Factual Dispatch

This will be the first in a regular (as weekly as the universe allows) dive into topics, policies, cultural trends, and events of the day. I'm hoping this can act as a counterweight to the increasingly useless awful din of weaponized digital tabloids, for-profit message amplification, and information overload. This dispatch assumes you're aware of the news, so I hope to provide perspectives, articles, data visualizations, and other context that you might not come across. But enough about that, here's what you've been waiting for!

Using mass communications to indirectly incite violence is referred to as Stochastic Terrorism. The idea has been on the minds of foreign policy analysts & researchers for decades, with some headway actually being made by the University of Maryland's Laboratory for Computational Cultural Dynamics (LCCD). A decade ago, researchers were able to produce a Stochastic Opponent Modeling Agent (SOMA) framework that took historical data & facts on the ground, to predict how terrorist groups and non-state actors would act in a given situation. The LCCD then applied this model to two of the most prominently recognized terrorist groups in the world, Hamas & Hezbollah. SOMA & these case studies don't just provide novel & actionable findings about those groups, but SOMA can point the way for policy alternatives the United States. In Canada and the Eurozone, the pendulum has swung the other way, with certain flavors of hate speech now banned and earning convictions. If we want to keep our full-throated 1st Amendment, we'll need to solve this problem another way. (Post-script: A great fictional meditation on stochastic terrorism is seen in Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, which is worlds better than the recent dystopian car crash of a cinematic release by the same name.)

Intimately related to stochastic terrorism is the ongoing misinformation AND disinformation campaigns that have been referred to (most times disingenuously) as fake news. Misinformation (mistaken/incorrect information) as a word comes from the early 1600's English, disinformation (information deliberately spread to mislead) is actually a loan translation of the Russian dezinformatsiya, from literally a division of the KGB "devoted to black propaganda" (Great read on this is Dezinformatsia: Active Measures in Soviet Strategy). The term does have a short history in the USA, but in the last 5 years alone, we've seen hacks & subversions of corporations, rogue states, the mainstream media, the technology-enabled new media landscape, and even the G20. And this is without mentioning the information warfare campaigns associated with Trump or Brexit. To be clear, there's a massive difference between information terrorism campaigns, drummed up by websites, media outlets and run-of-the-mill corporations, and the information warfare (IW) campaigns we've started to see globally.

Discussed in a quiet way by the Chinese Major General Wang Pufeng in 1994 and in a loud supremacist way by Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin in 1997 (in his startlingly neo-fascist polemic The Foundations of Geopolitics), information warfare is "always on." Putin has refined Russian information warfare techniques exceptionally, wielding what's referred to as the "Firehose of Falsehood" both at home and abroad.  The idea of tactically probing an enemy's defenses for weaknesses 100% of the time in the NATO era is insane, but any VP of ITSecurity at a Fortune 500 company will tell you that's exactly what's happening all the time. Though mentioned in the USA first by Jerome Clayton Glenn back in 1989, Russia & China's Information Warfare doctrine continually differed from ours, which sees our cyberwar capabilities as "use when needed" deterrent like bombs, missiles & tanks. Many of us think of hacking as the keyboard slapping that causes secret data access, a dam to break or the power to go out. NATO is attempting to combat to both combination attacks (live fire combat & information warfare simultaneously, like what the Russians are doing Syria) and continual low-level attacks like we've seen in Ukraine. This difference in doctrine and rules of engagement allows many nation-state level actors to operate in the gray zone of "you probably can't prove I did a thing that's explicitly illegal" on the international stage. Here's a continually updated list of anti-misinformation campaigns being deployed by nation-states, in case you want to see how your favorite team is faring against "fake news."

Unfortunately, this information arms race has not gone unnoticed by non-state actors. Like military grade hardware eventually filtering down into the hands of amateurs & home enthusiasts, IW tactics & tech are now not just being used by Russia, China, and Iran. Many of us struggled to explain gamergate, the rise of the alt-right, and on a longer timeline, the lineage of what has been dubbed information terrorism, originating with the tactics pioneered by Newt Gingrich. I don't use the term lightly, but it's important to note that the first wave of the Alt Right's suicide bombers have already come and gone (Editor's Note: The best read on Milo and how radicalization of young American boys happens remains the one produced by Laurie Penny after being embedded with him & his coterie in 2017).  These campaigns are conducted within what Matthew Yglesias has dubbed the "hack gap," and it explains why tan suits get 2 weeks of Fox News coverage while we've already forgotten about Trump's multi-decade, $413,000,000 tax fraud unearthed by the NYTimes. Without adequate funding to fight this differently organized foe, extremism festers and grows. Eventually cells develop, and attacks become more and more likely. It's easy to blame Fox News, and they absolutely do shoulder a ton of the blame. But we need to start thinking about the idea of networked nationalism to truly cope with the scale and interconnectedness of nationalist, identitarian/supremacist & neo-fascist groups. With Brazil's recent election of Jair "Yo Trump, Hold My Beer" Bolsonaro, grappling with this issue becomes even more important.

Eye-Watering Data Visualization of the Week: 78% of the Top 50 companies in the S&P 500 are directly connected through 1 or more board members. And you thought the inbreeding in royal families was bad.Annoying But Correct Take of the Week: New York could learn a lot from Chicago when it comes to mass transit. Don't worry, their pizza still isn't pizza."Huh, Interesting" Read of the Week: Why you always want to sit in the same seat. For anyone who has been in a meeting or class with me, they know I agree 100%. Don't take my seat.Dunk of the Week:

Have a great weekend, and if you get turned away at the polls next week, here's what to do.You got this,T