Current Research

Below is my academic research. Jump to my Projects, Public Writing, Reviews, Data or Teaching to see other aspects of my work.

Works in Progress:

Cybersecurity, Race, and the Politics of Ignorance

Jeff Whyte, Scott Timcke

Contemporary discourses of cyberwarfare stress the significance of 'truth itself' as an object of insecurity in a geopolitically contested information environment. Adversaries of 'the West' are said to produce a 'post-truth era' by 'waging war on information itself', especially on social media. Consequently, not just information, but ideas surrounding 'truth itself' have been folded into new conceptualizations of security that hinge on the contingencies of knowledge and ignorance. Our case study concerns how cyberwarfare experts assert that #BlackLivesMatters activists unwittingly aid adversarial states by 'sowing division' within the United States. Drawing upon Charles Mills' arguments concerning 'epistemologies of ignorance' and racialized 'ways of knowing' we discuss how these experts subsume Black activism within a political imaginary of ignorance and insecurity. While cyberwarfare experts frame themselves as arbiters of truth, we argue that these discourses are themselves the product of long-cultivated and militant forms of 'white ignorance' concerning not only the history of Black activism, but also methods used for its suppression. We conclude that contemporary cybersecurity is not a cumulative project to replace ignorance with knowledge, but a project to manage the contingent circulation of knowledge and ignorance in configurations optimal to the goals of statecraft.

Here is a slide show of this project.