The Evolution of Information Warfare – The Inevitability Curve EP1

This is Textron tv. Hello folks. Welcome to the Inevitability Curve.

I am your host, Chris Blak, and in this series we talked to interesting folks about where we have been, where we are, and maybe, you know, some idea of where we're going on various topics. So, with me today is the great Winta win. How are you doing?

Uh, I don't like that introduction, Chris, but the, but everything's got some irony. It, it's okay. Right.

You know, we know each other. It's, it's Well, and what I mean, right. You know, the, the, the reason we're talking here today is 'cause you've had an interesting life.

You've done interesting things. Right. And we have talked cybersecurity and so forth, but we're not really gonna do that today.

Okay. This is, this is, you know, metamore, you know, your new book, your Focus, you know, you and I and and various friends have been talking about this for the last couple years. We all know it, you know, the information warfare, disinformation, misinformation, influence campaigns at a certain spot with that today.

And you've been thinking about that a lot, and everything about where you've been in your life and the things you've thought about. And before that, I mean, we can go back to single cell, you know, life and how it responded to messaging in occasions if we'd like. But, you know, and I, again, when I say the great, you know, I, I mean it, you know, to a certain extent, you know, you're a great guy.

I wouldn't, you wouldn't be one of my good friends if you weren't. Um, but it's, you know, we're all, we're all in the middle of this, right? You know, it's, it's the, the, let me, let me see if I can promise it this way.

We have the internet now, and everybody can see this, and they can talk to each other and they can comment on everybody on Earth, Facebook. Right? That's new.

And we've been here long enough to get some of the emergent properties that get us into nation state disinformation campaigns and all those wonderful things that, that are worth spending time on. That's what I'd like to dig into with you today. So, any, any initial thoughts before we get into the, before, during, and after?

Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm, I'm, I'm just gonna say it. I, you know, when I got involved with this project, involved with, when I came up with a stupid ass idea to, to start looking, I guess it was eight years ago, into how neuroscience and security awareness was, where it all began, just kind of behavioral thing. And then I met a rollercoaster designer who's, and some stuff going on in England.

Um, I thought I was looking at a purely technical issue. Okay, here comes the metaverse, yada yada, where are we gonna plug on the sims in the idss? And how, how's that all gonna work?

And kind of just gonna prognosticate, uh, based upon, um, some of the technologies that are being proposed. And then I guess more than halfway through it, it was, I left out the human being, oh s**t, time to start all over again. And that I gave 11 talks in five days in Europe, and they beat the crap out of me righteously.

So I'm not b******g. I mean, these are my, you know, I, I, in fact dedicate a piece of the book to my Dutch friends for putting me back on the straight and narrow. Um, it's from a cybersecurity standpoint, from everything I've ever done in my whole life, it sort of has come to, uh, a lot of holy s**t moments.

And with regards to the nation state issue you brought up when I was, um, I went into depression at one point in the book. It was towards the end when I was writing it, and I, I hit depression when I realized, um, that the United States is fundamentally defenseless against any form of cognitive warfare. Um, a cognitive Pearl Harbor may have already hit us, may not.

And that gets into political discussions, uh, which we're not gonna do here. But when you look at meta war, uh, being the art and science of manipulating reality, well, um, all of that turned into, we have seen in the US a systematic, uh, dismantling of all private and public research and efforts into cognitive security. And that when I realized that it scared the living hell outta me.

Well, and, and this is, I, I think we can bend to that to a, to a positive conversation, right? And this has always been my point about inevitability curves, right? You know, and quite a number of things.

And where I started with all this, the internet itself, it's like, inevitably we're gonna get to the point we're at now. And if we are, then 30 years ago, or 20, you know, certain things are worth considering. You know, I slightly more limited, uh, version of that is to say that there are possible futures where we have in fact, figured this out.

You know, I don't believe we're a hundred percent guaranteed to never work any of this stuff out, which means that while we may not reach there, there are futures where we can stand and look back and say, aha, that's how we did it. Right? And I think if we look all the way back, let me go roll that first banner for kicks, you know, and as I said in the, in the intro, weekly, if you like, you know, start with single cell life, because I think, you know, there's lessons in there that we can use today, or understandings because just how you were create messaging and respond to messaging and the, and the, the survival characteristics, uh, benefits of that up to what we're doing today.

