After Cyberwar

From the outset I am deliberately going to challenge the distinction between criminal and combative conduct. As intelligence experts at GCHQ and MI5, and cyber experts we've spoken to on our show claim, the fences between organised crime even at the street level, and classical warfare, are seriously full of holes and falling over. Mobilised by international digital communications and cryptocurrency, acts of subversion, diversion, sabotage, vandalism, espionage, propaganda, hate and other unconventional tactics have become the tools of paramilitaries, drug gangs, political pressure groups, corporations and religious sects. Communications technology has lowered the technical and moral bar for harmful action at a distance and various forms of terrorism by all groups.

Which products or organisations can be trusted is now unclear. Whether it is HikVison cameras and TikTok spying on Western school-children for the Chinese state, or US companies like eBay terrorising its critics by sending them dead pigs and funeral wreaths, the compartmentalisation between ostensibly civilian, criminal, and military operations is wobbling. This has extraordinary implications for human rights, policing and the conduct of war under International Law. MI5 director general Kenneth McCallum recently expressed serious concerns over new hybrid tactics for sowing chaos and fear, leveraging economic desperation, online mob culture, radicalisation and hate groups.

Cyberweapons are much more than "malware". Most of the victims of cybercrimes are not infiltrated by viruses, trojans, or any of the things we hear computer security people talk about. That is so last century. They are harmed by the tools they use every day. Battered women are sometimes tracked by covert "spouseware" installed by violent and insecure partners, but more commonly their abusers simply leverage existing "location-sharing features". The women are coerced to switch them on just as some victims of abusive employers are coerced to be subject to "bossware" and other kinds of inhumane workplace surveillance. Technology is leverage. At the cybershow it concerns us how many applications labelled as "cybersecurity" and given a veneer of legitimacy are really "weaponised" and abusive code.

Here, technology directly facilitates harm without being acknowledged as a "weapon". Nothing new to see here of course, since any candlestick, rope or piece of plumbing can be put to misuse, as all Cluedo players know. The very term "weaponised" is somewhat clumsy.

But what is new is the casual normalisation with which tech is used aggressively and our general acceptance of ostensibly peaceful populations quietly arming themselves. Watch any group of teenagers all pull out their phones and start filming each other when trouble breaks out. The body language and attitude is identical to gangsters pulling out knives or pistols. The act of filming is loaded with menace.

It has always confused me that a minority of people claim to feel "safer" in a street bristling with CCTV surveillance. I assume they are the same kind of people who feel "safer" in a nightclub where there are guards with assualt rifles. Their kind of security is proximate symbols of power, regarless the very high probability of that power being used, accidentally or otherwise, agsinst themselves.

There are no end of cautionary sci-fi tales involving trusted guardians that turn against their creators. People who become victims of the two most common digital crimes, ransomware and push-payment fraud, rarely make technical mistakes. They make mistakes about power relations, which they are encouraged to do by an extant system that robs people of personal autonomy and control. It is the very culture of our society, of technical deference, implied or imposed trust models, fear of authority and mother-knows-best psychology that creates the conditions for modern crime. To the extent that technology robs people of agency it makes them vulnerable.

In cybersecurity we are dealing constantly with people who are the victims of abusive technologies (not abusive people; which we will come to shortly). Their stuff gets hacked. Their property is violated. They are betrayed by officials, and service providers they trusted in. Their data gets leaked. They are spied on. They are manipulated. They are robbed of money. They are humiliated and exposed to indignity. Their time is wasted. Their attention and focus is stolen. Their life choices, opportunity and health is limited.

These digital harms are foundational to a definition of new forms of cyber-conflict as "ambient", as something different from an overt military spat between nation states. It is a war both for humane and dignified technology that serves humanity, and against pathological ideas and implementations of that technology by those who have the power but not the good sense to deploy it well. This is the state of ambient cyberwar. We cannot trust our devices. It feels wrong to take a smartphone into a business meeting or a doctors appointment where confidential matters may be discussed. We no longer worry that a plane might crash because of mechanical failure. Aeronautic engineering in 2025 is extraordinarily safe. We rightly worry that a software bug or hack will route us into the side of a mountain while the pilots blissfully play games on the their phones because the "AI" instruments tell them everything is fine!

