial, and later Soviet, authorities and functionaries, this sort of intense focus is nothing new.  Douglas Rodgers in his excellent book, The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals, describes two groups of Old Believer communities in the town of Sepych that maintained their religious traditions even as they consistently updated their ethics and interpretations of belief in the face of changes brought about through Soviet and post-Soviet rule.  While his in-depth study provides many points that would fit the theme discussed here, I want to focus on one particular historical episode described by Rodgers- that being the emergence of a textual community in the 1960's between the Old Believers of Sepych and Soviet archaeographers (those who study the practice of publishing written sources) seeking out traditional religious books and manuscripts.

While discussion of religion was generally considered taboo for Soviet scholars, archaeographers claimed that analysis of traditional religious texts, often found in Old Believer communities due to their reverence for pre-Nikonian sources, could be used to uncover a "nation-based critique of of the visions of socialist modernity." (166) Rogers notes that,

"Finding these original manuscripts, scholars hypothesized, could revolutionize the study of Russian history, language, and literature in the post-war, post-Stalin years, when it was becoming politically possible to talk about Russian national history and traditions." (166)

Scholars would pour into Old Believer communities like Sepych every spring, looking for and sending back to their home institutions any sufficiently old religious texts or books various families or elders in a community willingly handed over.  Some elders, initially wary of the Soviet scholar invasion into their often private and secluded lives, turned this relationship to their advantage, collecting names, calling cards, and patronage with a zeal equal to that of the book collecting Scholars that sought their texts in the first place.  

Yet, as Rogers notes, "the textual community that grew up between archaeographers and Old Believer elders was laced with inequality and power relations." (169) Some elders told Rogers of their purposeful avoidance of the scholars, hiding in their houses and refusing to answer the door when they knocked.  One woman even produced for Rogers a shrill impersonation of the scholars and their constant demands of 'Give us the book!  Give us the Book!'  Ultimately Rogers concludes,

"…early field archaeography's focus on finding and preserving national tradition- born of a particular moment int eh Soviet academy, crystalized in unexpectedly close relationships with Old Believer elders, and exemplified in the material durability of 'book culture' (knizhnost')- does not capture central aspects of the Old Belief as lived practice in the twentieth century." (172, emphasis mine)

Roy Robson, one of America's top Old Belief scholars, sounds a similar note in his book, Old Believers in Modern Russia:

"Consequently, we can understand the Old Belief as an ongoing relationship between the symbols of pre-Nikonian Orthodoxy and the lives of the old ritualist faithful." (9)

Even though the tendency for outside observers is to see Old Belief as essentially trapped in a bygone era, the real crux of Old Belief is reconciling the needs of the ever-contemporary community with that of the rituals and beliefs that form the core of their religious expression.  Old Belief is constantly adaptive, even as it holds dear those elements that mark it as antiquated and distinctly anti-modern to those looking from the outside in.

Keeping this point in mind, let's return to the Smithsonian article introduced above.

In framing the setting of this tale of rediscovery, the article opens with a depiction of the Siberian forest as "the last and greatest of Earth's wildernesses."  This puts the reader in a mindset to accept that what they will read occurs beyond the frontier of modernity, in a place untouched by roads, factories, and electricity.  When the Soviet geologists initially encounter the 'lost' family, the focus of the narrative centers on their disheveled appearance and clothes made of patches and sacking material.  Here the family in question is revealed to be Old Believers, members "of a fundamentalist Russian Orthodox sect, worshiping in a style unchanged since the 17th century."  Already, the family in question acquires a patina of backwardness not solely dictated by their impoverished homestead.

For entertainment, they would recount for each other their dreams.  Having long ago lost their only metal kettles to rust, the family was forced to utilize birch-bark baskets that could not be placed on a fire thus severely limiting their ability to cook food.  One member of the family, a son named Dmitry, is hailed as the workhorse of the family, possessing "astonishing endurance" and the ability to "hunt barefoot in the Winter, sometimes returning to the hut after several days, having slept in the open in 40 degrees of frost, a young elk across his shoulders."  For American audiences, parallels to the noble savage ideal of Native Americans is easy to grasp and, indeed, the article implicitly makes this connection through its depiction of the primordial forrest and the family that struggled mightily against the forces of nature, all the while maintaining surprising ability to survive and even keep track of complicated phenomena like time despite the lack of modern technology.

