james stout, against the state — ideas
james stout's journalism is second to none as he becomes intimately involved in the daily lives of actual drone warfare soldiers and tragically regurgitates their death in real time in his writing
as aspects of war become engrained into daily time due to the way in which the stretching of time under capitalism has caused a fear regarding teleological "final" acts, and has weaponized the event of tragedy itself and quantized values into equally important or unimportant segments, so does war increasingly begin to feel like every day existence in its presentation, where conflict emerges as a statistical and territorial process, an ultimately real final abstraction, rather than a type of abstraction that ocassionally does feel like a genuinely developed outcome.
stout mentions how before the coup, zaw’s only reference point for war was playing pubg on his phone. "playing pubg on his phone" here is not an abstraction of war, rather, war is an abstraction of zaw playing pubg on his phone. the point is that, the digital medium and everything in it is neither the result of war (the deeper result, not the causal one), nor the result of daily life (it doesn't "result" from daily life, it could causally originate from it), whereas daily life is neither an escape from war, nor an escape from digital mediums. pubg for zaw is a part of war rather than a representation of it, and so is texting his girlfriend, or using telegram, or "using" memes.
the point about representation isn't that these have instrumental value in a war-like setting, but that war as a transcendental quest literally arrives as something already connected to all possible forms that zaw could encounter or could have encountered, regardless of what these forms were originally meant for or how they emerged. in the same way, the western subject is connected to war because of these things, so that their emergence isn't stuck to zaw's spatio-temporal existence. when war can "use" something or become a part of daily lived time, war is daily lived time, it contaminates the logic of anything it touches. when global supply chains and global networks start to get plugged into the relational logic of inhuman systems, these inhuman systems become ever-more closer to the structural logic of the originally unconnected daily living experience. the text at one point suggests that their form of democracy is one that avoids both categorical identity-based division and one that has its own "diy supply chain". even the logic of the text mimics the broader incentive that the world takes on these issues.
this doesn't mean that inhuman systems somehow leech off of daily lived experience, but far worse, the contamination runs to the very core of what it means to live. what it means to live becomes equivalent to what it means to avoid war, or what it means to use a phone application. what it means to do it isn't that it's simply a tool to reach this or that circulatory value or network, it means that telegram is a tool for war not when its used for war for the first time, but when it overall exists in the context of war. there is no "innocent telegram" when the world is in a state where myanmar could possibly experience a coup. telegram's existence was always contaminated by the "maybe-war" of the world itself and was only ever another tool for capital.
stout reminds us: "sadly, despite their unimpeachable wit, the peaceful protesters in the streets of yangon, nay pyi taw, and mandalay got very little other than a few retweets from the neoliberal core states who they had hoped would save them. nor did they receive help from china, despite the efforts of pro-chinese communist groups like the leftist youth organization to spread maoist thought and solidarity in the country. when humor didn’t dislodge the junta or motivate the us, eu, or un to act, the people of myanmar remained in the streets anyway"
in third world countries such as myanmar, the development of war is simply the "allocation" of the terrestrial or segmentatory logic of genocide into daily life. essentially, the western states or the internet cant do anything about war or genocide in places like myanmar because authority is increasingly organized as an efficient instead of a final calling. there is no teleology to political organization. wars are no longer produced, not even by warmongerers, as grand quests or genuinely whole activities, so naturally, the organizational form of the global authorities of war also looks like an office, a council of people on vacation, a piece of lost nobility that itself has nothing to do with a "war somewhere else".
nothing except retweets actually exists for the western subject, there is no "helping in a war", because this subject is not one that is in any way actually connected in the world anymore. the western subject quite literally is coded into a logic where it cannot even touch or interact with an institutional logic. the castle has returned, stronger and greater than ever before, every single thing has a camera, every single thing bites, there is nothing to be done from the perspective of a physical action or a transversal of territory. countries, states, people, entire organizations are levelled to shit, incapable of even raising a finger. war occurs because whoever can start a war is already winning in a far greater way compared to everyone else, regardless of if they actually win whatever way they start. whilst this logic persists, every single person in the world is subjected indefinitely those with the ability to actually interact with the world in any way, shape or form. if they decide that everybody is going to be a part of a systemic torture operation, then western subjects will still only be able to retweet their doom.
