America Lost the first Battle of the Information Age

This past weekend we marked ninety nine years since the end of the war to end all wars, an act, which in hind sight seems presumptuous at best. If the past century has taught us any lesson about war it is that the we, as a species have a gritted determination to overcome any peace and seek out new weapons of conflict; using our incredible ability to improvise and adapt to create new ways of destroying each other, a fact of conflict that was thrust into the modern consciousness in the violence of the First World War. 

It was there that centuries old tactics met the modern genius of the industrial revolution. With the addition of massive artillery, poison gas, machine driven firepower, tanks, airplanes, the world saw first hand the true horror of which we as a civilization are capable. The suffering we inflicted on each other and ourselves was immense and even today, those muddy, blood soaked and gas covered fields still evoke from us, a generation far removed from the violence itself a visceral, emotional, and deeply moving reaction. We know at its very sound the meaning of words like Ardennes, Flanders, Gallipoli, and Verdun. Until the guns of august fired, our historical narrative of warfare was based on the idea of victories won on the backs of heroes. It was the courage and tactical prowess of men, we believed, that won wars. We would be hard pressed to find just one person on this continent or across our sister commonwealth nations who could not name one hero of our long history iof war. But the great First World War broke that narrative. Our victories were won through math, through killing more of them than they killed of us. We found new and inventiveness in that conflict. In one day of battle of that war, the British Empire lost fifty thousand men. Glory died in that war, and what remained was a fundamental societal aversion to the very idea of it. The next century would see wars fought increasingly from the vantage of technological prowess, and as the century progressed, kinetic warfare, that is combat through arms, would become more and more limited. 

Technology, as heralded one hundred years ago, would set the tone of this past century of warfare. We have removed nearly all incentive for state to state conflict, and yet, as demonstrated by the recent wave of hardening relations with the former USSR, the very specter of state to state conflict still evokes such a strong emotional response that it has the power to influence the path of diplomacy. In the now seventy years since the last true state to state kinetic conflict, the world has increasingly, and aggressively, turned to information warfare. Between states, the lines of conflict are dark, and they run as deep as they ever have. This information war, the new psychological warfare of the digital age, is fought out daily in our news, on our news feeds, on our tablets, our phones, around our kitchen tables, in our coffee shops, in our workplaces, and now, perhaps more than ever before in memory, the conflict between states lies closer to the citizens it aims to influence than ever before. Modern warfare is playing out in our back pockets. 

The past two decades have seen a rapid advance in not only our technology but also in its rate of development. This Law of Escalating Returns dictates that not only is technology doubling in its complexity, but the rate at which it is developing is doubling every ten years. Indeed, the rate of technological development we saw between 2000 and 2010 is the same between 2010 and 2015. Technological development is beginning to outpace our ability to develop a tactical advantage. With each turn of globe it seems there is a new gadget or idea that just a short while ago seemed improbable. Just this week, success was announced in a neurological implant which learns in the same way that the human mind does, enabling machine precision in the human ability to recall information, a watershed moment that will be viewed in the future as the beginnning of our species Great Leap Forward. 

But even as our sophistication grows, we remain human and subject to human desires and human emotions. In the age where superstition has died and the supernatural banished, we retain those millennia old values, beliefs, behaviors, and norms which have driven the development of ordered society since Hammurabi first set out the codes that govern a just and lawful society.  In such, we eating the same susceptibilities which we always have. Our great Achilles heel is the very thing that makes us human.  We have hope, and faith. We believe in a moral order to the world.  It is our very humanity which has designed the modern battlefield of psychological warfare. It is not that the enemies of the idea of western liberal democracy have changed their stated goals in conflict with the west, it is that in the digital ecosphere of blogs, curated news, and a twenty four hour reporting cycle that they simply found a new means of accomplishing their goals. 

