Vic Castro defends their PhD thesis at the Department of Political Science
Title
Technology, the Speech Act: Mechanical Embodiments of Cybersecurity and International Politics.
The thesis
The thesis can be loaned from the Royal Danish Library.
Time and venue
Friday 8 March 2024 from 14:00-17:00 at Centre for Health and Society, Øster Farimagsgade 5, DK-1353 Copenhagen K., room 1.1.18. Kindly note that the defence will start precisely at 14:00.
Assessment committee
- Associate Professor Jonathan Luke Austin (Chair), University of Copenhagen
- Senior Scientist Myriam Dunn Cavelty, ETH Zurich
- Professor Michael C. Williams, University of Ottawa
Abstract
How does digital technology ‘act’ to disrupt existing socio-political orders? Software is made of (computing) language, like speech acts, but constrains as unescapably as matter. Its actions are determined by its code, but are also chaotic in their wider consequences. To understand these tensions, this dissertation develops a framework called mechanicity. The “mechanical”, in the 17th-century European scientific revolution, did not necessarily conjure images of authoritarian determinism. It instead pointed to a disorderly universe, moved by the unruly agency of matter, where the very possibility of political order was an acute question. The line between messy materiality and orderly society was drawn at the boundary of human skin – a line that cyberspace is now blurring again. The dissertation brings together critical security studies, realist International Relations theory, science and technology studies, and Hobbesian political philosophy to think through the place of the mechanical in international anarchy, human embodiments, and the cyber age. It finally applies its insights to two cases of cybersecurity controversies on smartphone encryption and mercenary spyware.