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The funny thing about history is that you always look back from the luxury of time and you can see these massive events taking place, you can understand the dynamics. We don't have that perspective when we are in it, so my idea of studying history was to remap the past onto the present, so that we might gain insight into what’s happening now.

This weird concept that we have developed, essential, non-essential work, this arbitrary division of what will matter and what will not matter. It wasn't until I was swept up in the uprising and really asking myself what's happening—there was this amazing video of this silent moment of people with their fists up, thousands of people on their knees, and it was just incredibly moving—I had this realization that this was the essential work, the work that we need to be doing.

I think we all lack a historical distance right now to make sense of this moment. But art can provide us with an abstracted or a historical lens, that gives us distance or a sense of a time bigger than the moment we're in.

When you were describing this 1990s utopian idea of the internet as public space, I was struck by the contrast with how things turned out. In both our physical and digital reality, we have lost the commons. Is Instagram a public space?

there's something virus-like about social media anyway, in the way that it operates, in the way that it taps into our physiology on a chemical level in our brain. It’s designed to function that way. And combining that kind of functionality with our addiction to or the dominance of visual culture, it's just sort of like a deadly combination. We get addicted and we just consume incredible amounts of visual information every day.

It really is true that very rarely you will see a photograph of a dead body in the printed newspaper. It reminds me, for example, of the absence of the flag-draped coffins that come when soldiers return from war. Because we're taught to think about COVID-19 as a kind of war, maybe it makes sense to really think about that.

If you don't see the picture of the dead body, there's no dead body. It's the reason why if I teach a foundation class, I always show the students this famous Stan Brakhage film, The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (1971). It’s a half hour silent film of multiple autopsies. We have this extended conversation about just how completely absent images of our bodies like that are from our cultural experience.

those are the images that people wanted to see. They were widely distributed; you could buy postcards of lynched men and women because people wanted to celebrate that. There is a completely different attitude at work. One could say they're doing the work of the same ideology, but in opposite directions. It would be hard to talk about a history of photography in this country and not talk about lynching photographs.

"The map is mapping us," says Martin Dodge, a senior lecturer in human geography at Manchester University. "I'm not paranoid, but I am quite suspicious and cynical about products that appear to be innocent and neutral, but that are actually vacuuming up all kinds of behavioural and attitudinal data."

In a world of GPS-enabled smartphones, you're not just consulting Google's or Apple's data stores when you consult a map: you're adding to them.

"There's kind of a fine line that you run," said Ed Parsons, Google's chief geospatial technologist, in a session at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado, "between this being really useful, and it being creepy."

"Google and Apple are saying that they want control over people's real and imagined space."

It can be easy to assume that maps are objective: that the world is out there, and that a good map is one that represents it accurately. But that's not true. Any square kilometre of the planet can be described in an infinite number of ways: in terms of its natural features, its weather, its socio-economic profile, or what you can buy in the shops there. Traditionally, the interests reflected in maps have been those of states and their armies, because they were the ones who did the map-making, and the primary use of many such maps was military. (If you had the better maps, you stood a good chance of winning the battle. The logo of Britain's Ordnance Survey still includes a visual reference to the 18th-century War Department.) Now, the power is shifting. "Every map," the cartography curator Lucy Fellowes once said, "is someone's way of getting you to look at the world his or her way."

The question cartographers are always being asked at cocktail parties, says Heyman, is whether there's really any map-making still left to do: we've mapped the whole planet already, haven't we? The question could hardly be more misconceived. We are just beginning to grasp what it means to live in a world in which maps are everywhere - and in which, by using maps, we are mapped ourselves.

Hitler, unlike Stalin or Mao, was an intuitive master of media stagecraft. David Bowie’s too-clever quip that Hitler was the first rock star, for which Bowie was widely reviled at the time, was spot-on.

the media like Hitler because Hitler liked the media

he prefigured postmodernity: the annexation of politics by Hollywood and Madison Avenue, the rise of the celebrity as a secular icon, the confusion of image and reality in a Matrix world. He regarded existence “as a kind of permanent parade before a gigantic audience” (Fest), calculating the visual impact of every histrionic pose, every propaganda tagline, every monumental building

His psychopathology is a queasy funhouse reflection, straight out of Nightmare Alley, of the instrumental rationality of the machine age. The genocidal assembly lines of Hitler’s death camps are a grotesque parody of Fordist mechanization, just as the Nazis’ fastidious recycling of every remnant of their victims but their smoke—their gold fillings melted down for bullion, their hair woven into socks for U-boat crewmen—is a depraved caricature of the Taylorist mania for workplace efficiency.

there’s something perversely comforting about Hitler’s unchallenged status as the metaphysical gravitational center of all our attempts at philosophizing evil

Perhaps that’s why he continues to mesmerize us: because he flickers, irresolvably, between the seemingly inhuman and the all too human.