there is nothing to do about war because the current nobility in the west are not the priests of war or ultimately the thing that can give it any significance, their sole duty is to deny having anything to do with war until their calling is actually required, and their calling will be demanded by a literal alien force, not just by the hypocrisy of something locally happening to them, but almost by this transcendental subject of capital, this "entity of war" who has the ability to declare when an impact should or shouldnt be connected to a value. all impacts in the world are no longer judged by their impact value but by their professed value, and no single human-made entity or organization in the world has any ability to call the shots on prophetic value anymore.
international law and the the death of the liberal “rules-based order” is not the cause of the lack of foreign aid in this war, rather, the world itself and its scale enters increasing waves of abstraction that fundamentally mess with simple boundaries between territories. as the world gets segmented and ruled by units with epistemic falsibility built into their very fundamental logic, expectations around basic civil duty and liberty collapse naturally. almost every form of global activism already failed a long time ago when it didn't manage to actually have representatives in places where they could impact the movement of military units. war happens first, in its basic sense as a result of domestic escalations which have no clear stopping point, it happens without any real ideology, and its a result of fundamental forces of existence where people, whether civil or beurocratic, reactionary or rebel, esentially overstep their own requirements as political subjects, request something increasingly unacceptable, or are no longer confirmed by the system of rulership that is supposed to call for them. the partisans already present in burma were already ethnically non-burmese, they already were outside of the logic of this very system. this is how the entire world already operates, by fundamental exclusions built into the core of the concept of security itself
by far the best part of the chapter is the cardi b reference, where supposedly the singer is used in the form of a slogan, “we are protesting peacefully,” a reference to the singer’s hugely popular 2020 song “wap.” the burmese resistence, mostly in the form of likely idiotic internet students, are essentially validating, maybe even so far as to say, masturbating america by using doge, pepe the frog, and other internet memes to attract international attention. they're feeding them their symbols back to them in an attempt to relate to them, to reach any form of communicational compromise, to maybe enable a wider mass of people to do something about them being executed by their own government. but these symbols and statements have very little activation power in american civil life. actually,
everything in american civil life has very little activation power in general, because that very same civil life barely even exists in any tangible or legible form. america, much like what the resulting heat of texas really does to its social architecture, is spread and disinegrated along an ever-increasing axis of beurocratical management andd the thin line it produces between management and significance, its stretched and convoluted in such a way that they have no cultural life, no real significance of their own. their own memes are a laughing stock within their own communities, they quite literally stand for nothing, they don't have any "real" ground to stand on, how could they possibly stand for someone else's war, on the "realest" (most immediately and directly impactful) ground that there is? it is even questionable if america has a ground at all, if any of its population is alive in any real sense of this term.
zaw mounts a phone on his chest to stream combat and updates to followers online, and even calls his own unit "chronically online". stout tells us three actual experiential or phenomenal realities about his interaction with zaw and the wider situation. one is that he watches kids on the phone every morning create weapons in the form of toys and that unbeknownst to the wider western world that this is happening, they use these same toys to chase actual military personnel. the second is that he sends zaw memes and treats him like a friend amongst the more serious solidarity and is awaiting his likely late response on a regular basis, and the third is that the first thing he does after working out is that he opens his phone to check that zaw is dead and looks at the image of him dead in a graphic manner like five times in a row in disbelief, which he also has to report to a famous podcast after the fact.
then instead of moralizing this experience, stout does his journalistic duty in this text by simply declaring that this shows us how none of us are safe from the government or whatever, and then goes back to widening his lens on the structural issue. it seems as if this type of partisanship actually serves the ancient doctrine of nobility, it simply reinforces an ignorant stoicism or basically a "settling of affairs". in war, all affairs are always seemingly settled. of course not by zaw's unit, who continues to improvise and so on, including the fact stout is not at fault at all for his descriptions, where these horrors are a totally expected part of the world, not just now but technically always, maybe minus the ability to see kids dying on your phone. what is shocking though is that the death was supposedly caused by a deputy minister publicly criticizing zaw’s unit on facebook and including his photo, which his comrades believe exposed him to danger.