For whom the bell tweets

Why do nation-states go to war? Clausewitzian wisdom would immediately tell us that war is merely an extension of politics. Indeed, politics and war are among the most universal and fundamental of all human historical experiences.

So fundamental, in fact, that technological innovation — another universal human experience — is often prompted by war. Gunpowder, for example, was developed in China during the brutal conflicts of the Song and Jin dynasties, and was transported West by the Mongols. Musketry and artillery then arose during the desperate wars of early modern Europe.

Of course, innovation hasn’t always been a bad thing. The telegraph, for example, helped connect far-flung regions of the world with an intimacy hitherto unimaginable, aiding in the development of a truly global economy. On the other hand, the telegraph also helped coordinate armies with unmatched precision, aiding European colonial powers in their conquest. Throughout history, conflict and technology have always been intimately intertwined.

And yet, at the end of the 20th century — the century of humanity’s most remarkable technological and social progress — the Internet was seen with tremendous hope, as a beacon of the very best that we could be. Universal connectivity, it was believed, would lead to free thought, free speech, and the end of aeons of pointless political and military conflict. In hindsight, one wonders how we were ever that optimistic.

LikeWar takes a long, hard look at possibly the defining feature of the 21st century: The emergence, for the first time in human history, of a truly global and accessible social network. But, to paraphrase the authors, social media is not an alternate reality governed by a different set of rules. It is governed by the same rules (or lack thereof) as politics. Humans, they point out, prefer people like them (homophily) and social media makes it ridiculously easy to build echo chambers of people who collectively convince each other of their righteousness, and thus manage to organise for political ends.

Indeed, the extent to which humans have seamlessly and inventively adapted these technologies to serve political and military strategies, the book’s core theme, can be quite striking at times. The book recounts how on the one hand, the massive popular protests of the Arab Spring seemed to indicate that freely available information had succeeded in returning power to the people, thus validating the mission statement of Facebook (indeed, we are informed that a proud new Egyptian father named his baby after this beacon of hope).

On the other hand, within barely a year of the protests, states had figured out how to shut off, monitor, and manipulate their citizenry through social media. And soon after that, information warfare officers and troll armies were born, and the Internet became yet another battleground for the politics of parties and nation-states (and executives of Facebook, that beacon of hope, did nothing to stop it).

The authors have an extremely critical perspective on the nuances of 21st century information conflicts, founded on neurobiology and history, and this is easily their book’s greatest strength. However, they also manage not to lose the essential humanity of the subjects of its study. Through it, we meet the Macedonian teens who churned out fake news and derailed the world’s most powerful nation-state. We meet the Palestinian child journalists who livestream Israeli attacks on Gaza. And we meet the patriotic Israeli military officers who monitor social media to gauge the reaction of the global commons and tweak the intensity of their attacks accordingly. It can be deeply unsettling, but also rewarding in its nuance and refusal to label heroes and villains.

One of LikeWar’s weaknesses, however, is the emphasis it places on information conflicts on Facebook and Twitter. There are only cursory analyses of the landscapes of, say, Indian social media — especially weaponised WhatsApp forwards (the term WhatsApp appears a total of three times). And though it attempts to foresee the future of information warfare through a discussion of the potential of chatbots and neural networks, its predictions cannot but ring somewhat hollow when vast swathes of the world’s population, with their wildly differing societies and polities, are not dealt with using the same nuance applied to populations familiar to Western readers.

Nevertheless, LikeWar is a gritty, multifaceted, and insightful look into a world of online conflict that many of us are only peripherally aware of. Its observations on the challenges facing democratic countries founded on Enlightenment-era values, and private companies that run their digital empires for shareholders unmindful of their social and political effects, serve as a much-needed splash of cold water that can, and should, be a wake-up call.

LIKEWAR

The Weaponization of Social Media Peter Singer and Emerson Brooking Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

400 pages; $28