Post-Cybernetic Judicial War

Post-cybernetic judicial war is the title and governing diagram of a pamphlet by David Cole, published as number 9 in the second swarm of Abstract Culture. It is not an established doctrine of law, and “judicial” does not mean that the essay studies courts. Cole splices game theory, market exchange, information cost, state violence, nuclear strategy and a speculative Bangalore into a single apparatus: rules allocate possible moves, scores travel across rounds, and systems of exchange make war continuous with apparently peaceful competition.

The archive preserves two useful witnesses. The original-format scan supplies the decisive bibliographic evidence: its cover names David Cole and the title, while its contents panel places the work between Rob Heath and Christina Paouros's “Destination 3000 Degrees” and Iain Hamilton Grant's “Burning AutoPoiOedipus”; the same panel identifies Ccru as publisher (original pamphlet, pp. 1, 3). A plainer twelve-page PDF preserves searchable text without the wrapper (reading copy, pp. 1–12). Its filename begins CCRU-, but that later filing label does not supersede Cole's displayed byline.

The pinball operating table

The essay opens with a hammer striking a kneecap and a dent becoming a metal landscape. That injured body is also a pinball table. Gods, emperors, political celebrities, military figures, trademarks and botanical ornaments light up around its arc; a ball bearing enters combat; mechanical impacts accumulate a score. The player discovers that the machine has reversed agency: one is “no longer playing, but being played,” no longer spending but being spent (reading copy, pp. 1–2).

This frame makes the essay's abrupt shifts legible. Pinball is not merely an image attached to an economic argument. It is the operating diagram that lets bodies, information, money, belief and violence collide without becoming identical. The table supplies boundaries and rules; the moving ball supplies contingent contact; the score converts unlike events into a portable quantity. The opening's named rulers and strategists function as illuminated signs in this machine, not as subjects of sustained historical interpretation.

At the end, the injured player returns to the table. An attendant decodes and removes the score, and another ball fires into “the chaos of war” (reading copy, p. 12). The circuit therefore does not culminate in victory or knowledge. It produces another round, carrying a record of violence that the player cannot control.

Core, information and the price of contact

The first technical passage recasts exchange as a cooperative game. A market's core is the set of outcomes that no coalition can improve by abandoning the proposed allocation. Cole treats a nonempty core, common unit values and the possibility that money can “set up on its own” as constraints on what the game can stabilize. Competition is nonpersonal: players may intend one thing while equilibrium coordinates something else (reading copy, pp. 2–3).

Information is costly, so participants limit contacts to the sources they can reach. Substitution reduces those costs by making one object, source or participant replaceable by another; it can prolong exchange and render it predictable. Yet information also differentiates legal from illegal strata and creates pathways that regulation cannot fully contain. Cole's “judicial war” begins here: law is neither a sovereign command imposed from outside nor a neutral referee. It is an immanent sorting operation inside the game, continually revised as information and alliances change (reading copy, pp. 3–4).

The argument resembles the Ccru's xeno economy and cyberpositive vocabularies in treating capital as a feedback process that exceeds individual intention. Cole's emphasis is different, however. The score and the coalition keep distributive conflict visible: the system's apparent autonomy does not abolish winners, pivotal actors or enforceable boundaries.

Biataxy: when rules settle into force

The next game expands across India, Pakistan and the thermonuclear state system. Cole borrows Stanislav Andreski's term biataxy for the settlement of argument through force and uses it to place war and peace, coercion and agreement on a shared strategic field. Game-theoretical coalitions then range from zero-sum conflict through coordination to a deliberately comic “utter confusion theory,” where random choice writes coincidence into the machinic formula (reading copy, pp. 4–6).

Alongside this, a Deleuze–Guattari vocabulary of decoded flows, state isomorphy, models of realization, social subjection and machinic enslavement explains how formally different regimes can participate in the same capitalist axiomatic. The television viewer is the key miniature: not simply a consumer standing before a machine but a feedback component within it (reading copy, p. 5). The pinball player and viewer occupy the same unstable position. Each appears to choose while also furnishing an input that allows the apparatus to choose through them.

