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
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