100 Days in the Infosphere

Contributors to the volume Threats in the Age of Obama are commenting on how well the President has done - and how their predictions stack up - 100 days into Obama's new term. I contributed a chapter on information warfare, media, cyberculture, and new forms of organization. Like Zenpundit, my piece was not as much about Obama himself but the new media and network environment that he would find himself dealing with. To use Safranski's own phrasing, I was doing "deep cultural intel futurism"--so commenting on Obama's actions doesn't exactly relate to the piece. However, there is some food for thought in Obama's usage of new media.

The government (especially the military) has at least superficially embraced new media forms like blogging, Twitter, and YouTube. Many government figures have Twitter feeds and/or blog, utilizing it as a means of getting around traditional media forms. This does continue a process started in the early 90s, where politicians used talk shows to get around traditional media filters (think Bill Clinton's saxophone bit on Arsenio Hall). This time, though, many in "Government 2.0" are attempting to cut out the middleman entirely.

It's too early to judge whether this embrace of social media is sincere, but I do think that Obama's singular usage of his own charisma for public diplomacy purposes comes at the expense of structural government change. As important as it is to directly address the Iranian people on YouTube, it matters more to ensure that rank-and-file foreign service officers are engaging foreign populations through those mediums. The content of the message matters too--especially if it is contradicted by US actions in "meatspace."

At the same time, it's also worrying to see cavalier talk of "carpet-bombing in cyberspace" taken seriously. It transplants a meatspace concept into cyberspace without thinking how it will deter the likes of either the Russian Business Network or hyper-nationalistic Chinese "netizens."

Finally, I'd like to conclude on this post by Tim Stevens:

"I’d also change what I wrote about cyberspace being cybernetic - after reading the work of Antoine Bousquet, I’ve had to think more about cyberspace as a post-cybernetic environment, characterised by positive rather than negative feedback loops. I still don’t know, but this definitely would change the calculus."

Stevens is referring to Antoine Bousquet's book The Scientific Way of Warfare, which distinguishes "cybernetic warfare"--a massively centralized method of warfare predicated on automated systems of command and control (C2)--from "chaoplexic warfare"--decentralized operations in which complexity is generated from the pattern of individual action. Although cyberspace was certainly generated by a cybernetic apparatus (the military C2 systems of the Cold War), it is by no means "cybernetic" in quality. Is it a completely chaoplexic system? That's yet to be determined--especially since the techno-scientific regime has by no means reached maturity.