Virtual Weaponry: The Militarized Internet in Hollywood War Films

by Aaron Tucker

This book examines the convergent paths of the Internet and the American military, interweaving a history of the militarized Internet with analysis of a number of popular Hollywood movies in order to track how the introduction of the Internet into the war film has changed the genre, and how the movies often function as one part of the larger Military-Industrial- Media-Entertainment Network and the Total War Machine. The book catalogues and analyzes representations of a militarized Internet in popular Hollywood cinema, arguing that such illustrations of digitally networked technologies promotes an unhealthy transhumanism that weaponizes the relationships between the biological and technological aspects of that audience, while also hierarchically placing the “human” components at the top. Such filmmaking and movie-watching should be replaced with a critical posthumanism that challenges the relationships between the audience and their technologies, in addition to providing critical tools that can be applied to understanding and potentially resist modern warfare.

348 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 26, 2017

About the author

Aaron Tucker is the author of the forthcoming novel Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys with Coach House Books on June 6th, 2023. His essay “A Cowboy’s Work” was longlisted for the 2022 CBC Non-Fiction Prize and is part of a work-in-progress collection of essays.

Tucker’s latest poetry collection is Catalogue d’oiseaux (Book*hug Press, Spring 2021). His novel Y: Oppenheimer, Horseman of Los Alamos (Coach House Books) was translated by Rachel Martinez into French as Oppenheimer (La Peuplade) in the summer of 2020. In addition, he is the author of two books of poetry, Irresponsible Mediums: The Chess Games of Marcel Duchamp (Bookthug Press) and punchlines (Mansfield Press), and two scholarly cinema studies monographs, Virtual Weaponry: The Militarized Internet in Hollywood War Films and Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema (both published by Palgrave Macmillan).

He is currently a PhD candidate in the Cinema and Media Studies Department at York University where he is an Elia Scholar, a VISTA doctoral Scholar and a 2020 Joseph-Armand Bombardier doctoral fellow. He is currently studying the cinema of facial recognition software and its impacts on citizenship, mobility and crisis.

He was born in Vernon B.C. and grew up in Lavington B.C., on the lands of the Syilx Okanagan Nation. Currently, he is a guest on the Dish with One Spoon Territory.