The name of this blog, kyberwarlord is not meant to invoke the image of a red-teamer looking for vulnerabilities in a network. Further, the name need not even be about computers or the digital realm at all. It is a name that seeks to invoke the feeling of control, regardless of the form of control---psychological, political, social, economic, information, digital.
The original inspiration, I must admit, does stem from one of my favorite (and I will contend, one of the best) records of all time, Deltron 3030’s eponymous album. Deltron 3030 (when speaking of the album I will use italics, when speaking of the group I will use regular) is, on first listen, about a man seeking to compete in an intergalactic rap battle. The term “kyberwarlord” originates from the song “3030”, the first track after the introduction. The line goes:
…cyberwarlords are activating abominations…
Now, this obviously denotes a resentment of these fictitious cyberwarlords. Though I think that I am so compelled by the word due to my training in Ancient Greek, where the prefix kuber means control, which is etymologically linked to our modern cyber prefix. These cyberwarlords are not mere hackers looking for ransom money, these cyberwarlords fight for the control over people. It is this act of fighting for control of the self---an act of cyberwarfare---that obliges a certain reaction within me. We are each in constant struggles for control over ourselves, either seeking to lift the yolk of political, psychological, social, economic, information, and digital control that pulls the strings1 of each of us.
Of course, kyberwarlord clearly pays tribute to Mark Fisher, with whose writing I come back to every few years, and each time discovering new ways of seeing his forest.2 My most recent re-confrontation is reading Mark Fisher’s dissertation, Flatline Constructs where Fisher analyzes film, literature, and the critiques thereof, to define gothic materialism and cybernetic theory-fiction. I think that the text is far too broad and deep to be adequately analyzed by me. But, the text struck me in such way that it makes me feel paranoid of the fictions that seep into reality. The text of Deltron 3030 threatens to break the diagesis of an intergalactic rap battle, and the prophetic imaginations of systems of control penetrating all art in 3030 makes the work an act of theory-fiction.
I think that I tend to make these blog posts more akin to book reports, as that is all I know. I am going to try and make this more experimental as I go along.