But we don't have to, you know, if you've set in your, uh, in your intro, in our lifetimes, you know, this, this has actually evolved a great deal. We could look at, you know, human history, recent human history, the last couple centuries, the last couple of millennia, and see these patterns of evolving. So when we look back at where we've been, we have a couple starting spots we can, we can choose, but again, the shape of this curve, I think goes literally all the way back.

So, where do you wanna start? Well, the curve, I, well, when you say curve, I kinda look at it almost as a hysteresis curve that we, uh, everything up through. And I'm gonna pick a couple dates.

You know, some people say, Gutenberg, okay, you wanna play that game? Cool. Some people say the telephone.

That's cool. Um, I, and then they go, Shannon and Von Neuman and those eras, and, okay, okay, that's cool. I still, based upon what I've learned, or I think I've learned and wish I would love to argue about, is that when the, it really hit the fan for us, the curve, that steep part of the hysteresis or hockey stick for some marketing folks, um, really began in, I'm gonna say 1956.

And I picked that date only because that was IBM's first hard drive. And, uh, it's a date. You wanna say the, uh, the, the what, 4,004 by Intel.

Cool, whatever. But it's about the information glut, it's about TMI. Everything we're seeing today is about one fundamental thing.

Are we as human beings able to coexist with technology? And that ended up being the existential question that I examined and came up with some ideas on. They don't have to be right, but there does need to be a discussion if our existential survival is of importance to anybody.

Well, and, and you know, I I, I always try to be clear when I'm thinking through, you know, future, you know, trends like this that I, I, I could, A, a I could be wrong, and b, the answer maybe something I don't like, you know, maybe open democracy and freedom of speech and so forth is not sustainable over the long term. And only authoritarian, you know, dictatorship basically will be the human norm for millions of years, like forever. Um, I don't think that's true.

You know, I tend to think that there are, are among the possible futures. There are ways to figure out all these things as we keep doing, but maybe I'm wrong. And this case, you see all the, the, the, you know, I like, uh, using Hammurabi, you know, in supply chain.

I think there's a lot of this, the, my cybersecurity day job, you know, supply chain is the thing. And I like to harken back to all these points in history where we've done similar things and we word it out. But in this case, maybe we don't, you know, maybe we can't handle the TMI and the AI and all the other acronyms that, that are coming at us.

Well, the, the, the biggest difference, and, you know, people say, well, it's happened before. All right, all right. We, we'll say again, Gutenberg, the telephone, radio, and tv, every one of those was a passive form of communication to the listener, recipient use, or whatever term.

To us, that is entirely different than having active participation with a complex set of oodle loops, where you, as a human being in your behavior and reaction to content becomes integral to the next bit of content that comes your way. Now you are part of the system. Is that symbiotic?

Is it parasitic? And this is a lot of what of I've explored technically, and that we are not tuned the deal natively at, uh, coming out to shoot as babies. We are not tuned to survive with technology.

We're tuned to survive with lions and bears and tigers. OMI maybe. But that's really about it.

Tech is not part of the human innate survival mechanism. And we're gonna have to learn how to coexist a lot better if one of the inevitable curves and the probabilities comes out that we do make it, you know, I I, in the, in 1998, I got a head-on collision guy ran red light at 70 miles an hour, you know, uh, uh, fan it pretty bad. And then physiotherapy, a number of months later, I was saying to the, to the, uh, therapist, you know, I get this, if I hold a cell phone to my head to this day for more than a couple of seconds, my arm just starts going numb.

Like a little nerve thing, right? And, uh, and one of the little thing, and he, he said, you know, you're really designed to survive falling out of a short tree and then limp it, what was the rest of your life? So at a certain point, you gotta say, you know, I got hit with the, the energy of a, a Sidewinder missile, and I'm sitting here today and, and yeah.

So we're not, we're really not built for this, right? And I, I, and, and I do, you know, I have my concerns, right? We have so many of the things that excite me, like AI right now.

You know, I'm obsessed with the idea that every human being in the developed world, at least will have a dedicated personal assistant in the foreseeable future. And I think that's in your 3, 5, 7 year sort of, you know, near term future at some point. And what does that even mean?

Because as, as you said a second ago, to be clear, this has never happened before, ever, all of human history. You know, what does it even mean if every single one of us has somebody who's always paying attention? Knows, you know, and just does the things that if you're, you're an actual, you know, big business executive, and you have an assistant that has so many benefits, we don't really know what that means.

You know, that much effectiveness and productivity at the same time in a, in a less positive direction. Yeah, we're not really billed for this. Maybe we can't figure it out, you know, but, but, but these, you know, if there is a, a, a success, I think it lies down the resonant path of, of history.

