Are You a Bot in a Denial of Democracy Attack?

A year ago I wrote this think piece on Facebook in response to the London Bridge attack. Republising here in memoriam.

“You’re nowhere near London Bridge, are you?”

“Not too far, but not close - what’s up?”

“You’re safe, that’s all I care about”

Oh no. Not again.

I didn’t even need the details: the concern in my friend’s WhatsApp message was enough. “Terror Attack at London Bridge”. My brain actually printed the headline. I turned to my friends in the high-storied restaurant in Canary Wharf where we had been celebrating a friends birthday and said “something has happened at London Bridge”.

Anyone who wasn’t already checking their phone, immediately picked up their phone and checked it.

“Yep, police incident”

“London Bridge/Borough Market”

“White van”

OK. Fuck.

A modern-day terrorist incident is really two attacks. The victims of the first are the people who are directly killed, injured or traumatised by the physical action that takes place. A friend whose cousin was working in one of the bars where the injured were refuged, and she herself had been in Borough Market earlier that day, messaged me and was clearly shaken. I would count her as a victim of the first attack, not directly involved, but close enough to those who had been to suffer direct psychological shock.

The second attack starts around 30 minutes after the first, when televisions, tablets, mobiles, PCs and laptops start popping with “Breaking News” overlays. It then continues for the next 24 to 36 hours, as the accidental agents of this attack publish their own fears, sympathies, incredulity, solidarity, defiance, satire, and cynicism on their chosen communication channel. The victims of this attack are all of us, or more accurately our individual psychologies: we cannot shift the images of terror and chaos that linger in our consciousness, and like a piece of malware that deposits itself on the hard drive of a computer, and waits for it’s author to trigger it’s nefarious commands, these buried fears are the weapons used in the global warfare of 21st Century. And make no mistake, these victims are the real targets of the architects of this war.

With the advent of television (even radio before it), terror made its way into our safest of safe places: the family living room. Right there in the corner of our urban/sub-urban paradises was a squawking box, telling us of atrocities, murder, acts of god, mayhem, destruction and all manner of horrors. We now have in our pockets and handbags a device that does the same, and we take it with us everywhere we go. There is no place that we cannot be terrified in an instant. When we read about what happened at London Bridge, Manchester, Kabul, Paris, Brussels on our smart phones, we use our thumbs or fingers to scroll, almost tenderly, over every terrifying detail - caressing words like “brutality”, “chaos”, “wounded” and myriad adjectives that may as well be executable commands in our brain’s software which deposits a payload of acid straight to our gut.

Our internal antivirus attempts to cleanse the infection by getting us to express our defiance: our city is made of sterner stuff! Our religion is one of peace, not hate! Enough is enough, we must change the internet! But this is palliative. We know that the next time we walk over a London bridge, or go to a concert, or catch a tube that the hacker’s program will execute, and ever-so briefly we will imagine ourselves being hit by a car, or stabbed in the heart, or our heads ripped open by a common B&Q bolt.

What is the point of this? Why are these guerrilla mind-hackers playing this game?

In the 20th Century, the purpose of war shifted from the destruction of the enemy forces to destruction of the enemies forces and it’s civilian population. WWI was fought with in the traditional way: uniformed armies facing off across a battlefield. With the blitz-bombing of European cities in WWII Hitler introduced the concept of total war, where there were no rules on what constitutes an enemy combatant: everyone was fair game. The Allies caught on fast and perhaps the apex (or nadir) of this concept was the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic weapons.

In this century we have a different game being played. When hackers first wrote worms (computer programs that can spread from computer to computer), the payload was usually destructive. It would wipe the hard drive leaving the victim either scrambling for backups, or having to reconstitute their data from scratch. It didn’t take long for the hackers to work out that this was not a sustainable policy: there is no utility left in a dead PC. It was obvious, particularly in a world where the internet was starting to flourish, that a PC still connected to the network, but under their control (aka a “bot”), was far more useful. Could this be a metaphor for a paradigm shift in the war against democratic nations? Why kill the enemy’s population in large numbers, when they (and their votes) are far more useful if you can bring them under your control?

There is a lot to support this idea: the rise of Trump, Farage and the far right is directly related to the rise of inter-connectedness and the explosion of media across mutiple platforms. The links between these actors and the traditional arch-enemy of democratic west, Russia, seem like the world’s worst kept secret. ISIS could never hope to win a physical war with the western super-powers, but they can certainly set our news agenda by manipulating a few easily impressionable, and hot-headed minions with promises of superstar martyrdom into horrifying acts on small groups of innocent people. It is clear that Russia (or more properly, Russia’s political interests according to one V.V. Putin) and ISIS are the two groups that have benefited most from the turmoil being sown into the fabric of western democracies. The dismantling of European political union through technological influence is far more valuable to Putin than sending a nuclear bomb to destroy a western city, nor does it inspire the enemy’s population to demand retribution and is far easier to deny. ISIS, like Osama Bin-Laden before them are trying inspire the infidels to turn on themselves by using terror to create political chaos and hatred between their liberal and conservative milieu. Their hope is this will bring Christians and Muslims together in the great holy war which Allah will settle in their favour.

The timings of the Manchester and London Bridge attacks could not be more obviously politically motivated. Just before the “Brexit Election”, where political parties are forced to stop campaigning, where the news channels and newspapers are focused on “Terror” and all its accoutrement, where the Prime Minister can talk tough and while the electorate is still in the reactive mode, and posit that more of our liberties be stripped away. This is not just a randomly timed attack: we, the bots, have had our programs initialised and we have probably already done our master’s bidding.

We need to figure out how to reboot the system.