Information Warfare (Paperback) | Released: 28 Feb 2019

Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), but who does one become when the thought is hijacked? We are no longer a society ruled by geographic lines in the sand laid by men who won and lost wars 50 years ago. Rather, we are a society governed by ideological variation, led by chieftains in a digital tribal society. This is the new world order and the precise opposite of what the self-proclaimed elites had planned. The United Nations is no more relevant than Facebook. The new covert is overt. WikiLeaks is more in the know than an intelligence analyst in the CIA, and Google's dragnet surveillance censorship algorithm has become the new gatekeeper of critical information that could lead society into a new renaissance. The power shift has gone from a focus on kinetic controls to an all-out battle for the psychological core of the global population. Digitized influence operations have become the new norm for controlling the electoral process, public opinion, and narrative.The potency of the actors in this space is fierce. Both nation-states and special interest groups in every conceivable variation are battling for the pinnacle position in controlling the public narrative, and though there are many initiatives operating in this space, few understand the actual process for harnessing a consistent grip on the narrative in this digital age. While most actors attempt to use archaic relics, such as the mainstream media, nation-states and sophisticated special interests are gunning for the almighty meme. The meme is the embryo of the narrative, and there is a process to harnessing its potency. Ideas are the composition of memes. Belief systems are the composition of ideas. Belief systems and their reinforcement create the narrative. Control over the meme renders control of the narrative; thus, he who controls the meme controls the population. Therefore, the objective is not to focus on control of the narrative; rather, the hyper-focus has become the creation, mutation, expansion, and replication of the meme. The mind is the new war space, and the meme is both a subliminal hand grenade and the new nuclear weapon. Psychographic targeting renders the expedience of parasitically embedding the meme within the vast labyrinth of the mind. Psychographic targeting is made easy via big data analytics, the treasure troves of readily available metadata curated by dragnet surveillance capitalists, and a legislative body that lacks the understanding of the dangers of its weaponization. Metadata layered with the weaponization of other digital vectors, such as search engine results, social media, banner placement, blogs, and bots infused with machine learning and artificial intelligence, can introduce, mutate, and expand memes and conversations out of thin air that can instantaneously become part of the mainstream narrative.Forums, blog comments, hashtags, and YouTube videos have replaced the mainstream media, and the mainstream media has submitted to its position as the automaton regurgitators of the narrative that was introduced by the meme. The meme is the central character in digital influence operations (DIO), and DIO is the ingredient that fuels the new war space as well as the common thread of potency in political warfare, propaganda, and information warfare. The formula is quite simple: Control the meme; control the narrative; and control who is elected to office, how the public perceives current events, and the introduction of a new military offensive. Combined with cyber vectors for distribution, the meme renders an infinite number of variations for an attack. This new frontier harnesses the bleeding-edge technologies and strategies of machine learning, deep learning, socionics, artificial intelligence, cognitive biases, spam bots, memetics, and the psychographic zeroing in on population sub-groups using metadata with the further targeting capabilities that define national and population subgroups' evolution stage.