"Ten Things You Need to Know About the Infowar"

or, Are We Living in Post-Reality Yet?

Full-blown essay with links and illustrations is now online at http://www.c-cyte.com/Ten_things_you_need_to_know.html .

Comments very much appreciated, esp. w/ sources if appropriate!

The SHORT version is below, but I'd really appreciate feedback on the LONG version at the link above.

Thanks, everyone.

SHORT Version (to give you an idea of what this is):


TEN THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE INFOWAR:

1. A balance of power requires a balance of knowledge. Prior to Wikileaks, the trend has been toward governments and corporations knowing everything about us, while we've known less and less of importance about them. The power of knowledge has been concentrated in the hands of the oligarchs.

2. What's new about Wikileaks is that it may be the first instance of an institutional system that confers the power that comes from the revelation of secrets on the people rather than their rulers. The potential to help restore the balance of knowledge and thus the balance of power between the oligarchs and the rest of us constitutes what I've regarded as the most important effect of Wikileaks' revelations.

3. The strategy of exposing the secrets of corrupt regimes (which for now I'm calling the "Exposure Strategy"), as described by Julian Assange, is three-pronged:

(a) It gives us the opportunity to correct previously hidden injustices;
(b) It tends to deter injustices in the first place by heightening the likelihood and thus the fear of exposure;
(c) It tends to weaken corrupt organizations by prompting them to tighten security, thus lowering their own computational I.Q.

4. The counter to the Exposure Strategy is "public relations," which uses our most primitive emotions and drives to induce us to disregard revealed truth and act against our own best interests, at least up to an as-yet-not-fully-understood point.

5. To the extent p.r. is effective, it neutralizes all three prongs of the Exposure Strategy; i.e.,

(a) The injustices exposed need not be investigated, prosecuted, or corrected;
(b) Future injustices are therefore not particularly deterred;
(c) It is no longer necessary for corrupt organizations to tighten their security, and thus they can avoid having to lower their own computational I.Q.

How far p.r. wins over the Exposure Strategy may be an indication of the extent to which we're now living in a post-"reality-based" world.

6. An infowar is not just a war using information as ammo; it is a struggle between old and new power structures over who will control access to information. As a corollary, information technologies (hard and soft) are the new guns.

7. The infowar is in essence a class war over knowledge as a form of wealth. Information is accordingly a commodity for which there are markets that are (absent regulation) manipulable.


8. Greater transparency maximizes efficiency and profits for a group as a whole, but individuals within the group profit most when they're not transparent while others in the group are.

9. So long as a system as a whole remains mostly transparent, it's a more-than-zero-sum game, since everyone working together can be smarter and more efficient than they could working separately; but where transparency has sufficiently deteriorated, the competition among "players" devolves into a less-than-zero sum game, i.e., it devolves into a race to see who can loot the most the fastest, even if valuable resources are wasted in the process.

10. Humanity is (again) on the verge of a potential transition from a system in which governing elites exploit the governed in a less-than-zero sum game, to a more transparent, collaborative, more-than-zero-sum game system. If the system as a whole remains mostly transparent, mankind's collective intelligence and well-being may be about to explode. However, this beneficial effect could be retarded, perhaps partially prevented, if we fail to protect the internet and facilities like Wikileaks from those who seek to control them.

However, I do want to offer one potentially useful metaphor (perhaps inspired by your "dendrite forest" backdrop). I am coming to thing of the worldwide communication net as a sort of emergent cortex in its own right, with us functioning something like neurons. This cortex is something like Tielhard's Noosphere. I think of it as wanting to live, grow and complexify itself in its own right, driven by the cumulative effect of the human intelligences that go into its composition. To the extent that it maintains a "starfish-" like structure, it remains sufficiently decentralized to avoid capture or co-optation by any centralized power. Just as happened in Egypt, it will find ways to route itself around blockages and restrictions, with its structure continuously modifying itself to preserve meaning and distribute information. At some critical point--perhaps that point has already arrived--it will be too big to kill.

I absolutely agree with the metaphor (and I'm glad to know you recognized the nature of my background tile!)

Even banks aren't REALLY too big to kill! (Not to mention dinosaurs.)

I'm concerned that there's a lot of wishful thinking out there on this point. In fact the 'net has already been partly brought to heel -- not only in countries like China, but even in the US, companies like Comcast have been caught censoring political content; Homeland Security has taken down numerous websites without good cause; etc.

A lot of people who know a LOT about the internet are VERY worried; see, e.g., the Lawrence Lessig piece referred to in my essay, at http://www.lessig.org/content/columns/foreignpolicy1.pdf :"he innovation commons of the Internet threatens important and powerful pre-Internet interests. During the past five years, those interests have mobilized to launch a counterrevolution that is now having a global impact."

:applause:

this looks like some excellent work and I will be reading it in its entirety. The perspective and strategy is interesting.

I think this is a good companion to the work of Baudrillard, who is, BTW, very difficult for most people, (including myself) to read, and yet his philosophical insights were extremely poignant and provided some basis and inspiration for the move, The Matrix.

Change is the ultimate constant, and we can all easily see that transition and transformation are accelerating rapidly. It behooves us to understand media and what is going on since the major players are always ahead of the game and our response, reaction and actions are pivotal at every step.

Turn on the lights and watch the Vermin run for cover.

gonna bookmark this to read and think about. dinner(and kitchen cleanup) conversation tonight is gonna be interesting. thanks for the link.