LIKEWAR
Add the work of P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking in LIKEWAR: THE WEAPONIZATION OF SOCIAL MEDIA to the essential modern library of understanding – alongside Naomi Klein’s THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Timothy Snyder’s ON TYRANNY, Zeynep Tufecki’s TWITTER AND TEAR GAS, Rebecca Solnit’s HOPE IN THE DARK, and Jane Mayer’s DARK MONEY – that illuminate the forces known and unknown shaping our lives.
More invasive and personal than bombs or simple hacking, the concept of LikeWar represents the new frontline of hybridized warfare, a potent cocktail of Cold War propaganda and Taylor Swift delivered intravenously and immediately via our ubiquitous social media networks to take advantage of and weaponize the rampant stateside deficiencies in media literacy (rightly pointed out by the authors as not only an issue of education but one now of national security — though one clearly not in the self-interest of the Orange Malignancy’s regime) and the anger and outrage of those most susceptible to pernicious manipulation (as we are each capable of being; it takes only but a momentary lowering of our bullshit detectors and a single mindless share for the false idea, the false story, to metastasize like the cancer that it is – no matter how much we might tell ourselves otherwise) to rewire the mind of either a single person, a single group, or an entire country and exploit the resultant short circuit for ignoble and sometimes deadly ends.
Indeed, in hindsight and with the understanding provided by LIKEWAR’s terrifying dissemination of the circumstances beind its rise, the surprising thing about The Orange Malignancy’s 2016 victory* is not that he won* or that he replays this victory* over and again, like Al Bundy and his state championship glory days, to anyone within earshot (“‘This war doesn’t end with the last rocket,'” an Israeli activist told the authors), but rather that, given the forces demonstrably at work in the murk, we were shocked by that victory* in the first place – but then again, as Singer and Brooking point out, “…people like to be right; they hate to proven wrong.”
A crucial read.
