Open AccessWhat is a Digital Weapon? Towards a Functional Approach to Hypermodern Warfare Media
Author(s) -
Alessandro De Cesaris
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
philosophical journal of conflict and violence
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2559-9917
pISSN - 2559-9798
DOI - 10.22618/tp.pjcv.20215.1.139003
Subject(s) - cyberwarfare , dimension (graph theory) , field (mathematics) , order (exchange) , the internet , digital revolution , computer security , cyberspace , epistemology , engineering ethics , computer science , political science , law and economics , internet privacy , sociology , law , business , engineering , philosophy , world wide web , mathematics , finance , pure mathematics
There is a wide debate concerning cyberwar and the new dangers of the Internet, but this debate focuses too often on practical issues, while the conceptual and somehow strictly “philosophical” dimension remains unquestioned. In this article, I will try to show that a better understanding of what we mean when we speak about weapons, or at least a better understanding of the new difficulties entailed by digital technologies in the field of military devices, can help us to provide a better analysis of the risks and of the ethical issues connected to contemporary fighting. In particular, I will argue that the so-called “digital turn” entails a blurring of the distinction between weapons and non-weapons, because in what I will call our “hypermodern era” the criteria we traditionally used in order to make this distinction have become obsolete.