One hour with Joseph Masco

More than two years have passed since Edward Snowden’s first batch of revelations about the National Security Agency’s massive domestic spying program. This past December, the long-awaited release of the Senate torture report confirmed the Bush administration’s use of torture in the early years of the global war on terror. While that program is now defunct, the New York Times recently revealed that its architects are now running covert drone programmes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. In Pakistan alone, drone strikes have killed nearly 4,000 people since 2004, according to estimates by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

To understand how this state of affairs has become the new normal in the American state, Maliha Ali spoke to Joseph Masco, author of The Theatre of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror which came out this past December, just a few days before the torture report was released. Professor of Anthropology and Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, Masco’s current work unpacks the evolution of the national security state in the United States and is the first to really connect the War on Terror to the Cold War.

Maliha Ali: In your new book, you’re saying the Cold War hasn’t ended but has been transformed into the war on terror. What made you connect the two?

Joseph Masco: I consider the 2001 emergency moment as a formal effort to restore the American power that was first established during the Cold War. There are continuities in peoples and programmes but because of a shift in objects and techniques, the counter-terror state that emerges is a different security state with different objects. The notion of deterrence – a Cold War paradigm to achieve global stability through massive nuclear threat and mutually assured destruction – has been replaced by preemption — a counter-terror state effort to anticipate and manipulate a constantly emerging future. And that shift is really profound.

Ali: You write that the atomic bomb has changed the conception of the state in the US fundamentally. Massive investments in terms of time and money and the restructuring of lives for something that’s never meant to be used — what did that do to the state?

Masco: Oh it did a lot of things. Americans naturalized a national security commitment after World War II because of efforts to code nuclear fear into bureaucracy, state planning and geopolitics in very particular ways. The bomb became a coordinating feature in American life. It created a way of doing revolutionary military science in secret. For a democracy to have a large part of its military, scientific, and industrial life managed via compartmentalised secrecy is quite a radical shift. The public needed to be taught how to accept existential danger as normal, to not worry about official secrecy, and to accept an increasingly militarized notion of everyday life. The civil defense program of the first decades of the Cold War was not aimed at protecting populations from physical attack. It was rather a means of teaching citizens to fear the bomb in a specific way and thereby a mechanism to militarize them as Cold War subjects.

Ali: Let’s talk about this idea of national management of emotion. You write that a great deal of imagination, creativity and myth has gone into the remaking of the American security state.

Masco: How is it today that you can find a highly diverse population of American people who don’t know each other but have very similar attitudes towards events they’ve never experienced? How is it that a general member of the public comes to have an imagined relationship to technologies that are extremely rare and often never used?

They have to be taught to think and feel in a specific way and the US has taken a great deal of care over several generations to do just that. The early Cold War state used the public school system and mass media to produce a new kind of subject, one oriented towards the nuclear danger. We’ve just come through a decade in which an official strategy very similar to the civil defense campaigns of the 1950s was pursued. However, rather than a direct address to the citizen via mass media, the counter-terror state locates its messaging in news sites, creating a rebounding space of reiteration across radio, television, and social media.

Ali: And part of that emotional management happens through euphemism and language. When James Clapper (Director of National Intelligence) was cross-questioned about replying “no” to the Senate on whether the NSA collects records on Americans, he said: “I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner, by saying no,” What’s happening there?

Masco: I don’t think public statements from national security officials can actually be understood anymore. In so many key moments, we’ve seen words mean their exact opposite in official practice. If everything concerning security is on a “need to know basis”, citizens never need to know and under the counter-terror logics of preemption are also cast as potential future terrorists. Clapper’s statement was helpful because he finally said it out loud and revealed the structures in which deception and misdirection have been basic tactics of official language for those formally committed to securing the lives of citizens.

Ali: Secrecy changes the citizen-state relationship completely, as you’ve argued, but what does it mean when the scale of the secrets between them is that the unclassified archive is about 10x the open literature?

Masco: This is Peter Galison’s estimate about the amount of classified material. The case made for government secrecy is that it protects information that would be dangerous to American citizens and the system itself, if it got out. The root of this logic is “the nuclear secret”.

In the 1990s, there was a short-lived moment of openness within the US government. There was an expectation that the democratic promise of the internet combined with the end of the Cold War constituted a new opportunity for an open government. But some of the very first actions of the Bush Administration in September 2001 involved reclassifying the archives and issuing guidelines throughout government that openness requests should be resisted. The U.S. now has 4 to 5 million people with security clearances, and you only have access to a kind of knowledge if you’re involved in the production of that project in some way.

