 We got talking to a good friend of ours who works down there, Bob Evans, and we ended up having lunch and realizing that it was a lot of areas where we were very interested. I was being asked to do some work on the SA80, the replacement for the SA80, as part of my previous research regime, which was around military innovation and analog technology. I'll let Andrew explain what he was doing, but that's how we met and that led to finding ourselves realizing that there was a lot to discuss, really. Andrew? Yeah, so we met through Historical Branch Army and they are responsible for the active archive of British Army's operational records and also historical and legacy material, so that's where we met. What I was doing there was a two-year AHRC fellowship looking at the digital transformations of the archive and issues around economic and political technological transformations of military organizational memory. So, Bob introduced me to Matthew and I thought, oh, this is an interesting guy. I think what's interesting for us in this discussion, certainly for our book, is that we come from quite contrasting disciplinary perspectives and histories. For us, that's very much part of where we come from. A discussion around whatever Matthew is, I would kind of pinhole him as kind of wall studies, international relations. He can describe himself much better than I can. And wherever I am, which is probably media studies, social media and memory studies. Historically, we think there's a kind of divergence of separation from these disciplinary fields as there is in most subject areas, but particularly around war and technology. So you have kind of traditions and methods and histories of looking at technologies of war and archives, certainly. And there's not much cross-fertilization. So I guess the book is really about cross-fertilization. I've just described it as. And so there's some difficult conversations that come out of that, because often we have very similar concepts and ideas about, sorry, very different concepts and ideas about very similar trajectories of change. So how do we describe these transformations without kind of boxing us into these kind of narrow disciplinary trajectories that we're all brought up to believe in and inhabit and this difficult to escape from. So interdisciplinarity is very much part of our kind of philosophy, if you like. And the book, I guess, might give a great description. Thanks, Mike, very much for hosting us again. But just in some, I mean, we're interested in disruption, I think, the ways in which smartphones and apps and social media have kind of disrupted, I think, the long-standing relationships between war and society. So we've got this global arena in which we map this in the book, the kind of blurring or collapsing of traditional distinctions between combatants, civilian, informational warrior. And what we call radical war thrives exactly because this fundamental relationship between, I guess, perception, knowledge, action around war has changed. Is that fair intro, Matthew? Yeah, I think I've been summarizing it on Twitter, which is a perfect place to summarize these things as war on the edge of the smartphone, really. How has this handheld device come about and shaped the way we... It's a device that allows us to produce and consume media all in one place. We're literally producing the stuff through what we're seeing, reproducing it online, publishing it online, and then we're consuming it. And that cycle works in a completely different way to how we might think about how media and more mainstream media has worked. And there are a whole series of implications around that for war and society that I think are potentially underexplored. But our starting place was something really rather elementary in terms of just archives and how, if we are working in a post-trust environment, what are the structures of knowledge, the structures of the very core matter that helps us start as academics, as people who are interested in trying to make sense of the world? How do those archives work? And how does that work in a 21st century context? Because it's not necessarily the way we have thought about it traditionally. And for historians, you know, they're rooted in paper archives, getting dusty. And I mean, I've worked in those kinds of spaces and thoroughly enjoyed it. But things have changed considerably over the last 20 years. And so that was our point at which we could jump off. And in fact, this whole process started off, if you like, as being a book framed in terms of how do you write military history or how do you write history in the 21st century? And that was a real challenge to try and get your head around. Actually, what are the sort of practices of data storage, of archiving? And how does that then affect, you know, how armed forces can make, can think about learning lessons and derive meaning that can then shape their own activities in a context that is totally digital. So that's where we can join. And as Andrew said, the challenge was to write something into this interdisciplinary way. And that really did mean stripping out all the jargon as much as we could to get it read, because if we start writing in our specific fields, what happens is we barely understand each other, let alone help anyone else understand what the hell's going on. So it was a real challenge to try and pull it all back to can we can we really get down to the specificities here so that people will follow what we're trying to, where our claims are and what we think is going on really now, not necessarily in the future, but just, you know, do we have a sense of what's going on now and over the next, you know, maybe a couple of years and what's happened in the previous 10 years or so, you know. So that's where I'd add my couple of pennies. And of course it's, sorry, Mike. No, please, Andrew. And of course there's any archive where there's a lot of this collapsing of boundaries that takes place, you know, between the professional and the amateur, between the public and the private, between what's sensitive and what is not sensitive. But, you know, I think the wider point, I think around smartphones and archives is that if you think that all of our communicational acts are archival, you've been to see it in those terms and you think, well, hang on a minute, what we mean by the archive is to transform beyond imagination and particularly when it comes to fighting and understanding and comprehending conflict. I mean, you know, people talk about weaponisation of smartphone, but for us, you know, I think it's partly around a growing individualisation of war. You know, the smartphone kind of gets under your skin. One of our favourite quotes is Soin Dukaro, who he was once head of future, future war in NATO. And he said, he's quoted as saying, smart, the smartphone is the soft underbelly of NATO. So, you know, the smartphone kind of embodies radical war, really, because it's the weapon, but it's also their vulnerability. You know, think about, I guess, this multi-directionality of war through data and attention. So on the one hand, you've got this, you know, and radical war is about these kind of contradictory relationships, you know, on the one hand, individualisation, certainly, but also on the other massification, you know, complexity, scale, connectivity, volume of the archive, but also personalisation, you know, people talk about pinpoint propaganda, the capacity for Russians, we can talk about Russians and Ukrainians in a minute, if you like, to aim and pinpoint text messages. And, you know, if you think about some kind of traditional theories of warfare, like network centric warfare, I think what's different now is where, once upon a time, you could kind of feed information down to the battlefield, you know, and individuals at units could kind of self-organise from about the 2012 onwards. And radical war was really about the kind of really contemporary period more recently. What you realise is more about sucking information up from things, you know, the rise of corporate surveillance and, in the book, we talk a lot about trajectories of information. So information going down to the battlefield can be replicated without this comes up. So the future of war then is not kind of decentralised network centric war, but radical war is where, you know, every action of every individual is potentially locatable, trackable, traceable, recordable, and this enables a greater kind of centralisation of control than ever before. And so