War games

1. War machines
2. Better killing through technology
3. Cold War
4. First person shooters

Recommended Readings/Viewings

• Peoples, Columba (2008) "Sputnik and ‘skill thinking’ revisited: technological determinism in American responses to the Soviet missile threat." Cold War History, Vol. 8, No. 1, 55–75.
• Stahl, Roger (2006) "Have you played the War on Terror?" Critical Studies in Media Communication, Vol. 23, No. 2, 112-130.

Key concepts, people, etc

• Division of Labour
  The dividing up of work processes into small micro-jobs for the sake of efficiency, mechanization, and cheap labour; connected by Stanley Milgram to the Banality of Evil and the Nazi Holocaust
• Banality of Evil
  Hannah Arendt's term for a form of evil in the modern world where those participating in evil acts are focused on obedience and conformity and don't really think about or feel responsible for the evil they are involved with
  
• Skill-thinking
  The mindset that developed in the United States after World War II where citizens become focused on the technical abilities (military) that their country has at the expense of the reasons for violence engaged in by their government
• Military-industrial complex
  President Eisenhower's term for the way that the U.S. military and private capitalist industry became partners and mutually boosted each other using the fear of shadowy foreign enemies during the Cold War and the War on Terror to encourage citizens to accept the growth of the military economy,
• Military-industrial-entertainment complex
  A term that describes how the entertainment media have now become complicit with the military and the capitalist concerns, creating simulations for the Army, recruitment games, and entertainment products that promote military action (First Person Shooters, etc)
• Virtual citizen-soldier
  Roger Stahl's term for how the typical American citizen was feeling during the War on Terror - it combines the idea that the citizen is at risk from foreign terrorism and thus feels "at war" even though no war has been declared and the idea that at the same time real war is something the average American has experienced only as hyperreal and fictionalized media (movies, news coverage, video games). In other words, the realities of war are highly distorted for the average American consumer and that consumer may not understand or care about what their government does in their name in other parts of the world

References

• Eisenhower, Dwight (1961) The "military industrial complex" speech
• Harari, Yuval Noah (2018) 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. London: Jonathan Cape.
• Marcuse, Herbert (1964) One Dimensional Man. 2nd ed. Routledege, 1991.
• Milgram, Stanley (1973) "The Perils of Obedience," Harper's 247 Dec., 1973, 62-77.
• Truman, Harry S. (1945) Personal diary entry for July 16, 1945