Likewar

Renaissance Humans, #83

Last week I passed through Doha airport, which was a reminder the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed, as Taylor Swift science fiction novelist William Gibson memorably said. The indoor forest is pretty remarkable.

By the time you read this (Sunday morning on 9/21), I will have just completed gamemastering my first one-shot adventure for a long-time gaming group. I suspect that sentence may be confusing for some readers unfamiliar with the true depths of my nerdpravity, which is a word I just invented to portmanteau nerd and depravity.

It was a challenging but fun creative exercise. I’ll do a writeup once we’re complete. We rented a castle on an island, which made it extra special, and again, is an unusual declaration which bears unpacking at a later date.

Singer Castle on Dark Island

The Nexus of Nerdpravity

I recently built a week Irregular Warfare curriculum for my day job, and I have a few pieces tailored to understanding that environment. This book, although getting dated, provides a solid primer for understanding the environment which humans of every nation face online today.

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Bottom Line Up Front:

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Singer and Emerson T. Brooking (2018) explores how social media has become a new front in modern warfare. Battles are fought not only with guns and bombs, but with information and disinformation. The book examines the impact of social media on politics, war, and individual lives, highlighting how it is used to influence public opinion, spread propaganda, and manipulate outcomes in the digital age.

Five core principles:

1. The internet has left adolescence. After years of growing, the internet is the main medium of communications around the world, for both commerce and politics. It is following the same trajectory as the telegraph, telephone, radio, and television. But social media takes the internet to even greater heights- it is both global and instantaneous. Still, half the world is not yet online.

2. The internet has become a battlefield. It is equally indispensable to business and social life as to militaries and governments. Warfare without borders. Every battle seems personal, but every conflict is global. (See The Weaponization of Everything by Galeotti)

3. This battlefield changes how conflicts are fought. Social media has rendered secrets impossible to keep. Virality can overwhelm truth; what is known can be reshaped. “Power” is not simply measured by the physical, but by what can command attention.

4. This battle changes what “war” means. Winning online battles wins the world. War and politics have begun to fuse. The same tactics which create political wins, create military ones.

5. We are all part of this war. Attention is contested territory. Everything you watch, every like, is a ripple in the pond. Attention is both the target of and ammunition for additional attacks.

“Around the world at this hour and every hour of the 24, there is a constant battle on the ether waves for the possession of man’s thoughts, emotions, and attitudes- influencing his will to fight, to stop fighting, to work hard, to stop working, to resist and sabotage, to doubt, to grumble, to stand fast in faith and loyalty… We estimate that by short wave alone, you as a citizen of this radio world are being assailed by 2,000 words per minute in 40-45 different languages and dialects.”— Robert D. Leigh, Director of Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service, testimony before congress, 1945

History of ARPANET: This is the DARPA initiative that grows into the internet we know today. First email in 1979. First emoticons in 1982. By 1980, there were 70 institutions and 5,000 individuals on it. By 1990, 3 million users. In 1995, 16 million. By 2000, 360 million.

The 5 D’s of Russian disinformation:

Dismiss the critic, Distort the facts, Distract from the main issue, Dismay the audience, and Divide your enemies.

Two main principles to Russian Information Operations:

1. Believability. “AIDS was created by the CIA to hurt black people.”

2. Extension. Extend across large numbers of people, and across time. Staying power.

Sock puppets- people paid to impersonate others on the internet, through fake accounts, which can steer and influence on social media.

Bots- automated accounts used to artificially create trending interest in a given topic or the illusion of mass support.

Power law online- Large numbers of humans influenced from just a handful of accounts— think the influence of the Kardashians (think, shudder, and weep for your world).

Effective Tactics for the New Environment

Narrative- Spin a Tale

The first rule of narrative is consistency: keep your content fairly uniform in messaging, aesthetics, topic.

The second rule is resonance: make the frame familiar and relatable to a majority of people.

The third rule is novelty: it should have new elements to be intriguing and compelling.

Emotion- Pull the Heartstrings, Feed the Fury

Create arousal- anger works the best. Emotional contagion is real and works over social media.

Authenticity- The Power of Being Real.

Community- The Power of Others. You see fellows like you, people in your circumstances, your tribe.

Inundation- Drown the Web, Run the World

Firehose of Falsehood. So much chaff, it’s difficult to discern the wheat. At present, authoritarian nations are better at leveraging these tools, techniques, and technologies to their advantage.

Memetic Warfare- the weaponization of memes for warfare purposes. Ex: Pepe the Frog in the political arena.

