Obama’s web 2.0 presidency

Barack Obama’s successful election campaign has been proclaimed as momentous for many
reasons, not least of which is the exploitation of digital media. Although previous campaigns
have made use of the Internet and cell phones, Obama’s innovation was to combine them with
Web 2.0 technologies, like Facebook and Twitter, to mobilize vast communities of local
volunteers and micro-fundraisers around a common cause.

A DEVOLUTION OF POWER?
Digital media — which include the global Internet, cell phones, and consumer electronic devices –
- infiltrate and give shape to every aspect of society, economics, and politics today. They are
small, portable, and increasingly mobile. There are roughly 3.2 billion mobile phones in the
world, with the highest growth rates occurring in the developing world. They are also global,
carried through the vectors of business, social and military networks, but also percolating from
below through spontaneous grassroots development and individual ingenuity.

For years, theorists have grappled with the social and political consequences of digital media.
Are they flattening power structures? Are they bringing about the end of sovereignty? Are they
empowering individuals? Does the Obama campaign, and other innovative uses of social
networking like it, represent a radical new devolution of power? The thesis put forth here is
much less linear and tidy. The consequences for world politics of digital media penetration are
mixed, chaotic, often contradictory, and therefore turbulent.

THE GEOPOLITICS OF CYBERSPACE – STATES STILL MATTER
It was once widely believed that states are too rigid, hierarchical, and cumbersome to control
flows of digital media. That assumption has not been shared by many states themselves,
especially in recent years. After 9/11, the methods and tools of “hard politics” entered into the
soft power realm of digital media. The digital media environment emerged as a battlefield,
fought within and across each of its spheres, from physical infrastructure, to code, to the
cognitive realm of ideas. Dozens of states routinely block access to information deemed
strategically, culturally, or political threatening, often timed to coincide with key political events,
such as elections. The methods employed range from filtering software installed at key Internet
chokepoints and gateways, to computer network attacks, to the strategic propagation of malware
and disinformation through open channels.

Often operating deep within the subterranean infrastructure of the net, without transparency and
accountability, these methods have as their ultimate aim the desire to shape the ideasphere, a
borderless and amorphous realm. The ancient art of propaganda has morphed from an appendage
to the centerpiece of 21st century military strategy. Ideas are the object of geopolitical
contestation, as much as natural resources and territory have been in the past, with much greater
attention paid to techniques of persuasion, psychological operations, and viral marketing for
military strategic ends. As the geopolitics of digital media are inherently transnational, states’
information warfare activities are themselves internationalized, and thus (ironically) contributing
to the unbundling of the sovereignty paradigm.

DISTRIBUTED INGENUITY CAN BE MALICIOUS TOO
State acts of cyber warfare described above are highly chaotic, volatile, and inherently
unpredictable, in part because of the distributed nature of the digital media environment itself. It
is well known that the Internet exhibits great complexity; its structure effectively empowers
users at end points or edges of the networks. Given the seamlessly linked character, innovation at
these edge locations can have system wide effects. The system as a whole is thus dynamic and
occasionally turbulent. Although states may seed cyber warfare campaigns, the campaigns have a
tendency to take on a life of their own because of the unavoidable participation of multiple actors
swarming from edge locations, as evidenced in Estonia, Georgia, Tibet, Burma, Pakistan, and
elsewhere.

The most recent conflict between Hamas and Israel offers a case in point. The Israeli Defense
Force (IDF)’s campaign has been highly influenced by the lessons learned from the 2006 War
with Hezbollah, particularly the need to ensure the public relations part of the battle — control of
the ideasphere — was not lost. Telecommunication networks and cellular towers were targeted as
part of the IDF incursion into Gaza, and foreign journalists cordoned off to limit outside access.
Such methods cannot prevent distributed acts of swarming, however, on both sides of the
conflict. For example, a Moroccan-based hacking group called “TEAM-Evil,” infiltrated the
database of the official Israeli domain registrar, DomaintheNet. This gave them the ability to
alter the name servers of several important Israeli websites, including the popular Israeli online
new service, YnetNews.com, redirecting its traffic to a page containing pro-Hamas information.

Tens of thousands of Israeli websites were defaced by individuals and groups based in Turkey,
Lebanon, and Iran, among others. On the other side of the conflict, a group of Israeli computer
science students created a website advertising a downloadable Trojan horse that allows users all
over the world to “turn over” their PCs to control servers that in turn employ them to execute
distributed denial of service attacks on Hamas related websites. Their website claimed several
thousands signed up. However much the parties to a conflict try to manage the idea-zone to suit
their strategic aims, swarms of groups and individuals intervene, leading to unpredictable and
potentially highly chaotic outcomes.

FLATTENED, FUSED AND MONITORED
The distributed ingenuity described above has led many to believe that one clear consequence of
digital media is the empowerment of individuals and grassroots organizations at the expense of
more hierarchical centers of power, such as states and corporations — a kind of “flattening” of
power, to borrow a phrase popularized by the journalist Thomas Friedman. Flattened power is
derived, in part, from the platforms of Web 2.0 and 3.0, including ubiquitous, distributed and
sharable computing systems and databases, social networking platforms, three-dimensional
shared spaces (Second Life), open protocols and “intelligent” applications that allow for machine
learning and exploitation of the semantic web. The thesis is dramatically illustrated by numerous
examples of grassroots advocacy campaigns, new electoral strategies, and coordinated mass
mobilizations, including Obama’s dramatic election victory referred to above.

However, the flattened power thesis needs to be qualified in several important ways.First, many
of the Web 3.0 platforms are serviced by third party private intermediaries on so-called “cloud”
computing systems in an oligopolistic market dominated by a few large Internet service
companies, like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. These companies sit on top of, and thus control,
vast rivers of data, which they can then archive, fuse, re-commercialize, and mine. As many of
their operations cross territorial boundaries and include jurisdictions that do not respect human
rights or the rule of law, the consequences of the storage of this data can be quite profound and
disempowering. For example, a recent report uncovered a massive surveillance system on the
Chinese version of the popular networking phone system, Skype, which was operated by the
company in collusion with the Chinese government. Millions of encrypted chat messages and
phone numbers and other personal details were uploaded and stored onto insecure servers in
China, to be shared with the Chinese public security bureau. Revelations such as these can create
anxious and insecure publics who lack trust in digital media because of the lack of transparency
and accountability. Self-censorship and political restraint can become the norm.

Second, and related, traditional centers of power, like state intelligence agencies, are effectively
exploiting the very same intelligent tools and distributed databases to monitor the activities of
individuals. These efforts are enhanced by rapid advances in data mining, fusion, and
visualization tools as well as the voluminous amount of personal information that is voluntarily
supplied by the individuals using the social networking platforms. Today’s job of mass
surveillance is thus enhanced dramatically by the extent to which users willingly upload images,
videos, and updates of their daily lives, all cross-referenced, geolocationally fixed and
individually tagged, thus ripe for picking by both public audiences and determined private actors.

THE GLOBAL VILLAGE COMPRESSED.
The domain of digital media is being militarized and mined at the same time as it is exploding
with ingenuity and grassroots empowerment. This suggests a highly volatile mix of power
politics, but one that operates in multiple jurisdictions simultaneously, and involving both public
and private actors all at an extremely high rate of speed. While the Obama campaign and other
innovative uses of digital media are remarkable, the geopolitical battles over and through digital
media have not disappeared and power still matters.

Original article available here.