this is where the future of AI lies, you know, as information is obviously too complex for the, you know, in terms of the volume for humans to manage, which brings us back to the archive, you know, the idea is where we started in terms of the challenges that we all have for managing the sheer volume and complexity of information about war. And that challenge is for archivists, it's for us as viewers or participants, it's certainly for militaries, it's for governments, it's for states. So all of us are kind of grasping, grappling with this problem of the complexity and volume of the digital, which has all kinds of consequences for how wars are fought, understood, misunderstood, ended, started, forgotten, remember, historicised, you know, and that for us is so it's so the challenge for us is about bringing together very different kinds of aspects of this debate. And it's a bit of a, I don't know, easy thing to say, but more of a holistic view. And that's, and that comes to, you know, what we've been trying to map in our work. Let me, let me jump in. I guess this, before we get too far into this, I'm just wondering if you can sort of walk us through the book. I mean, you've got a really elegant construct in the way you've organised things between data, attention and control. And I thought that was a really nice and intuitive way. The way you use that to build your argument really worked quite nicely. And Matthew, your comment about stripping out the jargon, so you could get to the essence of what the two of you coming from different disciplines were getting at. And I like the idea that you sort of, in trying to map equivalencies or identify sort of common ground, you actually have to get rid of a lot of that extra fluff and get down to essentials. So it's just wondering, you know, could you sort of walk us through, you know, we can be pedantic for a few minutes and then get back into the rest of the topic. If you could just sort of walk us through the book itself and sort of how you set that up. And, you know, if you want to bring in any entertaining being yet or what have you from the book, this would be the space for it. And then we can build from there. Okay, so I mean, really, the book is about trying to, we're trying to map this informational space, this battle space that, you know, takes the focus is maybe draws on the smartphone and allows everyone to understand, you know, the essential point here is that we're all connected, you know, connectivity is ubiquitous now. And so many people have smartphones that mobile cellular connection is universal almost. The internet is literally everywhere. And people are consuming their media in completely different ways now than they were even 10 or 15 years ago. And that's producing data footprints, producing profiles, producing material that needs to, you will need to map through our way through that, so that we understand how that might be how that is then used to shape your attention and shape the way you might focus on particular ideas, topics, redirect you, misdirect you and obviously into the space around disinformation and misinformation. And then from there, you know, this, there is a there is clearly an information infrastructure, a really hard information infrastructure that underpins all of this. And it's here where you see a lot of the geopolitics of infrastructure, you know, is that we're back to the obvious things around Belt and Road initiatives, we're interested in cell masks, we're interested in who accesses, who can deploy low satellite communications technologies to make it possible for people to get access to the internet, irrespective of what's going on in terms of a fixed broadband or a cellular phone connection. And of course, all those nodes are interdictable and a, you know, open to military action. And all of that then refashions and reshapes what people see at any one point if they log on to the wrong networks, then of course, they might reveal a whole here it series of things to those who are controlling those networks, that, you know, fundamentally rewrites how they, what they're seeing. And so you for example, you know, in Syria, the one of the genus Syrian civil war, you know, the battlefield might move over the top of people as their civilians is there, you know, in their basements trying to fight squirrel away from the fighting. And, you know, at the same time, the networks may or may not switch, you know, what broadband, what connectivity are they going to log into? What's that, that kind of electronic warfare battles, what's that electronic battle space? And of course, this is something that's the combatants themselves are very conscious of and trying to control shape. And, you know, you log on, what kinds of information are you then willing to upload? If you're, if you're upload, if you're uploading stuff, and you accidentally log on to the wrong network, you're giving away all sorts of all sorts of details about yourself, the results in you potentially opening yourself up to being a target. Or and of course, then how does that shape the kinds of truths, realities, and other things that you then yourself upload to the internet. And so that takes it to a whole second, third order battle space where actually the fighting over what gets represented on YouTube, what what gets pulled down, who's arguing over what what material is pre recorded, what's being doctored, what's been, you know, all of this space then becomes a real a real space that is itself open to discussion and and reframing miles away from what you might describe as the front lines. And of course, that's how, you know, people are communicating that way in and we need to some of this is some of this is is a function of just the fact that in one device, we are literally, we are literally being able to publish and sorry to to produce, publish, and consume things. You know, that disintermediates that strips out whole processes in mainstream media, you're now your own editor, you don't need editorial controls. And immediately, you can have an immediate effect. And that sort of the net result of that is, and we would argue that, you know, everyone participates, you know, your phone, as soon as you have it, it's giving it's your it's a sensor, it provides data for anyone who can access your your your phone. And of course, we know from recent examples, I'm thinking of the Israeli company, you know, you don't even have to download stuff onto your phone for it to be accessible. I tweeted earlier, how the American Armed Forces are making a point of just scraping your apps for geolocation data. We know about Strava and the US Armed Forces who are, you know, going out on runs, and that pretty much tells you where they are located and their bases are, you know, the same when it comes to Elliott Higgins and Bellingcat stuff that people in Worcester are very familiar with, you know, they're just that those data points then become something that you can track and follow. And it reveals all sorts of things. Now that's just classic. In some ways, you'd say that's OSIN, just simple OSIN, but it's, what is that in terms of making the whole battle space transparent? You know, what you've effectively got is billions of people who can provide information in a way that the armed forces, you know, just from our perspective when we're looking at what is being collected at the right at the back end, right down in the archives, the armed forces aren't able to keep up with this in the same way that you might have, you know, there are lots of people, there are lots of people with smartphones and there's a small group of people and, you know, a small number of people in the armed forces who are also relying on civilian infrastructure to get a lot of their communications to work. And it's unsurprising in those circumstances when, you know, someone on their smartphone pings something up, pings something out more quickly than you'd expect to see otherwise or never gets reported even on mainstream media because it's going through an editorial process. And lots of implications in terms of how people participate in war, right? This is, this is, and it's the participatory aspect that is really reshaping for us these these challenges around and which we're calling, you know, radical, where we think radical war is located. Andrew, you were going to say. No, no, it's absolutely it's, and this is a problem ultimately then of control. Okay, so partly because the smartphone is such a kind of personal intimate individual