Tag: internet

FLASHBACK: Weaponized Narrative Is the New Battlespace

Conventional military dominance is still critical to the superpower status of the United States. But even in a military sense, it is no longer enough: if an American election can be controlled by an adversarial power, then stealth aircraft and special forces are not the answer. With lawmakers poised to authorize $160 million to counter Russian “fake news” and disinformation, and the CIA and the Congress examining meddling in the U.S. election and democracies around the world, it’s time to see weaponized narrative for what it is: a deep threat to national security.

Weaponized narrative seeks to undermine an opponent’s civilization, identity, and will by generating complexity, confusion, and political and social schisms. It can be used tactically, as part of explicit military or geopolitical conflict; or strategically, as a way to reduce, neutralize, and defeat a civilization, state, or organization. Done well, it limits or even eliminates the need for armed force to achieve political and military aims.

The efforts to muscle into the affairs of the American presidency, Brexit, the Ukraine, the Baltics, and NATO reflect a shift to a “post-factual” political and cultural environment that is vulnerable to weaponized narrative. This begs three deeper questions:

  • How global is this phenomenon?
  • Are the underlying drivers temporary or systemic?
  • What are the implications for an American military used to technological dominance?

Far from being simply a U.S. or U.K. phenomenon, shifts to “post-factualism” can be seen in Poland, Hungary, Turkey, France, and the Philippines, among other democracies. Russia, whose own political culture is deeply post-factual and indeed post-modern, is now ably constructing ironic, highly cynical, weaponized narratives that were effective in the Ukrainian invasion, and are now destabilizing the Baltic states and the U.S. election process.

Such a large and varied shift to weaponized narrative implies that the enablers are indeed systemic. One fundamental underpinning – often overlooked – is the accelerating volume and velocity of information. Cultures, institutions, and individuals are, among many other things, information-processing mechanisms. As they become overwhelmed with information complexity, the tendency to retreat into simpler narratives becomes stronger.

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Progressives Are Ditching Free Speech To Fight ‘Disinformation’

In my column last week, I detailed how GOP lawmakers in several Western states have jettisoned their usual concerns about free speech and have passed laws that require cellphone users to disable government-mandated filters before having open access to apps. It’s a foolhardy endeavor done in the name of protecting The Children from obscenity, but at least these measures are narrow in scope (and mostly about posturing).

Meanwhile, progressives are hatching attacks on “disinformation” that threaten the foundations of the Constitution. Republicans share some responsibility, as they’ve backed various proposals targeting Big Tech out of pique about the censorship of conservative views. These ideas included limits on liability protections for posted content and plans to treat social media sites as public utilities.

Conservatives have already shown a willingness to insert government into speech considerations, so they are left flat-footed as leftists hatch plots to rejigger open debate. Whenever the Right plays footsie with big government, the Left then ups the ante—and conservatives end up wondering what happened. What is happening now is an effort to use legitimate concerns about internet distortions to squelch what we read and say.

Traditionally, Americans of all political stripes have accepted that—except for a few strictly limited circumstances—people can say whatever they choose. The nation’s libel laws impose civil penalties on those who have engaged in defamatory speech, but those laws are narrowly tailored so the threat of lawsuits doesn’t halt legitimate speech. This emanates from the First Amendment, which said Congress shall make “no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

Such protections were applied to all governments, of course. The courts wrestle with gray areas (commercial and corporate speech, pornography, political advertising), but our nation thankfully has tilted heavily in the direction of upholding the broadest speech rights. This legal framework has been bolstered by a broad consensus among the citizenry that speech rights are sacrosanct. There always have been those people who want to police speech, but they have largely been outliers.

The internet and the information free for all that’s followed have challenged that consensus. When I first got into the journalism business, Americans had limited access to information. We could read the daily newspaper, which didn’t cover many issues and where editors served as gatekeepers. We could watch the network news at 6 p. or subscribe to magazines. There was no internet or cable news. Talk radio was in its infancy. Now anyone can post anything online and traditional news sources are struggling.

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Government Funds AI Tools for Whole-of-Internet Surveillance and Censorship

Ifeel scared. Very scared.

Internet-wide surveillance and censorship, enabled by the unimaginably vast computational power of artificial intelligence (AI), is here.

This is not a futuristic dystopia. It’s happening now.

Government agencies are working with universities and nonprofits to use AI tools to surveil and censor content on the Internet.

This is not political or partisan. This is not about any particular opinion or idea. 

