NATIVE
By Patrick Laurie
‘Today one of the primary ways governments shape geopolitics is by hacking other countries’. This is perhaps a bold statement, but the plethora of examples recounted in this book illustrate how devastating cyber attacks, affecting both the public and private spheres, have begun to animate a contemporary digital battleground between states. Ben Buchanan demonstrates how this field has evolved from espionage operations and a field dominated by the United States to cyber attacks that have broader implications for economies and societies – increasingly becoming ‘the new normal of geopolitics’.
There is nuance to Buchanan’s argument. As he notes, the ‘chaotic arena of cyber operations... is not what scholars and military planners had long imagined’. Unlike the interpretation that envisions cyber attacks as the digital equivalent of nuclear warfare, in being devastating but rare, Buchanan argues that cyber operations have instead become a persistent, common and pervasive tool of statecraft – ‘more subtle than policy makers imagined, yet with impacts that are world changing’.
A key distinction is between ‘signalling’ and ‘shaping’. During the Cold War, the emphasis was on signalling, but cyber attacks, conversely, are versatile tools for shaping geopolitics. Their apparent weakness as a means of geopolitical signalling is more than counterbalanced by their versatility as a tool for geopolitical shaping, as evidenced by examples such as the group known as the Shadow Brokers who leaked NSA files and espionage techniques from 2015 to 2018.
Moreover, cyber operations will continue to become more powerful, scalable and widespread. As Buchanan states, ‘the harm that hackers can do is expanding faster than the deterrence or defences against them’. Although the book perhaps does not concentrate enough on the explicit political implications of each attack, it does provide an excellent primer for understanding how cyber operations have become an indelible part of global relations and ably demonstrates how hacking has ‘earned its place in the playbook of statecraft’.
ANGUS PARKER
One of my all-time favorite fictions is this postapocalyptic story of a survivor who stumbles upon the skeletal remains of a US Postal Service mail carrier, picks up his bag, and proceeds to reunite a ravaged country with a modern day Pony Express.
It’s the Water (2020)
by mala
Most self-published teen-fiction is tripe, but there are hidden gems, like this rollicking coming-of-age featuring two 14-year-old misfit entrepreneurs.