The Death of Cyber
Utopia
PA U L R O S E N Z W E I G
Review of P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Booking, "LikeWar: The
Weaponization of Social Media" (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,
2018)
Back in the mid-1990s senior leaders in the
U.S. Air Force were deeply enmeshed in a
debate--one that, as General (Ret.)
Michael Hayden describes it, was almost
Jesuitical in its seeming abstruseness. The
Air Force, on the cutting edge of new
computer-enabled capabilities, was trying
to decide whether this new domain of
activity was one of "cyber" operations or
one of "information" operations.

inevitable. As a government, we shied
away from the implications of viewing the
domain as an area where ideas and
information competed. Influenced by social
constructs that resonated with our history
of First Amendment freedoms, we chose to
see the domain through a technical and
mechanistic lens (replete with firewalls
and malware and the like), rather than
with a holistic vision of information in its
full scope and scale. Within ten years, our
country had created a Cyber Czar and
assembled a Cyber Command (aka
CYBERCOM).

They understood that cyber operations
were a subset of information operations.
They knew that the two were enmeshed
but, in many ways, distinct. And though
the debate was couched as theoretical and
philosophical, they knew it was one of great
practical
consequence.
The
debate
concerned the question of how the U.S.
military--and, by extension, the entire
U.S. government--would organize to
engage in this emerging area of
competition. What would our military
structure be? How would we approach
regulation of the domain? What tools would
be brought to bear in times of conflict?

Most of the rest of the world, on the other
hand--most notably our authoritarian
adversaries like Russia, but also large
swaths of non-state "influencers," ranging
from 4chan to the alt-right--chose option
B. Where we saw "cyber," they saw
"information." They looked at the new
domain and saw it as a network where
memes and likes and virality were the new
measures of power and ways of leveraging
it. America is still paying the price for
making the wrong philosophical choice.

By now, of course, we all know the answer.
The United States chose option A and
organized its approach to computerenabled competition around operational
concepts that focused primarily on the
cyber domain. Perhaps this choice was

Peter Singer and Emerson Booking have
written a new book, "LikeWar: The
Weaponization of Social Media," that is an
eye-opening indictment of our folly.
Tracing the growth of social media from its

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The Death of Cyber Utopia | P. Rosenzweig

beginnings just a few short years ago (both
Facebook and Twitter are little more than
a decade old), they show how social media
has become a new weapon of conflict and
war.

authoritarian control of information access
on the network--a response as timeless as
it is effective.
The difference today lies in the greater
effectiveness
of
information
and
disinformation campaigns--what we call
their superior virality. One of the most
engaging and, for this reader, enlightening
aspects of "LikeWar" is its attempt to
capture what it is precisely that makes
social media information campaigns so
consequential. The authors' conclusion--
essentially that we are hard-wired to
accept some types of information more
readily that others--is distressing because
it portends, ultimately, a lack of rationality
in human information processing.

The book is filled with an astonishing array
of anecdotes and exemplars, each more
chilling than the last. The authors provide
us with a number of stories ripped from
today's headlines, including:
? a comprehensive summary of
Russia's influence campaign on
the 2016 elections;
? a reminder of how a viral story
about an alleged pedophile ring in
a small, local pizzeria mutated
from a bit of anti-Clinton fake
news into a real-life assault and a
four-year prison sentence; and
? a history of how a rather
unassuming green frog became a
symbol for racism and hatred.
Perhaps more ominously, Singer and
Booking give the reader a real-world
examination of how social media is being
mobilized as an adjunct to kinetic combat.
We watch as terrorists and irregular
armies like the Islamic State use social
media for recruiting, propaganda and even
tactical coordination of kinetic activity. The
same is true, at an even more sophisticated
level, however, with Russian activity. The
book tells, for example, how Russia laid the
groundwork for its invasion of Crimea by
sowing memes of Russian control that were
transformed into a casus belli for Russian
intervention.

The picture Singer and Booking paint of
how social media is being weaponized is
compelling, and one that ought to give
pause to any practitioner in the field of
national security. I am reluctant to be so
effusive in my praise, but this is truly a
must-read book.
The book's only flaw--such as it is--is that
the authors are long on problems but short
on solutions. For this they really cannot be
blamed. The freedom of discourse in social
media is so deeply ingrained in Western
culture that it is difficult to conceive of any
politically acceptable solutions that could
mitigate the threat with a high degree of
confidence. As a result, we are left with the
authors telling us that we need to take the
problem more seriously and act more
responsibly
as
individuals.
That
conclusion, by itself, is insufficient--but at
least it is a start.

None of this is new. One useful aspect of
"LikeWar" is how current information
operations
are
contextualized
with
historical applications. When the British
cut submerged German telegraph cables at
the outset of World War I, they were not
only conducting an essential military
operation; they were altering the
information battlespace in a way that
allowed
pro-British/anti-German
propaganda to flourish outside of Europe
unchecked. The equivalent today is

What strikes me most forcefully in the
book's analysis is how deeply disruptive the
problem of social media weaponization
truly is. Several years ago, in his book "Net
Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet
Freedom," Evgeny Morozov called the
penchant to believe that we would see the
emergence the best of all possible network
futures "cyber utopianism." He derided,
even then, the idea that greater

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The Death of Cyber Utopia | P. Rosenzweig

connectivity would bring greater harmony
and prosperity.

questions in the sense of offering solutions.
Perhaps it's asking too much that it do so
since,
in
some
ways,
they
are
unanswerable. But in bringing this
discussion to the foreground "LikeWar"
does us all a great service.

Today, that derision of cyber utopianism is
even more justified. What I truly fear
Singer and Booking have shown us is that
the very premise of western democracy and
liberal government is built upon a
foundation of sand. In the end, freedom and
voting and choice are dependent on the
collective and individual rationality of the
citizens who enable government. What
"LikeWar" demonstrates--to our great
regret--is that the assumption of
rationality is, at least on a collective basis,
a false assumption.

Singer and Booking close their work by
urging an educated citizenry to be more
discerning in their social-media choices. As
they put it, "you are what you like" and
"what you share is who you are." With that
in mind, I am pleased indeed to "like"
"LikeWar" and to share it with you. Doing
so reflects well on me, but even better on
Singer and Booking, to whom we should all
be grateful for their contribution to this
important discussion.

Many years ago, Justice Louis Brandeis
famously defended the marketplace of
ideas, writing: "If there be time to expose
through discussion the falsehood and
fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes
of education, the remedy to be applied is
more speech, not enforced silence." He
trusted that, in the end, the truth will win
out. How horrible a disruption will it be to
our notion of a free society if we discover
that Brandeis' premise was wrong--that
the transition to a social-media world, filled
with Twitter and Facebook and the like,
means that more (true) speech is not an
effective remedy to even greater volumes of
more (false) speech? What if, to put it
bluntly, the First Amendment is wrong?

Paul Rosenzweig is the founder of Red
Branch Consulting PLLC, a homeland
security consulting company and a Senior
Fellow at the R Street Institute. He is also
a Senior Advisor to The Chertoff Group.
Mr. Rosenzweig formerly served as Deputy
Assistant Secretary for Policy in the
Department of Homeland Security. He is a
Professorial Lecturer in Law at George
Washington University and an Adjunct
Lecturer at Northwestern University.
Cite as: Paul Rosenzweig, The Death of
Cyber
Utopia,
(Nov.
6,
2018)
http://lawfareblog.com/death-cyberutopia/.

"LikeWar" is an elegant volume that does
not come to grips with these fundamental

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