This is the essay's closest contact with the later human security system: security does not arrive after danger as its solution, because the systems that calculate, distribute and inhibit danger are themselves modes of participation in it. But Cole's pamphlet is more interested in market cores and geopolitical inversion than in the later Ccru concept's integrated policing of the human.

Bangalore as speculative projection

Bangalore appears as a coming junction where technological innovation, Hindu myth, caste, trade and cyberspace are made to converge. Cole predicts capital and information dispersing toward an Asian core while Europe and America orbit it. Religion is cast as a regulator of violence between city and Land; economic acceleration supposedly dissolves inherited strata and reorganizes them as informational micro-units (reading copy, pp. 4, 6–8).

The claim is not a report on 1990s Bangalore. It is theory fiction staged as geopolitical forecast, using India as the imagined reversal point of Western centrality. Its wager is that trade networks, technical knowledge and lower production costs can bypass bureaucratic regulation and make an old centre peripheral. In that respect, the pamphlet belongs near accelerationism: it imagines stratification liquefied by intensified economic and informational circulation rather than by a political programme standing outside those processes.

The same section also exposes the pamphlet's sharpest limits. It compresses India, Hindu traditions, caste, Brahmins, colonial history and the India–Pakistan conflict into sweeping civilizational types. Its contrast between an exhausted “Christian West” and an inventive Eastern multicellularity is exoticizing; its “Brahmin as nomads” forecast turns a complex social hierarchy into a ready-made cybernetic function (reading copy, pp. 9–12). These propositions should be read as dated rhetoric doing work inside the projection, not as reliable sociology, religious history or analysis of South Asian politics.

Living flows against state axioms

Cole opposes “living flows” to axioms subordinated to centres of command. Corporations, military pressure groups and state legislation measure geographical segments, whereas flows form through shifting relations among status, order and material events. Examples involving BSE and Soviet farming are offered to argue that proliferating regulation can make the relation between city and countryside brittle (reading copy, pp. 8–9).

The opposition is unstable in a productive way. The market requires constraints, common measures and information channels, yet the essay celebrates circulation precisely where it evades central decision. States help homogenize an external world market while dividing it into rights and political segments. Networks promise escape from that hierarchy, but their saturation points become profit centres and new loci of organization. “Post-cybernetic” therefore does not name a world after feedback. It names a recursive phase in which feedback systems can no longer be assigned cleanly to either regulation or escape.

This ambivalence prevents the pamphlet from reducing to a hymn to frictionless markets. It imagines the net being wrenched from monopoly, but it also shows information made expensive, contacts rationed, coalitions weaponized and scores removed by an attendant. Like swarmachines, its collectivity is distributed rather than centrally authored; unlike a simple swarm, the pinball table insists on rails, gates and accounting.

How to read the title

The three words designate a composite problem:

• Post-cybernetic: feedback has spread from identifiable control mechanisms into markets, media, bodies and geopolitical relations; there is no external controller from which to survey the whole.
• Judicial: laws, substitutions, cores and scores sort admissible moves and distribute consequences from within the apparatus. This is broader than courts and should not be mistaken for legal doctrine.
• War: force persists through market competition, information control, coalition formation and scoring, even where exchange presents itself as peaceful coordination.

The title's value is diagrammatic. It gives a name to the pamphlet's passage between domains without proving that economics, law, games and armed conflict obey one empirical model.

SOURCE AND INTERPRETIVE CAUTION: The original wrapper credits David Cole; Ccru is the publisher and Abstract Culture the container. The searchable copy's filename is not an authorship statement. The essay is a deliberately hybrid and speculative artifact, not validated economics, international-relations research, caste sociology or jurisprudence. Its claims about India and Brahmins require historical and critical distance rather than repetition as present fact.