PositiveThe London Review of BooksDavies’s account is full of acute observations, but there are several points at which the tools of Marxist analysis might have helped him out. One of the major themes of the book is the idea that the ‘weaponisation of everyday things’ has undermined any meaningful distinction between war and peace. When weaponised, an otherwise peaceful tool is seen ‘not in terms of its intended functions, but in terms of its full range of possible impacts’. Set up a social media account to share a few of your trivial thoughts with the world and you don’t expect to find yourself trolled towards suicide, but that can happen ... Davies suggests that we should ‘accept that we are all in a situation of quasi-war,’ but doesn’t make clear who he thinks is fighting whom.
