Contesting “Cyber”

Introduction

Over the last few decades there has been a proliferation of the term
“cyber”, and commensurate levels of inconsistency. This series argues that the
inconsistent application of the prefix “cyber” stems not only from confusion,
as some scholars and policymakers have proposed, but also from contest. Our
goal of this series is not to resolve conceptual disputes, but instead to
understand how and why contests occur, and whether, once the lines along which
contests occur are identified, resolution is possible.

As the prefix “cyber” has rarely been used alone, we place the concept
of cyberspace at the centre of analysis, for two reasons. First, it is
considered to be the “elemental” concept in the field, and demarcates the boundaries of relevant
technical and social activity through an intuitive geographical metaphor.
Second, selecting the concept “cyberspace” for analysis can be considered a
least-likely (or least-obvious) study of contest. The attachment of the prefix
“cyber” to various nouns has left cyber-related concepts with a variety of
underlying normative connotations. On the one side, some concepts describe a
clear activity or state of affairs, which are prima facie undesirable, like “cyber warfare” or “cyber threat”.
On the other side, various concepts reflect a more positive degree of
attractiveness—“cyber democracy” is a good example of this. The obvious
normative aspects of these terms to which the cyber prefix is attached make
these likely sites for contest, whereas “cyberspace” is seemingly more neutral.
We suggest instead that it is the ominous calm at the heart of the storm,
providing an excellent case in which to study the tension regarding the prefix
more broadly.

Over the next six days, we will publish a series of blog post that show that
cyberspace is contested in a number of ways: through its change in connotations
from opportunity to threat; through the existence of substantive and implied
definitions, with different rhetorical functions; and through competing
understandings of the key historical exemplar for cyberspace: that of ARPANET.
We therefore note that the prospects for agreement regarding cyberspace are
low. Overall, this presents the choice of what we term, following Hirschman, an ‘exit’ rather than ‘voice’ strategy, to use other concepts
instead. An initial post in this series was published last Friday at Slate’s
Future Tense and can be found here.

PART 1. Cyber: not just a confused but
also a contested concept.

Since the early 1990s the prefix “cyber” has become
widespread. As often noted, its use stretches back to Norbert Wiener’s coinage of “cybernetics” from its Greek equivalent in the 1940s. It is
similarly canonical to cite novelist William Gibson as creating the “ur” metaphor for this prefix in the early 1980s by combining it
with “space”. Almost three decades later in an interview with The A.V. Club, Gibson argued that “‘cyberspace’ as a term is sort
of over. It’s over in the way that after a certain time, people stopped using
the prefix ‘-electro’ to
make things cool, because everything was electrical. ‘Electro’ was all over the early twentieth century, and now
it’s gone. I think ‘cyber’ is sort of the same way”.

In contrast to Gibson’s prediction, a simple automated content analysis using Google Trends indicates that
the popularity of the prefix “cyber” has remained stable (with a spike in
November each year for “cyber Monday”). There are ever more applications of
this prefix, to words such as crime, law, cafe, hate, bullying, attack, war,
vandalism, politics, dating, security, and power. Today, more people enter the
search term “cyber” into Google than the term “democracy” or
“terrorist”. Needless to say, the term “cyber” has also gained in
prominence in academia and policymaking.

The proliferation of this prefix has, inevitably, led
to substantial inconsistencies in its use. On one level, these contradictions
may stem from simple confusion. As Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA
and NSA, remarked: “rarely has something been so
important and so talked about with less clarity and apparent understanding than
this phenomenon.” Scholars and policy-makers, among others, are not
always consistent in their own usage of cyber-related concepts, and they
sometimes reinterpret the definitions employed by others, especially when given
a liberal dose of cross-disciplinary fertilization.

Many hold that such disagreement is primarily caused
by the apparently abstruse and multifaceted nature of the phenomenon. For
example, in a Foreign Policy
article,
Stephen Walt notes that “the whole issue is highly esoteric—you really need to
know a great deal about computer networks, software, encryption, etc., to know
how serious the danger might be,” concluding that “here are lots of different
problems being lumped under a single banner, whether the label is
‘cyber-terror’ or ‘cyber-war’. If this is the case, more research can iron out
the lack of clarity surrounding this relatively young concept, and then we can
get to the one and only “meaning of the cyber revolution,” as Lucas
Kello emphasizes in his recent book (and earlier article). However, in this article
series we argue that the inconsistent application of the prefix “cyber” stems
not only from confusion, but also from contestation.

In other words, the roots of disagreement are deeper
than a mere struggle to absorb the collective knowledge of another discipline,
but stem from underlying normative disagreements.

Understanding the nature and extent of this
contestation of “cyber” is important for both policy-making and academic
research. For policy-makers, the promise of what Joseph Nye Jr. calls “rules of the road” in cyberspace is much diminished if the very domain itself
remains in question (also see the UK
government strategy). Constructing effective international cyber-governance becomes more
difficult—although not impossible—if the scope of what to be governed is
fundamentally disputed.

For academics, if the roots of disagreement are
deeper, then faith in a unified understanding of the cyber-issue is utopic; and
further investigation of why and how broader political disputes are translated
into problems with this proliferating prefix is urgently required.

Here we will explore what it means when we talk about
cyber, and address the nature of contestation from various angles.