advice device that no one wants to be without. So in Ukraine, you know, Russians triangulate Ukrainian positions with smartphones, so hack into cell phone towers, send out a bunch of SMS text messages to random smartphones saying, oh, hi, how are you doing? How are you going? Ukrainian soldier replies or phones or texts is located through that reply, and then the Russians do artillery on that position. And but it's more than that, you know, other examples where you've got AI in humans working in concert. I think good example we're using the book is where the SFF has been set up a Facebook group, and they kind of radicalise a Ukrainian parliament parliamentary group member through setting up a great Facebook book of, you know, 10 or 15 people, some are human, some are not. And then they start, you know, liking and sending them memes with, you know, kittens on and and over time kind of the individual comes to trust them, and then they can turn them. So there's, there's all kinds of in some ways very new, but also very multiple vulnerabilities that are tied up in our attachment to these technologies. So, you know, in historians, philosophers and historians of technology argued that the key shift is from a reliance on these technologies, first kind of sociology and living and working and entertainment and war to dependency. So that is the historical shift, certainly of radical war. But of course, this is a massive problem then what what do militaries do, you know, do they ban smartphones and social media? And that there's really inconsistencies about how militaries attempt to defend against these kind of new vulnerabilities. So, for example, the Canadians in Ukraine were told to delete all their social media accounts and do everything via VPN servers and obviously secure WhatsApp and Signal, don't make phone calls, don't use smartwatches. But I think other militaries and other parts of the world, the Americans, I think, don't have universally such stringent and such consistent kind of rules of using such technologies. So there seems to be a real kind of messiness to the responses and capacity to deal with and manage radical war. There are other examples. I mean, just quickly, Mike, I mean, I was just thinking about the Israeli campaign last spring in Gaza and elsewhere, you know, they had to acknowledge that they asked local citizens to switch off their, on the Israeli side of the boundary to switch off their smart devices that they might have plugged in, you know, their CCTV and other bits and pieces that were connecting through the internet. And on the one hand, you know, that's smart because it prevents the other side from hacking those devices, using that data to gain access to tech as insights as to how they are affecting the battle space, whether their rockets are having any effect, whether they need to read, you know, pick out different targets, all this kind of stuff. But it's also in some ways an acknowledgement that they can't actually control that environment, right? So by actually asking people to switch them off, they're not actually just directly switching them off. So that's on the one hand. On the other, you know, that they attacked a large building that also they claim had Hamas fighters in it. And it took out Al Jazeera, it was Associated Press and another news agency, the name of which escapes me right now, Long Day, excuse me. But, you know, so on the one hand, they are trying to slow, this is all about trying to slow how mainstream media report. And on the other hand, it's about preventing the targeting of things on their own side. But at the same time, what you're seeing is that the Israelis themselves are struggling to keep control over the propaganda itself. So they're actually having to, they're recognizing that they can't control the battle space because everything previously would have gone through the military sensor, and now they can't keep it going through the military sensor. And that means that, you know, the implication is that these devices and the internet itself is just sort of making it much, much harder, generally speaking, for the armed forces to just shape what comes out of the battle space. And in that respect, the military just become an additional actor. There's this ecology, if you like, which is where I was, there's this space that is where things are going on. And the armed forces are just one component of a whole series of things that reflect how civil society likes to work when it comes to, you know, sharing information, using the internet, using WhatsApp or whatever. And it's that shift, if you like, where civil society is driving what's going on. And the armed forces are, you know, having to catch up, it seems to me, with how, how apps are being used, how people are engaging online, how people are thinking about the world, how they are, you know, you can't go on the tube or on, or you can't go anywhere, it seems to me. You know, the first thing you do is when you look on the tele, all you see is people using their smart phones to send a text or record something and bounce it back and forth, you know, when I was watching that awful explosion in the Lebanon where the grain silo went up, the footage I remember seeing most distinctly was people videoing the destruction, but there were people videoing the videoers of the destruction. That's how ubiquitous the smartphone was because everyone was doing it, you know, and everyone was recording this stuff in the cases of the same sort of image coming back and forth all the time, but it was really, really fascinating to see how, you know, many devices, people just on their devices all the time. And that civil society, it seems to me, not, you know, that's something the armed forces have to, that's where the battle space has to try and figure out where that, how that fits. It collapses boundaries, you know, and puts the civilian, if you want, the participant in the driving seat in a way that they previously hadn't been. Let me jump in with a few questions. I know there's some specific points that you want to cover, and you've already covered a lot of territories. Maybe what I'll do is I'll start with kind of an obvious question, but possibly, you know, I mean, it's a question that's been asked in various guises in different ways for a long time, so it's not all that new a sort of question, but it's directly relevant to the book. A lot of what you're talking about is very right now, right? And I guess that's the function of, you know, what we're talking about sort of access to data and presentation of data and transparency of data and ubiquity of, you know, the medium and the message as well. And I guess the question would be, you know, how do you, how do those kind of technologies, those digital technologies of media, how do they challenge and change, you know, what we're fundamentally talking about is the nobility of war, right? I mean, that second part is not a new question at all, but what you're getting at with one of the things that you're talking about quite a bit in the book is that, you know, how this challenges that nobility. Does it clarify things? Or does it muddle things? What does it, you know, what does it do for people like the historians in the audience who maybe don't deal with digital data at all, or those who are not dealing exclusively with that in their work? So, yeah, it's a huge, huge massive challenge for historians. And, you know, Matthew and I were saying where we met at Army Historical Branch, maybe just say something briefly about the branch, just for those who aren't aware of what it is, that they use operational record keeping to understand historical engagement, you know, operations and campaigns for public inquiries and police and war pensions. So their job is really the structured disclosure of official military records. And they've got a unique collection of operational records from the 90s, and they've got lots of other historical material at all. And, you know, and for me, for the book for us, there's this battle space of archives really. And that comes from a number of kind of intercepting pressures, the technological, the political, the economic, and the policy, absolutely. So in this country, we've got this, and I'll come on more specifically to answer your question, Mike, this is part of the, it's all connected. You know, we've got the Public Records Act, for those of you who know where the rule from the reviews of official records is shifting from 30 years to what will reach next year, 20 years. So