The Society 4.0, Internet, Tourism and the War on Terror
The 9/11 marked the end of an epoch, or so it is claimed by many voices. Scholars and colleagues of all stripes agree that the attacks on the World Trade Center changed international relations and geopolitics as never before. In this context, this chapter
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The Society 4.0, Internet, Tourism and the War on Terror Maximiliano E. Korstanje
Introduction Since the attacks to the World Trade Center (WTC) on September 11 of 2001 (a tragic event baptized as 9/11) the world was radically altered, paving the way for the rise of new international relations while the current global stability that marks the geopolitical relations was at the least reconsidered (Pyszczynski et al. 2003). Political analysts proclaim a quest for sustainable security in view of the stock and market crisis that whipped the US and Europe in 2008 (Suri and Valentino 2016). To put this bluntly in other terms, the needs to rethink national security strategy, in which the Bush administration coined the term “the war on terror”, doubtless marked the epicentre of a political crisis in the US and its allies (Kirshner 2016; Inboden 2016; Hall 2016). As Suri and Valentino put it, the global financial crisis, which recently occurred, not only placed the US into a paradoxical situation, simply because the struggle against terrorism demands a great deal of financial resources, but undermined the possibilities for weaving alliances with different autonomous nations. No matter
M. E. Korstanje (*) University of Palermo, Buenos Aires, Argentina e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 A. Scribano, P. Lisdero (eds.), Digital Labour, Society and the Politics of Sensibilities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12306-2_6
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the ideology of the administration, it is remarkable that the mediocrity of American strategic leadership jeopardizes the political stability of the government due to the excessive cost accumulation, adjoined to the decline of the US as an economic power (Suri and Valentino 2016). Meanwhile, some neo-pragmatic voices call attention to the dangers of the US retreat from its leading position as a watchdog in view of the radicalization of modern terrorism and the advance of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS; Cronin 2015; Khader 2016). Still further, the digital technologies, which today connect the world, provide a fertile ground for the radicalized cells to instil their message of panic and extortion. As Mahmoud Eid (2014) brilliantly observed, a strange symbiosis between the media, which looks to cover terrorism-containing news to gain further investors, maximizing its profits, and the terrorist groups, which benefit from making their crimes public, converges. In the culture of witnessing, Luke Howie (2015) adds, any news is covered, packaged and disseminated to any geographical point in hours engaging a remote audience with the facts as never before. This begs some interesting questions that deserve to be discussed— through this chapter—such as, is technology a path to create a culture of fear? Or simply an alternative aimed at fighting against terrorism? Why has terrorism transformed in a sort of popular entertainment? What are the connections between terrorism and mobilities? And lastly, what are the direct effects of terrorism on the organization of labour in to
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