Information wars are nothing new

The Digital Alarmist

Almost 50 years ago, a prescient senior executive of IBM, from Australia I believe, remarked that whoever controlled information would, in the future, end up controlling the world. A citizen’s legal right to information, even in exigent circumstances such as the coronavirus pandemic, is rendered meaningless when the people in charge of making the information available place every conceivable roadblock. Whether this is done in the context of India’s Right to Information (RTI) Act or America’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), it doesn’t really matter, does it?

In 1965, when the University of California-Berkeley professor and world-renowned computer scientist Lotfi Zadeh first developed “Fuzzy Logic,” an AI model for human reasoning in which everything -- including truth -- is a matter of degree, he did not, at that time, realise how his work would end up being repurposed. In his May 25, 1997, commencement address to UC-Berkeley Computer Science graduates, Professor Zadeh stated that unrestrained advertising, with its high content of half-truths and untruths, had become a corrosive force in the US and that other countries were being forced to follow this undesirable route. He bemoaned the quest for efficiency and stronger competitive position in the global marketplace using intrusive advertising to promote consumerism in total disregard to cultural values and social rights. This single-mindedness, he added, would become stronger and less amenable to control as the world moved further and further into the Information Age and multimedia.

And he delivered the address well before the age of social media and fake news.

The information wars really began about 600 years ago when, around 1440, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, which enabled the wide dissemination of information, and therefore knowledge, across Europe on a scale unknown until then. This singular invention broke the monopoly on information held by the Papacy and the aristocracies in France, Spain, Italy, Holland, Germany, and England. Of course, the backlash that ensued resulted in the creation of the Protestant denomination, and a series of religious sectarian wars which broke out across Europe lasted almost 200 years.

The same invention was also responsible for the spread of Christianity across much of Africa and the Americas since translated versions of the Bible could now be easily mass-produced in a variety of vernacular languages and distributed by the colonialists. Of course, these days one can use Google software to translate almost any utterance, oral or written, into whatever language one chooses. With a caveat, however. Translated versions oftentimes do violence to the original, as any competent linguist will attest. The victims of enhanced interrogations do not suffer any less pain, do they? If changing Stalingrad to Leningrad or vice versa can bring back the victims of the purges, it would be a really neat trick if it can be pulled off. Perhaps AI can help?

Fast forward 500 years, we have Joseph Goebbels who, as Information Minister under Hitler, quickly gained control of the print media and used the relatively new media of radio and film for propaganda purposes. He was responsible for making available to the German populace the 1940s version of the mobile phone and social media – a cheap radio receiver dubbed the Volksempfänger (people’s receiver), which enabled Germans to stay tuned to Nazi broadcasts. As Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and later Minister for Armaments and War Production, so cogently put it, “Through technical devices like the radio and loudspeaker, 80 million people were deprived of independent thought.” It is only too well-known that Nazi Germany went on to grab territories and exterminate what it considered undesirable segments of the population.

Four hundred years ago, missionaries came calling on Central and South America, Bible in one hand, sword in the other. In the process of colonising the continents, they exterminated the natives in genocidal wrath and ruined their culture. Their descendants are still in control.

In the 2020 world of information and all things AI, when nattily attired missionaries of commerce come calling, they bear the internet’s promise of riches and most-favoured-nation treaties in one hand, and sanctions and cyber weapons in the other.

While book bans and book burnings still go on in various parts of the globe, these days a simple mouse click can make entire libraries disappear, leaving behind neither fire nor smoke. An environment-conscious act on the part of governments and corporations alike, I suppose.

The proselytizers of today are to be found not in thatched huts in remote villages but in sparkling glass and concrete edifices bearing innocuous names such as the XYZ Enterprise Institute and the ABC Consulting Group.

The missionaries of old sold religion and grabbed resources, the new ones peddle consumerism and greed while exploiting resources.

Plus ca change.