My typology of fun.

I tend to think of fun in terms of a type-1 (feels fun in the moment), type-2 (feels fun afterward, although not – or not necessarily – in the moment), type-3 (which isn’t remembered as having been fun, but is still fun to tell stories about), and type-4 (which isn’t even fun to tell stories about, for you, but is fun for others to tell them, about you and your sufferings).

Shake It Off

Electronic Terraforming: “The creation of a material environment that mimics a digital representation of a physical territory…but is entirely fictional. [A] process of emitting an electromagnetic volume that creates fictitious cyberscapes… [E]lectronic terraforming operates through elastic – and increasingly uncanny – spatial behaviour, allowing it to bend, stretch, and fold cyber territories. This topological, rather than topographical, understanding of spatial deformation provides a novel approach to defining the territorial power of cyberwar.”  

(Anna Engelhardt 2023)

In a chapter of the forthcoming book Cyberwar Topologies (co-edited by Svitlana Matviyenko & Kayla Hilstob), Anna Engelhardt introduces the idea of “electronic terraforming.” Her premise is that cyberwar combatants, with the right equipment and expertise, are now capable of producing – and then ensnarling opponents in – a new sort of ‘Eldenian’ territory that obeys a topological rather than topographical logic, one characterized by elastic, disorienting deformations of spacetime as digital devices – jammed, spoofed, or countermanded – get pulled forcibly into electromagnetic looking-glass worlds, and trapped there, temporarily, for tactical reasons.

I’m fascinated with this idea, and I’ve been thinking about territorial contestations in which the distinction she draws between the two logics might be collapsed and/or usefully set in dialectical opposition. 

A mountain range, for instance. Let me explain.

In 2009, Friedmann Freund of NASA Ames demonstrated that strain at seismogenic depths can cause igneous and high-grade metamorphic rocks to release positive charge carriers (so-called “positive holes” or “p-holes”) from the stressed rock into unstressed rock surrounding it, leaving electrons behind. Positive surface potential builds up in the unstressed rock, and as the stressed rock becomes negatively charged the difference between the potentials results in a semiconductive, battery-like outflow of electric current. Positive charge accumulates at the surface, ionizing the ground-air interface and producing a plasma. As airborne radio waves strike it, they can induce what Masafumi Fujii of the University of Toyama has called a “terrestrial surface plasmon.” The waves bend asymptotically from their path in the air, couple with the plasma, and follow its complex topographic path toward mountain peaks, where they are diffracted and reradiated beyond lines of sight.

In short, deformational pre-seismic stress could turn a mountain into a giant radio – an electrified, infrastructural landform that enables the sorts of electronic terraforming Engelhardt describes. That is, topography (specifically, a mechanically topologized topography) harnessed to deploy weaponized topologies with.

At the risk of sounding unserious, consider the Pamir mountains; or the Carpathians, or the Caucasus, or the Zagros. They all satisfy the requisite tectonic and geological conditions for a surface plasmon-based radio frequency network. They’re all settings where geopolitics and geology might (sadly, if somewhat predictably) align in such a way that guerrilla insurgents get chased among pleated folds of rock at high elevation by technologically superior belligerents determined to make use of mountain geophysics – not just for cyberwarfare, but also to establish electromagnetic supply chains for communications, piloting drones and EOD robots, even SIGINT, snatching radio whispers out of the mouths of caves. 

One can, of course, also imagine the guerillas utilizing their traditional terrain in novel ways: to monitor EM signal fires from afar; to track the spectral bleed of alpine commandos; to disrupt enemy comms; to jam and spoof their weapon systems.

One can further imagine locals wanting to be able to shut the radio effect off, should the invading army be trying to make use of it; or turn it on, should it not already be available for themselves to use.

What I’ve described is a byproduct of pre-seismic stress, and seismic induction is its kill switch. Whether by inducing a small earthquake (by means of, say, hydraulic injection – lubricating faults until they slip – as three USGS scientists first demonstrated was possible to do deliberately at a Chevron oil field in Rangely, Colorado back in 1969) or some other, more controlled, method (about which I have ideas), once the stress gets discharged, the surface plasmon will collapse, and the radio effect with it. 

Conversely, if stress can be built up to a point where the rock strains but doesn’t rupture, a plasmon could be generated artificially. Once again, the work done fifty years ago at Rangely is instructive. Those guys didn’t just start earthquakes, after all, they also stopped them – by reversing hydrostatic pressure in the fault complex. Pumping water out of the ground dried up pore space in the rocks, increased their friction, and stopped them from slipping. Which, in turn, set the stage for new deformational stress to build.

Think of it as a geophysical pas de deux based on a tactical truism that holds at every geopolitical scale from a barfight to Westphalianism: when your opponent bends, you break; when they break, you bend.