Lenses, Screens, and Datafication

This subsection considers the different interfaces that have mediated experiences of war narratives historically. It considers how social media enable the sharing of diverse content, encouraging interactions from increasingly global audiences. It also discusses how war lives and traumas have been documented and analyzed in the past, and what this means for our datafied present.

In his acclaimed memoir of the US experience of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the New York Times journalist Dexter Filkins describes a moment of shifting perspective as a Black Hawk helicopter moved up and up, “offering a cubist view of the world below. Green rectangles of farmland shifted as if in a mirror then flattened as they fell into the horizon. The anarchy of the streets carried no sound so high.” The view from above offered a respite, and Filkins pauses to consider the overlay of perspectives he contends with in his attempt to make sense of the conflicts: American and Iraqi and Afghanistani; analog and digital; past, present, and future. The wider lens might allow for hope in the latter, justifying the suffering and death, “just as the Americans in the Green Zone and the angry bloggers told me back home. Sometimes even Iraqis told me that.”¹

In warfare, and particularly in writing about conflict, perspective is a key inflection point. National and individual narrators apply different lenses through which to view and ultimately explain their experience of war. This can take place at macro- and microlevels, often simultaneously.

In his assessment of one of the first wide-release motion pictures about drone warfare, Eye in the Sky (2015), Samuel Fernández-Pichel details how the fictional characters offer up traces of individual, real-life actors, even as they serve as embodied caricatures of geopolitical dynamic power relations. The British representatives, meanwhile, frame their decision-making through the “imperial guilty conscience,”² even as they consider it right and proper that Anglo-American forces pursue and destroy Al-Shabaab operatives, training significant amounts of firepower on a civilian Kenyan neighbourhood. In the end it is the US representative in the discussions – operating by digital conference call from China – who makes the “tough” call, which results in the death of a young girl in Nairobi.

Films like Eye in the Sky – and numerous other Western television and video games examples – present the technological capacity of American and British forces in their war on terror in a way that is fundamentally false but deeply compelling and potentially reassuring to viewers. The data produced by modern surveillance is far less linear. Fictionalized reimagining renders it overtly narrative, and hence comprehensible to the networked decision-makers in the moment as well as to subsequent audiences. This creates yet another lens through which broader publics assess moral debates around such actions, whereas in practice the information available to human – and increasingly AI – actors is fragmentary and incomplete. The moral dilemma for all such actors is starker and more troubling than it appears in this relatively simplistic example of datafied storytelling.

In the Eye in the Sky example, the drone pilots, stationed somewhere in the heart of the United States, fret over the morality of their actions and their not insignificant but still unclear sense of autonomy; their guilt is complicated by the strange unresolved space they occupy operationally as semi-active parties caught between different government actors, the laws of war, and technologically mediated warfare. Peter Lee, drawing on his interviews with Reaper drone pilots and their spouses, identifies a fatigue born not just of tiredness but of the nature of sustained surveillance directing concentrated force and ultimately death. One pilot recalled:

We may watch “target A” for weeks, building up a pattern of life for the individual, know exactly what time he eats his meals, drives to the Mosque, uses the ablutions – outdoors of course! What we also see is the individual interacting with his family – playing with his kids and helping his wife around the compound. When a strike goes in we stay on station and see the reactions of the wife and kids when the body is brought to them. You see someone fall to the floor and sob so hard their body is convulsing.³

In this instance, although the technologies create a potential distance between pilot and operators and their targets, the human connection remains and is potentially amplified. In a article that examines how drones, data, and trauma have come to be fetishized in Western culture in the twenty-first century, Michelle Bentley calls attention to the ways that internet news sites publishing interviews with drone pilots, replete with social media filters, interfere with these complex examples of war and life writing, “threatening to undermine the analytic and cultural value of this data.”⁴ Bentley is careful to place the twenty-one stories and personal feelings of the pilots at the heart of her analysis, but worries about sensationalist reductions and fragmentations of complex material that takes place on the Web 2.0 as war stories are channeled across and through social media networks. For example, she points out that the “Playstation mentality” that signifies an exceptional amount of emotional detachment on the part of modern drone pilots is subsequently overstated and is in fact part of a long military-psychological tradition wherein some objectification of human enemies – or targets – is always required;⁵ a similar detachment would have been the “ideal” (from a pure military effectiveness point of view) state for artillery gunners and bomber pilots in previous conflicts (as Joanna Bourke has observed, the inability of training and technology to hone predictable “man-machine units” is a persistent frustration for the planner).⁶ Bentley also points out that – generally speaking and on a relative scale – cultural and political comfort with the ethics of drone killing has not actually produced pilots who themselves escape trauma. Instead many provide details about how intimate drone killings feel and how difficult it is to emotionally disengage from the hyperreality of their digitally enhanced and enabled battlescapes.⁷

