China and the new art of i-war

We need to fathom human nature to combat the dangers of technology.

‘We cannot compel China to abide by norms with which we would be comfortable. We must, therefore, look to our defences’. Picture: iStock

As we enter the 2020s, one of the more pressing concerns we face is the weaponisation of social media and the use of the internet for purposes of surveillance, both commercial and political; as well as the development of cyber warfare and the demonstrated means for manipulating human judgment and behaviour on a large scale. This is worth thinking about from the very beginning of the new decade, because what we have seen in the past decade is disturbing. It’s time to get a much better grip on what is happening and why.

In late October last year, an Information Warfare conference was held in Canberra. The first day of it was conducted under the Chatham House rule, the second was classified. Remarks, therefore, cannot be attributed to speakers. Three things, however, stood out from the proceedings. The technological revolution in information sciences has become:

● The single most challenging arena of military strategy and national security.

● A game changer in regard to politics, public policy debate and social cohesion, with profound implications for our ideas of what constitute democratic government, political legitimacy and civil rights.

● A matter of grave importance for each of us in regard to personal privacy and the integrity of our intellectual independence.

The thinking that governed the proceedings did not go deep enough into the roots of these problems. But it was refreshing to find them being seriously pondered by our country’s national security agencies and to have been invited to participate.

Rather oddly, speaker after speaker avoided mentioning the word China. It was clear, however, that China is the country of primary strategic concern when it comes to the above three areas — not Facebook or the US government, much less our own. For China conducts very large-scale information warfare operations, domestically and abroad. Among other things, it has hacked into our federal parliament, the records of the Australian National Univer­sity and other major organisations. It is at war with us and our traditional allies in this space and we are only beginning to come to grips with the implications. Hence the conference.

When openly asked why the C-word was not being used even within a Chatham House environment, even though it was clear that China was being referred to, one senior Defence figure responded, “Well, if it’s perfectly clear, why do you need me to spell it out?” One of the speakers was an American specialist on 21st-century technologies and their strategic implications, Peter Warren Singer. His 2019 book LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media, co-authored with Emerson Brooking, has been getting rave reviews from serious players. His presentation was especially stimulating.

The most fundamental point Singer and Brooking make is that the technological innovations we are now worried about were conceived by their inventors as wholly benign. And famously, in 2011-12, there was a euphoric belief in many quarters that they were leading to democratic revolution in the Middle East against reactionary and repressive regimes, religious and secular alike. They would do the same in Russia, China, Iran. Evgeny Morozov in The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World (2011) and others warned, however, even as the Arab Spring unfolded that dictators, criminal cartels and anarchic forces were mastering the new technologies and conducting a very dark counter-revolution. Islamic State used social media masterfully and malignantly. Vladimir Putin’s regime has certainly been doing so. Xi Jinping’s China is at the forefront.

Dream gone wrong

All this was the stuff of the conference. But we need to dig deeper, if we want to understand the problems confronting us and to address them. Our point of departure should be the disillusionment of key figures in the IT revolution. Vint Cerf, co-inventor of the internet and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005, has stated that the engine he helped create “has outrun our social intuitions about its power”. For many people in the liberal democracies, this was most dramatically made clear in 2016 by the unexpected outcomes of the Brexit referendum in Britain and the victory of Donald Trump in the US presidential election.

But the root problem here goes much deeper than that. None of this began with IT. An indirect clue to the nature of what we are seeing is to be found in the rueful confession by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams: “I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world was automatically going to be a better place. I was wrong about that.”

But why was he wrong? Because Silicon Valley companies monetised their online platforms by making them addictive, secretly collected data and sold it to interested parties? Because dictatorships and terrorists and criminal cartels used the net and social media to disseminate propaganda and “fake news”? No. Those are just symptoms of a far deeper problem. Singer and others at the conference fell back on stock lines from Sun Tzu and Clausewitz on knowledge, politics and war. But if we want to understand why the information technologies have had the disturbing effects they have, why masses of human beings are susceptible to being misled and manipulated, why companies and governments prey on the unsuspecting, we have to go back long, long before Sun Tzu or Clausewitz. Fundamentally, although these technologies are made possible by the use of advanced physics and mathematics, their use and the way it spirals out of rational control can only be understood in terms of biology, game theory and human cognitive evolution.

