Information, Communcation, Media, Stigmergy

I read Robb's book this weekend.

One thing that puzzles me greatly is Robb's lack of any sort of recommendations for offensive tactics against the GGs. All of his recommendations are defensive in nature: I think they can be summed up in two words: Increase resiliency (of our own networks). Robb seems very fatalastic about GGs, painting a picture of invincibility. He is nothing if not very imaginative. But is there a failure of imagination in this particular regard? I want to throw out two ideas about this, hoping it may get some sparks flying with some of you.

1. Incredible to me, given Robb's background and obvious habits of technogeek thought, is an absence of offensive tactical metaphors based on viruses, worms, trojans, spyware and the like. Decentralized, flat networks like GGs have their own weaknesses, which have long been exploited by hackers for fun and/or profit: They can be used to spread malicious bits of code that bring down portions of the network, turn individual nodes in the network into unaware bots that are actually working for the attacker, and unwittingly send crucial proprietary information back to the attacker. Are there useful offensive equivalents to these in fighting GGs? GGs are after all massively parrallel information processors with low and/or heterogenous intelligence at any given processing node: That low intelligence should be exploitable by malicious code, so to speak.

2. Reading chapter six closely (though the dependence is clear elsewhere in the book), I notice the importance of the media to the behavior of GGs. I'm not talking about the symbolic war here; I'm talking about the importance of the media to the offensive capabilities of GGs. The media plays a crucial role in Robb's description of GG stigmergy and communications (see pp. 123-5).

Now, this is going to sound very controversial, I know, because of the role we may normally ascribe to media--an objective and passive witness and reporter. But frankly, that role is so thoroughly under attack these days, even from many journalists, that one wonders whether it needs updating anyway. Like it or not, according to Robb's story, the media has become an active participant in warfare because of the way it behaves, by providing the means for GG stigmergy to take place. Should the media be rethinking its own values?--Are those values simply inconsistent with reality, if the media is being used as a communications network by hostile forces? I can imagine the media changing its own behavior in ways that would dampen its usefulness as a stigmergic bulletin board for GGs.

Historically speaking, the media has occasionally cooperated with government and/or industry in ways that are inconsistent with its own "passive witness" value system. In Houston, for instance, business leaders did not want any kind of unpleasant public spectacle associated with the desegregation of businesses. It was widely believed by that time that media reporting of lunch counter sit-ins and so forth simply fanned flames on both the revolutionary and reactionary sides of that struggle. A voluntary media blackout was instigated by Houston business leaders during a crucial period, and public business desegregation was implemented relatively painlessly. In other words, the media voluntarily declined to be a stigmergic bulletin board for positive feedback loops of protest and counterprotest for a specified time period.

So, the questions under 2 are:

2-a. Do journalists. bloggers and the like need to rethink their own value systems in an age where they become stigmergic bulletin boards for GGs?

2-b. Could media be recruited as offensive players at critical points to actually maliciously disrupt the system of stigmergic signs that have been established by GGs?

(a) I'm being too theoretical above...I live and breathe theories of adaptive learning and maybe I need to be more concrete. I think I can spin some more concrete examples to chew on.

(b) The whole idea is well-known and hence boring, in which case I'd be happy to be pointed toward good sources on the subject. Y'all live and breathe tactics.

I don't think this is too theoretical at all. I do, however, see a problem with convincing the media to play along. Over the years (I think fueled by television and the sense of importance many in the media developed during the 1960s and passed on to their successors) I believe that the media has gotten away from the role of passive observer (except in their own rhetoric) and has graduated to at least passive participant in much of what we see. I'm not sure they'd be willing to surrender or share even a small bit of that power even in the role of saving the greater good, because that would also involve them admitting that they are not the passive observers they would like us to believe they are.

Outside of the MSM, I think you see some of the same tendencies, although the biases are much more clear and accepted by many of the bloggers themselves. They might be more open to such an approach.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Steve Blair

I don't think this is too theoretical at all. I do, however, see a problem with convincing the media to play along. Over the years (I think fueled by television and the sense of importance many in the media developed during the 1960s and passed on to their successors) I believe that the media has gotten away from the role of passive observer (except in their own rhetoric) and has graduated to at least passive participant in much of what we see. I'm not sure they'd be willing to surrender or share even a small bit of that power even in the role of saving the greater good, because that would also involve them admitting that they are not the passive observers they would like us to believe they are.

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You are probably right about this. It reminds me of a typically sardonic remark P. J. O'Rourke once made, something like: "Under the modern journalistic code of Olympian objectivity, I am not obliged to step on roaches. All I have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch them scurry."

With media per se, I wondered whether one could cultivate one's own wholly bogus media. Probably not; too high of a payoff to real journalists who manage to sniff that out.

There is the possible creation of sequences of bogus outcomes, though.

In this tactic, you would forget about trying to get the media's cooperation, but instead associate bogus outcomes with actions taken by your GGs and depend on the trusty media to report them faithfully. You would for instance "take down" a part of your electric grid for some amount of time in the wake of attacks on it that were actually unsuccessful, thus "teaching" the adaptive learning network of the GGs bogus lessons. One thing about adaptive learning processes, such as those implemented by massively parallel networks, is that they tend to be susceptible to this sort of manipulation. Of course this has costs--you are willingly inflicting on yourself some damages in order to do it--but I'll bet it could be a profitable tactic under the right circumstances. There's a literature on "strategic teaching" that is about this sort of thing in game theory: It can be a profitable tactic against adaptive learning mechanisms.