By denying everyone’s capability, at least in theory, for Hitlerian evil, we let ourselves off the hook

Yet Hitler, paradoxically, is also a shriveled untermensch, the protypical nonentity; a face in the crowd in an age of crowds, instantly forgettable despite his calculated efforts to brand himself (the toothbrush mustache of the military man coupled with the flopping forelock of the art-school bohemian)

there was always a comic distance between the public image of the world-bestriding, godlike Fuhrer and his Inner Adolf, a nail-biting nebbish tormented by flatulence. Knowingly or not, the Downfall parodies dance in the gap between the two. More immediately, they rely on the tried-and-true gimmick of bathos. What makes the Downfall parodies so consistently hilarious is the incongruity of whatever viral topic is making the Fuhrer go ballistic and the outsized scale of his gotterdammerung-strength tirade

The Downfall meme dramatizes the cultural logic of our remixed, mashed-up times, when digital technology allows us to loot recorded history, prying loose any signifier that catches our magpie eyes and repurposing it to any end. The near-instantaneous speed with which parodists use these viral videos to respond to current events underscores the extent to which the social Web, unlike the media ecologies of Hitler’s day, is a many-to-many phenomenon, more collective cacophony than one-way rant. As well, the furor (forgive pun) over YouTube’s decision to capitulate to the movie studio’s takedown demand, rather than standing fast in defense of Fair Use (a provision in copyright law that protects the re-use of a work for purposes of parody), indicates the extent to which ordinary people feel that commercial culture is somehow theirs, to misread or misuse as the spirit moves them.

the closest thing we have to a folk culture, the connective tissue that binds us as a society

SPIEGEL: Can you also get your revenge on him by using comedy? Brooks: Yes, absolutely. Of course it is impossible to take revenge for 6 million murdered Jews. But by using the medium of comedy, we can try to rob Hitler of his posthumous power and myths. [...] We take away from him the holy seriousness that always surrounded him and protected him like a cordon.”

risking the noose, some Germans laughed off their fears and mocked the Orwellian boot stamping on the human face, giving vent to covert opposition through flüsterwitze (“whispered jokes”). Incredibly, even Jews joked about their plight, drawing on the absurdist humor that is quintessentially Jewish to mock the Nazis even as they lightened the intolerable burden of Jewish life in the shadow of the swastika. Rapaport offers a sample of Jewish humor in Hitler’s Germany: “A Jew is arrested during the war, having been denounced for killing a Nazi at 10 P.M. and even eating the brain of his victim. This is his defense: In the first place, a Nazi hasn’t got any brain. Secondly, a Jew doesn’t eat anything that comes from a pig. And thirdly, he could not have killed the Nazi at 10 P.M. because at that time everybody listens to the BBC broadcast.”

The combatants view this as a Hobbesian information war of all against all and a tactical arms race; the other side sees it as a peacetime civil governance problem.

Our most technically-competent agencies are prevented from finding and countering influence operations because of the concern that they might inadvertently engage with real U.S. citizens as they target Russia’s digital illegals and ISIS’ recruiters. This capability gap is eminently exploitable; why execute a lengthy, costly, complex attack on the power grid when there is relatively no cost, in terms of dollars as well as consequences, to attack a society’s ability to operate with a shared epistemology? This leaves us in a terrible position, because there are so many more points of failure

Cyberwar, most people thought, would be fought over infrastructure — armies of state-sponsored hackers and the occasional international crime syndicate infiltrating networks and exfiltrating secrets, or taking over critical systems. That’s what governments prepared and hired for; it’s what defense and intelligence agencies got good at. It’s what CSOs built their teams to handle. But as social platforms grew, acquiring standing audiences in the hundreds of millions and developing tools for precision targeting and viral amplification, a variety of malign actors simultaneously realized that there was another way. They could go straight for the people, easily and cheaply. And that’s because influence operations can, and do, impact public opinion. Adversaries can target corporate entities and transform the global power structure by manipulating civilians and exploiting human cognitive vulnerabilities at scale. Even actual hacks are increasingly done in service of influence operations: stolen, leaked emails, for example, were profoundly effective at shaping a national narrative in the U.S. election of 2016.

The substantial time and money spent on defense against critical-infrastructure hacks is one reason why poorly-resourced adversaries choose to pursue a cheap, easy, low-cost-of-failure psy-ops war instead

Information war combatants have certainly pursued regime change: there is reasonable suspicion that they succeeded in a few cases (Brexit) and clear indications of it in others (Duterte). They’ve targeted corporations and industries. And they’ve certainly gone after mores: social media became the main battleground for the culture wars years ago, and we now describe the unbridgeable gap between two polarized Americas using technological terms like filter bubble. But ultimately the information war is about territory — just not the geographic kind. In a warm information war, the human mind is the territory. If you aren’t a combatant, you are the territory. And once a combatant wins over a sufficient number of minds, they have the power to influence culture and society, policy and politics.

