Information Cartels and Global Warfare
As of this writing, the United States of America has not made an official declaration of war against the Russian Federation in response to its invasion of Ukraine. This is to say that the nominal state — that agency possessing the name identifying it as such — has not taken the perfunctory step of filing the proper paperwork to that effect, but it is nevertheless clear that the American state cartel — the collection of social systems working in collaborative competition to establish normal order within their territory — has de facto entered the war.
The lines have been drawn and the generals have organized their war cabinets. In one of the latest moves, the Russian government announced that it is blocking Facebook. The Verge decries this as censorship, and doubtless it is exactly that, but are we to find it at all surprising that Russia has blocked a hostile foreign information cartel from operating within its borders during a time of war? Russia, after all, is operating a disinformation campaign central to its war efforts, a campaign which Meta is openly working against.
Meta president of global affairs Nick Clegg, participating in a disinformation campaign of his own, tweeted,
Soon millions of ordinary Russians will find themselves cut off from reliable information, deprived of their everyday ways of connecting with family and friends and silenced from speaking out. We will continue to do everything we can to restore our services so that they remain available to people to safely and securely express themselves and organize for action.
The Russian people are indeed threatened by the loss of reliable information sources, but to imply that Facebook is one of these sources is simply laughable given their track record and, in particular, in light of the fact that, for the past six months, they have been promoting Russian state content (allegedly as a result of incompetence rather than malice, but this gives us no reason to trust their reliability).
Were the Russian government to allow American military information cartels such as the Army’s 4th and 8th PSYOP groups to operate within Russia, even during a time of peace, we would certainly be very surprised. And yet their blocking a (nominally) non-military information cartel which cooperates with the American government is treated as surprising. Why?
The conceit is that commerce and government are non-overlapping magisteria, and that the “peaceful” operations of commerce should not be threatened by state disputes. And given the degree to which information cartels’ platforms have become the substrate of our social realities, such censorship is (we are led to believe) an unfair punishment of civilians.
The reality, as Harvard Law School Rappaport Fellow Elena Chachko describes in a recent article for Lawfare, is that information cartels are full participants in the postmodern theater of warfare. “[M]ore than in previous geopolitical crises”, she writes, “tech giants’ policies and sanctions have played a major role in the Ukraine conflict, alongside those of states and international organizations.” What we are presented with is a collection of social systems cooperating against an enemy in an an existential battle. What is the conventional name for such a cartel? An army? A military? If the nominal state militaries and the information cartels are engaged in and cooperating in the same activities and towards the same ends, are we to draw a distinction between them based on what clothing they’re wearing when they do it?
Chachko, who does seem to draw this distinction, advocates for this platform-government cooperation. It is inevitable, she says, and it must be approached deliberately, with “the right leadership” — which is curious in an article in which she describes Facebook as having “contributed to mass atrocities in Myanmar and Thailand” — and “limited to democratic states.” “Clearly,” she writes, “platforms should not be the long arm of authoritarian regimes or used to trample political opposition and ‘enemies of the state’ in countries where democracies are fragile.” I would respond that, if the United States doesn’t qualify as a fragile democracy, it’s only because a state in which little more than half of the electorate turns out once every couple years to elect representatives based largely on the very misinformation and disinformation that Meta is promulgating hardly qualifies as democratic at all.
Chachko acknowledges numerous potential concerns regarding this sort of cooperation, but ultimately falls back on its inevitability in defending sensible policies for structuring and regulating it. She’s entirely correct, of course, but this is regardless a consent to the deception and oppression of the American people that I find unpalatable. In Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (Vintage Books, 1973), philosopher and Christian anarchist Jacques Ellul describes modern propaganda as a direct attack against humanity which renders the true exercise of democracy almost impossible (pp. 14–15). “Step by step,” Ellul writes, “the propagandist builds his techniques on the basis of his knowledge of man, his tendencies, his desires, his needs, his psychic mechanisms” (p. 19). This knowledge is exactly what what information cartels provide — it is the primary distributionary resource of those distribution systems which the cartels control — and given the power of information resources to control the electorate and manufacture consent, this makes the integration of information cartels into the American state cartel a possibility of unprecedented danger.
How have information cartels historically used the vast information resources available to them? If recent news concerning Meta is insufficient to inform us, we can look to the book Algorithms of Oppression by Professor of Gender Studies and African American Studies Safiya Noble (New York University Press, 2018), which tells us that Google in particular has used their powers to control a powerful social hegemony, promoting the values and norms of its partners and advertisers and profiting from our lowest and most demeaning beliefs.
Even the most pro-government progressive would balk were the government to surveil and document the public to the same degree as the information cartels, but so long as the cartels involved are nominally commercial rather than political, we joyfully buy in to our own oppression. And central to this control is the illusion of that very distinction, which disguises as well the ability of the American government to wage unrestricted warfare — potentially against its own citizens — across the new media of the postmodern era. Chachko’s article effectively shatters this illusion and presages a terrifying future.