The age of leaflets dropped from bombers has long past, it is a rarely used mechanism of psychological warfare, an artifact of an age which is gasping its final breaths. Rather, as social media has democratized the means by which we communicate, it has given all participants, good, bad, and evil, the same means and access as the free.  Indeed, when it comes to use of the media as a tool of psychological warfare, our rigorous defense of the right to a free press has left us with no or few means of legally adjudicating use of psychological warfare. Of the three types of psychological warfare products, White (based in truth, with a known source) Grey (based in truth with an unknown source) and Black (fabrication of truth, unknown source) even the use of black propaganda is legal and legally defensible in nearly every western nation.  The battle over propaganda is fought between the players, and even in the world of military use of psychological warfare, the United States is limited in its ability to respond in that US Psychological Operations are legal barred from operating within the United States, a physical boundary which the internet has difficulty seeing. All the more so because of these legal limitations, the United States rarely, if ever will make a concerted effort to engage in psychological operations online.  It is relegated to cyber command to accomplish these activities, a command who's very nature and mission lend it to fighting the war from a stand point of digital security and protection of vital digital systems, rather than the much more difficult to define counter propaganda fight.  Indeed, the defining of psychological warfare itself is a difficult task for those not trained in its arts and sciences. Psychological Operations in the United States and most western nations is geared towards working externally and regionally, with no central command structure working in concert with overall missions to defend against threats to the interests of concerned nations. It is no surprise then that in the national discussion about foreign influence in the recent election in the United States that all sides tend to focus on the potential legal issues regarding collisions between actors and direct action from foreign actors; legally adjudicateable actions. The problem, however is that foreign influence and interference in the United States by a foreign actor, state agent or state sponsored would have likely not ventured into the realm of legality. In the war of ideas, a trial would be an abject strategic failure.  If we are to discuss the idea of foreign influence in the west through means of exploring potential psychological warfare actions, we must clearly define the parameters by which that influence will be defined. 

We shall do this by two means, deductive and inductive investigation. Time, I would fear, is not on our side in this conflict.  By inductive we shall attempt to define the battlefield of modern psychological warfare as it is today, and by deductive we will take what we already know about the objectives of the enemies of the United States and define how they fit into the modern battlescape. 

While it is true that the speed of information and communication today is incredible, the beauty of the internet is that it archives and catalogues everything.  We have a record of the totality of human communication going back to the early days of the Internet. To begin our search, we must know what we are looking for.  What are the end goals of psychological warfare against the United States, what means are used (historical or otherwise), and how are these efforts measured?  These questions attempt to accomplish one objective and that is to reverse engineer a psychological warfare operation.  By the doctrine of US Psychological Operations, these questions form the framework by which all Operations are conducted, so it is the logical starting point for any counter propaganda investigation. 

Our longest standing adversary over modern history has been the Soviet Union. And despite a near twenty year thaw in relations between the former Soviet Union and the West, Russia, it would seem remains dedicated to remaining the superpower counterweight to US influence. What then were and are the strategic psychological warfare objectives of this adversary? We are fortunate enough that it doesn't take much research, after all, they've told us.  First, to undermine the moral authority of the United States, and second, to degrade the perceived legitimacy of western democracy. Throughout the twentieth century these objectives were accomplished through proxy wars between the United States and the Soviet Union. However, the war of words has never really cooled.  It is here, in the realm of information combat that we gain our greatest insight into the lines of argument used by Soviet, and now Russian actors. The primary argument is called moral equivalency, or as John Oliver so eloquently put it recently, whataboutism. In the simplest structure it goes like this, when accused of a moral or ethical breech, a party will pivot to "what about the accuser?" We have seen this played out ad infinitum with questions about Benghazi, emails, and on and on and on.  What this argument does is not to answer questions but to remove the moral ability of any party to accuse another. This argument has played well throughout the world in accusing the United States of imperialism, or support of dictators. (If they love democracy so much, why do they engage in regime change, etc.) These arguments are not foreign to us, indeed, any relatively conscious person will recognize this tactic as having been played out nearly every hour since our access to media has gripped every aspect of our lives at every hour. 

