Expending technosecurity culture: on wild card, imagination and disaster prevention

Abstract

The systematized imagination of rather unlikely but highly devastating disaster scenarios – i.e. wild cards – is currently seeing a boom. In this chapter I want to consider the role of the imagination in the discourses and practices of current preventive and ‘premediated’ security research and policy, analysing the extent to which it is a response to new media-related epistemological and societal conditions. In doing so I shall look first at the roles of future scenarios and imagination in the strategic approach to nuclear war. I shall then explore the current condition of our technosecurity culture in which these highly speculative approaches – which come across more as literary processes than as classical scientific methods – appear attractive and indicate a profound shift in contemporary regimes of knowledge.