Awareness of this and the popular counter to it is "civic cybersecurity". The goal is a society where people do not feel unsafe and unfree because of technology - whether that is being defrauded at a restaurant, spied on by CCTV at the bus stop, tracked by their own phone, bullied or treated as a second-class citizen because of technical choices or abilities. Civic cybersecurity incorporates psychological and social security alongside technical security. It re-situates "national security" to include the security of every single individual not just prominent economic actors.

To live in "peace" is a wonderful privilege. Most of the world is in fact, at peace. One experiences a lack of constant worry. Time flows more slowly. It is possible to make plans. There is a possibility for economic growth. Indeed most people in the world are happier and friendlier than ever. Rising standards of healthcare and education have improved everyone's outlook. There are even stirrings that apparently doom-laden situations like the COVID pandemic and climate change can serve as a powerful uniting force. Physical crime is at an all-time low.

But a report by Cambridge University researchers led by Prof. Ross Anderson and meta-studies of many works by global researchers collated by Jonathan Haidt reveals a devastating "gotcha". As violence and misery has disappeared from everyday "meat-space" life, there's been an equal, commensurate rise in all kinds of online harms and violence. No matter how many soothing sound effects, pastel candy colours, rounded corners and drop-shadows vendors add to make technology seem less threatening the reality is that "tech means trouble". Most of us carry around some little box of anxiety in our pockets.

Ambient warfare is a state of looming terror, uncertainty and anxiety. The "Cold War" affected my generation deeply when in the 1980s school-children drilled nuclear attacks by hiding in the basement. The people of Taiwan or Israel live under these conditions. Whether realistically or not, it was palpable in the US in the decade following the WTC attacks of September 2001. As a recent example we can see Sweden's decision to scrap plans for a large Baltic Sea wind farm due to the "serious international security climate", as as a chilling effect on progress.

It makes sense to understand war not as a well delineated period, with declaration and cessation, but with a protracted period of prelude and aftermath. It is in the prelude as much as the shadow of war that trauma is formed and harms are done to health and wealth.

Living or working with veterans teaches you one thing about war, that it has a habit of not really ending. It transforms and twists into new kinds of violence. For so many "after" never comes, instead there is self-harm and self-sabotage, a limited life, depression or suicide. For others it sublimates, becomes cold, paranoiac, racist, and insular. For still others it fixates on past symbols, single moments of amplified living and becomes always-on hyper-vigilance, defensiveness and either retreat or constant seeking of new conflict - just to feel normal and at home.

The inability to let go of war, with its many industrial benefits and its many political justifications, is sometimes given as the reason for the Cold War which then led to an ever expanding continuation of intelligence apparatus after it ended. Documentarist Adam Curtis is fond of pointing out how British Intelligence was at a loss to either foresee or reinvent itself following the tear-down of the Iron Curtain at the end of the 1980s.

Perhaps the truth is that the "Cold War" was really a mass psychological event. Nobody except historians with luxurious hindsight ever really understood it, militarily, economically, or culturally. I think the same is true of the present state of cyberwar. There is a monumental struggle afoot, but nobody really seems to able to put their finger on the map.

The Internet, far from being a "place" (a la "Cyberspace") or even an "Idea", is very much a battleground for ideas in lieu of kinetic struggle. To the extent some believe it was built by US defence interests as a beachhead for international democracy, its many scrapes and skirmishes are an expected counter by totalitarian forces. Since then it has become a testing ground for new weapons, this time ranged against the civilian populations of the West. It's become a place for struggle of liberal democratic freedom, not only against "foreigners", but against our own ghosts, elements of fascism, post-imperial guilt and self-destructive urges, many of which have assumed new and surprising forms.

We like to make little categories like "cybercriminal", "state adversary", "malicious script kiddie" or "cloud service provider". These are largely distractions to assuage our sense of confusion and apportion legitimacy to some, but not others. Actual laws, let alone morals, have very little to do with this labelling.

Attribution is a "problem" that matters mostly to egotists rather than pragmatists. When you have a knife sticking out of your belly it doesn't matter so much who put it there than that you have a knife wound to deal with. It's an urgent medical matter. Later, maybe when you are well again, there's time to seek justice and assign blame.