But how is success measured in this kind of operation? Measures of effectiveness are not writ large, they are not a general feeling.  Rather they are exactly what the phrase denotes: measures.  They are metric, they are mathematical, statistical, and because they are measurements, there is a mechanism by which they are measured.  Having worked in psychological operations for many years, I can attest to a number of factors when it comes to measuring effectiveness of psychological operations. Mechanisms must remain invisible to the target audience (think of test bias, or implicit bias), and as such they are difficult to design, difficult to implement, and once constructed they often are reused for multiple operations. One distinct advantage of using the same mechanisms to measure effectiveness is that they operate on the same baseline and the results can therefore be trusted.  If we are to claim that there was foreign influence in the west, specifically the United States, the question of objective and means alone being satisfied are not enough to level an accusation, rather, the mechanism by which success is measured must be identified. How we do this brings us to the inductive portion of our investigation.  If we know the objectives, we can begin to narrow our search, and if we know the means, we can isolate it.  Because we are seeking real events, involving real data, which occurred at fixed points in history, in a world where all data is archived, the markers of these mechanisms are clear once we search in the right direction.  Before we begin the inductive portion of our investigation, I'd like to point out that any time someone says 'false flag operation' they haven't the faintest idea what they're talking about. They have satisfied their personal conclusions about means, but they have not satisfied the professional questions of objective or measurability.  Any conspiracy which lacks satisfaction of all three aspects is nothing more than a pipe dream. Professional psychological operations have always, since the beginning of language itself, relied on measures of effectiveness. 

If the hallmark of effectiveness is the pervasiveness of moral equivalency, we can begin to look back to find the trends which mark these actions. Search trends can point us in the right direction, and my research landed me in the middle of 2014. It is here, in the summer of 2014 that we begin to see click bait begin in earnest, the rise of curated news blogs (news sources with an implicit political bias), and first volley of fire in the war against concrete truth.  2014 was indeed a watershed year with the Sochi olympics and every scandal surrounding it, the crisis in Ukraine, rising tensions between NATO and Russia, detente with Cuba, Crimean secession, the downing of a passenger airliner, and of course the outlier, the disappearance of a Malaysian airlines jet. (In the interest of brevity, I would like to dismiss every conspiracy surrounding MH 370 as absolute nonsense, it was a physical object, with an incident that occurred in the physical world, in a fixed point in time; there will be evidence, it will be followed, and that evidence, through investigation will illuminate the facts of this incident)

What all of these events, when working in concert together create, however, is an air of unbelievability. To see barricades on European streets, protesters turning into revolutionaries, absurd abuses of power inside of modern democracies, inversions of traditional and contemporary structures of power and influence, and finally a modern airliner vanish seemingly without a trace, we are left in an environment wherein we are left with no answers, no concrete facts, simply rumors and here say. In the past as environments like this were created, they remained regional, for the simple fact that the speed of communication would not allow universal access.  However a scant three to six months of the unbelievable occurring in front of a watching world had a power we had not yet seen in the modern age. The possibility of the impossible became part of our daily lives. 

Fringe arguments and conspiracies became mainstream, or close to it. It was in this watershed year that these small online biased 'news' sites found their audience. What developed has been described as an ecosystem of closed feedback loops, in which target demographics routinely access the same information sources and content, share this content, which in turn informs the content produced by these sources. This so called echo chamber effect would prove disastrous to the health of democracy. Indeed, even in the absence of foreign influence, the reliance of population, writ large, on single source content access in and of itself is a grave threat to any free people. It should be obscenely obvious, on face value alone, that reliance on biased, ill informed, closed loop content generators is an abject rejection of the very idea of intellectual freedom by the individual and an abrogation of our responsibility to each other as free citizens of a democracy. Later, I will call this treason.

The development of this ecosystem was fueled by a number of factors, but mostly driven by the ability of any person or entity to develop highly sophisticated means of reaching a specific demographic.  In the professional psychological operations world this is called something else. It is, most specifically and obviously, developing product delivery according to access methods of a specific target audience.  And while your access of information from sources in line with your political leanings may seem innocuous on face value, the reality is that these are the exact methods used by professional military psychological operations to reach foreign target audiences. This brave new world of media choice gives us the illusion of freedom while feeding our most base emotional drives; like the endorphin loop triggered by ingesting sugar or alcohol or heroin, it calls us back. The tyranny of choice splits us, divides us by what we already believe. 

It is access to the data regarding who is accessing these materials, how often they access it, where they access it, who they share it with, what time they share it, how long they spend on each page, what ads they click, how long they watch videos, and every other measurable data point available regarding online content that must give us pause. This information, coupled with the extremely high specificity of the target audiences in question that leads us to this one inexorable conclusion: this ecosystem of biased, highly demographically segmented, curated content delivery platforms is the very mechanism by which effectiveness of psychological operations against populations within the United States are measured.

