Reviews of A New Kind Of Wilderness, The Marching Band, Good One and Magic Farm by MARIA DUARTE, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA
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When the smartphone replaces the rifle
GAVIN O’TOOLE recommends a book that analyses how a smartphone is creating combatants of us all, at least in terms of how wars are understood and represented
RELENTLESS VISUAL ASSAULT: An image of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is projected onto Edinburgh Castle during the finale at this year's Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo
SCOTT ALSWORTH foresees the coming of the smaller, leaner, and class conscious indie studio, with art as its guiding star
MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
Radical War: Data, Attention and Control in the 21st Century
Matthew Ford and Andrew Hoskins
Hurst £20
THERE is no doubt that digital technology with all its open-ended potential is changing war — but less acknowledgement that it is changing the meaning of war.
That matters, because wars as classically understood were prosecuted with purpose, never in a vacuum, by tradition-bound military institutions of nation-states, reinforced by mass-media sappers to ensure public legitimacy around an assembled consensus.
The smartphone, however, has changed everything. Mass connectivity, led not by states but corporations leveraging globalisation, is creating combatants of us all, at least in terms of how wars are understood and represented, and leaving the military behind.
This is the underlying argument of Radical War, a complex and at times dense set of reflections on the undeniably disturbing interactions between technological change and political violence.
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