The virtualization of violence and the disappearance of war

Abstract

Abstract This essay begins with the recent visit of the Secretary of Defense William Cohen to the National Training Center for an Advanced Warfighting Experiment (AWE), and ends with an ethnographic ramble in Disneyworld's backyard at Orlando, Florida, where the CEOs of the defense industries and the flag and general officers of US armed forces convened for four days at the annual Interservice/Industry Training Systems and Education Conference, to analyze, exhibit, and hawk ‘Information Technologies: The World Tomorrow’. In between lies an effort to understand the persistence of what William S. Burroughs called the ‘war universe’.