Cacography, anomaly detection, and counterfactual violence

Abstract

The counterfactual sound-byte, a technocratic aphorism for phobogenic rumor, has bisected the public use of (un)reason, such as the counterfactual pattern recognitions that precipitated the invasion of Iraq. The militarized datafication of the counterfactual is predicated on signal/noise discriminations or cacography. Interrogation by torture, promissory kill lists, prosecutorial, algorithmically generated metadata, drone signature strikes, superimposed kill boxes and enforced political disappearances become rumor materially enacted upon and lodged in cacographic, bodies, which, in turn, become rumor forms. The collaterally damaged as fabulations of the computational enemy are indispensable to the prosecution of a war. The circulating body deemed to be cacographic is the metadata underwriting the pattern recognition and excision of the politically anomalous. The hyperpeformativitiy of real-time data collection generates its own inadmissible cacographic surplus through “lossies” caused by compression technology. Asymmetrical war, seeking to purge the interference and cacophony of global asymmetry, returns us to the archaic association of rumor with the din of mobilized armies. Algorithmic warfare has not immunized itself from cacographic dissonance but produces it as surplus value through prosecutorial metadata, anomaly detection, and collateral damage.