Creative and commercial examples of life writing online and the digital tools that enhance and enable modern warfare pose difficult moral questions for individual warriors and the societies they serve. Such difficulties are not without historical precedents. Technologies constantly throw up challenges that further complicate human behaviors and subsequent reactions to warfare. Sometimes these technologies elide and, in some instances, center the fact that conceptually war is, at its heart, about the violence and destruction of other human and animal beings and the landscapes and environments they inhabit.

Drones and drone footage represents an emerging area of research for life writers in which technological possibility and life and death stories converge. Craig Howes addressed this at an Ego Media Public Round Table in September 2015:

Through another lens, the artist James Bridle, the creator of Dronestagram,⁸ writes about the ways drones obfuscate, as opposed to expose, human death in war:

The political and practical possibilities of drone strikes are the consequence of invisible, distancing technologies, and a technologically-disengaged media and society. Foreign wars and foreign bodies have always counted for less, but the technology that was supposed to bring us closer together is used to obscure and obfuscate.

Bridle reminds viewers and readers that “we use military technologies like GPS and Kinect for work and play.”⁹ With respect to Kinect, Microsoft adapted missile targeting technology for their gesture-tracking Xbox controller. As part of the Ego-Media and Strandlines projects, Janina Lange used the same technology in turning historical women into digital avatars. She repurposed the DIY motion capture, which allowed her to reanimate late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century stars of the London Gaiety Theatre.[^10

Yet Bridle notes that these same technologies “continue to be used militarily to maim and kill, ever further away and ever less visibly.” Working with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which compiled reports about strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia from 2012 to 2015, Bridle posted images from Google Maps Satellite view with short contextual summaries of the details of attacks to Instagram,¹¹ syndicating the feed to Tumblr¹² and Twitter.¹³ In so doing he reminds viewers that the places exist before they became targets, independent of their destruction.

Dronestagram counters the passive consumption of images of death and the associated feelings of apathy: Bridle reminds readers (or followers, numbering over 22,000 at the time of writing) that history is “coproduced by us and our technologies” and that “immediacy,” “intimacy,” and “empathy” can be brought back into public discussions of military technologies. He nods to established discourses about the potential for mediating technologies to stimulate the senses to humanist ends.¹⁴ This could extend from Virginia Woolf’s hopes for war photography as described in Three Guineas (1938) to the To-Day and To-Morrow series.

And yet war technologies are most often destructive technologies; air power in particular offers those interested in establishing systems of control with a relatively low-cost option for surveillance and destruction, particularly when the peoples they are looking to establish control over have already been to some degree caricatured (Priya Satia has pointed out that it was in Iraq between the First and Second World Wars that the RAF and British government first tested and came to rely on air power for what might now be deemed counterinsurgency.)¹⁵ With respect to how weapons destroy human bodies, there has long been a tacit difference between the treatment of what is written, as opposed to what is depicted in art, photography, and film. From 1914 to 1918 the artist Henry Tonks created a series of pastels, medical illustrations of facial injuries and reconstructions. Balancing assessments of their artistic quality with recognition of the particular ethical context in which they were created did, for a time, mean that digital access to them was carefully regulated in the offline and, for a time, in the online. Art historians have been careful to consider the way the portraits “continually negotiate an uncomfortable ambiguity between the portrayal of the sitter as ‘object’ (a record of medical procedure) and as ‘subject’ (an individual whose subjectivity is presented through portraiture).”¹⁶

Considering online appropriation of war portraits, Suzannah Biernoff has been critical of the irresponsible – and pretentious – ways in which the games designers appropriate the faces of historical humans such as those drawn by Tonks to populate the video game BioShock without any sense of the “burden of care” to the suffering, disfigured survivors of war or to the context in which the original drawings were created.¹⁷ Other examples – DOOM and Spec Ops: The Line, to name a few – were even less careful in their appropriation of material.