Primal instincts

Technologies, whatever their inventors may fondly imagine, arrive in a world in which human beings behave in a complex and unstable mixture of competition and co-operation with very deep roots in evolutionary biology.

These animal behaviours date back even further than the Cambrian explosion, a half-billion years ago. That seminal epoch in biological evolution saw the emergence of carnivorous predators for perhaps the first time and an arms race in eyes, jaws, armour, camouflage and speed among predators and prey alike. Through an immensely long lineage, we are sprung from that evolutionary pedigree. However much we may deceive ourselves about being “sapient” or being the “children of God”, we behave, at the most fundamental level, according to deeply ingrained and primal instincts of wariness, tacit co-operation, opportunistic defection and predation. This can be seen at every level of barbarism and civilisation, in war and in commerce. Until the nature of evolutionary biology was slowly discovered, between Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace’s pioneering work in the mid-19th century and the astonishing discoveries of the past few decades, no one could do much better than coming up with religious myths or political philosophies to try to explain human behaviour. Nor was animal behaviour in general much better understood. Until the invention of game theory at the RAND Corporation, in the 1950s, in an attempt to pin down the logic of arms races and disarmament negotiations, we floundered in trying to make sense of the what determines the behaviour of states and the prospects for deterrence and coexistence. And until Herbert Simon and others talked up the idea of “bounded rationality”, we were generically prone to wrongly assume that every rational being saw the world and thought about its interests in the same general way.

The invention of nuclear weapons and the apparent existential threat they presented to human survival goaded a few thoughtful people to think harder about these fundamental matters. It was remarked of such weapons that they had outstripped our social intuitions and capacities for rational thought. Fortunately, that has not been wholly so. We have muddled through 70 years of nuclear arsenals and scaled back the biggest and worst of them. We are going to have to do the same with information technologies.

But one thing should by now be clear: basic human proclivities and irrational behaviours spring from very ancient behavioural instincts and these will not change. Education, law, explicit agreements can put rules and boundaries around certain egregious behaviours, but the underlying proclivities remain embedded and will resurface given provocation, uncertainty or opportunity. Therefore, we must understand them and create social institutions and regulatory frameworks — constitutions, broadly speaking — as well as international agreements that factor this into their design.

And even then we’ll have to keep muddling through. There won’t be a perfect or utopian outcome — ever.

Predators on steroids

The cognitive terrain we are in, by default, whenever we venture into social media, or for that matter into unbridled exchanges in the public sphere, is one of flawed, evolved, barely conscious brains reacting to stimuli, floundering around among complex data they barely comprehend, becoming emotional and tribal. This leaves us open to being deliberately misled, with strategic intent, by other parties, who seek to harvest the fruits of irrational and emotional behaviours. That’s the way it is.

That’s the nature of life — primordially, with or without the internet. It was ever thus. What these tools have done is put all these cognitive flaws and competitive or predatory strategies on steroids. “When will they ever learn?” is the refrain of pacifists, in the face of recurrent violent human conflict. There is no permanent learning in this regard. There are institutional mechanisms for coping with our nature, but there is the ever-present danger of regression.

How, then, does this apply to our current dilemmas? What does it have to tell us about the three key problems outlined and agreed upon at the Information Warfare conference last October? Fundamentally, it means that if we seek international peace and order, we have to build it not on naive assumptions about human rationality and the common good, but on realistic assumptions about competition, negotiation, predation and the conditions under which productive co-operation will emerge or degenerate. We have to be prepared to create institutional mechanisms for deterring or thwarting defection from productive norms or predation.