The same is true for civilians in a war zone. They do not care whose missiles just landed on their farm. Their lot is no better for knowing they were "friendly" ones, or that they were the victim of "necessity" to drive out an enemy.

Moreover, the same is true for all of us in the digital conflict we now endure. It does not matter that "digital cash is more efficient" when I cannot pay for a meal or gift my children pocket money. It does not matter that it's my "own government" spying on me when my privacy is violated. It does not matter that "everyone uses Microsoft and that's just our policy" when I cannot create or share content. It does not matter that "there's a glitch in the software and the bank will refund it" when someone loses their home or job, or life as a consequence of tech failure.

We're not interested in why.

We're interested in it not happening.

Digital technology is increasingly a mechanism for one group to impose their problems on another group. And to do so profitably. And to call that "helping people".

It is an abrogation of responsibility, and a foisting of "economic externality". Rationalisation is at the core of the "tech thinkers" mindset. So long as a rational explanation exists all of the very real harms can be dismissed. After all, we're interested in the golden future not your grubby little parochial tragedy. Every harm is "a glitch", " a bug", "a one in a million". And you are the only one. We are always hearing about "necessary evils" and "double edged swords". We are supposed to gracefully smile and gladly accept enshitified lives as the "necessary price to pay for…" Well… for what exactly?

I think if most ordinary people knew the real reasons their technology is abusive they'd be taking up torches and pitchforks. Thankfully, for sly governments and big technology companies they are easily bamboozled and thrown off the trail. One word achieves that;

"Progress!"

And to be "against progress" is already to be less than human. Baby murderers deserve less scorn than someone who is so mad, bad and dangerous as to be "against progress". Ted Kaczynski could not have done more to set back rational tech critique by 50 years if he had been on the direct payroll of IBM, Microsoft and Google. But more eloquent sceptics like Neil Postman ask, "progress towards what?". If your doctor says you have a "progressive disease" that's not good. Progress is not an unqualified abstract noun. Progress is a vector, with a magnitude, but more importantly a direction. And there are more directions than just forward or backwards. Science also has a steering wheel.

The drivers, sadly, are of the mistaken belief that they are in a race, and not the cautious exploration of a minefield. They talk about the "AI arms race", and "not being left behind". They are locked in a Dr. Strangelove style obsession to "close the indignity gap" and destroy all vestiges of western democracy, privacy, human attachment and love… before our enemies do. Committing suicide simply to rob your enemy of the kill seems … (I'm not sure how to put this)… a higher level of cowardly dishonour.

Ignorance is the greatest violence, said Emma Goldman. Much of our cyberwar is against entrenched ignorance and the active efforts of those who gain from ignorance to perpetuate it.

For example; We are still in a world where there's a widely held but absolutely wrong idea that "technology is neutral".

It persists despite obvious knock-down arguments to the contrary, because it seems intuitive and amenable to a few cheap rhetorical tricks that a pre-schooler should see through. There is simply a universe of difference between an atomic bomb and penicillin, and once you have accepted that you've already moved through a doorway into a higher philosophy.

This misunderstanding (or perhaps misinformation) - that all technologies are simply tools whose good or bad uses depends on who uses them, and to what end - benefits mainly one class; those who make and sell technology. Even Mikhail Kalashnikov who gave as sincere a self-examination as any technologist like Oppenheimer, did not accept such patent simplicity.

What defines war? It is a state of relations. A disagreement over visions of the future. Most commonly, who is to be slave and who is to be master? Who is to decide and who is to follow? While wars are superficially about resources, they originate in goals or grievances. The latter accounts for the perpetuation of war. Modern wars are mainly continuations of unresolved grievances from earlier "unfinished" conflicts.

Perhaps the best way to define war, as my friend asks, is to look at the conditions for ending war. Without examining the word "won", when is it no longer a war? The conditions are:

• obtain diplomatic peace
• surrender
• convince the enemy they have lost
• remove the capacity of the enemy to wage war
• change the conditions that perpetuate war
• obtain stalemate through exhaustion
• minimise or reclassify the war

People, as victims in a war, don't want to win, but to end it! To stop the suffering and harm. To go home. But to end it one must deal with a recalcitrant, psychopathic, deceptive enemy. The danger with such an enemy is not his capability but disposition. The enemy will put down their weapons and agree to peace, then attack and make a massive surprise land-grab at your point of weakness. Such an enemy cannot be reasoned with or trusted. The only choice left is to utterly defeat and eradicate him. The reality is that digital tech exacerbates almost all of these conditions.

