Description
Technological possibilities and constraints influence socio-economic processes and political contexts shape the evolution of digital technologies in turn. An important, previously understudied aspect of the Global Politics of Cyberspace is the dynamic interplay of cyber security markets and cyber security politics. Critical Security Studies are well aware of how crucial imaginaries of technologies are in giving rise to new danger discourses, whereby technologies are implicated in “creating” new threats as well as providing solutions against threats. What we do not understand well enough to date is how the logics of commercial security markets interact with those imaginaries, in specific, how security desires meet design and vice versa. This paper focuses on the practices of business actors that develop cyber security tools for a growth market of grand proportions. In specific, it explores the economic side of cyber-in-security through an analysis of the marketing strategies of “cyber security companies”. To that end, it will look at how cyber-threats are visualized, how companies try to make cybersecurity “sexy” and it will explore how these representations shape the pervasiveness of cyber-in-securities in politics.
