Useless Fiction? Beyond the Visual Crisis in Cyber(In)Security

Useful Fiction has become a promising new analytical tool for militaries and intelligence agencies in preparing and planning for future conflict. However, as a tool to foresight cyber conflict, Useful Fiction remains largely useless. Engaging critical security scholarship on fiction, the article argues that there is a dramaturgical clash between the fiction writers’ need to represent cyberattacks as visually spectacular events and the everyday practices of and effects produced by the criminals, spies and soldiers who pursue their objectives through cyberspace. The article collects empirical evidence both in popular culture, such as the TV show Mr Robot, National Geographic documentaries, Hollywood hacker movies, and bestselling novels, as well as in military training and education material. Through such empirical focus, the article further demonstrates that the dominant cyber disaster visuality of fiction writers reproduces (1) social contestable assumptions about catastrophes, (2) counterproductive hacker stereotypes, and (3) unrealistic expectations that undermine the integration of cyber effects in military operations. The article ends by discussing what is to be done with the visual crisis in cybersecurity. Here we propose to use fiction not as a tool to predict the future but to provide a necessary aesthetic-affective “background” to sense cyber(in)security in a way that enables us to live with the discomfort and unease that characterize our digitalized identities.