It, it's history does not repeat, but it does fine. I think those lessons, it, it, it is amplifying, uh, it's an amplified effect. The effect was the same.

But it's so much further into the noise level way back when, uh, first simple of writing, whether you're gonna go with runo runo or you're gonna go with, uh, QA form, there was some form of writing that was attempting to communicate. And again, it was passive. So it's all down there in that noise level until, and again, my hockey stick, I, I pick a date, we can argue anytime over, but does it matter?

Same thing when we, when we were all doing info war, everybody goes, well, we need a definition. No, you don't. That puts you into the box.

And once you're in the box, you see nothing else. And you're to the fundamental problem is all I see is all there is. And that is one of the most limiting mindsets you can have.

So it's a curve. Everything is a curve, as you know, I've been ranting for how many decades now, and I don't, there there are answers. Are they gonna work?

It's gonna take a huge interdisciplinary effort and somebody at national levels to actually give a s**t. Well, let's take that to the present, right? You know, so this is where we are right now, you know, and as, as we both said more than once in this, in this conversation already, you know, it's an we're uda folks, observe, orient, decide, act.

The world is what it is. You're in it at a certain place. You just are, which means you have a couple of choices.

Ah, sorry. You should pick one and just try that and then go back to the top, right? So we are here right now, and I'm gonna riff for a second on, on something you touched on, like, yeah, I think the US as a, as a nation state is relatively un unprotected.

We don't have any nation state defenses against this. Things like fact checkers and so forth. You know, I think we exercise some components, but we don't have a plan and we're not organized.

And that's not the case everywhere in the world today. It was five years ago, if not today, in Europe. You know, you know, as a good example, there are folks among the, you know, our friends and colleagues working with serious official nation state, uh, EU organizations to put together the systematic sort of defenses that has information security people you and I expect.

So we're there today, right? And what else, what are the current state, like where we're right now, what are your pros and cons, worries, hopes about today? Well, the comparison to the EU and uk, um, it's a shame we have to say those two you for a few years.

We could just say eu. Now we gotta do both. Um, they are so far ahead of us in this, and I don't mean necess technically.

Yeah, they're doing stuff. They're spending roughly public private investment. And the public side is about 5 billion euros a year into cognitive security.

Any, you know, we can talk whether it's misinformation, any of those things somewhere in that space. 'cause they're trying to understand it and they're trying to understand coexistence. We dismantled it.

Certain political forces in the United States dismantled every one of our efforts. And while, because, and over the last years, I mean, you know, I've spent how much time over in the EU because there are people I can talk to, there are people that are engaged. There are people that speak the language that are not afraid to.

And over here it has been stifled, extraordinarily stifled. So we've gotta get out of that mindset of the me versus we. We have to become part of the we issue.

'cause the EU understands that far more than we do in terms of, uh, it, it's collective mindset. It's individual mindset. It's a culturable cultural grasp on some sense of reality.

They get a hell of a lot more than we do. And I'm not gonna go down any of those other roads because we, well, lemme, lemme, lemme see if I can find a pro on both sides of the pond on this one. Right.

You know? 'cause you're right. You know, I, I see in the u it, you know, folks, in the kind of boring, pedantic, organized efforts, you know, that we all, you know, we each know from our lives and careers, it really requires to make these really large scale things work.

It's all well and good to say we should do a thing. But if you want, for example, a global internet, it requires thousands of hours of working group meetings, the standards and everything else, and committees and, you know, bureaucracy and so forth, or just doesn't bloody work all God. Right?

That's that. You do that. So shoot me.

Right? You know, it, it's, but again, it's one of these pros and cons. 'cause you know, I want a global internet and everything else, and therefore I have to put up with committees.

'cause I can't build it myself. Right? It won't work.

I won't, you know, so anyways, so my point being that we are actually going through this now in Europe, and you know, as a Yankee who's traveled the world like you have, I'm right now, I snow, I'm snowboarding in, uh, Canada. So I'm in Canada at the moment. Love Canada to death.

Um, but, you know, it helps me look at my own country, what is it America is actually good at? And I would argue that the same things that drive you and me a little mental right now, uh, is a benefit, right? That mm-hmm.

What they, what we do as America is, if a lot of us think something, and maybe it's stupid, we'll tend to run it up the flagpole anyways and run around and kick it and knock it over and set it on fire and see what it does. And our history shows, you know, that actually tends to work really well. And as a, you know, free speech, open source capitalist, you know, there I have a libertarian streak that's a lot broader than you would think, you know, based on my various, you know, public, you know, political stances.