Example: Israeli Defense Forces and Hezbollah shitposting each other virtually while the physical battle is going on. From the book:

“Whether the conflict is a civil war echoing across YouTube, a dispute over missile tests that culminates in one leader tweeting threats at another, a swaggering Facebook argument between criminal gangs, or just a celebrity flame war, all of these socially mediated conflicts are overtly theatrical. It’s about bolstering friends and dissuading foes, just like the kind of macho showmanship that precedes a bar fight. It is about persuading someone to back off before the first fist punch is thrown. Failing that, it’s about weakening and embarrassing them, sapping their supporters while energizing your own.”

Conclusion

1. For all the sense of flux, the modern information environment is stabilizing. Social media and the internet will continue to grow, but form and centrality will remain.

2. The Internet is a battlefield- It is contiguous, continuous, and contagious. It is not a harbinger of peace, it’s a platform to achieve the goals of those who can manipulate it the best. Battle is for attention and engagement.

3. This battlefield changes how we must thing about information itself. If something happens, we must assume that there’s a picture or record of it somewhere, and it will surface. An event only carries power if people believe that it happened. Manufactured events can have power, and real events can be duds. Mastery of facts isn’t the most important thing, but rather understanding psychological, political, and algorithmic manipulation.

4. War and Politics have never been so intertwined. In cyberspace, the ways to win politically and militarily are identical. Silicon Valley engineers are accidental power brokers.

5. We are all part of the battle. All these information struggles, going on all around us, are influencing our perceptions, attitudes, and decisions. Whatever we like or share becomes part of the next salvo.

Implications:

1. For governments, the first and most important step is to take this new battleground seriously. Social media is now a foundation for commercial, political, and civic life.

2. The United States must move quickly to develop a national strategy to address the challenges of Likewar. Look to the Baltic states for a model- media literacy, public tracking of foreign disinformation, election transparency, and legal action to limit poisonous super spreaders¹. See American past- Active Measures Working Group during cold war.

3. Today, a significant part of the American political culture is willfully denying new threats to its cohesion. In some cases, it’s colluding with them. Examples from Trump administration.

4. Information literacy is no longer an education issue, but a national security imperative. Start with childhood education. University of Washington course curriculum- “Calling Bullshit: Data Reasoning in a Digital World.”

5. When someone engages in the spread of lies, hate, and other societal poisons, they should be stigmatized accordingly. This requires a cultural shift.

6. Those who deliberately facilitate enemy efforts, whether it be providing a megaphone for terrorist groups or consciously spreading disinformation, especially that from foreign governments, have to be seen for what they are. They are no longer fighting for their personal brand or party- they are aiding and abetting American adversaries.

Dangerous Speech- defined as what promotes communal violence. 5 categories:

a. Dehumanizing language— comparing people to animals or sub-humans

b. Coded language— coy historical language, loaded memes

c. Suggestions of impurity— target is unworthy of human rights, poisoning society

d. Opportunistic claims of attacks on women, but by people with no concern for women’s rights— groups using valor as a shield.

e. Accusation in a mirror— reversal of reality, group told it’s under attack as a reason to justify preemptive violence against the target.

7. Silicon Valley must accept more of the political and social responsibility that the success of its technology has thrust upon it. Their platforms shape our reality, and their posture must reflect that.

8. Accordingly, these companies must abandon the pretense that they are merely “neutral” platform providers. Firmer stand against bigotry, racism, and trolls, limit ability of authoritarians to exploit the networks.

9. Silicon Valley must break its internal code of silence. Soldiers, Spies, Mercenaries, Insurgents, and Hackers were more talkative than Big Tech employees.

10. Big Tech/Social Media Companies must proactively consider the political, social, and moral ramifications of their services. They have to do more to “game out” the second and third order effects of their decisions and products.

11. By acting less like angry customers and more like concerned constituents, we stand the best chance of guiding these digital empires in the right direction. As of 2021, Facebook is only sixteen years old, Twitter 14, and Google 22. When the auto industry was that age, there were no seat belts, airbags, emission controls, or mandatory crumple zones. They are growing and learning as they go.

12. If we want to avoid being manipulated online, we must change how we navigate the new media environment. Practice lateral thinking- leap across and check diverse sources rather than remain in one source (“vertically”). Use the “SIFT” method:

a. Stop.

b. Investigate the source.

c. Find better coverage.

d. Trace claims, quotes and media to the original context.

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Currere Certamen Tuum / Run Your Race

1. This is about Estonia’s efforts: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220128-the-country-inoculating-against-disinformation