Treasure squandered / Treasures preserved

Today: Brian Hioe, Taipei-based editor, translator, activist, DJ, and co-founder of New Bloom; and several other Flaming Hydras.

Issue No. 185

The Speed of War
Brian Hioe

Keeping Election Receipts at the Internet Archive
The Editors

The Speed of War

by Brian Hioe

The other day I covered a protest march for Gaza. After an afternoon of marching around in the brutal heat, the emcee, a friend, remarked that the distance we’d covered that afternoon was the amount of territory obliterated by a single one of the hundreds of 2,000-pound bombs dropped by Israel on Gaza.

The technological sophistication that goes into amplifying the capacity to kill is boggling. Since I write on military affairs once in a while, I can tell you that modern-day bombs with advanced targeting systems are best thought of, not as simple incendiary explosives, but as self-destructing flying computers designed for the sole purpose of taking lives.

Today’s computer technology, going back to the advanced chips that now power your computer or iPhone, is linked historically to the U.S. military development of targeting systems during the Cold War and Vietnam. The original purpose of the tech we use all day in our daily lives was to throw bombs through the air with greater and ever-more-deadly accuracy.

I wrote recently on China’s military drills around Taiwan. These exercises involved a record-breaking 152 Chinese warplanes deployed around the country. Contemporary warplanes cost billions—they’re among the most advanced and complex machines humanity has ever developed. And yet all this accumulation of the wonders of technology is intended simply to take life, too.

In ancient times, human civilizations commonly mythologized the sky and the sun. The heavens were seen as the domain of the gods, on which man dare not trespass. But today, metal machines hurtle through the sky at mind-boggling speeds like some grim reaper on high.

Also striking: jet fuel is not exactly cheap. For China to deploy that many fighter jets was a display of wealth as well as menace. In 2020, Taiwan spent 900 million USD just on intercepting and monitoring Chinese warplanes. China, which has many more planes and is the source of these continuous threats to begin with, must have spent many times that sum. It’s horrible to consider the socially productive uses for all these resources—the healthcare and education, the reduction of poverty, the scientific, medical, and academic research—that are ignored in favor of keeping the world’s war machines fed.

David Graeber wrote an essay on how the future has failed us. The science fiction of the past once dreamed of flying cars, but this never came to pass. Today’s ambitions are so much smaller, the scientific advancements we dream of in our own lifetimes shrunken in scale. But I wonder—another way of looking at it is to see how wildly advanced our capacity for killing ourselves has become. 

Honestly, war gets so boring—like the possibility of China invading Taiwan, a topic I have covered literally dozens, maybe even hundreds of times over the years. The bleakness of it all is exhausting, just part of the daily grind of churning out news articles year after year.

For a whole year and more now, while scrolling through the feed of cute doggos and cats I usually stare at on Instagram for the sake of my mental health, I’m randomly pulled out of my reverie by the image of a dead child in Gaza. Or sometimes I’ll be in Daybreak, the left-wing activist space I run with friends, chatting cheerfully with friends, and suddenly I’ll catch sight of a poster about Gaza and feel my mood suddenly darken.

We’re all living in this new and special sort of hell in which it’s possible for someone to be burned alive in Gaza, for the video of this atrocity to go viral, and then the Internet to mine out this person’s entire life story in a mere few hours. In the past, you wouldn’t see such a video at all, much less learn that person’s life story. And yet despite such images and videos and human stories of suffering circulating freely all over the world, the killing continues.

The Taiwanese military is the primary disseminator of information about Chinese military activity aimed at threatening Taiwan—as all these military exercises take place over the Pacific Ocean, civilians have no other access to information about them. By contrast, where the war crimes in Gaza are concerned, brave reporters, citizen journalists and professionals alike, are paying for immediate information about them with their lives. And since Israel turned its destructive rampage to Lebanon, the same has begun happening there, too.

In many ways, my cruel and absurd profession exists because of the inhumanity of the world, which simply won’t go away—but should. But must.

Who knows? Someday my own head might end up on the chopping block of history. But maybe, that also makes the burden of this responsibility for journalism, for telling the truth, all the more clear to me. It could happen to any of us, someday.

Keeping Election Receipts at The Internet Archive

by The Editors

The latest Brick House video, Part Three in our series on Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive, demonstrates the irreplaceable value of the Archive’s collected web pages to those interested in the history of U.S. elections. (Also see Part One, The Internet Archive Is a Library, and Part Part Two, Libraries and Versions.)

Many thanks to Hydra Joe MacLeod and video whiz Todd Evans for their stellar work on these.

If you're in San Francisco tonight, why not pop by the Internet Archive at 300 Funston Avenue, where a couple of Hydras (Jennie Rose Halperin and Maria Bustillos, plus our developer and designer, Jacob Ford) will be gallivanting around from 5:00 p.m. onward.

Love press freedom?? Heck yes, so subscribe, donate, send someone a gift subscription, or buy a subscription for a student to Flaming Hydra.