Wars have many beginnings, but generally, they refuse to end. They erupt and proceed beyond the front lines, surpassing what we understand as boundaries to become milieux and difficult to detect when they proliferate and blend with the realms of so-called peace.

The anchoring point of the martial environment preceding the ongoing fossil-fuel war is found at the nexus of cyber and nuclear, and it has become prominent through the many acts of energy terrorism that have been deployed during the war of the Russian Federation against Ukraine. A war taking place within a colonial legacy wherein the imperial vector of terror has long been aligned with a hidden inter-imperial vector of deterrence.

The Marshall McLuhan Lecture 2023 will decipher the fast-forming military assemblages that engulf and impact webs of life-affirming relations, and detect the vectors of slow and fast violence that spread and scale toward uncertain futures.