Re: <nettime> Anatomy of information warfare in the social media age

On Wed, Mar 2, 2022, Balazs Bodo wrote:

"I believe that western audiences are increasingly locked into a media environment that is rapidly re-structured under the conditions of a total information warfare. Information that circulates in this environment is at best incomplete, at worst is the result of an unknown selection process. The news that is saturating this environment may be inaccurate or incomplete, but nevertheless is extremely engaging. The – deliberate or accidental – product of this engagement is the total emotional mobilization of western audiences in support of Ukraine. Highly consequential political decisions are apparently taken in response to the outrage of online population. In my opinion, this is a new development in information warfare. So far, consent was manufactured to support geopolitical strategies. This time it seems to be the other way around: the next step in the geopolitical grand game is decided by the popular vote of badly informed outrage."

Now there's a question for the collective intelligence of nettime!

It gains its urgency from the sudden turnabout of Olaf Scholz, who - after huge demos in Germany over the weekend - suddenly announced support for blocking SWIFT transactions, direct military aid to Ukraine and a hundred billion euro bump to Germany's defense budget, to be followed by a permanent rise of that budget from 1.5 to 2 percent of GDP. Is this really the influence of social media? I'm not certain - other people could contribute their expertise on that one - but I'm with Balazs when he says: "First, let’s not forget, for a single moment while this war lasts, and beyond, that this is a war, and we are living in one of its theaters."

As I see it there are four linked questions: What is information warfare? By whom is it promulgated? Do its targets (civil societies) have agency? Or as Balazs suggests, are they/we the unwitting victims of a social-media machinery that maximizes outrage?

I already tried to go there with some reflections on Vladislav Surkov, one of Putin's closest advisors and head of Russia's Ukraine policy until 2020. But it's impossible to separate Surkov from the calculated disinformation of his own pronouncements. So after reading Balazs I looked around and found a (mercifully short) 2018 book on theories of information warfare from both the American and Russian perspectives, by a guy named Olaf Fridman, entitled "Russian 'Hybrid Warfare': Resurgence and Politicisation." Sure, it's a bit dry, no entertainment value there. But it's a brilliant cross-cultural history of recent military doctrines beyond the battlefield.

Fridman analyzes the US military doctrine of Hybrid Warfare, dating back to a 2007 essay by Frank Hoffman. According to Hoffman, hybrid warfare involves a combination of state and non-state actors, engaging in "a range of different modes of warfare, including conventional capabilities, irregular tactics and formations, terrorist acts including indiscriminate violence and coercion, and criminal disorder." These ideas were forged to describe the relation between regular and irregular forces in Middle Eastern insurgency and US counter-insurgency. But could they really capture the disconcerting mix of local revolt, disguised Russian aggression and contradictory media and diplomatic messaging that characterized the 2014 war in Ukraine's Donbas region? And what about the Russian information war in the 2016 US elections?

Fridman shows that specifically Russian concepts of net-centric warfare, information warfare and hybrid warfare ("gibridnaya voyna") were developed in the 2000s in order to analyze American strategy toward the Soviet Union and its successor, the Russian Federation, as well as the package of civil-society strategies developed by the Otpor movement in Serbia in the 1990s and spread with US state department help throughout the post-Soviet space by the so-called "color revolutions." For the sharpest of the Russian theorists, Aleksandr Dugin, the phrase "network-centric warfare" is not about the technologies of the Gulf War era "Revolution in Military Affairs" that some might remember. Instead it is about the imposition on Russia and the former Soviet territories of a set of civilizational norms, including finance, entrepreneurialism, liberal political philosophy, mass media, educational standards, scientific institutions and youth fashions. All of these norms are conceived by the Russian theorists to exert a subversive influence. As Dugin wrote: "‘The U.S. could not beat the U.S.S.R., neither in a direct confrontation, nor in a direct ideological battle, nor in any direct way of a struggle between special services ... Then the major principle of networking strategies was employed: informal infiltration finding weak, indeterminate, entropic elements within Soviet hierarchy. The U.S.S.R. was defeated neither by a counter-power, nor by an anti-Soviet organisation, but by skilfully organised, manipulated and mobilised ‘entropy’." (In: Fridman 2018)