This last point is especially important, as the American cultural context heavily pervades the Smithsonian article.  Philip Deloria has a fascinating introduction in his book, Indians in Unexpected Places, about the 'Expectation and Anomaly' photographic depictions of Native Americans possessed in American cultural identity construction.  Opening with a picture of 'Red Cloud Woman in Beauty Shop', Deloria notes, "even in the wake of decades of stereotype busting, a beaded buckskin dress and a pair of braids continues to evoke a broad set of cultural expectations about Indian people." (3)  He later adds, "broad cultural expectations are both the products and tools of domination and…they are an inheritance that haunts each and every one of us." (4)

Indeed, later in the Smithsonian article, the Old Believer family is described as being marveled by modern artifacts such as television and cellophane wrapping.  Yet despite the introduction of the modern into these 'timeless' Old Believer's lives, three of the four children succumb to kidney failure (a consequence of their primitive diet) while Dmitry, having possessed 'astonishing endurance', falls prey to pneumonia "which might have begun as an infection he acquired from his new friends."  The amazing discovery of this lost family ends on a discordant note about the dangers of such anti-modern behavior, and the reader is left with a sense of security in knowing they won't fall prey to such calamity given their safe proximity to modern life.

We could stop here, declaring that this article is simply a 'one-off' occurrence of the American audience being introduced to such a strange and foreign group.  However, my own research into the immigration of Old Believers from Turkey to Oregon in the 1960's suggests this viewing of Old Belief as a distant mirror of the modern possesses a lasting and enduring legacy, albeit one with an interesting twist.

On 3 September 1959, the famous Icon painter Pimen Sofronov sent a letter to Tatiana Alexeevna, then a member of the Tolstoy Foundation, regarding the plight of Old Believers living in Turkey and seeking relocation to the West.  The Tolstoy Foundation was known for it's dedication in helping groups of Russian emigres receive safe passage to Western nations in order to escape the clutches and propaganda efforts then being waged by the Soviet government.  During the late 50's and early 60's, the Soviets put increasing pressure on the Turkish Old Believers (a group that originally immigrated to Turkey during the 17th century) to 'Return to the Homeland' with lavish promises of land and the freedom to worship as they chose.

The Turkish Old Believers reached out to Sofronov mainly because the pressure to return to Soviet Russia was compounded by their need for additional marriage partners.  With their numbers dwindling, the Turkish Old Believers could no longer find suitable candidates for marriage, their beliefs having severe restrictions on the blood relation of potential couples.  In his letter, Sofronov states, "They are the oldest emigrants. …Their "stanitsa" is like a small island of ancient Russia which remained unchanged since the days preceding the era of Peter the Great.  Nothing similar to this group of people can be found anywhere else, neither in Russia, nor abroad."

He ends his letter with a curious statement regarding the gullibility of the Old Believers: [They] are completely unaware of the Soviet reality and therefore can be deceived more easily than others."  Quite literally, they are so distant from the modern forces embodied in Soviet propaganda that they will easily fall prey to their machinations.  It is no longer a question of measuring modernity through the distant presence of Old Belief- it is now a battle between two nations in the assertion of the modern on this "small island of ancient Russia."

Made aware of this situation, the Tolstoy Foundation began petitioning US authorities for a special allowance to let these Turkish Old Believers immigrate to the United States, despite the fact their total numbers exceeded the, then, established quotas of allowable immigrants from Turkey.  In a 21 March 1963 memo to Abba Schwartz, senior administrator for the Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs in the State Department, the Tolstoy Foundation framed the Old Believers as "an ideologically strong and firm group of 250 persons in their rejection of any Communist offers and promises continued to await assistance from the West," before ending with a 'throwing down of the gauntlet' to American authorities:

"It seems in the U.S. interest- if only in counteracting Soviet propaganda and one of the USSR strong cold war weapons that 'the West does nothing to help effectively human beings in distress'- to authorize the admission of this group of 250 persons…"