But I get it. I'm not a MAGA guy, but I have lots of, you know, friends and family that way and, and some of 'em I love more than, you know, people who agree with me more and I get it right. You know, so I see the mechanisms and I understand why there's the pushback on censorship and all these things that can be perceived.

If I have a fringe position, maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong, but, you know, I would like to make sure I can say it. So we, I, I would argue that right now we have this dynamic tension. 'cause you know, I don't know anybody on the domestic political spectrum who isn't sick and tired of this.

Right? You know, it's not just because you're a liberal liberal, you know, a a west coast, elitist, techno, whatever, or they not, not you personally. But anyway, yeah, it, it's, it's, you know, anyways, you know, humans, this is the inability, curved thing, right?

None of us want to be uncomfortable in, in an odd, weird, and dangerous space for a long time, will tend back towards norm normalcy. I think what we have today is the right dynamic tension. Domestically, internationally, we just realize that it's not funny anymore.

We have to be able to run the lights. You know, we can't keep the power systems running. If at a certain point, which is now I can make a deep fo deep fake audio that sounds exactly like the boss of the person who has the switch and the power station, and just, you know, call them, play that, you know, audio and say, oh, if the town's on fire turn the power off.

You actually need to systematically engineer the, the solutions that will keep everything running, running in a world where deep fakes and, you know, concerted information, uh, influence campaigns are a thing. Uh, see the bones of that lane and you in your book and all the conversations you've been driving, that's where we are today. So, hopeful or not today before we get into tomorrow, um, there, there's, there's always an if, if, if it's gonna take in the United States as it has in Europe national agreement to do something, an openmindedness to do something to recognize the issue and without fear.

And right now there is so much fear in this country. Um, I, I have to assume, and I'm saying this without specific knowledge, that an awful lot of the efforts to shut down open research, publicly funded research and private research from the university level to the corporate level as well, and the pressures that have been put onto these organizations, um, that's gotta go away. If we're gonna do anything, if we're gonna solve anything, uh, if, if we're gonna remain inside of an isolationist, uh, echo chamber bubble isolated from the rest of the world, uh, when it comes to cognitive security, we're gonna lose.

And that couldn't be a possibly better bridge to the the next point, right? Because I think the evolutionary pressures, you know, socioeconomic, e evolutionary pressures is really what you're talking about there, you know, are what they are. And again, I may be wrong about this one, but this is, you know, I, I can't be more clear on this.

This is a point of mine. Free speech, open source, democracy, voting, capitalism, you know, I believe in these things structurally, you know, we need to implement various, you know, definitions. But I think that's just more competitive.

I think transparency is more competitive. I think it, the time and effort wasted at a personal, at a corporate, at a national level on not being transparent, not being appropriately honest. Right?

And, and again, as, as you know, folks like you and I have, have learned in our cybersecurity careers, there are answers to these things. We can share threat intelligence. Over the last 10, 20 years, we learned that and know the initial response from the corporate world of does this mean we're just telling everybody our weaknesses?

Does this mean we're giving away our intellectual property? And the answer is no. That would be, I don't know, dumb.

Maybe what we'll do is make sure that the people that you're already have a business relationship with, you actually literally signed contracts and you end user license agreements and so forth that they, under these circumstances get access to that information. In these kind we can engineer ways to deal with it, right? And when we do, every time we find a way to be more transparent, I think, and everywhere in the world, I think this is a human thing.

But again, I think this is something that America, you know, deserves credit for. We, you know, we should feel good about this because our history shows that like it or not, whatever we're arguing about at the time, we just pragmatically find out that just being more honest, more transparent, faster, you know, reduce the TMI just by telling the truth works. So I think that leans into fixing this in, in today's world.

Absolutely correct. And in, in, in, in older worlds, you could almost make the same argument. Um, and I use the phrase, he who controls the technology, controls the narrative.

Look at John d Rockefeller. He controlled the narrative over oil. Then along came Goodyear, who decided to control the narrative on rubber and rip up the railways of California and the West in order to be able to get rid of public transportation.

'cause everybody want needed his tires. So capitalism, yes, unrestrained capitalism. I also think we've seen an awful lot of the problems where it's more about me versus we and a lot of the messes that we're in.

But no matter what the technology is, there has been a bump. And how, you know, is it I punctuated equilibrium? Eh, and one thing that you used a phrase, and I'm not gonna argue with you, I'm gonna argue with you, uh, you say tension.

