conference paper
Dissuasion, disinformation, dissonance: Complexity and autocritique as tools of information warfare
Abstract
"Yesterday's was a totalitarian war, in which the dominant elements were quantity, mass and the power of the atomic bomb. Tomorrow's war will be globalitarian, in which, by virtue of the information bomb, the qualitative will be of greater importance than geophysical scale or population size." (Virilio 2005:144) Virilio'sThe Information Bomb presents a vision of future conflicts occurring as much on an informational and conceptual battlefield as a physical terrain. In a world where even the 24-hour news cycle of conventional broadcasting fails to keep up with the endlessly proliferating, instantly updated streams of data, and where the boundaries between sender and receiver are blurred to the point of non-existence, any concept of "full-spectrum dominance" in the informational realm is doomed to failure. Conventional models of influence, based on one to many, top-down delivery will be rejected out of hand by audiences who display an ever-growing disillusion with and distrust of official channels of information. In this paper, I suggest that the present terrain offers a number of opportunities for developing strategies and tactics of information warfare which are based on the techniques already deployed by anti-establishment actors: détournement, satire, and the appropriation and subversion of pre-existing media artefacts. I will also argue that conflict in the "fifth domain" should view the inherent complexity, diversity and apparent anarchy of the online realm as aids, rather than threats to the effective exercise of influence. Norbert Wiener wrote in 1954 that "There is no Maginot Line of the brain". This is both a salutary reminder that a fortress mentality is fatal in cybersecurity, and a call to arms against any system of thought which is not multidisciplinary. The final section of this paper will build on Wiener's idea, by arguing that we can learn from certain current trends in computer gaming (most notably what has been termed "ludonarrative dissonance") how to devise strategies of influence which rely, not on the presentation of a simplistic message or counter-narrative, but on the cultivation of a mindset which sows doubt, uncertainty in a receiver's mind, and an awareness that their world-view is not the only one possible. Truly successful information warfare must rely less on the information itself than on the construction of the mental frameworks through and within which that information is processed, this paper seeks to present a number of ways in which this framework may be reshaped.
Author keywords
confusion, gaming, influence, information warfare