 What’s happening is that a tool powerful enough to surveil everything that’s said and done on the Internet (or large portions of it) is becoming available to the government to monitor all of us, all the time. And, based on that monitoring, the government – and any organization or company the government partners with – can then use the same tool to suppress, silence, and shut down whatever speech it doesn’t like. 

But that’s not all. Using the same tool, the government and its public-private, “non-governmental” partners (think, for example: the World Health Organization, or Monsanto) can also shut down any activity that is linked to the Internet. Banking, buying, selling, teaching, learning, entertaining, connecting to each other – if the government-controlled AI does not like what you (or your kids!) say in a tweet or an email, it can shut down all of that for you. 

Yes, we’ve seen this on a very local and politicized scale with, for example, the Canadian truckers. 

But if we thought this type of activity could not, or would not, happen on a national (or even scarier – global) scale, we need to wake up right now and realize it’s happening, and it might not be stoppable.

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New Report Measures Attempts to Impose, and Evade, Internet Repression

This week, government officials in both Pakistan and Senegal cut public access to the internet in moves clearly meant to crack down on political debate. Pakistan severed connections to limit information coinciding with a general election of questionable credibility while Senegal’s action occurred after the government postponed a presidential vote to the end of the year. The restrictions come amidst global concern about increasing online censorship and surveillance.

“Global internet freedom declined for the 13th consecutive year,” Allie Funk, Adrian Shahbaz, and Kian Vesteinsson of Freedom House noted in last year’s Freedom on the Net 2023 report. “Ahead of and during electoral periods, many incumbent leaders criminalized broad categories of speech, blocked access to independent news sites, and imposed other controls over the flow of information to sway balloting in their favor,” they added.

Controlling access to information regarding electoral politics is precisely what happened in both the recent incidents in countries where authorities are barely going through the motions of democracy.

“Polls have closed in Pakistan after the authorities suspended mobile calls and data while millions voted for a new government in a controversial election,” report Yvette Tan, Caroline Davies, and Simon Fraser for the BBC. They noted that the prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, seeks approval for another term in office while the party of his predecessor, Imran Khan, who was jailed last year for corruption, called the internet cut a “cowardly act.”

Meanwhile, “Senegal’s internet service was restored Wednesday, days after the government suspended it following the postponement of this month’s presidential election” and subsequent unrest, according to Deutsche Welle.

“The government’s abrupt shutdown of internet access via mobile data and Walf TV’s broadcasting, along with the revocation of its license, constitutes a blatant assault on the right to freedom of expression and press rights,” commented Samira Daoud of Amnesty International.

Senegal, notably, appears on a list compiled by Techopedia of places where internet searches on virtual private networks (VPNs), which mask users’ identities and provide a measure of anonymity, are soaring.

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Of memes and magick

Deep in the labyrinthine tags of TikTok, a group of teenage occultists promise they have the power to help you change your life. ‘Manifesting’ influencers – as they’ve come to be known – promise their legions of viewers that, with the right amount of focus, positive thinking and desire, the universe will bend to their will. ‘Most of these people [who manifest] end up doing what they say they’re going to do and being who they say they’re going to become,’ insists one speaker on the mindsetvibrations account (600,000 followers). Another influencer, Lila the Manifestess (70,000 followers) offers a special manifestation (incantation?) for getting your partner to text you back. (‘Manifest a text every time.’) Manifest With Gabby tells her 130,000-odd followers in pursuit of ‘abundance’ about ‘5 things I stopped doing when learning how to manifest’ – among them, saying ‘I can’t afford.’

It’s not just TikTok. Throughout the wider wellness and spirituality subcultures of social media, ‘manifesting’ – the art, science and magic of attracting positive energy into your life through internal focus and meditation, and harnessing that energy to achieve material results – is part and parcel of a well-regulated spiritual and personal life. It’s as ubiquitous as yoga or meditation might have been a decade ago. TikTok influencers and wellness gurus regularly encourage their followers to focus, Law of Attraction-style, on their desired life goals, in order to bring them about in reality. (‘These Celebrities Predicted Their Futures Through Manifesting’, crows one 2022 Glamour magazine article.)

It’s possible, of course, to read ‘manifesting’ as yet another vaguely spiritual wellness trend, up there with sage cleansing or lighting votive candles with Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s face on them. But to do so would be to ignore the increasingly visible intersection of occult and magical practices and internet subcultures. As our technology has grown ever more powerful, our control over nature seemingly ever more absolute, the discursive subculture of the internet has gotten, well, ever more weird.