Photo of Document taken by Me, found at the Tolstoy Foundation Archive

Here we have a subtle twisting of the 'distant mirror' portrayal found in both the Smithsonian article and Soviet archaeographers quest for Old Believer religious texts.  The Turkish Old Believers are definitely 'pre-modern' in their way of life, even to the point of being incapable of seeing through Soviet deceptions targeted towards them, yet the West can act as a modernizing force for this timeless group through demonstrating their willingness to assist them in immigration and placement into the 'correct' modern setting.  In the face of impending Soviet repatriation, on 12 April 1963 Attorney General Robert Kennedy authorized the admission of the Turkish Old Believers into the United States under 'parolee' status.

Photo taken by Me, found at the Tolstoy Foundation Archive

The New York Times ran a front page story on 27 April 1966 about the Old Believers with a focus on their adjustment to American life in New Jersey.  (While the Turkish Old Believers were initially settled in New Jersey, later that year most of the group would immigrate to the Woodburn area of Oregon in order to live a more secluded life, away from the Westernizing influence of the heavily populated East Coast)  Compared to the images found in the Smithsonian article above, these Old Believers look to be well-adjusted to the modern lifestyle, even as they still possess beards 'in accordance with Old Believers' tradition.'  With the subtitle 'Old Believers Leaning to New Ways', one can tell that the acculturation process is far from complete, even as the article would have the reader believe that the modern influence of America is pulling this distant group from the past and into the present.

Whereas the Smithsonian 'Pin it' photo acts as an assuaging force depicting the modern lifestyle as truly progressive, the New York Times photos represent the other end, or result of this assuagement, depicting the distant Old Belief as catching up, even though their distinctive qualities remain.  Despite these differences, both sets of photos present the same 'Expectation and Anomaly' discussed by Deloria with his 'Red Cloud Woman in Beauty Shop'.  We see the Old Believer as modernizing, yet the expectation of their backwardness makes their acculturation process all the more strange, all the more anomalous.  Even with the distance removed, the Old Believer still acts as a measuring stick by which the modern can judge itself.  The gaze may soften in a modern setting, but the intense focus remains.

Obviously, the depiction of Old Belief through outsider accounts is a complicated matter that could take up far more space than afforded here.  Yet it is worth noting that American cultural attitudes, despite their seeming modernity, possess powerful influence over our conception of the other in relation to ourselves.

Ephemerality is a Snap...

Photo by Steve Bailey

…but the truth certainly is not.

Preparation for my upcoming Theorizing the Web presentation on data serfdom has me reading about notions of truth and comparing those notions to how various data platforms guide users in constructing their data selves.  While I have a good handle (at least, in my own mind) on how Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk create conditions favorable for the development of data serfdom, novel services/platforms like Snapchat introduce a new variable in the data self equation that, I believe, has interesting implications on both the development of the data self and the 'lived reality', or verisimilitude, the data self supposedly projects and provides.  That factor is ephemerality, and it's implementation forces us to consider how 'Snaps' alter the role of truth in the social media landscape.

In the post 'Why does Snapchat Matter?', Sam Ladner addresses a central issue the picture-sharing platform obviates through its service, that being the existence persistence of photos, likes, and comments shared on the Internet.  "Snapchat allows you to turn the Web back into regular conversation, shared with only those “present,” and not recorded for anyone else to hear," Ladner argues, as she frames the function, or affordance, of disappearing content as enabling a return to pre-Web discursive practices.  Instead of deciding 'Should I take a picture of this?', Ladner states that Snapchat allows one to make the perfectly acceptable choice that something is of little archival value, hence the desirability of ephemerality, and that this lack of 'documentary pressure' (what Nathan Jurgenson has termed the Facebook Eye) reduces the cognitive load associated with other platforms and their existence persistence stance on shared content.

Granted, the disappearing nature of Snaps (the term used by Snapchat for the photos you take and share) certainly reduces cognitive load- but it also has additional, far-reaching effects regarding the ability of the user to engage in parresia, or truth-telling.  This is something I would like to explore in greater detail below.

