⚔️ Wars: the Monthly Read #2
In August 2018, I launched a monthly newsletter where I recommend quality content from media and blogs that help understand tech & politics. Here’s the September issue.
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Hello again to the first subscribers, and welcome aboard for the newcomers.
I received useful feedback after the first letter last month, which helped me rethink the format in order to make this newsletter more valuable for you while sticking to its original spirit — that is, to help skip the too often pointless and draining breaking news craze, and focus on the best reads instead.
The monthly read remains about tech & politics, and will still be sent every last Thursday of the month. It will feature one topic per month, about which I will recommend up to 3 outstanding media articles, blog posts and op-eds that helped me shape my understanding of the issues at stake or challenged my views. 🤔
As usual, I am still open to feedback on the format as well as thoughts on the topic of each letter.
Now, let’s go. While in August we discussed liquid democracy, this month let’s switch to a completely different topic ⤵️
If you happen to be A/ sometimes watching news on TV, and B/ a normal human being, you probably surprised yourself thinking at some point that we were living in dark times that could easily escalate to terrifying, large-scale wars like history has plenty of examples to provide.
Fortunately, our world has dramatically changed over the last decades, and what comes first to your mind is probably too outdated to actually happen. Not that the future holds no possibility for major conflicts though, but they sure won’t look like those of the past. That is what this monthly read is about.
Now omnipresent in the media, Harari first blew my mind with a time.com column last year. In it, the famous author of “Sapiens” mathematically demonstrates how wars are becoming impossible to win.
Although they may seem like pure madness retrospectively, wars are almost always based on a rational bet: that the gains will outweigh, preferably by far, the losses. The digital transition of our economy makes this condition harder to fulfill than ever, for two main reasons.
First, it puts potentially highly damaging technologies in the hands of the many, thus dramatically reducing the chances of suffering low losses in any attack. Second, most of the wealth created in our world is now information, which can’t be seized by armed forces. As a result, war gains are much harder to capture. For instance, it would make no sense for China or Russia to militarily raid and invade California, and then hope to seize the enormous amount of wealth created there. Or, as perfectly summed up in one sentence in the column : “In the great age of conquerors, warfare was a low-damage, high-profit affair. […] Nuclear weapons and cyber warfare, by contrast, are high-damage, low-profit technologies.”
Therefore, if wars cease to be a rational bet in the world that is emerging today, they will become less likely to happen by the hour. At the very least, when it comes to traditional, armed conflicts that previous generations were accustomed to witness.
This doesn’t mean that practices we could think as being from another time are to disappear altogether.
In a piece almost resembling a spy novel published this Summer, Politico gave us a glimpse of what spy wars look like in today’s California. A long-time interest for foreign intelligence agencies, the San Francisco area has increasingly become a primary target for spies as Silicon Valley was emerging as a leading spot of global-scale economical and cultural power.
As could be expected, the main concern for US counter-intelligence is a sustained activity from both Chinese and Russian services, although the two have diametrically different approaches when it comes to spying on foreign activities : while Moscow favors the targeting of precisely selected persons of interest, Beijing has a strategy that attempts to use its nationals on a more massive scale. Western nations are also active there, and even France is mentioned. But the stakes are not really the same with “friendly” intelligence services.
Beyond the thrill of cold war-like anecdotes, what this piece efficiently reminds us is the switch of our economies and societies to ones where the strategic assets, those that will closely interest foreign powers, are increasingly information and software.
Then, assuming that conflicts are not about to disappear entirely, what shape could they take in the world of information and software we are just entering?
A lot has been said about the rise of hybrid wars — conflicts that merge traditional and novel weapons and tactics. With it, the concept of cyber warfare has been trendy since the first major cyberattack occurred against a nation, which happened with Estonia in 2007. Back then though, the attack was everything but sophisticated ; and it became clear ever since that future cyber conflicts would be different. But how different?
I didn’t really realize what cyber wars could look like until Wired published “The Code that Crashed the World”, subtitled “The Untold Story of NotPetya, the Most Devastating Cyberattack in History”, on the cover of its September issue.
Probably designed by Russia, the worm NotPetya targeted Ukraine in June 2017, where it wiped out data of up to 10 percent of all computers of the country. Wired sees it as yet another proof that the country has become “a scorched-earth testing ground for Russian cyberwar tactics”. And as the cyberspace knows no tangible border, the worm has spread to other countries as well — from Denmark to France to… Russia –, eventually reaching a global damage estimated at around 10 billion USD. As a then-cybersecurity advisor for the Trump administration sees it: “While there was no loss of life, it was the equivalent of using a nuclear bomb to achieve a small tactical victory. […] That’s a degree of recklessness we can’t tolerate on the world stage.”
The creepy part about NotPetya is also that we don’t even know its original intent: was it simply designed to destroy all that data, or was this just the cleanup phase after continued spying on devices across Ukraine and beyond? What’s particularly ironic about the worm is that it was created thanks to an unfortunate leak from the works of… the US National Security Agency. And if there’s one certainty about NotPetya, it is that almost every expert of the field agrees the near future will witness more attacks of the kind. So we better know what it looks like.
Have a great monthly read and see you next month! 👋
