Two consecutive posts from Spiked is a guaranteed never-to-be-repeated anomaly, but in this case chief ideologue Frank Furedi's oft-expounded 'politics of fear' line leads to an important point about the Malthusian basis of ecology's millennial crusade.  (It's a point that's made all too rarely; for a more theoretically-informed version see the Iain Boal interview posted a few months back on this site.)  'Terrorism' serves as a sort of template for other official universal enemies: 'global warming', pandemics, 'overpopulation', etc.  (And, coming full-circle,

What mutations in the circulatory logic of capital and spectacle have occurred since September 11th? In their 2005 book Afflicted Powers: Capital in a New Age of War, Bay Area collective Retort argue that neoliberalism has moved from an era of austerity programmes and agreements to one of all out war – over air, land, and media. Here Anustup Basu reviews their book and traces the demise of a Kantian modernity based on ‘enfranchisement and eternal peace’ and the rise of one based on ‘weak citizenship and perpetual conflict’

During the political fallout from the Madrid bombing, Spain’s citizens faced an informatic coup from a government desperate to keep and extend its hold on power. But using organisational tools tested by the anti-globalisation movement, the effects of media manipulation and disinformation were reversed: Spain was no longer following the script. Mayo Fuster-Morell kept a diary of the remarkable events following the bombing

After the heady days of the dot com boom and the online corporate critique that followed in its wake, net artists’ and activists’ preoccupations are shifting towards the state. Raimundas Malasauskas reports on one New York example

Agnese Trocchi of Candida TV analyses the recently released Italian parliamentary report on 'Internal and International Terrorism', which links groups of the social movement such as the Disobedienti to terrorism, and argues that the fate of political activism in Italy hangs in the balance.

What happens when the ‘network of terror’ meets the ‘network society’? The US military reaches for its strategic gurus. JJ King unpicks the latest thinking on asymmetric warfare in an age of ‘full spectrum dominance’

John Fitzpatrick on how New Labour are planning to phase out politics, errr sorry, ‘terrorism’.

>> Images from www.contrast.org/borders