International Journal on Criminology Volume 3, Number 2, Fall 2015 | Page 92

Confronting Cybercrime through Criminology
committed, but do not operate—do not yet have the knowledge, and therefore cannot
operate—in a preventative register. Yet there is no spontaneous generation in the
strategic realm, no more than there is in biology. The preparations for a violent act
like the attack on Charlie Hebdo (in the physical world) or that on TV5Monde (in the
cyberworld) will necessarily leave traces; what are called weak signals or “deviations
from the ambient background,” analogous to what ancient Greek wisdom called
“epiphanies.”
These are what we need to detect before the drama unfolds. In the months
preceding September 11, 2001, multiple warning signs were reported to the authorities.
But these signs were not understood in time. Essentially, their meaning was only
realized on September 12, when the catastrophe had already occurred. This is what
must be avoided. In strategic terms, what we need to do is simply allow France to
apply concretely the popular wisdom of the proverb: “Prevention is better than cure.”
An overexcited media often speaks to us of “cyber-prediction”: can we take this seriously?
There is a generational question here: those who govern know little of the
cyberworld and the perils it contains. In particular, they are entirely ignorant of
the pernicious ideology of Silicon Valley, a highly toxic cocktail of scientism (Max
Planck: “only the measurable is real”) and hyperliberalism (so-called “libertarianism”)
bordering on pure and simple anarchism. The dominant idea in the propaganda of
this anarcho-capitalism is that only information technology can protect us from
the perils of the world. Thus it is affirmed, with unprecedented force: “There is no
Alternative (TINA).” And consequently—so Silicon Valley tells us—the future lies in
prediction via information technology.
Now of course this is absurd, because true uncertainty can no more be modeled
today than it could in Aristotle’s time. Otherwise, everyone would win the lottery or
at the racetrack. This is absurdity verging on intellectual fraud, peddled to dupes by
the giants of Silicon Valley. I expose all of it in my book Cyber-Criminologie. 4 Read it,
and see what you can learn!
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