Umair Haque, blogging for the Harvard Business Publishing, has an interesting take on information warfare. He lists ten rules for information warfare, many of which are best applied to tech heavy societies (I've added some notes and spin of my own to the list). This list applies to conflict from politics to market destabilization to guerrilla warfare to counter-insurgency.
- Speed it up. As close to real-time as possible. Classic OODA acceleration.
- Micro-chunk it. Smaller and more condensed messaging. Thousands of sound bites (not just a few).
- Meta-attack. Facts don't matter. Focus on how to value attacks. Context over substance, provide a framework for decentralizing rebuttals.
- Anti-defend. Don't try to centralize defense, spread it across the board. Make it redundant and ubiquitous across your network, so no one node is vulnerable.
- Darwinian counter-attacks. Classic open source warfare approach. Copy anything that works, no matter what the source.
- Hack your enemies weapons. Repurpose anything and everything the enemy uses to your own advantage.
- Normatize it. Make rules for what is acceptable warfare and what isn't. Generate outrage.
- Self-organize hyper-locally. Generate interest groups that link up in local geographies. Reinforce face to face relationships based on common cause.
- Re-mix. Give people information that they can remix to fit local conditions. Best way to do this: provide a platform and modular tools to allow people to repurpose messages.
- Attack the base. Go after the main supporters of the opposition directly. The best way to do this is to get them to attack each other or divert them (rather than attempting to enlist them).