Reviews for Strategy of Deception

The average rating for Strategy of Deception based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-09-10 00:00:00 Christopher Copeland In this book, Virilio writes that improving technology burgeoning all over the world has changed the way that wars have been executed. Media has become pivotal in the transformation of public opinion, as was in the case of the Kosovo skirmishes during the late 1990s. Through its constant bombardment of imagery, media have desensitized people to violence, and this has fostered a sort of stoicism due to the viewers' familiarity with images of war. In light of the issues of "fake news" created and utilized by strongmen, the reader is invited by this work to think about the issues that should actually be addressed. The current political climate, for example, praises Marcos as a cynosure of the past. However, books like these provide the proper vista regarding his achievements. After all, Dictators have always felt the need to give a semblance of legitimacy to their darkest schemes. Further, On the Web, where, as everyone knows, the terrorist temptation is constant and where the depredations of hackers are committed with impunity in a strange state of legal indeterminacy, the difference between (true) information and (false) deception fades a little more each day. (p. 78) What can I say? Virilio seems to be right.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-01-19 00:00:00 Fred Farid Paul kinda goes off... what's so funny is Virilio's style of writing, filled with italics, bolded slogans, kind of in a weird early 2000's paranoid frenzy. Similar almost to Gilles Chatelet in that stylistic manner, but without as much of the rhetorical flare, I found myself seeing the same points being brought up again and again. Maybe that's to do with the Verso imprint (it was originally published as a series of articles) but still, I think Slavoj Zizek also made similar points about Kosovo as well.