Written nearly two years ago, the blogger and writer Venkatesh Rao makes the case that the rules of engagement for warfare have changed from attacks on physical infrastructure to manipulation of information. That the nature of the attackers has changed, their objectives have changed – from destruction of assets to hijacking of opinion and emotions, and that governments in particular and society in general has not yet fully understood this:
Cyberwar, most people thought, would be fought over infrastructure — armies of state-sponsored hackers and the occasional international crime syndicate infiltrating networks and exfiltrating secrets, or taking over critical systems. That’s what governments prepared and hired for;
[But] In a warm information war, the human mind is the territory. If you aren’t a combatant, you are the territory. And once a combatant wins over a sufficient number of minds, they have the power to influence culture and society, policy and politics.
We know this is coming, and yet we’re doing very little to get ahead of it. No one is responsible for getting ahead of it.
He draws the analogy to the infamously ineffective Maginot Line built by the French in the 1920s, for future WW1-style attacks that left the Ardennes forest unprotected because it was thought to be impenetrable.
Academic leaders and technologists wonder if faster fact checking might solve the problem, and attempt to engage in good-faith debate about whether moderation is censorship… The combatants view this as a Hobbesian information war of all against all and a tactical arms race; the other side sees it as a peacetime civil governance problem
Powerfully,
What made democracies strong in the past — a strong commitment to free speech and the free exchange of ideas — makes them profoundly vulnerable in the era of democratized propaganda and rampant misinformation.