JUNE 14
To win at the government's cyber game and to avoid inadvertently becoming a mouthpiece for propaganda, a journalist's best bet is to go gonzo, says innovator and information activist Smári McCarthy in his talk "Lies, propaganda and CyberCyberCyberCyberLOL" at Mezhyhirya Festival in Ukraine, which Wired.co.uk attended.
McCarthy was brought in by the Ministry of Defence last year to help the Defence Academy figure out what its policy should be in terms of cyberwar. The end result was a paper that they published called "The Global Cyber Game". It is, says McCarthy, "a laughable document in many ways" and not only because it contains far too many instances of the word cyber. Not many people read it and even fewer people understood it, but that was the intention, he says. They only wanted it to have a certain kind of impact on a certain type of person in the upper echelons of the defence community.
The document was based around the concept of the cyber game board -- a grid used to analyse the hard power and soft power dynamics in a conflict situation when there are information systems mixing with traditional warfare, with a core concept of legitimacy running all the way through it. In one column of the grid the MoD outlines its cyber assets, organising them into three categories: anything that can cause physical destruction to hardware, anything that can disrupt computation (software) and assets that can influence cognition.
It was this last category that McCarthy almost overlooked that ended up interesting him most, when he realised not what, but who these assets were.
It is important to remember, he says, "in the global geopolitical game of legitimacy, he who has the best journalists wins." Quoting from the Cyber Game paper, he points to a section that refers specifically to the role journalists can play in upholding legitimacy:
"Treating journalists as threats may be justified in a tactical sense, but the problem is that investigative journalists are generally regarded as an essential and legitimate part of the democratic system, so this is hardly a holistic appraisal, let alone a holistic strategy. That a Western Cyber Game player could regard them as a threat is a view that can only be maintained if the player has limited their thinking to the hard power level of the gameboard… The dominant source of legitimacy in the Cyber Game comes through promotion of open information exchange in the global knowledge commons, scary as that might be."
What this is saying is that the MoD can't ignore the investigative journalists, and so it might as well make them part of its soft power strategy, by attempting to exploit their ability to "influence cognition". If the MoD has its way, journalists can therefore unintentionally become part of the problem. Most journalists have their ethics, but are there subtle ways that journalism is being manipulated to benefit the sources of power, asks McCarthy. The downward economic pressure on journalism as an industry doesn't help much either, he adds. In the quest for pageviews, quality stops mattering as much -- or in some cases at all -- which results in "sites like Buzzfeed" that "eat people's attention like monsters eating kittens".
There's a lot of talk about the inconvenient leaks as far as the government is concerned, he points out, but there's a lot less being said about the leaks the governments release with the intention of shaping public discourse. "The main issue is, who is getting to set the agenda?" he says. Politicians can use military soft power tactics on journalists, including not only tactical, strategic and operational forms of deception, but also "ambiguity deception" -- geared towards creating general confusion -- and "misleading deception", which is designed towards misleading an adversary in a preconceived direction.
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According to McCarthy, if journalists don't want to be pulled into this madness and become subject to a global manipulation game, the best thing for them to do is to go off grid. Quoting Hunter S Thompson, the father of gonzo journalism, he says: "When the going gets weird, the weird turns pro."
Give up on being objective, he says. "Instead of trying to and capture a view without any bias, project a slice of your own reality." When the politician who never wants to be interviewed suddenly calls up with something they want to say, don't become their mouthpiece. Preempt political events -- did you know for example that last week an inspector from OLAF, the EU agency responsible for making sure member states abide by EU anti-fraud and anti-corruption rules visited Ukraine, a non-EU country? Also, providing perspectives based on historical investigations might actually be useful for readers who don't necessarily follow every news story and can't connect the dots in the same way you can.
By doing so, McCarthy argues, journalists have the ability to "illegitimise soft power" and "reduce the manoeuvring strategies of states". "You're going to be fighting this kind of fight anyway, so why not try to win?" he says.
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