General Gerasimov, who currently commands the Russian forces in Ukraine, put it this way in 2016: "In contemporary conflicts, the emphasis of the methods of confrontation is more frequently shifting towards an integrated application of political, economic, informational and other non-military measures, implemented with the support of the military force. These are so-called hybrid methods. Their purpose is to achieve political goals with a minimal military influence on the enemy ... by undermining its military and economic potential by information and psychological pressure, the active support of the internal opposition, partisan and subversive methods ... A state that falls under the influence of a hybrid of aggression usually descends into a state of complete chaos, political crisis and economic collapse." (Again, in Fridman 2018)

Okay okay, not only are these wildly paranoid ideas, but also, more pertinently, they do not describe what's currently going on in Ukraine. We are seeing a brutal strategy of rocketry, bombs, encirclement and urban warfare, which likely will culminate in a scenario like the destruction of Grozny in the early years of the Putin regime - or worse, the second, unforgettable battle of Fallujah that marked the culmination of American aggression in Iraq. But remember, the Russian concepts of hybrid warfare were conceived, above all, as an analysis of American/Western strategy toward Russia. Do these ideas describe the current Western mix of military aid and sweeping financial sanctions, fueled by social-media outrage? Do they explain why Putin dreams of a "Russky Mir" or "Russian World" extending non-Western norms throughout Eurasia? Above all, do they make all of us into the useful clickbait fools of a clash of civilizations?

Sanctions, as everyone should realize, do not aim at deterring war or even primarily at curtailing the ability of a state to wage an ongoing war. Instead, by inflicting widespread economic pain, they aim at breaking the will of a population to support and tolerate a regime engaged in war. This is the entropy, the societal breakdown, that the Russian information-war theorists describe. This kind of war is promulgated by governments, and, to a lesser degree, by non-state strategic actors including political parties, major corporations and oligarchical networks. In rarer circumstances (I am glad to have been part of a few) it can be promulgated by social movements. Right now, the information war against Russia is being led by the Biden administration, which has basically gotten all it wanted out of the EU: cancellation of NordStream II, heavy sanctions including exclusion of non-energy payments from SWIFT, direct military aid, and above all, reinforcement of NATO. Like Balazs, I think the outpouring of popular support for Ukraine and the charismatic Zelensky may have encouraged the freezing of Russian foreign exchange reserves and the sanctions on Putin's personal assets - the two riskiest moves so far. However, I am less convinced that all this represents an uncontrolled social-media whirlwind stopping wiser heads from pursuing wiser courses. Most importantly, I would argue that if we are all being targeted by information-war strategies, then it becomes urgent to decide which ones we support, and which ones we don't.

In 2015-16 the United States was informationally "invaded" by Russia, to use Rebecca Solnit's word. In combination with the equally iniquitous strategies of Cambridge Analytica, and with the monetization of outrage by Facebook in particular, the US was pushed toward an entopic breakdown of the type that Dugin and Gerasimov describe. This had some good effects: it shattered the bipartisan consensus that allowed the US elites to maintain their liberal free-trade empire across the earth, on the basis of vicious exploitation and racism at home; and it brought the progressive, Bernie Sanders ideas that I support into the mainstream. It also inaugurated a state of quasi civil war, exacerbating the most brutal and ignorant tendencies of settler-colonial society. The US went from being a loosely managed democracy to a cauldron of wild-eyed resentment and armed aggression, taking social-media outrage to literally murderous domestic heights.

The useful right-wing fools of the information war think that the US exit from Afghanistan constituted the "weakness" that encouraged the Russian invasion of Ukraine. From the Russian viewpoint, it is rather the subversion of US society and the consequent entropic breakdown that encouraged their entry into a war aiming to rebuild the medieval Russian Empire. (More on the "civilization-state" some other time.)

In my view, the worst outcome of social-media outrage is not likely to be bad strategic decisions in the conflict with Russia, although there is some danger of that, and Scholz's sudden turnabout last weekend raises a lot of questions. In the near future, if surging energy prices and more supply-chain snarls provoke widespread discontent in the Nato countries, the outrage situation could take on a whole different character and become a real threat. But the worst possible outcome would be repatching the status quo ante, and covering up extreme exploitation, structural racism and the ecological crisis with a false sense of wartime unity. The promise of this moment is that it argues for an energy transition away from fossil fuels, since that's the stranglehold that Russia has over Europe. Too many forces on either side of the Atlantic oppose the energy transition, and if we all have our little molecular roles in the information war, we would do best to push for that transition, as both a wartime strategy and a longer-term civilizational strategy.

Balazs has a lot of doubts and dark forebodings about what's happening. So do I, but unfortunately I can't believe that wiser heads in the government will prevail. At this point it's democracy or bust.

Let's seek the truth,

Brian