Thank you b and B! I appreciated your reflections. A couple of brief
responses / reactions:
What if reason and emotion are inseparable? What if our attempts to
separate them were not only misguided but damaging to our social
comprehension? Gerd Gigerenzer has some interesting thoughts on this, in
particular the notion of ecological rationality.
What if the primary impact of algorithmic media is not the exploitation of
our outrage (which obviously is a central element of their business model)
but the reconstruction of "we" and who you or I might perceive that "we" to
be?
I initially read this in b's post with difficulty, as I found the use of
the word "we" to be problematic. However in B's post I could recognize the
analysis of the conflicting "we"s that reside here in North America.
I experienced the information war recently here in the Ottawa theatre of
operations. The fascist led convoy occupation was quite the spectacle, and
it is no coincidence that many of its leaders, namely the elected
representative for my provincial riding, Randy Hillier, became open
supporters of Russia's military invasion of Ukraine.
What was quite profound during the occupation was the use of the word "we"
and how the framing of it became impenetrable. It was not so much a clash
of civilizations as it was a clash of realities. The perception of we, or
the perception of the pandemic, or the perception of who and what the
government is, was and is, incompatible.
Dialogue is not possible in such a situation, not because there isn't a
shared language, but that the shared language no longer has shared meaning.
One could argue that the shared meaning has become incendiary, in that the
same words trigger harm or great impact on each other as a result of
divergent meaning and perception.
Ironically to reconcile this, both sides, out of necessity, construct
narratives that position themselves as the righteous. One side is defending
freedom. And the other is defending democracy.
Yet is that really the war at hand? Or is that a consequence of the
information war?
Is this really democracy or bust? Or to your point B, are we dismantling
the (western) illusions that propped up neoliberalism the last few decades?
What if behind this apparent battle between two geopolitical forces there
is a third? A third that desires an entirely new geopolitical order,
created in its image?
By this I don't refer to China. But rather the Californian Ideology. What
if in the fog of war we're focused on nation states when the real
beneficiaries are the libertarian lords marshalling their focus towards the
construction of a new order, that they call the Metaverse?
-j
On Thu, Mar 3, 2022 at 2:03 AM Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> 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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