To begin, what is parresia?  Here I am utilizing discussions crafted by Foucault for his 1982-1983 lecture series on 'The Government of Self and Others', in which he both elaborates the meaning of parresia and charts its evolution of use through antiquity and up to the modern era.  Paressia  is actually a Greek word which describes the quality of free-spokeness, although it means much more than having a glib tongue.  It denotes that the one with free-spokeness speaks the truth, even to the point where utterance of such truth means possible mortal danger to the speaker.  Foucault states that parresia is "a truth-telling, an irruptive truth-telling which creates a fracture and opens up the risk; a possibility, a field of dangers, or at any rate, an undefined eventuality." (63) Those who engage in parresia form truth on two levels; the statement itself is true, but the one uttering parresia thinks, judges, and considers that the truth expressed is genuinely true.  It is not rhetoric, whereby one arranges facts to persuade another to accept a position- it is an expression of pure, believed truth, which is beyond rhetoric and situated more properly in the realm of philosophy.

Another characteristic of parresia is that one does not come equipped, naturally, with the ability to use such a discourse.  It has to be proven, fought over, so that the utterer of parresia is assured that others will listen to them and heed the truth they bravely proclaim.  Yet, parresia is not so above reproach that it cannot be subverted, cannot be twisted to suit needs that are less than altruistic.  Plato, himself, questioned how Democracy could co-exist in harmony with parresia, given that such pure truth-telling might not be accepted by the representative bodies summoned to debate the pressing issues of the polis.  It is entirely possible to have bad parresia, he concludes, false truth-telling that borders on flattery.

Foucault stipulated that bad parresia contained three elements.  First, it allowed anyone to speak.  Ascendency, the process of jousting with others for recognition, no longer matters in those places where bad parresia reigns.  While this was a necessary precondition for those who utter good parresia (one needs to be heeded, after all, for the truth to have any effect), in the converse situation ascendency is moot because anyone can speak.  This leads to the second element of bad parresia, that being the situation where speakers won't give their 'true' opinion but, rather, they sustain the prevailing opinion.  Foucault notes that, "the bad ascendency of anybody is achieved through conformity to what anybody may say and think." (183)  The third, and final, characteristic of bad parresia extends from the conformity found in the previous characteristic; by pleasing others, the utterer of bad parresia ensures their own safety and success, thus circumventing any potential danger.

"Such is the mechanism of bad parresia, which is the elimination the of distinctive difference of truth-telling in the game of democracy." (183)  Foucault states that this is the real danger of bad parresia before elaborating what Plato saw as the main consequence of democratic man lacking a logos alethes, or discourse of truth:

"In the anarchy of his desires he will want always to satisfy greater desires.  He will seek to exercise power over others, power which is desirable in itself and which will give him access to the satisfaction of all his desires." (201)

While there is quite a bit more to the analysis by Foucault on the notion of parresia, (highly recommend you check-out the entire lecture series) there is enough here to begin asking questions about how parresia, or rather how bad parresia, operates on a social media platform where ephemerality is the central feature.  Let's return to the analysis of Ladner, described above.

Without complicating this post with the particulars of data serfdom on non-ephemeral platforms (NEP's), like Facebook or Twitter, one essential point must be made regarding the nature of data self verisimilitude promised by these platforms; they trap users in unchanging expressions that promote stasis and formation of the ossified self, so as to make marketing easier and more accurate (even as this ossification creates asynchronicity between the data self and the lived self).  Conflict arises when users question the veracity of their data selves, because we have reached the point where shareable information can be accessed and indexed to such a degree that the resulting amalgamation alienates users from the platforms they dutifully toil upon.

Photo via Mark Smith

This is what Ladner means when she discusses the lessening of 'cognitive load' associated with NEP's, the fact that persistent existence routinely exposes users to embarrassment and even greater liability.  There is no longer the question of 'should I document this?' or 'what is the best moment to document?', questions inherent to actualization of the 'Facebook Eye', but rather a general freeing of the self to engage in frivolity, to rest assured that the ridiculous (or not) Snap just sent won't be around for others to critique tomorrow, or the whole sequencing of tomorrows that will inevitably follow.  The benefits are immediate for Ladner:  

"Snapchat came and took out the garbage that you put in a particular pile.  You don't even have to think of that pile.  It is simply gone.  How liberating!"

