(by Giovanni Ramunno) The digital technological revolution has accelerated the birth of new economy. Ideas, knowledge and advanced skills are the most sought-after assets, intangible assets of course. The cognitive skills they will characterize the immaterial economy, even more than the adoption of technological tools.
The relationships, until recently founded on the relationship between entities, material or animated, take on an increasingly virtual connotation, denoting the network as the future agora where to inquire, negotiate their beliefs and conduct negotiations for a new social order.
A process that is difficult to understand by those who completely rely on intuition and needs that can be easily manipulated without the guidance and filter of critical thinking.
This destabilizes a way of thinking produced by evolution, which finds in the linear relationship between cause and effect, with actions deriving from anthropomorphic subjects or in any case deriving from intentional actions, the adaptive cognitive system adapted to a world that gradually loses its intelligibility with those same cognitive tools.
Moreover, from these contradictions more and more i bias distortions due the speed with which decisions need to be made, which, in turn, would stimulate precisely that intuition forged by evolution, partly inadequate to the complexity of the world we have created.
It seems that the consequence of this contradiction highlights a cognitive and cultural contradiction that makes that information aware and shared by a greater number of people really difficult, as an element for a democracy which, to be such, would also require a preventive and participatory assessment of the impacts. economic and social aspects of innovation.
New ideological and pseudo-philosophical narratives, which would like to demonize the free world, artfully spread doubt and disorient democratic public opinion unprepared to resist such a cognitive attack.
La cognitive war it positions the mind as a space of battle and contested domain. Its goal is to sow dissonance, instigate conflicting narratives, polarize opinion and radicalize groups. Cognitive warfare can motivate people to act in ways that can disrupt or fragment an otherwise cohesive society.
The process is facilitated by hyper-connectivity, as everyone has a mobile phone, and continues with information, exploiting the dissociation between intuition and computistic intelligence, which interferes with our cognition, the way our brain processes information and transforms it into knowledge.
The point of strength of the cognitive attack is human capital of an organization or an entire nation. The purpose is not alone deceive or misinform, but fueling a pertinent controversy ascertained by means of plausible facts capable of polarizing and dividing, the informational cascades will allow the induced divisions to become viral and last over time.
Paradoxically, Western societies arrive unprepared, while the same immaterial economy makes evident the centrality of the same relationships, as fundamental elements in the understanding of the contemporary world.
Losing, in fact, the anchor to materiality, a certain and stable element as it is perceived directly by our natural senses, causes uncertainty to break into our own cognitive processes, complicating the shared understanding of the world, because it requires, in order to be faced, to understand anti-instinctive concepts and related cognitive contradictions.
Democracies need to resist the malevolent interference of autocracies who have identified the vulnerability of democracies: public opinion; a resilience that many would like and that is very difficult to pursue without a specific education that overcomes that sometimes a priori rejection of a rationality inherent in the scientific process and in critical thinking and in the concrete defense of national interests with adequate support of human capital .
Insights
As he writes Giuseppe Gagliano on IASSP, a cognitive warfare operation can take the following form:
- identification of the competitor's weaknesses in the area in question (the weaknesses can be of various kinds: bribes paid to the authorities, environmental pollution, failure to respect humanitarian rights). All information collected must be verifiable and must not give rise to misleading interpretations.
- Choice of attack procedure through information: if we consider the cognitive aspect, we can imagine the following scenario. The director in charge of this function makes funds pay to a private foundation supported by the company. Within this foundation, a trusted man will use this money by directing it to an NGO that has set itself the goal of protecting the environment. The maneuver then consists in making the NGO aware of this dossier, indirectly communicating verifiable information (therefore not manipulated) on the misdeeds of the competing multinational. The NGO spreads negative messages against the competitor's project through its website. The cognitive chain is thus created. Later it is a question of knowing how to consciously activate it to destabilize the target.
The strength of the cognitive attack it is not deceiving or misinforming, but fueling a relevant controversy established by means of objective facts. The level of the conspiracy is limited to setting up and activating the information chain. But the more the controversy is "founded", the less easy it is to demonstrate, even theoretically, the conspiracy.
It is evident that the diffusion of new information technologies have exacerbated the competitive dimension and facilitated the cognitive war causing, according to the French analysts, an unprecedented conflict even compared to the Cold War.
Information becomes part of the art of war as a weapon capable of winning or losing a conflict, military or economic that is.
These are changes that require a cultural revolution.
Psychological warfare, then, is one of the main forms of information warfare, the most sophisticated because it relies, above all, on human intelligence in its ability to understand possible successful actions, by means, of course, of controlling the means of communication.
Little practiced and known in France, psychological warfare has remained far from the concerns of the military who, more often than not, encountered it under the pressure of events or adversaries, as happened in Indochina and Algeria.
Psychological warfare uses all the methods at its disposal, from disinformation to deception, from propaganda to interdiction, in clashes of a different nature (from the fight against terrorism to conventional combat, to the granting of peace), and is mostly directed towards the public opinion, to condition or manipulate it.
The psychological weapon does not contemplate improvisation, but relies on an operational structure organized and conducted by specialized personnel and bodies.
Civilian communications systems have reached a level of performance previously reserved only for government forces and the military. This caused a mass effect with a consequent reduction in costs. Therefore, even if the preservation of some autonomous military capabilities is foreseen, the development of defense and intervention information systems increasingly depend on civilian systems, which creates a vulnerability that could be underestimated in the event of a crisis or conflict.
The framework of action of the information sphere has therefore become very conflicting information warfare has become inevitable and is exercised according to the function of appropriation (intelligence); prohibition (restriction of access to information) and manipulation (intoxication).
THEintelligence economic is a necessary response to a world without boundaries of time and space, where information is instantaneous and reaction time zero. A reorganization of the structures around the new dimension assumed by the relationship between information and intelligence, it leads to changes in the decision-making system as well as in the management of human resources. A revolution, above all, cultural, which makes information a weapon that must be integrated into the national defense strategy.