War and information

I think the final point about wars, and the propaganda required to sustain them, might be a very optimistic sign for the future. The Iraq war which started in 2003 is a good example of this kind of scenario, where more transparency might have perhaps fatally undermined the narrative emerging from Blair and his co-workers.

Imagine for example if two minutes after Colin Powell delivered his infamous Iraq speech to the UN people at the claimed locations of the blurry missile silo photos were able to tweet a link to a live video stream from the same site showing that no such silos existed. With advanced editing tools and augmented reality fake videos will become increasingly possible to produce, but if enough corroborating crowdsourced evidence exists this might be sufficient to shift the narrative in a very different direction.

Another strategy which sustains wars, rather than generating a highly elaborate deception narrative, seems to be to avoid talking about them altogether. So for example in the previous five years, apart from the exposure by Wikileaks, there has been extremely minimal media coverage of the war in Afghanistan apart from occasional reports of soldiers being killed. Essentially Afghanistan has become a forgotten war as far as public awareness is concerned, and the propaganda used to prop it up seems to be very minimalistic indeed.

A reason for optimism is that we now live in a world of ubiquitous information, and maintaining largely or wholly fictitious narratives is going to become an increasingly difficult and high maintenance task. The fragility of propaganda narratives in an environment where multiple independent countervailing observations are available, often in real time, is likely to make the buildup to wars more difficult if they are to enjoy any degree of support amongst the populace.

So, one possible response to this in future might be wars which are launched rapidly, with almost no propaganda buildup, and in a cultural environment in which citizens are encouraged to be ultra-loyalists who bear more emotional allegiance to the flag than to any rationalizing narrative involving ideas about democracy or WMD.