For most of human history, surrender meant certain death, at least for the menfolk, rape for the women or humiliating slavery. Most solutions to war are to incapacitate the enemy, through kinetic action or today through economic or cyber action.

Conditions where both sides put down their axes and return to "normalised" relations are rare. When the abusive husband asks his wife "How would you like me to not hit you any more?" that isn't a credible invitation to a fresh and rosy relationship. By this point the wife simply wants the man to leave. To go away and not exist. All trust relations have been burned and the possibility of any future loving relation is gone. The abuser must accept this. But to the abuser this means death, if not literal starvation because of dependency and inadequacy then ego-death and humiliation. In many cultures it may also mean literal or social death for the woman who is now "shamed" as a divorcee.

This has become our attachment relation to digital technology in our time. We've gotten locked in a toxic co-dependency with it. To disengage means death. To continue means endless painful struggle. Where is peace to be found here?

Microsoft, Google (indeed all of BigTech) have had abusive tendencies for all their existence. Companies coming out of the neoliberal creed of the United States since the late 1970s are fundamentally predicated on unchecked growth and domination. There is no question of them living "in equilibrium" with the world and we should accept this as their nature. They seek to take over and control everything. Given the chance they would usurp democratic governance and impose their way of "being" (of organising and conducting technological life) on every person on the planet. All that keeps them in check is other predatory companies cut from the same cloth. The state of war we are in, which we might call "late stage market capitalism" is presently the "best possible" dynamic alternative to tyrannical stasis.

So to answer my friend, I must say that sadly I do not see an end to cyberwar. Cyberwar defines our epoch. The information age is also the age of information warfare. Perhaps within my lifetime we will look back at the power of BigTech corporations as we now see the East India Company and Royal African Company. We will be astonished at the concentration of unchecked private power and the abuse of individual citizens as commercial chattel. Perhaps we will enter a new era of international relations when we look back at state hackers who target civilian infrastructure and politicians as an aberration and war crime.

Until we find a very different way of organising technology, moving past the industrialised, centralised and capital-centric phase, I think we must live with perpetual cyberwar. The best we can hope is that it becomes a less bloody and painful substitute for existing forms of trans-national and class war.

So next time someone tells me that I "must use Microsoft, because their system demands it" or that they "Don't take cash" or that they feel terribly progressive to declare they have "nothing to fear and nothing to hide", I cannot help but hear the cries of a frightened soul, bewildered, cowering in a foxhole. Who can blame them as the shells burst all around, in a world where simply paying your bus fare and buying a snack is a combative adventure in not being screwed-over by one kind of bandit or another? War is seldom seen at the individual level. Nothing makes sense at the time. To live in war is to live from one moment to the next. Only decades later can a "picture" be seen.

But let's try to see that the technological war is not Kaczynski's struggle against technology itself (a ridiculous position) nor against simplistic exploiters of technology who prey on the weak - a winnable but costly and indecisive war. It is against a kind of laziness or drive toward self-infantilisation. It is the war of Eros and Thanatos, where technology has come to represent the forces "of death and forgetfulness" (Plato). It is a war against "convenience". It is against defeatism itself, shrugging apathy and learned helplessness.

We've certainly taken a wrong turning to get into this struggle. But there is no retreat now. We let the "efficiency" goals of industrial society become the goals of all of humanity and enshrined them in broken systems. The wonderful hope, as anthropologist David Graeber put it, is that we can remake the rules any time we like. That's the beauty of software. Let the reckless industrialists and greedy hucksters build the system at their expense, and then one night while they sleep, we'll just flip the switch and change the operating system. Perhaps it is the most bloodless form of war imaginable, but it is a cyberwar nonetheless.

This internal struggle is best summarised by Gen. Patton and author D.H Lawrence who say:

"Men are at war with each other because each man is at war with himself." – General George S. Patton

"To every man, the war is himself". – D. H. Lawrence

Simply, we will master technology or it will master us, and that outcome is entirely our choosing - which Einstein saw as the most important aspect of Science - it's moral imperative.