Surrendering privacy

We need to think hard about our interests and those of other parties. We have to have an eye for our individual and collective vulnerabilities. We have to become astute and committed to practical, not utopian norms. In other words, we have to do the kind of hard thinking that the pioneers of the internet, alas, did not do. And we have to work for norms that the entrepreneurs of social media and the exploiters of it did not create and do not sufficiently practice. This thinking and this work will not occur simply by default. It will not be something most people will even be capable of doing well for themselves. It will not become law, much less accepted and enacted international agreement, without a very great deal of patient and strenuous work. We have our work cut out for us and the first order of business is resilience in the face of escalating dangers.

Part of the unspoken agenda of the Information Warfare conference was to bring together more or less actively concerned people to ponder what is to be done in this space — not least with regard to the ominous rise of China. Plainly, we cannot compel China to abide by norms with which we would be comfortable. We must, therefore, look to our defences.

The concern in this regard goes beyond hacking to political interference and even strategic assault. It pertains, as we have seen in the case of the 2016 elections, to deep intrusion into and manipulation of voting behaviours in the democracies by malign and undeclared external parties, or by machineries acting clandestinely for political movements. Singer and Brooking ­emphasise the extraordinary interference by Putin’s Russia in the 2016 presidential election in the US. But as Brittany Kaiser points out in her recent memoir Targeted, Cambridge Analytica, a UK-based firm with deep reach into the US and operations around the world, was doing the very same things as the Russians.

A Democrat by conviction, Kaiser became more and more disturbed by the nature and scale of the work Cambridge Analytica and its boss Alexander Nix did with the most reactionary and populist elements on the Republican right. She didn’t even notice what the Russians were up to in America until the election was well and truly over. And what Cambridge Analytica did was inextricably linked with Facebook and its use of private information.

The matter of private information brings us right down to the individual level, of course. Back in 2007, German sociologist and analyst of terror and dictatorship, Wolfgang Sofsky, gave us a little book called Privacy: A Manifesto. At that point, social media as we now know it was just getting started. Facebook was only three years old. Cambridge Analytica would not come into existence for another six years. Blockchain would be pioneered by “Satoshi Nakamoto” in 2008. Sofsky argued not simply that surveillance and data collection were growing but that far too many of us had already been complacently surrendering our privacy or were complicit in its evaporation through an eagerness to divulge things about ­ourselves in a thoughtlessly exhibitionist manner.

And, of course, at the private and personal level, fakery, bullying, fraud and all manner of really dark activities raise the question as to what level of “privacy” individuals are entitled to. The recent arrest of octogenarian business tycoon Ron Brierley with staggering quantities of child sexual abuse pornography in his possession points to this problem.

The formation and proliferation of criminal and terrorist, sociopathic or factually degenerate internet groups (think flat earthers and anti-vaxxers) illustrates the dilemmas that confront us as regards reason, law and the web. To these problems there is no guaranteed solution. The scale and rapid proliferation of them are such as to require the invention of new standards, while providing that those standards do not themselves undermine our liberties or our social order.

Approaching Waterloo

Pondering all this, in its late ­December 2019 double issue, The Economist ran a sage piece under the title “Pessimism vs Progress”. Its net assessment, as it were, was characteristically sane and level-headed:

To be alive in the tech-obsessed 2020s is to be among the luckiest people who have ever lived.

Your intuitive response to that viewpoint from elite London will be a litmus test of how you see the challenges ahead of us over the next decade — in geopolitics, democratic politics and private behaviour or safety. Whatever the extent of your unease and even alarm, it might help, as a thought experiment, to think of yourself as a participant in the late October conference in Canberra, asking questions and listening attentively to speeches. Or perhaps to imagine yourself a staff member at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, in Waterloo, Canada, intermediate between Niagara Falls and Detroit. Are we approaching our Waterloo? Are we all about to go over the waterfall, at least as regards decency and liberty? Are we headed for a world of decay like Detroit?

Or are we about to rise to the challenges we face and reinvent international governance on resilient and evolutionarily insightful lines? Something to ponder emerging from silly season.

Paul Monk is a former senior intelligence analyst and consultant in applied cognitive science. He is the author 10 books, including Dictators and Dangerous Ideas (Echo Books, 2018).