Footnote 5 Their number is increasing and more and more countries are involved that are not officially at war with each other. According to Arbor Networks, more than 2,000 of DDoS occur worldwide every day. Take for instance distributed denial-of-service attacks. You cannot see it, and cannot hear it, it silently happens everyday, can hit anyone anywhere, and we can all be its unaware victims.
It is mostly latent, that is, it is in the world but not experienced as part of the world. Global information warfare is not virtual.
But it was wrong in selecting models as the new battlefields. The analysis was correct both in perceiving a difference and in identifying that difference in the decoupling between the system and the model. Thus, in 1991, Footnote 4 Baudrillard argued in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place that the hi-tech fighting on the American side during the first Gulf War had transformed a conflict into propaganda and mass-mediated experience. For a short time, in the eighties, passive mass media and digital consumerism made us mistakenly think that war could be experienced by the public as virtual: a televised or computerized game, involving only representations to which nothing corresponded, like shadows without objects, simulacra in Baudrillard’s terminology. The hard facts of war were inevitably accompanied by their informational shadows: the human shouting, the smell of horses, the sounds of trumpets in battles, the rhythm of machineguns, the pitched whistles of bombs falling from the sky, the smell of napalm, the marks left by the tanks’ tracks. In the past, war has always and only been real, in the system + model sense, like the bed in which you sleep and the apple you eat. Let us return to the nature of information warfare. To change example a little: when you eat an apple, you eat both the system (whatever the noumenal apple in itself may be, in Kant’s terminology) and the model (whatever the phenomenal apple is perceived to be by you when eating it). One of the problems with Kant is that, when you lie in bed, you lie in the noumenal not just in the phenomenal bed, whatever that may be in itself. You know it is virtual because you cannot sleep in it, no more than you could sleep in Plato’s idea of the bed. The engineer designing a bed is working with a model (blueprint) to which nothing yet in the world corresponds, it is a “virtual” bed, like the shadow of an object without its corresponding object. It is rather a model without a corresponding system. The virtual is not real, but it is not a mistake either. When this relation does not work correctly, we make mistakes, e.g., we bump into the bed (the system) at night because we think it (the model) is elsewhere. When we treat something as real, we expect the system and the model to be correctly related. Or it may be an idea of your bed, say what you have in mind when you are at work. This may be the actual object in which you sleep. To understand why, consider your bed in your house. The question is how we should understand such a macroscopic transformation. Today, those who live by the digit may die by the digit. Information has become a weapon because the targets too have become informational. The difference between then and now is that information warfare is acquiring kinetic aspects unknown to past generations. ” Footnote 1 This is why the radar, the computer, the satellite, the GPS system, and the Internet were initially developed as military technologies, while unmanned vehicles are becoming a reality thanks to DARPA. As Von Clausewitz once stated “by the word ‘information’ we denote all the knowledge which we have of the enemy and his country therefore, in fact, the foundation of all our ideas of actions. He famously remarked that “an army marches on its stomach,” but he also knew that the same army acted on information. When Napoleon planned to invade Italy, he duly upgraded the first telegraph network in the world, the French “semaphore”. Information has always been at the core of conflicts.
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