Creators of antiwar artgames, artmods, and interventions in virtual worlds offered a critique of this material on its own terms. These include Anne-Marie Schleiner’s Velvet Strike,¹⁸ Frasca’s September 12th, and Joseph Delappe’s Dead_in_Iraq. In order to create an interactive memorial, Delappe logged in to America’s Army (an online FPS/government recruitment tool) and “typed the names of soldiers killed in Iraq, and the date of their death, into the game’s text messaging system, such that the information scrolls across the screen for all users to see.”¹⁹

Closely but not necessarily obviously linked to considerations of the ethicality of fragmenting violent content for commercial ends is the broader issue of the datafication of war. Deploying quantification as a strategy for narrating of war is not new, and its effect on tactics and strategy have been critically considered, even as its potential to sharpen human understanding and improve outcomes is sometimes taken for granted. For example, it is possible to draw a line – as Kenneth Neil Cukier and Viktor Mayer Schoenberger do in an article for Foreign Affairs in 2013 – between twenty-first century excitement over what Big Data can tell us about our world and, for example, Robert McNamara’s attempts to manage cost-effectiveness by quantifying military “success” in the war in Vietnam²⁰; Rebecca Roach has considered how writers like J. M. Coetzee analyzed and responded to the datafication of the conflict through technological and writerly lenses. Theo Farrell has shown how, in Afghanistan, data collection and ultimately overload (largely with the aim of minimizing risk) effectively paralyzed British command and in various period overlaid the “illusion of progress” that made it easier to delay addressing regional, national, and international political challenges.²¹

Data and quantification played a signifiant role in the deployment of US Air Force and RAF bombing campaigns in the Second World War and went on to inform – and potentially dominate – strategy in Vietnam and to an extent subsequent conflicts. The former was preceded by a period that instilled a sense of acceptance of not only military but inevitable civilian casualties, particularly in air campaigns; this came to be viewed as “an inevitable consequence of the way war had developed in an age of modern science and mass democracy.”²² In Vietnam Paul D. Harkens’s Military Assistance Command (MAC-V) was responsible for preparing daily updates that charted progress against over a hundred separate indicators. The 2017 documentary film The Vietnam War, written by Geoffrey C. Ward and directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick– and digitally distributed and available for mobile viewing on Netflix platforms around the world – includes testimonials from American and Vietnamese commanders, former officials, and veterans. Their stories speak to how data practices morphed into a broader strategy of war dependent on quantification. One of the documentary’s innovations is its introduction of the quiet through-line of a datafication, introduced – and critiqued – when juxtaposed against the life stories of American and Vietnamese men and women, who use the numbers to illustrate and interrogate their assumptions and behaviors, and those of the war’s senior decision makers and official narrators.

The Vietnam War episode “Resolve (January 1966–June 1967)” tells of MAC-V’s – and ultimately Command’s – reliance on body count as a proxy for US military success. Data helps to illustrate the war’s escalation, but it is fallible. The omnipotent narrator speaks to myopic assessment and what was not included in analysis at the time: the 1966 bombing and search and destroy campaigns that killed unknown numbers of civilians and turned one in five South Vietnamese into homeless refugees were documented with great detail, but the broader human story and its repercussions were largely set aside. US Army advisor James Willbanks, whose story and reflections are woven in to the documentary film, speaks to the role of data skewing as a narrative device in war writing and analyses: “The problem with war...or the metrics...if you can’t count what’s important, you make what you can count important. So in this particular case what you could count was dead enemy bodies.” Journalist Joe Galloway goes further in his condemnation of how metrics influenced individual behavior as well as the more general story of the war: “You don’t get details with the body count, you get numbers. And the numbers are lies, most of them.” The film then affords veterans the opportunity to reflect on actual bodies in war: on their witnessing of the effects of war on them and of the common humanity of the soldiers mourning them.²³

Derek Gregory, in a 2014 article on “Drone Geographies” talks about how data dehumanizes, reducing human beings to mere “network traces/sensor signatures.”²⁴ Yet some online initiatives have managed to combine numerical and qualitative analysis. Iraq Body Count (IBC) provides, in its words, a “public record of violent deaths following the 2002 invasion of Iraq.”²⁵ The site defines its scope as limited to “civilian deaths caused by US-led coalition and Iraqi government forces and paramilitary or criminal attacks by others.” Databases like the IBC collect and contain fragments of life writing from victims, perpetrators, and witnesses, but they also can be considered, collectively, as exemplar forms of life writing about war that are capable of serving multiple ends. The IBC divides the sectors in which its database and reports have been used: press and media organizations; governments and government departments; intergovernmental organizations and agencies; activists and activist organizations; lawyers and legal organizations; NGOs and think tanks; and scholars and universities.²⁶

