Map of a Future War

"Some visions seem uniquely suited to digital writing. Angela Ferraiola’s 'Map of a Future War' is one: we can not imagine it being half as effective if delivered through any other medium. Texts appear and vie for our attention and are crowded out by the emergence of other texts. The navigational path seems like an exercise in randomness, yet there is an inevitability to what is displayed on the screen that is gleaned from the chaos of contemporary tumult.

The complexities explored in 'Map of a Future War' simply could not have been explored to the same effect on paper. Ferraiola writes that 'we are finally able to step back from the materiality of paper, the constraints paper has placed on language and, therefore, the limits paper has placed on thought and expression. The sentence and the paragraph, for instance, these are sort of ‘paper’ ideas.'

We like that term, 'paper ideas.'

In our mind, 'paper ideas' entail a lot more than the mere sentence- and paragraph-type conventions we use when writing on paper. 'Map of a Future War' works, in part, because of its dimensionality, the way it allows readers to see, for example, the conflict of texts that tussle for our attention. The work is about that tussle, that competition.

Paper, quite frankly, does not provide the same dimensionality; this is one of paper’s formal limits. The paragraph, with its neatly organized sentences, implies a fundamental order to the world and the ideas expressed within, an order that is rarely as complicated as that which actually exists in the world.

It is not too much to argue that the financial panic she writes about in 'Map of a Future War' was born from a hubris of paper ideas. This is not to say that financial instruments are simplistic ideas—derivatives are anything but—but that the worldview that underlies 21st century capitalism is simplistic, often willfully blind to the havoc and misery capitalism unleashes. Ferraiola’s choice of the digital writing form (with its emphasis on complexity) in and of itself becomes a salient critique of the socioeconomic system." -- From The New River Journal