The Soldier Interfaces on the Digitally Augmented Battlefield

Abstract

Previous fears, documented by Manuel De Landa and N. Katherine Hayles, of cutting humans “out of the loop” in military operations have almost completely dissipated within movies and have instead been replaced by a new model of soldier that is exemplified by the near-literal man-in-the-middle suits of the Iron Man films and the duo-wielded cyberconnected Jaeger pilots in Pacific Rim. Different from the hard technological body, the suits present an entirely different interface and symbiosis with its human user(s) in that the human is shrouded entirely within the Internet-enabled technology itself. Beginning with D.N. Rodowick’s theorizing on digital filmmaking, the suits present the user with an objective and “framed” vision of the world that is then further filtered through the lens of military organization and combat. When the machinic audience looks “through the eyes of these suits” there is a doubling of Judith Butler’s understanding of the war photograph’s frame, so that anything within that view is distanced and completely dehumanized from the cinema audience. These immediately mediated perceptions of the characters’ worlds, presented as supra-human tools completely under user control, encourage a dangerous remilitarization of the Internet, in an outdated model that promotes an overly simplistic nationalism and too-basic posthuman evolution. The chapter ends by exploring what happens, as harbingered by contemporary real-world advances in Internet technologies, when Internet and technological interfaces dissolve into the biological body, using Transcendence as a core example. Transcendence proposes a military entity that is completely unable to separate its biological components from its mechanical ones, instead generating a completely symbiotic assemblage.