Sometimes it seems like the whole internet is full of would-be magicians. ‘WitchTok’ and other Left-occult phenomena – largely framed around reclaiming ancient matriarchal or Indigenous practices in resistance to patriarchy – have popularised the esoteric among young, largely progressive members of Gen Z. The ‘meme magicians’ and ‘Kek-worshippers’ – troll-occultists of the 2016-era alt-Right – have given way to a generation of neotraditionalists: drawn to reactionary-coded esoteric figures like the Italian fascist-mage Julius Evola. Even the firmly sceptical, such as the Rationalists – Silicon Valley-based members of tech-adjacent subcultures like the Effective Altruism community – have gone, well, a little woo. In an article for The New Atlantis, I chronicled the ‘postrationalist’ turn of those eager to blend their Bayesian theories with psychedelics and ‘shadow work’ (a spiritualised examination of the darkest corners of our unconscious minds). As organised religion continues to decline in Western nations, interest in the spooky and the spiritual has only increased. Today, witches might be one of the fastest-growing religious groups in the United States.

Magic, of course, means a host of things to a plethora of people. The early 20th-century anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard used ‘magic’ to describe the animistic religious sentiments of the Azande people, whom he deemed primitive. There is folk magic, popular in a variety of cultures past and present: local remedies for ailments, horseshoes on doors, love charms. There is fantasy magic, the spellcasting and levitation and transmogrification we find in children’s novels like Harry Potter. And there is magic-as-illusion, the work of the showman who pulls rabbits out of hats. But magic, as I mean it here, and as it has been understood within the history of the Western esoteric tradition, means something related to, yet distinct from, all of these. It refers to a series of attempts to understand, and harness, the workings of the otherwise unknowable universe for our personal desired ends, outside of the safely hierarchical confines of traditional organised religion. This magic comes in different forms: historically, natural magic, linked with the manipulation of objects and bodies in nature, was often considered more theologically acceptable than necromancy, or the calling on demons. But, at its core, magic describes the process of manipulating the universe through uncommon knowledge, accessible to the learned or lucky few.

The canny reader may note that magic as I’ve defined it sounds an awful lot like technology, given a somewhat spiritualised sheen. This is no coincidence. The story of modernity and, in particular, the story of the quixotic founders of our early internet (equal parts hacker swagger and utopian hippy counterculture) is inextricable from the story of the development and proliferation of the Western esoteric tradition and its transformation from, essentially, a niche cult of court scientists and civil servants into one of the most influential yet least recognised forces acting upon contemporary life.

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Nanny State Social Media Mandates Are No Substitute for Effective Parenting

One of the basic tenets of American conservatism—at least it has been until the Make America Great Again movement has re-jiggered the Republican Party—is that individuals rather than government regulators are best suited to manage their own lives and raise their families. There’s always been an authoritarian streak in social conservatism, but progressives have traditionally been the ones to promote what we call the Nanny State.

“Whether it is forcing restaurants in England to print calorie counts on menus or banning energy drinks for under-18s, the government is full of ideas about how to protect people from themselves,” explained a 2018 BBC article. Although the term is of British origin, such policies are rampant throughout the United States and California in particular. One can think of any number of recent policies that fit the bill, but they all meddle in our lives to “help” or “uplift” us.

Most of these laws—from bans on single-use plastic bags and super-sized soft drinks to limits on trans-fats and e-cigarettes—accomplish little in terms of public health or the environment. There always are endless workarounds to render the edicts pointless. The Nanny State term is ideal, as we envision a hectoring nursemaid intent on depriving us of the simplest pleasures.

But now conservatives are giving leftists a run for the money. Throughout Republican-run Western states, lawmakers are passing legislation that treats adults as if they are children by mandating a variety of mostly pointless regulations in the name of protecting kids from pornography and other internet nastiness. Everyone wants to protect The Children, which makes it difficult to push back—even when such laws impose restrictions on everyone.

The latest frenzy started in Utah, which in 2021 passed a content-filter law that requires that all new cell phones and tablets sold or activated in the state be equipped with a filter that blocks “material that is harmful to minors,” as reports note. Because the law is contingent on five other states approving similar measures, lawmakers in other like-minded states have followed suit. The bills vary somewhat, but ultimately they require some form of age verification to disable the filter.

It’s obviously hypocritical for supposedly free-market lawmakers to mandate meddlesome business regulations. Device manufacturers don’t always know where their products will be sold or activated. Following the model of progressive California, these conservative legislatures are trying to use their muscle to create a de facto nationwide standard. But that’s the least of the problems with these proposals, which raise constitutional and privacy concerns.

If they pass, these laws will certainly get tied up in the federal courts. Previous U.S. Supreme Court decisions have made it clear that legislatures must take the least intrusive approach to limiting public access to websites. By foisting content filters on every device, these efforts take a heavy-handed approach. Such laws, as the court found, presume that parents lack the ability to protect their children.

