It is exactly 60 years ago that the Canadian media philosopher Marshall McLuhan coined the term “global village”. In his book “The Gutenberg Galaxy”, McLuhan describes how the world is growing ever closer together through electronic networking, until finally all people live in a global village. The prophets of the Technocene jumped on this term like fleas on flowing hair – standard bearers of the positive message that networking will lead humanity into a time of peace and understanding.
It sometimes helps to read a book before you peddle the buzzwords. McLuhan shows that he never interpreted the global village as mankind’s dream of peace. Rather, he saw the warlike tribal societies of the past reactivated in the comprehensive network: “As in primeval times, we live today in a global village that we created ourselves, in a simultaneous event. It doesn’t necessarily mean harmony and calm, but it does mean enormous interference in each other’s affairs.”
We have known since last Thursday that he was right.
With the war of aggression against Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has exposed himself as the chief of a tribe that is all too yesterday’s. The worldwide attention to what is happening in Ukraine, the reactions of NATO and the European Union, the visible and invisible fronts of the confrontation with physical and virtual weapons show that we have entered a new era. A time when every understanding and every misunderstanding is simultaneously possible on the world stage.
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It is the time of the hybrid war, in which there is not only the free marketplace of information but also the black market of disinformation. In which Ukrainian President Zelensky is able to speak to the world with a cellphone video while cyber attacks continue to paralyze parts of Ukraine’s internet, economy and government of the country.
This war is the first world information war, or “World War Wired,” as New York Times columnist Tom Friedman describes it. It didn’t start last Thursday, but eight years ago. In retrospect, since then, Putin’s Russia has worked consistently to wage a disinformation war against much of the world, particularly the West. Ukraine has always been the medium of his efforts.
Russian disinformation in US elections was state-of-the-art warfare
It began in late 2013 with demonstrations against pro-Russian President Yanukovych on Maidan Square in Kyiv. Yanukovych had to flee and shortly thereafter Russian troops occupied Crimea. Since then, the conflict has killed 14,000 people in Ukraine, a state of crisis that has received less and less attention in recent years. An active disinformation strategy, as rolled out in the wake of the annexation of Crimea, had not previously existed.
The actions of Russian intelligence services have been transformed by social media into digital propaganda on steroids, comprehensive, invisible and far from limited to Ukraine. As the FBI pointed out in the Mueller report, a detailed 448-page forensic analysis of the 2016 US election, Russian disinformation was just as consistently directed against the US. As a result, some eyewitnesses still argue about what really happened. You can get to the point pretty well: Putin hijacked the election with the help of his hacker troops and helped Trump to win through targeted data leaks.
Even today, many observers lack the courage to call this attack what it is: state-of-the-art warfare. Instead, even the Mueller report says that Russia “interfered in the 2016 presidential election in a comprehensive and systematic manner.” Manipulating the most important momentum of a democracy is not a game. Nor is it interference, but a violent act to restore an undemocratic, traditional order.
More on the Ukraine war:
Not only politicians have to deal with this new form of informational warfare. Businesses too need to know that this war is never just on the battlefield of vote-rigging. It can also hit your own IT systems. In the days leading up to the visible attack by Putin’s troops on Ukraine, there were many initially invisible malware attacks on government institutions, the financial and energy sectors in Ukraine, but also in Latvia and Lithuania.
The most destructive cyber attack to date by the malware “Notpetya” in 2017 also came from hackers in the Russian military and was initially aimed at Ukraine. Within a few hours, the ransomware had spread to other countries and their companies, paralyzed the ships of the Danish logistics company Maersk, the pharmaceutical company Merck and the French construction company Saint-Gobain and caused damage of ten billion dollars.
“We sometimes lack the sense of reality in our Disney World, which we would like to hold on to in the western world,” Telekom boss Tim Hoettges told the Handelsblatt last Thursday. We will have to adapt to this variant of cyber warfare in the global village. The fight for information and disinformation is tantamount to that with weapons. Not every attack is immediately visible. But a war is a war. That’s what he should be called before a country is invaded.
In this column, Miriam Meckel writes fortnightly about ideas, innovations and interpretations that make progress and a better life possible. Because what the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the rest of the world calls a butterfly. ada-magazin.com
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