If an operation is effective, the message will be pushed into the feeds of sympathetic real people who will amplify it themselves. If it goes viral or triggers a trending algorithm, it will be pushed into the feeds of a huge audience. Members of the media will cover it, reaching millions more. If the content is false or a hoax, perhaps there will be a subsequent correction article – it doesn’t matter, no one will pay attention to it.

The 2014-2016 influence operation playbook went something like this: a group of digital combatants decided to push a specific narrative, something that fit a long-term narrative but also had a short-term news hook. They created content: sometimes a full blog post, sometimes a video, sometimes quick visual memes. The content was posted to platforms that offer discovery and amplification tools. The trolls then activated collections of bots and sockpuppets to blanket the biggest social networks with the content. Some of the fake accounts were disposable amplifiers, used mostly to create the illusion of popular consensus by boosting like and share counts. Others were highly backstopped personas run by real human beings, who developed standing audiences and long-term relationships with sympathetic influencers and media; those accounts were used for precision messaging with the goal of reaching the press. Israeli company Psy Group marketed precisely these services to the 2016 Trump Presidential campaign; as their sales brochure put it, “Reality is a Matter of Perception”.

This shift from targeting infrastructure to targeting the minds of civilians was predictable. Theorists  like Edward Bernays, Hannah Arendt, and Marshall McLuhan saw it coming decades ago. As early as 1970, McLuhan wrote, in Culture is our Business, “World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.”

Combatants are now focusing on infiltration rather than automation: leveraging real, ideologically-aligned people to inadvertently spread real, ideologically-aligned content instead. Hostile state intelligence services in particular are now increasingly adept at operating collections of human-operated precision personas, often called sockpuppets, or cyborgs, that will escape punishment under the the bot laws. They will simply work harder to ingratiate themselves with real American influencers, to join real American retweet rings. If combatants need to quickly spin up a digital mass movement, well-placed personas can rile up a sympathetic subreddit or Facebook Group populated by real people, hijacking a community in the way that parasites mobilize zombie armies.

Attempts to legislate away 2016 tactics primarily have the effect of triggering civil libertarians, giving them an opportunity to push the narrative that regulators just don’t understand technology, so any regulation is going to be a disaster.

The entities best suited to mitigate the threat of any given emerging tactic will always be the platforms themselves, because they can move fast when so inclined or incentivized. The problem is that many of the mitigation strategies advanced by the platforms are the information integrity version of greenwashing; they’re a kind of digital security theater, the TSA of information warfare

Algorithmic distribution systems will always be co-opted by the best resourced or most technologically capable combatants. Soon, better AI will rewrite the playbook yet again — perhaps the digital equivalent of  Blitzkrieg in its potential for capturing new territory. AI-generated audio and video deepfakes will erode trust in what we see with our own eyes, leaving us vulnerable both to faked content and to the discrediting of the actual truth by insinuation. Authenticity debates will commandeer media cycles, pushing us into an infinite loop of perpetually investigating basic facts. Chronic skepticism and the cognitive DDoS will increase polarization, leading to a consolidation of trust in distinct sets of right and left-wing authority figures – thought oligarchs speaking to entirely separate groups

platforms aren’t incentivized to engage in the profoundly complex arms race against the worst actors when they can simply point to transparency reports showing that they caught a fair number of the mediocre actors

What made democracies strong in the past — a strong commitment to free speech and the free exchange of ideas — makes them profoundly vulnerable in the era of democratized propaganda and rampant misinformation. We are (rightfully) concerned about silencing voices or communities. But our commitment to free expression makes us disproportionately vulnerable in the era of chronic, perpetual information war. Digital combatants know that once speech goes up, we are loathe to moderate it; to retain this asymmetric advantage, they push an all-or-nothing absolutist narrative that moderation is censorship, that spammy distribution tactics and algorithmic amplification are somehow part of the right to free speech.

We need an understanding of free speech that is hardened against the environment of a continuous warm war on a broken information ecosystem. We need to defend the fundamental value from itself becoming a prop in a malign narrative.

Unceasing information war is one of the defining threats of our day. This conflict is already ongoing, but (so far, in the United States) it’s largely bloodless and so we aren’t acknowledging it despite the huge consequences hanging in the balance. It is as real as the Cold War was in the 1960s, and the stakes are staggeringly high: the legitimacy of government, the persistence of societal cohesion, even our ability to respond to the impending climate crisis.

Influence operations exploit divisions in our society using vulnerabilities in our information ecosystem. We have to move away from treating this as a problem of giving people better facts, or stopping some Russian bots, and move towards thinking about it as an ongoing battle for the integrity of our information infrastructure – easily as critical as the integrity of our financial markets.