Disruptive Power: The Crisis of The State in The Digital Age: A Critical Review

This paper is an attempt to review the book “Disruptive Power: The Crisis of the State in the Digital Age” (2015) by Taylor Owen. The work gains prominence in the wake of rising threats to the state power from ICT related activisms like cyber attacks, distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, counter surveillance on the state by Anonymous individuals and groups, data theft, hacking, military signal decoding, digital diplomacy, digital civil disobedience, individual centric real time reporting, virtual currency, surveillance circumvention technology, artificial intelligence, algorithm encoded automatic attacks, digitalized defense and the blurring boundaries between the virtual and the real. State has been able to withstand its ideological enemies like socialism, anarchism, religion etc. and has been successful in defending itself from enemies like terrorism, mafia, and varying ranges of revolutions. On all these occasions state has one common advantage—it knows its enemies, their ideologies, physical boundaries, organizational potential, influence of the ideas—and more importantly—their chances to succeed in strangling the state. But in the case of digital enemy—the enemies of the state are Anonymous most of time—and their form, place and methods of attack on the state also remain unknown on most occasions. This anonymity of the Anonymous gives them extraordinary potential to strike at the state without involving much efforts and costs—and most important of all—without being caught or shot. The Anonymous do not need to maintain any organization, office, hierarchy etc. nor do they need to present themselves physically against the state like in strikes, protests or revolutions—and they do not need violence as well. This makes the Anonymous stay very active all the time as certain traits that are considered lethargic like locking yourself in the room, being unsocial or to put in Robert Putnam's language—the bowling alone syndrome etc. actually strengthen the presence and networking capacity of the Anonymous. All these factors make the presence of Anonymous untraceable and asymmetrical—and yet their actions are highly symmetrical. Owen's work tries to explore the crisis that the state has been facing due to the advancements in ICTs and tries to explore how Network-Power is limiting the sovereign power of the state.