after 20 years in the official archive, these records, all records, government records, including military records need to be reviewed to see whether they're of historical value and should they go into the public domain via the National Archives? Are they of no historical value? So we destroy them? Or are they of value? But so they've got sensitive stuff in, so we can't let them out to the public. And this kind of process of the emerging into the public of secret military records that is stood a set of times for decades and feeds into military history, that system is completely and utterly broken, completely smashed. You can't even begin to imagine the change that has happened as part of what we're calling radical war. And so on a policy level, we've, in this country, we've got Public Records Act and Open Government, the sense we've got to open stuff up and share stuff, you know, this kind of digital values of openness, we call it on the one hand. And on the other, you've got GTPR, which says you can't let any personal stuff out. It's all sensitive, you know, we can't, we can't let that out. So you've got this almighty blowing or clash, when the person put the chat around, you know, it's a knowledge and clash of different types of knowledge that is embedded in the digital. So from about 2003, the stuff that was coming from the battlefield in Iraq to Army Historical Branch in an archive basement buried beneath Whitehall was digital stuff. All of a sudden they didn't get paper and, and, and they, all of a sudden they started all these CD-ROMs and discs started arriving with, with stand on them, you know. And so they, well, what are we going to do with this, you know, is, so the digital record begins then, okay, in, well, in a, sorry, before then, but in a kind of mass form. And the problem with all the digital records, and this comes back to the smartphone, the social media, individualization and personalization of all the soldiers out there, they're on social media, they're emailing this and taking photographs of this and making PowerPoints of this and having affairs with X, okay. And it's all happening on the same thing. It's all happening in the digital devices, the archive implodes, it collapses, the boundaries have gone. There's no official, unofficial, no secret and non-secret, no sensitive and nonsensitive. That's all there. I mean, so the question then becomes in this amazing, astonishing archive, we've got the most astonishing record of history, of the history of war that was ever conceivable or imaginable, okay. And it's sitting on archives, right? Okay. One, are the official archives ever going to come into the public domain? No, they're not. No, they're not. Because the GDPR will not allow the sensitive stuff to come out. And the sensitive stuff, i.e. that, that about the pornography that X was engaging in, the, the affairs that Y was engaging in, are all mixed up with the official records. So how do you disaggregate that? Well, you, you send it to these eight people who work for defence business services who, who are the sensitivity reviewers. So these are people who traditionally look at stuff and say, oh, oh, this, this isn't, this isn't a nuclear secret. This is just history. It's good, but let's send it to TNA and TNA will release it. Well, now because of GDPR, it's not going to go there anyway. And the TNA, the national archives will not release stuff anyway because of all this personal sensitivity. So this is massive, massive void of digital history. Meanwhile, out there on YouTube, you know, and social media, you've got everything's out there anyway. So you've got this, this kind of paradoxical world, whereby official records are caught up in the, in the problems of sensitivity review, the problems of GDPR, perfect storm of policy and technology and economy, economy being, we're not putting any resources into our historical balance because we don't think they're important enough. Okay, we're just starting out for you. Okay. And, you know, as we all know, record keepers are always bottom of the cooch hanger. And, and, you know, when you're fighting a war anyway, no one says, oh, where the archives, you know, it's the last one. If you have the archive, then you could be held to account somewhere. And of course, what are, what are archives being used predominantly for, they're being held used predominantly as part of a process of trying to hold militaries to account for breaking rules of engagement or doing some other nefarious activity. Whilst they're out on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, what are the, what does the historical branches then find themselves doing all the time, making sure that they can provide the kind of support necessary to make sure that the Ministry of Defence doesn't get caught on the back of some kind of legal action. The net result is, is do you, can you process the material so that you can then feed into how armed forces drive doctrine, you know, drive doctrine change or, you know, what are this, the dreadful euphemism, learn lessons, you know, actually, it's more convenient under those circumstances to not learn lessons, right, to not go into the archive, to rely on particular memory or particular instances, because the light, if you actually bring all of this stuff up at the same time, you get caught in all sorts of inconveniences, you know, it's, it doesn't seem any coincidence to me that we're in a situation where people are more interested in great power competition. That is a lovely euphemism for forgetting all of the mess that has been Iraq and Afghanistan. And we can draw a clean slate and do it all, start again without having to engage in all of that stuff. So I, you know, I think, and of course, the core infrastructure that armed forces are working on is nowhere near as sophisticated as civilian infrastructure. It just, you know, you can go out and but, and you can see this, I mean, this is what this most astonishing, that the, the, when it comes to getting purchasing gear, the armed forces and set the people in the in uniform would rather buy something from Amazon. In fact, they know they can get something quicker from Amazon than if they try and draw it from their own stores, it will be cheaper from Amazon than if they draw it from their own stores where they have to fill out stuff in using, I don't know, I wouldn't be surprised if it's still a green screen on maybe I'm being unfair to people. But, you know, that's the core business of trying to supply armed forces. I mean, and of course that doesn't stop people being really good at logistics and having a lot of, a lot of depth in an understanding how to make that work. But if, if you're relying on email to make it work, right, which is one of the things that we found, it just, I mean, having worked in the Ministry of Defense, I know, you know, we're not, we're not writing the stat, you have to draw a file, you put it in a shared file on using Microsoft Windows, you just, you know, you then, where does it go? You know, what happens to it? Does any, how much of it is printed off and put in the, in the project file? Do you remember to do that? And then you're relying on using email to make the system work. And this is one of those interesting instances where you're talking, everyone's talking about artificial intelligence and big data and all these big sophisticated things. And yet the practical reality of how things are working is you ask people to go back through their mailbox to find the thing that you sent a few days ago so that you can build the case that you can, you know, defend your position or advance a particular policy or whatever. And when you're doing policy, but policymaking by email, it's a real challenge, it seems to me, and that's just describing, you know, some of that's legacy, but some of it's still very much now, it seems, it seems to us, I think. Well, yeah, I mean, well, absolutely. So, so while, while the Russians are trolling the hella of the West, you know, the Western governments are, because of sensitive review and their inability to share knowledge at such a speed are just, you know, incapable of responding in real time. So we have to think about the kind of archive notions of knowledge and information, informational trajectories as we call them, you know, in terms of our capacity to process that information and knowledge in a meaningful way. And certainly within, you know, UK government, I'm sure the governments are similar, there's a real problem in terms of