Yet, I ask, what are the implications?  It's fine that Ladner sees Snapchat, and ephemerality in general, as a sort of automated trash pickup service, but this begs the question: if you liken it to garbage, what does that say about the content and its purpose to begin with?  Granted- this is the larger point Ladner is trying to make.  But I also think this garbage analogy hints at a general condition on the type of information ephemerality will promote.  

The genius of Snapchat, and ephemerality in general, is that it frees the lived self from the constraints of the data self.  Whereas NEP's continually have users conflate the truth of their utterances encoded in likes and retweets to that of their lived reality, producing disruptive asynchronicity, platforms that embrace ephemerality tell users, "Don't worry about the conflation of your data and yourself- the data will disappear, leaving only your true self behind."  However, while ephemeral platforms may claim to solve the data self conundrum, in reality they provide only a more ameliorating experience for the user to engage in bad parresia.

As it stands now, most uses of social media don't promote the practice of parresia- they promote forms of communication that claim legitimacy in the name of parresia.  In actuality, social media promotes bad parresia because marketers, who pay the bills for many social platforms, demand flattery over truth.  But the linkage of legitimacy to what parresia stands for, the unabashed, total belief in what someone is uttering, is what all social media platforms will claim to exercise.  For NEP's, this linkage comes from their claim that the data self is symphonic with the lived self, that the data will reveal a truth of your existence that was once completely unknown.  Ephemeral platforms point out the flaw in this reasoning, as persistence existence of data will continually pose as a liability, and suggest that the way to actual parresia is through elimination of the data itself.

Thus, when Ladner claims that Snapchat allows users to "turn the Web back into regular conversation" one can see the sort of validity these ephemeral platforms derive from linking themselves to notions of parresia.  But I would counter Ladner here, and suggest that ephemeral platforms only feel like a more authentic, digital version of ourselves because they present a novel way for us to engage in bad parresia.  Snapchat doesn't encourage one to send photos of value, only photos of frivolous value.  There is no ascendency involved with Snapchat.  Sure, you might be selective in who you decide to send or receive Snaps- but there is no preferring one over another, no quality meaningfully marking one as anything more than an equal of another.  It's all so frivolous, so YOLO, that anybody can speak, anybody can take a snap and send it to anyone without a care for anything more.  

Of course this ephemerality, while very liberating in practice, also means that there are no consequences tied to the data shared.  This is how Snapchat directly contributes to the formation of bad parresia.  The data you send melts away after mere seconds, leaving only a vague notion that any data was shared at all.  Recall what Foucault, quoted above, said was one of the central characteristics of parresia, that is "a truth-telling, an irruptive truth-telling which creates a fracture and opens up the risk; a possibility, a field of dangers, or at any rate, an undefined eventuality."  Ephemerality eliminates this fracture, or at least seals it far, far quicker than NEP's.  There is no danger, no undefined eventuality in sending a Snap.  

Recipients of Snaps may, if they are quick enough, take a screenshot, but here Snapchat upholds its ephemeral teleology and informs you that your picture has been kidnapped from the palace of forgetting and locked away in the dungeon of existence persistence.  This reinforces Snapchat's linkage to notions of good parresia, as the ephemeral platform tells those whose Snap's have been captured, "There is a traitor in your midst, one who would violate the true expression of yourself in order to possess a shadowy, asynchronous piece of your data self."  And since ephemeral platforms hold claims to veridiction through opposition to the data selves created by NEP's, this 'informer' aspect of having Snap's captured completes the false-loop of presumed good parresia.

As an evolving feature, we will have to wait and see how Snapchat (and the inevitable emergence of cloned services) continues to play with notions of verisimilitude tied to the larger issue of truth-telling.  Given that ephemeral data has a low value to marketers, one wonders how Snapchat will monetize its service given the demands of profitability in the marketplace.  It's not entirely out of the question that Snapchat is using ephemerality to lure in droves of potential data serfs, and once the demesne has reached suitable size who knows what gates will be shut and what data will take on a less than ephemeral existence.  Regardless, ephemerality represents a new take on the social media question.  We should be careful to not overlook its impact on how we see social media integrated into the notion of parresia.