Part
4
In a 2007 paper titled “Of
Networks and Nations,” John Arquilla, an expert of new patterns of
warfare at the Naval Postgraduate School, argued that loosely knit
sets of global and regional networks, enabled by the internet, had
begun to challenge the authority of nation-states in the same way
that nation-states had challenged the authority of empires a century
earlier.
In recent years, transnational
militant groups, civil society activists, and hackers have all been
able to inflict defeats on lumbering state adversaries, in part by
leveraging the speed of connectivity and communication afforded by
the internet. “The networks came to push, to prod, and to
confront. They came to solve the supranational problems of injustice,
inequity and environmental degradation that a nation-based capitalist
system could never, in their view, deal with adequately,” wrote
Arquilla. “In short, the networks came to change things, and
they came not in peace but with swords.”
The 21st century has seen the
rise of “gray-zone conflicts,” where armed force, politics, and
media increasingly blur together, such as the 2014 war between Israel
and the Palestinians. Gray-zone conflicts are seldom interstate wars
but are more likely to be civil uprisings, conflicts between states
and militant groups, and domestic insurgences. As scholars David
Barno and Nora Bensahel have written, these conflicts “involve
some aggression or use of force, but in many ways their defining
characteristic is ambiguity — about the ultimate objectives, the
participants, whether international treaties and norms have been
violated, and the role that military forces should play in response.”
It is within this ambiguous
environment that information warfare waged online by activist groups
and individuals is playing a critical, at times even definitive role.
As the dominance over information flows held by nation-states
evaporates, their ability to control the trajectory of conflicts by
managing international opinion and maintaining domestic authority is
eroding as well.
The threat of this change, as
well as the political impact of viral misinformation, has led to
calls from some corners for greater regulation and involvement by
tech companies in putting curbs on online speech. Although improved
media education for the general public is likely necessary, any
nostalgia for an earlier era when information was controlled by a few
hegemonic media institutions is wildly misplaced.
“If we allow the problems
that exist with social media and new technologies to be used as a
pretext to roll things back, it would be the ultimate crime,”
says Sienkiewicz. “The old media environment in which billions
of people had little access to getting their stories told – in
which entire classes of people were effectively deemed by media
institutions as not worth reporting on – is not something that we
should want to return to. We should address the problems that exist
with new media, not try to turn back the clock and deem this all a
failed experiment.”
For better or worse, thanks to
social media and smartphones, a version of the “guerilla world war”
predicted by Marshall McLuhan – a war over information drawing in
states, militaries, activists, and ordinary people in equal measure –
has come into existence. The consequences are likely to transform
politics, conflict, and daily life for generations to come. McLuhan
himself suggested that surviving in this new world would be possible
only through a conscious embrace of change, rather than a retreat
into reactionary policies.
“The new technological
environments generate the most pain among those least prepared to
alter their old value structures,” he said, in a 1969 interview
with Playboy Magazine. “When an individual or social group feels
that its whole identity is jeopardized by social or psychic change,
its natural reaction is to lash out in defensive fury.”
“But for all their
lamentations, the revolution has already taken place.”
***
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