I make the argument in the book that the civil defense program of the first decades of the Cold War was not aimed at protecting populations from physical attack. It was rather a means of teaching citizens to fear the bomb in a specific way and thereby a mechanism to militarize them as Cold War subjects.

Ali: And it creates a kind of terror in public life. In the book you have a 1953 federally issued pamphlet on how to be a “panic stopper” when gripped by nuclear fear which teaches citizens to act “like trained soldiers under fire.”

Masco: Yes, that pamphlet was part of a formal effort by a new federal civil defense agency to militarize citizens though nuclear danger. The crucial line in this campaign was between fear and terror. Fear was constituted by officials as a productive emotion but, in opposition to today, terror was considered a paralyzing experience, one that would be particularly dangerous in a democracy.

Post 9/11, the state was no longer worried about this calibration but focused on a maximal proliferation of things to worry about at every level of American society. Every aspect of public life, the entire infrastructure of the country – the electrical grid, train tracks, every post office, every national monument – were considered objects of counter-terror concern. It’s an extraordinary list of things to try to secure against every imaginable form of attack.

Ali: Can you explain how the Internet of Things fits into this state of affairs?

Masco: The Internet of Things is the idea that that everyday objects will soon be connected through WiFi. And this means not just your computer and your phone, but everyday appliances, electrical outlets, your car, anything that runs on energy. It’s a huge industrial push right now and the expectation is over 50 billion objects will become connected by 2020.

Each of these objects also becomes a potential surveillance device. In a March 2012 speech, General Petraeus (then head of the CIA) talked about the wonderful new possibility that is emerging for, as he put it, “clandestine tradecraft” in the world of the Internet of Things.

Ali: Where do you see the political conversation going with terror as the organizing principle of the state? What does it mean that the only presidential candidate (Vermont’s Bernie Sanders) who is not peddling the calculus of terror is the last person who is expected to win?

Masco: That’s the perverse nature of American politics right now. As more resources get devoted to questions of potential terroristic threats in an uncertain future, they get diverted from dealing with insecurities that are lived. But as I ask in the book, what happens when we have national infrastructures that are falling down, when we have multiple examples of financial markets collapsing because of crazy financial instruments and outright fraud, what happens when we factor in climate change into a security dynamic? Because these are understood as non-security problems and yet what you’re actually talking about in these cases is the safety of your air and water and food, the viability of your banks.

The fact that we now understand that there is a presidential meeting every week to decide which individuals on the planet will be subject to drone strikes should really put everybody in a position of deep reflection on what the status of the political is.

Ali: Do you see drones as the next game changer in the kinds of threats, access and politics that they produce?

Masco: Yeah, I really do. I don’t think there’s enough we can say about the implications of drone killings for international law, for democracy, for geopolitics, for ethics. The fact that we now understand that there is a presidential meeting every week to decide which individuals on the planet will be subject to drone strikes should really put everybody in a position of deep reflection on what the status of the political is..

Drones can seem to some like an ethical, economic form of warfare because all other options are more violent but many human rights and activist groups have put together extraordinarily detailed accounts of the accidental deaths occurring now with regularity. We should be thinking seriously not only about how this particular technological revolution is violent in its current incarnation but also about the worlds that are opening up via this kind of planetary scale, remote control killing, bereft of accountability.

Ali: You write about “the alternative history of the nuclear age”, what’s this alternative history and what do you see as the role of critique?

Masco: Everything to do with the nuclear referent in the US is coded in secrecy. As an ultimate existential danger, the bomb provided a specific scale to politics, one that continuously invited citizens to not think about things (in order to be protected from them).

The infrastructure coming out of the first decade of the War on Terror is one that will structure our lives for the coming decades. It’s not producing the world of unrestrained American hegemony that its designer’s intended, but it is producing the world we’ll all be living in, nonetheless.

So I think the role of critique in all this is to check carefully the kind of work being done by language, to think structurally about how technological revolution and security interact, and crucially to ask the question: what kinds of insecurities cannot be imagined through official languages and policies? Critique can reclaim a notion of security that is not about the fantastical, but that is about the lived. Without such a debate, the term will distort much of the work currently done in the name of protecting citizens from existential dangers.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.