Examples like the IBC, and a graphically more sophisticated site like airwars.org, present and ideally preserve testimonials, as all instances of life writing do, for the historical record. And although they center on death as opposed to life narratives – in the instance of the IBC the minimum information collected is the number killed (where and when), and if possible victims’ details (names, demographics) and circumstances of death (weapons used, perpetrators) – they extend the stories of the dead and of victims of war into an unknown future. For example, the IBC Twitter account @iraqbodycount regularly updates followers on instances of civilian death that it subsequently works to confirm; the Airwars website mounts statistics-driven investigations in partnership with a range of organizations monitoring (currently) five conflict zones; and the Violations Documentation Centre in Syria whose physical database is housed in Denmark is collecting stories with the an eye to eventual prosecution of the Assad regime for war crimes.²⁷

Blogs and databases began calling attention to the underestimated and reported theme of body counts in recent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. This theme, identifiable in modern war narratives, off- and online, inspired some scholarly attention – see for example Dead Bodies Don’t Count (2007) and the Human Security Centre’s 2005 report on “War and Peace in the 21st Century,” both of which incorporated IBC numbers and analysis and are cited on the IBC’s website. Recently, news organizations that merge data analysis with investigative journalism have provided examples of war writing that attempt to directly address Judith Butler’s framing of what happens to human lives and stories in times of war: “We might think of war as dividing populations into those who are grievable and those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all.”²⁸

To focus on narrative texts, an influential New York Times Magazine story illustrates how writers might use available media tools to shift how particular wars are framed and to question lenses that blur discussions about lost life. It achieves a balance between quantification and qualification, and contends with war as told from above, pushing back against narratives replete with datafied body counts and technological “solutions” but void of human stories (the authors discussed the article in an extended interview for the Ford Foundation).²⁹

I first read Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal’s November 2017 article “The Uncounted” on my smart phone.³⁰ The design of the mobile version is striking. Like the opening title sequence to a film, the white lettering fills the black screen, articulating the broader story of the article: that a sustained ground investigation in Iraq shows that Coalition airstrikes have been underestimating civilian deaths, with devastating, lingering effects for family members and communities.

The framing sequence acknowledges the concentrated nature of the war narrative that follows, telling a story that is simultaneously broad and specific. It works from the wide-lens perspective questioning the supposedly hypertargeted air strikes and casualties, and Coalition cost-benefit strategies and articulations of the “progress" and “effectiveness” of the war in Iraq. Focusing in, Khan and Gopal continue the title sequence by writing about the survivors searching for the dead: “Most will never receive an answer.” The photograph of a building reduced to rubble fills the screen. Then the text slide concludes the framing sequence: “This is the story of one man who did.” In parallel the image reel narrows down to the image of a single shoe atop a pile of pulverized building material, a sandal whose pink heart-motif is only just visible beneath a coating of concrete dust. The design for the story makes it stand out from so much online war writing. The overall effect is focused and sober; it encourages deep reading and critical reflection.

Khan and Gopal go on to recount the story of the two Razzo brothers and their families as they are attempting to maintain some semblance of normality in a suburb of Mosul after the city falls to ISIS. They set the scene: it is night and based on usual behavior, two members of the family, one in each of the adjacent homes, are most likely awake. One of the brothers, Basim, is most likely watching car review videos on YouTube; the eighteen-year-old Najib is possibly in the process of reading and posting on Facebook as he had a few days prior: “Someday it’ll all be over. Until that day, I’ll hold on to my strength.” Sometime after 01:00 on September 20, 2015, while the Razzos sleep, an airstrike destroys their house. That same day, the US-led coalition released YouTube footage of the attack, described as: “spectral black-and-white footage of two sprawling compounds, filmed by an aircraft slowing rotating above. There is no wound. Within seconds, the structures disappear in bursts of black smoke.” The caption to the footage claims that the “target” was a car-bomb factory. Khan and Gopal describe Basim’s reaction to the mediated footage, which he later found: he could only watch a few frames, because he immediately recognized the two family homes.