the speed of information that comes in, and the capacity of it to be shared amongst government, amongst militaries, because of policy GDPR of, you know, of classification, of access, and that sort of all jumps up, okay. So, so the problem is, well, you know, you've got all the disinformation, the world out here that's, you know, various countries use including this one, of course. But the archive in those terms, then it is a real hindrance. Yeah, the policies there to protect information are an absolute huge hindrance to the fighting of war in the digital era. Okay. And sorry, go on. Just a white and the wider point about archives that, you know, think about the, you know, in terms of complexity, volume and scale. Again, that I come back to my point earlier, this, you know, the amazing, amazing opportunity, apparently, to prosecute war crimes and international humanitarian law is completely caught up in the problems of the archive. You know, the UN mechanism investigating crimes in the Syrian Arab Republic since 2011, you know, they've got two million documents, videos and testimonies, 41 terabytes, you know, so data is the same savior, but also the albatross, you know, and things like Peter Pomerance, somehow who says, you know, you can have all the digital content of all these atrocities, but it's sitting there, waiting for facts to be given meaning. Okay. So you have terabytes and terabytes of stuff. But if you can't humanly process it, and we can't humanly process it. So, and as Matthew said, you know, AI and machine learning and stuff, you just, just isn't there yet. So we're in this strange vacuum where we've got all this amazing information and apparent knowledge and documentation about all things that are really important to us, you know, and especially the breaching of human rights. Yet we have an incapacity to do anything about it. We've got a real challenge here in terms of temporalities and how, you know, you can make sense of war and through these official processes and then look at it in terms of civilians also working at much greater speeds where data bounces around and you get a much, much different, you get an unofficial, a public interpretation. And you get this, you get this situation where you have official and unofficial lines that start to re, and because through social media, they really start to, they can really start to clash. You know, it becomes really obvious that what's being stated by governments is no, is not what's happening on the ground. And, you know, that's been, you could say that's been going on for a long time, but it's just suddenly been rendered really transparent. You've, as Andrew says, you've got these legal, you've got a lot of data being made available that then shapes how war crimes, proceedings and all the rest of it might, might progress. But in order to try and at least play part in this act, in shaping the narrative, you've got, you know, in the 2008, nine, six, seven, eight, nine, you've got the YouTube wars where, you know, headcan, footage and all the other stuff is coming through. And this is being actively shaped and promoted in order to try and construct narratives, which is, you know, really fascinating in terms of how that then frames the public understanding of war. And increasingly, that's no longer, you know, that's something that's increasingly in the hands of the public, public more generally, which, you know, again, adds additional layers and dimensions to how we might think about war in the 21st century. I'm just, I'm just keeping an eye on the time. I'm going to, I'm going to ask you a two-part question and I'm going to suggest or maybe, yeah, suggest you guys keep it to about five minutes and then I'd like to switch to Q&A if that's all right. We've got some really interesting questions lined up in the, in the chat. So the questions are two-part one. So, I mean, you've touched on this. So how do militaries learn lessons do or, or identify them and then ignore them or whatever sort of cynical variation on that theme you want to pick up on, but how do they do it, you know, in this, in this new war ecology that you've talked about? And, and I guess a related question is, is what's the rule for official histories in that, you know, in relation to that new war ecology? Can I suggest, Andrew, you pick up the second one, because I just, I've got a couple of what I was just about leading to. I mean, you know, the obvious answer is, is if war's always on, then what, at what point are you learning, you know, you're learning lessons on a continuous cycle? You know, there is no after-action review. Where do you do the after-action review? At what point is something switching out from some kind of activity and a new activity? I mean, you have to process that data and make it meaningful and intelligible for people in real time. And that's, you know, what, what point, you know, there's an activity here around reflection and thinking, not just instantaneous engagement with that in order to try and come to immediate conclusions, but there's, there's broader ones that might have much bigger organization or bureaucratic impact. They also need processing. And how do you allow this sort of the dimension around political time, you know, because that tends to become, starts to become a political activity. An organization has to try and make sense of some of this stuff. And it requires, you know, various parts of the bureaucracy to come together to figure out how they might interpret and think about what a lesson might be. And all of that, you know, in a context where war crimes have happened, where people have broken rules of engagement, where other oddities and unpleasantness has gone on, because of course war isn't something that, you know, unfolds according to how military historians portray it. And, you know, you suddenly get to a, you get to a whole series of loose ends and difficulties and challenges that make it much require some kind of social process to allow and that social process takes time. You know, you don't, who wants to be associated with the defeat and what happens to their, their careers if they are found wanting in various places. So that's, that's the first thing I'd say. The other thing I'd say is is that if you take seriously the point that we've been making about a break in institutional memory, that there's, there's been some institutional atrophy around how the archive might work. And the technology doesn't, in terms of archiving within the institution can't keep up with, how, with processes of digitalization. Then you're left with questions about, in our mind anyway, where does, what's, what actual record might there be for driving some kind of lesson learning activity? You're left with people thinking, employing memory rather than some kind of corroborating evidence. This is how we remember it. And of course, memory is an activity that, you know, start, is about recalling something in the present. And that is subject to all sorts of vagaries and uncertainties. And that implies it seems to us when it comes to, and this is me trying to set up Andrew a little bit. What does that, it, what does memory instead of documentary evidence do for how OH might, might, might work? Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I mean, the post up, someone told us the post operational reports. So the, the longstanding historical means of gathering information, reflecting upon lessons learned over campaign, you know, over a year or two years, or even several years, and then coming up with lots of reports on how we'll fight the next war differently and better. It's just gone. You can't do it, you know, and, and as Matthew was saying, you know, war is, is kind of permanent in some ways. In some ways that, that suits certain armies in certain ways of fighting, but the capacity to have pause and reflect has just gone. So the problem with then for official history is, you know, and the historians often say, you don't know that, you know, you can only write a history 10 years after the events happened, but the, the connectedness of war, the connectedness of archives, the, the inability, the, the, the, the difficulties in accessing such records that are even if you've got some way of accessing them or clearance to get to them, the, your capacity to separate them out in a, in a meaningful way in terms of the current policies around GDPR and other, other policies to protect personal information become all the greater, you know, and, and there are a number of people