The war for the future

Abstract

<jats:p> The following essay was born out of the authors’ participation in the Hamburg (Insecurity) Sessions 2019: Un-Cancelling the Future, and the discussions that took place in the workshop on Future Weapons and Emerging Technologies. The workshop participants critically addressed such problems as the future of defence technologies and their sociotechnical environments, cybersecurity and surveillance proliferation and the improvised instruments of insurgency. Our task was to weave the ideas and insights of the workshop’s participants into a vision of the world in 2040 and use it to motivate an analysis of the technoscientific imaginaries emerging in the present. From the workshop presentations and discussions, we identified three key areas of that allowed us to imagine the outlines and interactions of global security and technoscientific practice in 2040: ecopolitics: the exploitation of ecological systems for strategic ends; technonationalism: the use of advanced technologies to pursue racialised and nationalistic geopolitical agendas; and the security continuum: the extension of conflict modes to all aspects of social life and the open-source proliferation of security tools and techniques. </jats:p>