The authors advance the story by widening the lens, reporting on the scale of the aerial campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria – more than 27,500 raids at the time the article was written. The footage of attacks has been publicly documented on US Defense Department websites, shared broadly, furthering the institutional war story of technological superiority: “a military campaign unlike any other – precise, transparent and unyielding.” The article includes both black-and-white and color still and moving images of the aerial footage, which flattens the homes into mere shapes, an expression of topography seemingly drained of day-to-day human existence. (Modern militaries would also have participated in a linguistic flattening in anticipation of such actions, as homes become “compounds” and battles “contacts,” and applying deadly force is described as “going kinetic.”) In absorbing the carefully constructed story of the destruction of the Razzo family, and in particular Basim’s attempt to put together some sort of narrative that might explain what happened, the reader looks at these images of soon to be destroyed buildings – and the compiled body of material released by the Defense Department – and contemplates the lives the frames also contain and so insufficiently represented in their last moments. These lives should count, but in the official narrative, the story of this war-destroyed family does not seem to, or at least not enough.

This story and others published off- and online in the New York Times Magazine provide some narrative detail about human lives that exist and are extinguished, frame to frame, in the strange, distanced, and drab drone videos and satellite images released by the US military and its partners – an aesthetic first introduced by the US in the First Gulf War as part of a broader strategy to ensure the public of the precise nature of aerial campaigns.³¹ A 2018 article by Jeffrey E. Stern uses data tagging to trace a single bomb from its creation in Arizona to its destination in Yemen, where it kills and maims villagers gathering around a well. The story is terrifyingly and cinematically specific in its parallel narrative about the bomb and its victims. It is an example of war writing focused on technical efficiency and human frailty, as the following passage illustrates:

Fahd felt a little cold, though, so he walked away from the drill toward an old stone hut where some friends had gathered. At about that moment, thousands of feet above him, a pilot pushed a button that sent an electrical signal to a rack mounted underneath his plane. A series of pyrotechnic cartridges flashed, and a set of hooks holding a bomb in place popped open, while small pistons shoved the weapon away.

Now, as Fahd walked into the hut, a weapon about the length of a compact car was wobbling gracelessly down through the air toward him, losing altitude and unspooling an arming wire that connected it to the jet until, once it had extended a few feet, the wire ran out and ripped from the bomb.

Note in the subsequent passage the technological personification running alongside Fahd’s unknowing procession. On the one hand this portrayal detaches responsibility from the human beings who have designed and unleashed it at this particular moment to target these particular people. On the other hand it acknowledges the semi-human nature of modern smart weapons enabled by vast, complex systems:

Then it was as if the weapon woke up. A thermal battery was activated. Three fins on the rear extended all the way and locked in place. The bomb stabilized in the air. A guidance-control unit on the nose locked onto a laser reflection — invisible to the naked eye but meaningful to the bomb — sparkling on the rocks Fahd walked over.

Fahd was in a buoyant mood as the weapon homed in on a point just a few meters from him, a few meters from the drill, from Rabee’a, from the judge whose name was Judge, from the drill worker lying down for a rest, from the old man arriving with the installment of cash the villagers owed.

Above them, the warhead closed in at a few hundred knots.³²

In some ways, despite the problems with the concept of representative war stories, these have to be taken as such at some level. Examples like the above give some voice to some small aspect of the numbers representing, in one of the simplest forms of human notation, the trauma, pain, death, and displacement that is the direct result of war.

At the same time the uncomfortable corollary to these narrative efforts and to Butler’s grievable lives³³ is thrown into sharp relief when we consider the use of online-facilitated gatekeepers and networks, and social media as tools for self-documentation. What is the effect of compiling so much data? The New York Times Magazine stories are exceptional examples of stories that have been picked out and elevated, circulated across national, linguistic, and cultural divides. Yet does the ever-growing data set out of which they emerge, and which also enables modern technological warfare, render these untold selves more or less imaginable and worthy of protection? Do we start to only care about the lives we learn about on our screens? Or do the accreted stories work to chip away at the assumption that war is a legitimate state tool, as opposed to a failure of policy and diplomacy? If so, are we inching closer to an understanding of war – built on offline and online encounters – that contends with its broader human costs?

Carry on to Gatekeepers, the next subsection of Life and War Writing, Off- and Online.