I, i, I kind of would like to approach it from the standpoint of Buckminster Fuller's word, uh, tene, where that there is a balance of tension and integrity between in its given system. And how do you keep it from going chaotic? Well, that's what upper, lower bandwidth bound, all that stuff that, you know, we've all written about for all the years comes in.

And I think now with, with metal war, this is a potential tipping point because the cybersecurity industry as the experience, as you said, to do those parallels from our, what we've been through for 40 some years into, when you look at cognitive security, an awful lot of it is the same. It's just, we gotta get this kind of done and the terminology and what do we mean and bring in the psychs and the neuros and bring all these people to be able to make those metaphors actually actionable. Well, and, and I think the, you know, last one to end on I think is, is on everybody's mind right now, Ukraine, you know, Ukraine and Russia are locked in a, you know, two and a half year battle now, you know, completely, you know, Samson and, uh, not actually delay it, uh, bigger and smaller, you know, the, those little little dog is, is, uh, doing really, really well in this fight.

And so much of it has to do with, I think I would argue transparency. And while any sane person doesn't, you know, like military conflict, the reality is it drives a lot of evolutionary pressure. And we're seeing, I think, in front of us right now, uh, transparency versus opaqueness.

Because as you say, in Russia, Waterbury Putin controls the narrative period. And ev you know, not a political statement saying that everybody knows that he would say it himself. I, I'm guessing, right?

If, if you believe in saying that, I don't think that's an arguable position. I mean, that's like, yeah, that makes, yeah, so, you know, say what you like about the, what the Ukrainian, uh, administration or, or, uh, uh, interest right now. But I, but I think that you can take every, the content coming outta there with a smaller grain of salt because again, it, it is a relatively open environment.

There is international presence, ground, you know, the information is relatively clear, right? And, and down to the specifics in the last couple of weeks, you know, taking Russian territory, you know, that you see the analyst talking about it, you know, why is Ukraine doing this? Because militarily and physically and strategically, you know, may not make, make a difference.

Yes. But in the information space, it makes a huge difference. It may in fact, you know, do more to change the situation than anything kinetic.

And that, that's an evolutionary success of transparency. And, you know, the, the, it's not odd, but, but it's a, there's a certain degree of irony here. 'cause if you go back, uh, to the concept of information warfare, uh, even to the sixties, uh, with, and we didn't have much of it, but the Russians looked at information warfare as a purely cognitive exercise.

Uh, you can actually go back to the early KGB stuff in the a under the czar is when the intelligence services, they did very similar things. And historically you can look at it, uh, the same way. But we had the US had the opportunity, uh, back in the late eighties and early nineties to actually take that as an active position because during Dayton, during the, uh, peace dividends of the early nineties and all that, we had a huge amount of opportunity to work with the Russian system.

And I'm trying to get a little not too specific about what I was involved in. Um, and we stuck to our kinetic ways pretty much exclusively, especially in the public domain. So, um, the EU is doing everything they're doing now in terms of cognitive defense at the national public.

Oh, hell yeah, we're gonna do this and we're gonna work from our toddlers up through upskilling adults and seniors as part of a cognitive immune system strengthening cognitive, defensive strengthening, whatever terminology, uh, you're comfortable with. So it's the same just on, I hate that phrase on steroids, come up with a better phrase than that, would you please? Yeah.

I'm, I'm afraid my, most of my phraseology is aging out and needs to be modified anyways, but, uh, that's what I get for surviving this loan. Right? Well, that's, I, you know, so we're, we're about a half an hour, which I think is about as much of the two of us, you know, as the world should be able to, should have to stand at any one time.

And we can go on literally forever. But, uh, I, yeah, let me this last, last, uh, optimism check. You know, the prob you know, the, you know, I think the probability of the positive inevitability curve from here is extremely high.

Even in the, even in the, the nearish term. I think the US will work itself out. It's not gonna be the end of the country or the nation.

We're not gonna have World War iii and we'll find ourselves in 10 or 20 years with a system to be, we can feel pretty good about, because be clear, I don't want, you know, to have the government or the corporations or whatnot, you know, you know, fact checking me because I have a fringe position, how am I an honestly clear, competitive, you know, uh, uh, system. So I wanna cut the feedback loop, but that's another conversation. It is.

And we'll have those. Alright, thank you. Thank you everyone for your time.

Thank you, Chris. As always, we'll do more of this. Cheers folks.

Cheers.