who can be excited to say, we've got this amazing new software that will separate them all out. And it might be 90 or 95% you know, it might separate 90 or 99.9% of the stuff that you don't want to put in the public domain out, but the 1% you just can't account for in the digital world. There isn't that kind of machine AI a certain tears yet and they may never, they never be the, so the problem face story ends who you want to use such material is they'll just never get access to it. So, you know, what kinds of sources, what kinds of archives, what kind of memories can, can be drawn upon to inform those, those histories, I think is a really, really difficult question. We certainly don't have the answers. Sorry, Matthew, let me jump in. I was just going to say, I mean, and just picking up your point, Andrew, I mean, the point that Facebook can do American English, but it can't do, you know, if they're going to run an algorithm to, I'm going to be literally, I'm going to be two minutes, if they can run an algorithm to, to scrape for particular content, it works perfectly fine, you know, maybe for American English, but you, you, you start to get to nuances of different cultural approach, different ways of speaking English. And all of that has to be recalibrated. And, you know, you don't, you only have to look at recent whistleblowers to know that that's not there. That is just genuinely not there. And that is, that's a, it's not that, if that's not being, not working properly for Facebook, you know, the archivists at the bottom of the pile, who are having to apply technologies to try and sift through this stuff, they don't have it. Yeah. Okay, we'll shut up there. We'd much prefer to hear from the wonderful, wonderful people you've gathered here, Mike. Thank you. Okay, so let's, I'm just going to dig into the questions and start from, start in, in, you know, with the old, or the, sorry, I'm losing my words. It's, I'm three hours ahead here. So a question that got emailed in before the start of the talk, I think you two know who it is, but the name isn't here because it was pasted in after being emailed in with the advent of the mobile phone and personal. So this is about who controls the official version with the, the advent of the mobile phone and personal computer. Do you think that the likelihood of something being held on a personal device concerning military operations will undermine the state's preferred record of an event and therefore undermine, undermine state control of archives and therefore the study of military history? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And all the time, all the time there's this battle of the archives as we've described it. So the, the, partly because obviously, as we know, official archives work on a much longer trajectory and are subject to all kinds of policy regulations and capacity to extract nonsensitive information. I mean, that's, that's the blockage. Okay, that's the, that's the end of the line in terms of official history. So I guess it begs the question, well, what do you do with all the open access stuff or the OSINT stuff, you know? But then you run into a kind of similar problem, which is volume, complexity, scale and management of that. So, so the two different systems be they the official government, military documentation and archival of conflict versus the kind of open access participant, I'm on my smartphone in the front line kind of documentation. They're both running into the same historical problems in terms of how do you begin to manage and assimilate such a massive information that was just not imaginable even 15 years ago. I'm waiting for, you guys have been tag-teaming all evening. Okay, so I mean, I mean, in some ways, you know, there have always been unofficial archives, right? I mean, that's, that's, that's the way things work, you know, people take photos, it's all the nasty stuff. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't end up in the official archive, right? Or if it, you know, and if it does, then it's the stuff that we don't get to see because it's been, you know, filtered out. And it's that, that, that kind of material that allows all sorts of counter narratives and previously unstated narratives to be recovered, you know, approvably buried perspectives to be recovered and you can get alternative and more interesting, more nuanced histories emerging out of it. But I think what, what we're suggesting is that the, if on the OH side, it starts to, you start to find it harder and harder to get access to material. But on the public side, it remains easy to share and make material available. You've got this, this real grinding mismatch between how the OH might be able to shape and it's much more visceral in our view, compared to how it might have occurred over the, in the 20th century. And of course, on top of that, it's subject to all sorts of disinformation and all sorts of second order battlefield effects that then are already being employed to reshape and refashion how people perceive the world. And once you get to social media and all this other stuff, you know, these, these platforms are designed to keep people separate in ghetto, in their media ghettos, right down with talking to the communities that they want to hang out with, rather than to come to some kind of shared understanding, why will people aren't in front of the box, in front of the telly in the evenings, watching a program that will allow them to gain some sense of, you know, people don't go to school like I did the next day and talk about the program that everyone watched the night before, because that's not how people consume media anymore. They have three screens, my, my teenager's got three screens going, and they're looking at lots of different things all at the same time. And that's just, and I would expect that to, to continue. I don't see a reason why it would, would be any other way, because the internet makes it possible for all of these devices to, you know, for people to connect in lots of different communities, transnationally without any reference to some kind of immediate community. And that, that does undermine or reshape how we engage with different narratives about war and experience, war and society. All right, I'm going to scroll through these, I'm going to focus primarily on the ones that were framed as questions, some interesting comments in there, but just for, to manage time a little bit, I'll focus on the ones that were framed as questions from Philip Blood. So, so a good solid question on, you know, predictive and anticipatory uses versus, you know, retrospective understanding. The question is what are the implications for preventing future ethnic cleansing or genocide? So I was thinking about this in terms of what's been, I mean, what's been going on in Kazakhstan. I mean, the obvious thing here is that, what's been, what's clear is that the Kazakhstan governments just switched off the internet and then closed down cell phone communications. And on the one hand, that immediately destroys our thesis, right? Everyone's connected. And yet the government has just acted and completely destroyed our thesis. That's, you know, that's the immediate, I hope you're all going, but what about Kazakhstan, right? That this is far too, this is, we're being too absolutist about how this is going, this claims that we're making in radical war. And I think the answer to that is that actually, you know, they're going to switch the internet back on, and they're going to switch cell phone communications back on. And their acknowledgement that they can't, that they had to switch these things off in order to control how people were organizing on the streets in Kazakhstan is indicative of the fact that as soon as they switch it back on again, all of that stuff's going to go drink, and then they're going to be in a world of pain all over again. So, you know, just because you think, well, governments, they can control, they can switch things off, they can make things unhappy, you know, literally shape how communications happen in this, in this moment, doesn't mean that people aren't recording stuff, they're using their data, they're finding other ways of getting their data out onto the web. Things are going to get harder as we get to splinter webs, as we get different, different countries setting up their own networks, then patrolling those networks in all sorts of other ways, totally acknowledged, acknowledged. But, you know, that's, it seems to me emblematic