This personal essay explores the context of Haraway’s Star Wars through the lens of the author’s teenage encounters with military networks in Washington, DC. His first job interview, for example, was with the Center for Seismic Studies, an innocuously named place that in fact used sophisticated supercomputers to monitor and simulate the seismic signature of foreign nuclear tests. The author accessed his first online game by dialing a server that he later discovered belonged to the Naval Surface Warfare Research Center. The essay pairs such anecdotes with a consideration of Haraway’s own writing on Star Wars (both in the manifesto and elsewhere), in which she describes it, variously, as positing a “human body which is disabled by definition” (presumably so it can be augmented technologically). The essay reflects on one of the surprising directions of Haraway’s manifesto, which is about the possibility of recovering new political forms despite our complicity with such militarized technologies.
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