The World as a Target

We have been living in a targeted world for a while. We ourselves are targets of countless enterprises, from the most innocently commercial to the most nebulous undercover operations. A simple search on Google (not accidentally, a colossal machine for ‘finding targets’) will surely show a million occurrences, mostly in languages that operate in this same world full of targets. This inflation must say something about the society in which we live and the direction it is going. More than one author has said that we are turning into targeted societies. In the meantime, another theorist has shown that we have been living in an age where the world itself has become a target. Since we cannot directly face, speaking as an open and merely conceptual field, the hypothesis that we now live in a targeted society beyond discipline and control, as respectively put by Foucault and Deleuze, we can start by making a detour to test a variant of that hypothesis: the targeted society where we are struggling is the accumulation point of a long process of military definition of reality. If we can equally suggest that the so-called surveillance capitalism could be somehow explained by the expansion of that process of definition of reality, we might have sensed the specific tone of the tremendous war of the worlds that has been waged around us. In other words, to summarize this view of the world as a target, we can say that it is also an alternative hypothesis about contemporary militarization.

Keywords: Atomic Age, Emergency Age, Anthropocene, target audience, strategic bombing, militarization, security devices, Surveillance Capitalism, military metaphysics, Wright Mills, Veblen, Adorno, Virilio, targeted society.