of how the digital space has refashioned how we're thinking about information and our engagement with the world through the internet. No, I'll just add that, you know, I think one way to posit in on this question is to think about, well, who is adversary? You know, is the, you know, the digital idea of the adversary committing all crimes or genocide, or is the technologists that have facilitated the spread of genocidal hate? So, Myanmar, Luanda, places like that. So, you know, I think the digital shifts, you know, we're talking about war ecologies and each war ecology is different, you know, it's so easy to say global this, global that, but it isn't like that at all. Different technologies are introduced over different scales to different populations. And it's the often, as in the case with Myanmar, the very, very rapid introduction of the internet smartphones over a very short amount of period enabled, certainly many people say, you know, genocidal crimes to take place. So, who is the, who's the adversary there? Who's the enemy? Is it Facebook or is it the military or those who committed the hateful and genocidal acts? You know, I think it becomes much more complicated when given the use of the introduction of new technologies in specific war ecologies. Okay, let's move on to the next question from Natalie Jester. I have a really general question. Good. How does the law play into all of this? So, there's an interesting parallel dialogue going on in the chat here about how this intersects with law. But the example that Natalie gives is what digital data should governments be able to delete? I can see this working from a number of perspectives, so I'd like to hear what you find most interesting. Yeah, I mean, what should be deleted? What should be controlled? I think, you know, I always think that, and I've done some work on this, that the right to be forgotten legislation is like, you know, something, something that has happened after the horse has bolted really. So, the capacity for information to be copied, to be stolen, to be hacked, to be shared, I think puts a legislation in a tricky place. And so, that's why, you know, GDPR in some ways is closing down access to certain information where this kind of paradox, whereas over here you've got the fluidity and the kind of transferability of informational trajectories outside of that. So, I think the law has, you know, to what extent the law and technology, and this is a long argument, isn't it? You know, to what extent, what is that relationship between law and technological development? And to what extent has technological development exceeded or escaped the capacity of law to introduce kind of meaningful or manageable changes to protect people or individuals subject to the sharing of certain information, I think, is an interesting question. I mean, and just to take it in a slightly different direction, if, you know, in the ambition to learn lessons and render decision-making transparent, you actually allow headquarters to be recorded. And that recording, you know, by law, but at least in the UK, if it's recorded or then in order to facilitate learning or training or some other activity if it's recorded, then of course it has to be kept, you know, but what does that then do to how people might then engage in the process of making decisions? If they know that their perspectives, their views, their decision calculus is being recorded, you know, do they start to moderate or change their behavior? And if that material is recorded and it has to be kept as a result, what, you know, you'll have different perspectives through the ages of what is acceptable or not. And there you will have this recorded data that allows people to reinterpret what's going on in 20 or 30 years time. And, you know, what kind of minefield are you getting into in your ambition to render things transparent? You're also then conditioning people's behaviors in a slightly different way when it comes to decision-making. And so you've got these, there are all sorts of ways that the technology might be applied in order to engage, you know, find ways of delivering better outcomes that have all sorts of unintended and counterproductive consequences, that have legal ramifications. Okay. I'm going to ask, I'm going to, let's see, some of the questions I think have been addressed quite a bit. The really interesting questions went from Oliver Missy, really interesting, but I think it's been discussed quite a bit. I think Jeff Michael's question is probably getting right at the focus of the talk, right, shaping the military understanding of war. So there's some very sort of specific kinds of questions that Jeff is asking, how does the smartphone effect soldiers' relationships with their families? Does it make deployments easier? Regarding the smartphone as a disciplinary problem for armed forces, how they recruit personnel from the society addicted to smartphones? If it means entering your armed forces still require switching off potentially for long periods? So there's a bit more that you can probably read there. I'm going to give you a few minutes to... So just picking up Jeff's last question, you know, I think if you're extending the archive, you're creating the potential for infinite targets, right? I mean, this is what this data is doing, right? You go from, I think we describe it as iconic enemy, the iconic enemy, which is someone like Saddam Hussein, who the media builds up into the bogeyman that needs to be beheaded, right? And now we have the situation where the war on terror is literally something that can be continued by mining the archive to find new patterns of engagement throughout, across society that ultimately leads to a situation where not only are we all creating data, but depending on who's in charge of that data, you can spin it up in a different way. And you have a multiplicity of infinite targets, and that feeds the targeting machine, right? That's the horror, as it were, that emerges out of this exercise and where you see some real fundamental... I mean, taken to the extreme, that sounds absolutely daft, but there were points in 2020 when I was listening to what was watching, what was going on in as part of the presidential elections, and I was just, look, the war on terror has collapsed in on itself. And what we've got now is in order to continue that we have to come up with new policies to internalize the war on terror, to make it something that goes domestic in order to perpetuate the war on terror. And that, and that we need hidden adversaries as they're framed by these social networks that might emerge out of just reconstructing new patterns of information, we need that in order to keep this war in an ongoing state. That was, that's my initial provocative statement, if you like. I don't know whether I, that was... Andrew, I don't know whether you had chance to think about the other ones. Apologies, Andrew, I didn't mean to... No, no, no, I was typing some notes, so I was making a lot of noise. But yeah, this was too much to take in here. So, in terms of questions coming through about documentation and who's archive from James... Actually, if you could focus on James's question, James Gagal, Professor of War Studies Department. Okay. Thanks for a really great talk. How does the big shift relate to, say, UN, including war crimes archives? And can new skills be developed quickly enough to keep up? Will anyone ever be able to find a document, record item that they know exists? But the archivists say they cannot trace it. And there are big questions about who's archive, especially, say UNHCR and similar organizations collecting biometric data from refugees, migrants, et cetera. I just wanted to articulate that so it gets caught up in the, in the recording as well. Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah, thanks, James. Good to see you, or at least hear from you. Yeah, I mean, I'm very skeptical because there's simply a data economy. So data has a value from being aggregated. So data will always be, and well, currently regulation enables a lot of data that's collected, either open source, but also through other various means to be sold on through data brokers. And so who has ownership of that data, be it biometrics or even data collected for the purposes that seem perfectly reasonable and good? What actually happens to that data in the future, I think, is a difficult question. So who owns that data? Which organizations own it? I think that's a really difficult question to answer because ultimately, while there's an economy of data and while so much data is still accessible publicly, it has a value, it has a, you know, the collection of very different kinds of data sets and the aggregation of them has a value. So as long as that is the case, then I think, you know, all that we're talking about is a real risk of being utilized and sold and lost as well. I think one of the things perhaps we didn't emphasize enough in this talk that we do in the book is the kind of forgetting that's going on and the capacity certainly through sensitivity review and digital records to wipe stuff, to erase stuff. So in some sense, we're talking here about this phenomenal archive and access and millions and millions and millions of images that are used by NGOs and gathered for NGOs to pursue war crimes in the future. The Syrian archive, for instance, the Syrian archive problem with YouTube, of course YouTube deleting thousands and thousands of videos of alleged war crimes because they do not conform to the to the requirements, the services of YouTube, so the terms and conditions. So again, it's the technologists kind of intervening there and the kind of clash of archives, a class of regulations, a clash of walls, but absolutely that's leading to a diminishment of forgetting, a deletion. So these things, these paradoxes are in play definitely within radical war. You've gone quiet. Mike's gone muted. Thank you. I'm looking at the time we're an hour and a quarter in. That's all those substantive questions that are posted and I think it's probably appropriate to give you to the last word and then we'll close out. If we could do that in about five to 10 minutes, I know you could probably go on for a couple more hours, but I'm just saying there's a lot to be said. If you want to keep it to five to 10 minutes and then we can close out and then I'll stop the recording. And then if we want to hang back and chat a bit more than we can do that as well. Andrew, you have a time limit as well of half past, don't you? Yeah, yeah, I've got to go. Why don't you go first? Yeah, I mean, thanks so much for all your comments and questions. They're really interesting engagements. So really, thank you for your attention. I don't have a lot to add, but I think one of the things I'll underline is, you know, how we try and kind of map this idea of the new war ecology. And what we try not to do in the book is make speaking generalizations about the nature of technology or policy or war, even though we're talking about radical war. So, you know, I think we have to be tuned to how technologies and media and data and attention and perception work in very different ways and very different political, cultural and technological contexts. And so that's why I think it was important to mention the cases we did. You know, the media ecology and war ecology of Ukraine is very, very different to that in the UK or the US or Myanmar or Rwanda or Spain. You know, it's easy, I think, to make speaking generalizations about some of these, these, these trends. But hopefully we've been carefully enough to say, well, actually, all war ecologies are different and we have to attend. And this is why it's so difficult, you know, and this is comes back to the point about interdisciplinarity we made at the beginning. You know, you cannot understand the war ecology, you know, without understanding economy, politics, policy, technology, you know, people, organizational memory, as well as the nature of war and technology itself. And so to try and map those things together is not easy, because as we said at the beginning, we have very different concepts and ideas and frames to describe some of the same processes and some of the same transformations. And so that's why it's really challenging. So all I can end with really is a kind of plea to pursue interdisciplinarity. And, you know, and this is particularly around kind of war studies, media and communication studies, cultural studies, and sociology, those kind of key and politics, key disciplines and and how they, you know, are traditionally separated to the detriment, I think, of understanding of the subject matter we all claim to be interested in. So that's a kind of plea. And so I think if something comes out of our book, it's about at least trying to begin a more engaged interdisciplinary conversation to understand and map some of these processes. Thank you. Just to add, I mean, for us, I think we want to relink war and society, I think, in a way much more obvious way through the tech through these digital technologies and platforms, because, you know, so many times I read military stuff that seems to sort of have digitalization and digital digital stuff, the digital battlefield is some kind of it's in some way separate from or layered on to our experiences, you know, we have domains, we're talking about multi-domains, and the information space is another domain, and it's just, you know, this is this is looking at war from the military's perspective. And using that to drive how we understand war, it looks at looks ask about face to us, I think, we are interested in how do how do people make sense of these experiences, they don't, they make it the sense of the experiences independently of what the state says or what the armed forces tell them, they are not interested, they are getting information in ways that they they don't necessarily understand. And as Andrew rightly said, you know, there are different ecologies with different ways of, you know, with different mixes of mainstream media, official media, and social media, and all the types of social media that aren't actually broadcast, WhatsApp, and all these other messaging services that are all there shaping perspectives. And we kind of, and that's going on independently of what the armed forces want or think or anything to, you know, and, and most of these changes, all of these changes, it seems to us, I think, are being driven by society more broadly. And the real problem isn't society, it's the armed forces, the armed forces are struggling to catch up, to make sense of, and to work out how to deal with this complexity. And all we are trying to do is make sort of go, well, look at the complexity here, let's see if we can map and draw together some of the links, so that we can see how public and private data, and the infrastructure that's both public and private relate to each other, who owns that data, where does it get stored, where are the data centers, what are the interrelationships, what legal frameworks might be associated with how that data moves. You know, what happens if we go to spinternets and different countries and different corporations having their own internets, and how they then make available data. And, you know, these are, I think, we think these are real social society questions. And they are very much present now. And it's the armed forces that are struggling to keep up with that. And that, I think, is the, instead of looking at the battlefield driving change, we're, I think, very much looking at how society is engaged with technology, media, and the information infrastructures that society is now reliant on. It's not increasingly reliant on, it is reliant on, how that then is reshaping how people understand and engage with the world. And that is the key thing for takeaway for us, I think, in terms of rethinking what the battle space, war and society, you know, is going on. And what's happening here? Okay, brilliant. With that, I think we'll draw it to a close. Andrew, I just realized I was posting the link to the book directly to you. I've just posted it to everyone. So if you're not familiar yet with the book, the title, it's Radical War, Data, Attention, and Control in the 21st Century from Hearst. Is it coming out with OUP as well, or is it Hearst right now? We hope so. We haven't had official statement that it is, but Michael Dwyer at Hearst told us today that there's a strong possibility, but we're going to, I'm not going to commit Michael to anything more than that. Sure. And it's out, it's, it looks like it's set for March. Is that, is that right? Or are we looking at? March, yes. Well, I've just seen, we've just seen the final proof now. March, paperback, 20 quid. It's a bargain. It's got lots of good endorsements from Peter Pomerantsev and Paul Mason and Brigadier Kashi Sharafi. Just to, if you weren't going to say that, Michael, I might, I was just off of that in there as well. Thanks everybody. I'm going to stop recording now.