Xenowar dreams of itself

Abstract

What has war become in an age of recursive computation and the globalised technobiome? Combining speculative fiction, Clausewitzian theory and metadisciplinary analysis, this exploratory piece outlines the emergence of a war that is both new and familiar—Xenowar. ‘Xeno’ because this war incorporates the alien and the Other into a new, dynamic, topological trinity. Xenowar is the Clausewitzian trinity spun in recursive loops of alterity, where conflict diagonalizes into an inhuman, alien cognition. War persists, but Clausewitz’s wunderliche Dreifaltigkeit morphs to become topological. Combatants emerge from corporations and nations as the understanding of war as human activity evolves into the realisation that all human activity is now war. ‘Users’ are a ‘standing reserve’ for the Gestell. Simultaneously, the technological and biological merge, transforming conflict into three dimensions in a way that emphasises connection and shape, not geometry. This deforms war’s properties while preserving its form: asymmetry will be expressed as inhuman scales, and feedback loops will redefine geopolitics. Topological equivalence will mean the continuous mapping of States within Stack homeomorphism via oscillations of stretching and contraction. Westphalian deformations will increase turbulence at higher manifolds and dimensions. Equally, an inability to cut and paste borders of Stack topology will accentuate disconnection. Some Stacks may be enantiotopic to each other, mirror images but not superimposable. At other scales friction will spiral in recursions of homotopic functionalities across Stack infrastructures and diastereotopic data planes of invertible war: ‘recurgency’ will replace insurgency. State and Stack firewalls will constitute cosmotechnic event horizons of compression. From this black hole of Xenowar will pulse another type of Un-War, fought at the edges of the incomputable, an axiomatic reboot of Non-Turing mathematics and non-Abelian anyons of topological quantum computing. Sovereignty will not just be defined in the ontology of mathematical alterity. Life will prove non-computable. Adverserial relations will thus multiple via biolocial processes of mutation, while digital war’s front lines will recede to reflevive, recursive interstices. Consciousness is another limit upon which total war will press, and when war has co-opted consciousness what will we do—or even be?