In fact, parents have a nearly endless array of tools. They simply need to enable the filters and voluntary verification processes that are currently offered. The Competitive Enterprise Institute lists dozens of filter blockers from social media companies, Internet Service Providers, gaming companies, web browsers, and operating systems, as well as standalone app controls.

As the free-speech group NetChoice argued in testimony against Utah’s bill, such measures only provide a false sense of security, leading parents to believe their children are protected. Even the best filters are imperfect, so parents still need to be involved. The group also notes that it will stifle market innovation by imposing a one-size-fits-all standard.

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AI Versus Age-Verification Laws

A new AI-powered web tool seems tailor-made to help teens get around age-verification laws online—and showcases the futility of trying to set a minimum age for social media use.

In the old days, getting around a minimum-age requirement meant actually having a physical ID card to say that you were of legal age. But with online age verification, all one may need is an image of that ID card.

Enter OnlyFake, a website using AI technology to cheaply generate images of fake IDs.

“OnlyFake is claiming to use ‘neural networks’ to generate realistic looking photos of fake IDs for just $15,” reported 404 Media earlier this week:

In our own tests, OnlyFake created a highly convincing California driver’s license, complete with whatever arbitrary name, biographical information, address, expiration date, and signature we wanted. The photo even gives the appearance that the ID card is laying on a fluffy carpet, as if someone has placed it on the floor and snapped a picture, which many sites require for verification purposes.

The OnlyFake website disappeared (for now) after the 404 Media report. But it surely won’t be the last service to offer digital fake IDs.

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Google will no longer back up the Internet: Cached webpages are dead

Google will no longer be keeping a backup of the entire Internet. Google Search’s “cached” links have long been an alternative way to load a website that was down or had changed, but now the company is killing them off. Google “Search Liaison” Danny Sullivan confirmed the feature removal in an X post, saying the feature “was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.”

The feature has been appearing and disappearing for some people since December, and currently, we don’t see any cache links in Google Search. For now, you can still build your own cache links even without the button, just by going to “https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:” plus a website URL, or by typing “cache:” plus a URL into Google Search. For now, the cached version of Ars Technica seems to still work. All of Google’s support pages about cached sites have been taken down.

Cached links used to live under the drop-down menu next to every search result on Google’s page. As the Google web crawler scoured the Internet for new and updated webpages, it would also save a copy of whatever it was seeing. That quickly led to Google having a backup of basically the entire Internet, using what was probably an uncountable number of petabytes of data. Google is in the era of cost savings now, so assuming Google can just start deleting cache data, it can probably free up a lot of resources.

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Lawmakers and Tech CEOs Push Online Age and ID Verification Proposals During Hearing on Child Safety

As we reported previously, US lawmakers are intent on pushing online ID, age verification, and causing an end to online anonymity – despite constitutional concerns.

And during a hearing today, tech CEOs supported proposals that would greatly expand the requirements for online ID verification and erode the ability to use the internet without connecting your online activity to your identity.

The proposals are being pushed in the name of protecting children online but would impact anyone who doesn’t want to tie all of their online speech and activity to their real ID – over surveillance or censorship concerns.

In response to criticism from lawmakers, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg pushed for far-reaching online age verification standards that would impose age verification at the app store level — a proposal that would mean the vast majority of mobile app usage could be tied to a person’s official identity.

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To protect kids, California might require chronological feeds on social media

Social media companies design their feeds to be as gripping as possible, with complicated algorithms shuffling posts and ads into a never-ending stream of entertainment.

A new California law would require companies to shut off those algorithms by default for users under 18, and implement other mandated tweaks that lawmakers say would reduce the negative mental health effects of social media on children.

The bill, dubbed the Protecting Kids from Social Media Addiction Act by its author, state Sen. Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), was announced at a news conference with California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta on Monday, alongside another proposed law that would tighten privacy protections for minors.

“Social media companies have the ability to protect our kids,” Skinner said. “They could act; they have not.”

One of the act’s key provisions is making a chronological feed the default setting on platforms, which would show users posts from the people they follow in the order that they were uploaded, rather than arranging the content to maximize engagement.

This change would show young users “the things that they want to see, as opposed to the addictive algorithmic feed that is presently being fed to our children,” Bonta said.

The act would also require the default settings on social media apps to mute notifications between midnight and 6 a.m., cap use at one hour daily, and remove the visibility of “like” counts. Parents — and in practice, most likely, the children using these apps — would have the ability to change these default settings.

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