Page 159 - Cyber Defense eMagazine March 2024

More recently, the asymmetric battlefield moved into cyber space. My hackers paralyze your bank
account, your utility company, or even perhaps your country. As present as this danger continues to be,
cyberspace is in many ways yesterday’s battlefield.

Today’s true battlefield is Reality itself.

The attack on Reality hasn’t come out of nowhere. We are living in a fragmented ecosystem. Information
washes over to us from screens, speakers, and networks more prolific than anything history has ever
known. Our human brains still process content roughly as quickly as our ancestors, but the cacophony is
real, overwhelming, and fast. We have become polarized, pushed further and further into echo chambers
by algorithms and balkanized by pressure from our peer groups. Trust and credibility are at all-time lows
(check out the Edelman Trust Barometer), no matter whether we are looking at government, business,
religion, non-profits, credentials, or anything else that used to command a level of respect. Some of this
is an unintended consequence of seemingly harmless tech, and some of it is absolutely intentional.

The merchants of doubt have set the stage. But the weapons just got so much scarier. Social media,
algorithms, and hacking are still wreaking havoc, but we are about to enter a hall of mirrors brought to
you by AI, bots, and deepfakes that render totally believable facsimiles of faces, voices, and whole
people. This is next level information distortion.

I’d like to point out that I am no luddite. I’m a tech investor and a believer in innovation. But – and maybe
because of this – I respect technology and its potential. I recognize that technology itself doesn’t (yet)
have agency or morality of its own. But we rely on those who wield it to act with good intentions, knowing
that the world is full of bad actors.

Some of this is harmless and, at least at first, a little absurd: Bored Ape and other NFTs raised more cash
than climate technologies in 2021. People used real money to buy real estate in the (infinite) Metaverse.
But the ridiculous can so easily become weaponized. Now, cheaply accessible technologies like
OpenAI’s ChatGPT4 are being essentially tested on a global scale, placing the information equivalent of
nuclear weapons in the hands of individuals. Individuals, criminal enterprises, and even nations can and
do control bot farms and hacker groups, build the hard infrastructure of the digital world, and even direct
the algorithms and policies of entire social media platforms.

The very decentralization of the threat is also scary. The Reality War is a funhouse where there is no
truth (everyone has their own “facts”), where everyone is overwhelmed and there is no common ground,
and where no one knows any better (certainly not an expert!). Even the blue checkmark that was tenuous
indication at best before is no more.

Thirty years ago, when Francis Fukuyama wrote about the End of History and the Last Man, he argued
that Western style liberal democracies (and the associated financial systems) were the winners of the
great human search for models of governance and economics. Of course, this analysis requires societies
to make generally good decisions most of the time, which in turn requires reasonably good data. After
all, for a citizen and a consumer, good information is a key to making good decisions: otherwise, garbage
in, garbage out. How are liberal democracies to survive in a world at war with Reality?

We’ve been wondering whose Century would follow the American Century. Maybe it’s Nobody’s Century.
Isn’t that scary? A Reality War with no hegemon to enforce social norms. Doesn’t it feel like a global

Cyber Defense eMagazine – March 2024 Edition 159
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