About

WeaponizedCulture.org is dedicated to the study of the confluence of war, technology, and culture to interrogate how culture itself can be a destructive tool. Through interdisciplinary research, this website will study weapons, new technologies that have been adapted for warfare, and their lasting effects in the world around us. Topics will include the latest developments in small arm design, emergent research on cyberwarfare, and technology’s influence on cultural beliefs and practices. Moreover, this blog will discuss weapons technology and warfare in popular culture, literature, film, and new media.

Erich G. Simmers is an Alumni Fellow at the University of Florida where he researches postcolonial studies and cultural criticism. His previous publications include articles on the question of cultural citizenship in Arab-American fiction and images of terrorism in Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan.”

The banner artwork is a collage created using Seashore, an open source image editor for Mac OS X. Source images include Percy T. Reynolds’s illustration “A few conceptions, picked up from press accounts here and there, of what ‘tanks’ are really like,” Punch (27 September 1916), U. S. Department of Defense’s M16A2 Operator’s Manual, TM9-1005-319-10 (August 1986), and c0ntex’s Apple iPhone 1.1.2 Remote Denial of Service Exploit (24 January 2008), available via milw0rm.