I look across our media landscape of half truths, outright lies, conspiracies, fake news, and opinion before fact, and I do not simply see the failure of intellectualism, I see a muddy, gas covered battlefield. Success of foreign influence in the United States is obvious, all political sides, winners and losers, of the last election claim the same thing, that the democracy was hacked, that the other side was playing catch with the enemy, that no truth can be trusted, and no lie is false.  Our three criteria for defining a psychological warfare operation have been satisfied, its objectives, arguments, and measures of effectiveness, so blindingly obvious now, are impossible to ignore. We have, as a nation, not only failed in our implicit duty as citizens to safeguard the intellectual grounds of this democracy, but we have let in the enemy, and we have lost the first major battle of the Information Age. 

It is by happenstance and not design, I believe, that into this world of echo chambers and foreign actors that Donald Trump so chaotically burst. He is, in and of himself, a closed feedback loop. There are countless examples of his tweeting feeding a biased curated political news source, and then his quoting said source as proof of his previous claim.  Before his elevation to the national stage, these claims were isolated in their respective echo chambers, however, when coupled with the insatiable appetite of 24 hour news, his constant presence and the content generation it provided proved itself a tantalizing target of opportunity.  As his feedback look fed itself, it was disseminated by the national and international traditional media outlets, creating an illusion of legitimacy which in turn fed itself again.  I do not believe the Trump Phenomenon and its success was planned or even envisioned as a possible outcome of psychological operations against the United States. I believe the President is an outlier in content generation, and in this aspect alone, he proved himself a short circuit in the weapon. It is not that he is new or unique, he has been the same his entire life and will never change. It is that he was in the right place at the right time with an invisible psychological warfare weapon at his disposal of which even he himself was not aware. The foreign actors who used this mechanism of feedback loops had inadvertently let the proverbial genie out of the bottle. 

A full century after the conclusion of the war to end all wars, we are still fighting for the heart and soul of our own democracy and all of the noble and righteous values of a free society.  It is now, however, that we fight this battle not across the world with standing armies, but as citizens, as free people, in our own lives and in our own minds. The stakes now are higher than they have ever been, for the very survival of our democracy lies squarely on the shoulders of every single citizen. It requires out intellect, our education, our critical thinking.  We cannot afford to parrot false claims, half truths, rumors, and outright lies.  We must bring to bear absolute skepticism to every source, we must identify the ones which speak only to our own implicit biases, and we must cut them out. Those citizens who refuse to do these things are in league with the enemies of freedom and have committed intellectual treason against the Republic writ large. In no uncertain terms, this war we now fight on the information battlefield is going to determine whether or not this Republic, or any republic can survive. Because this democracy will survive so long as we choose for it to do so, so long as we see ourselves as brothers United and not enemies divided, as citizens united in a common goal and engaged in a common struggle to advance the cause of liberty.

I take solace, strangely, in our political division, in that we all, no matter how fierce our disagreements are, disagree with such violence only because of one common and universal truth. We love this country down to the very roots of our soul. We love it so wholly and completely that we want the best for it and in true American patriotic form, we all, each and every one of us, believes we are all individually absolutely right and we will fight anyone that gets in the way of making our blessed Republic greater than it is now. Even our division is propelled by our patriotism.

And so if this war we now fight is for the very existence of our republic and the survival of our Union, if the long history of our nation must come to an end in this generation, let us not allow it by our own hands.  If our Republic, baptized and consecrated in the sacrifice of a hundred generations, is destined to fall, that fall must only come with us standing on our feet, and fighting for every last inch of dirt, every last letter of our constitution, and every breath of liberty.  We cannot afford to let the devil a foothold on our airwaves, our news sources, our content, our laptops, our televisions, our phones, and our back pockets.  We must unfriend, block, ignore, unfollow, and ostracize those who spread lies and disinformation, who use the weapons of the enemy to advance their political cause. We must cut out the agents of this empire of evil, and send a clear, resolute, and unified message that if they wish to take this democracy from us, they will have to come here and wrench it from the last free breath of the very last one of us to hold firm in the faith of liberty, equality, and brotherhood.  Make no mistake that we are now at war for our own freedom, and it is the responsibility of every free citizens to ensure the safeguarding of our common liberty. 

I have faith, that while we stand here humiliated and beaten, we are not defeated. This war is far from over, and this generation, like every generation of Americans before us, will rise to this occasion, and we will answer to the call to defend this Republic. So long as we do this, in everything we read, in everything we do, as though it were religion, as though it were piety itself, this nation will not only endure, it will thrive.