Part of the issue with the cyber realm is the difficulty in conceptualizing it in a way that is meaningful and understandable to the broader public. It’s everywhere but everyone’s experience of it is completely unique. With that in mind, the following line from Peter W Singer discussing Fred Kaplan’s new book ‘Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War‘ is particularly interesting:

…leaders in Washington are having a hard time accepting a simple fact — that while the Internet may have been created by a United States government research program, it is no longer under American ­government control, or even American in its makeup.

The internet has moved from an American majority to a non-American majority place. There are two issues with this worth noting.

Surely there are rules (Images from 1983 classic hacker film ‘War Games’)

One, I think is what I call the Fallacy of Fair Play that has dogged the thinking of US businesses and organizations on the internet. Because the internet was created in the US there is an assumption that US values, derived from courts and law, are its natural operating environment. The truth is US values no longer predominate. In fact, the understanding of the internet is very different depending on where you are on the globe.

I would compare it to how kids often understand a technology’s application in a new way from the older generation’s intentions for the technology’s use. Nations like Russia, Iran and China may have initially seen the internet as a Made-in-the-USA threat to their domestic power structure. Over time, these same nations have come to see blind spots in the America’s use of the internet – the openness, the ease of accessibility, the expectation of transparency. All of it can be subverted and exploited from outside. In addition to the spoofed emails used in APTs, there are social cyber attacks, viral news manipulation, etc.

For those of us who remember the 1980s, when the computer-to-computer communication was popularised in films such as War Games (referenced, apparently in the Kaplan’s book), the internet also spawned its own sub-culture: conspiracy theory,  RPGs, sci-fi, libertarianism, the hacker ethos, and if I recall: talk of the Illuminati and the Church of the Sub-Genius. Being a wild land that knew no distances, but brought likeminded strangers together, there were shared codes of conduct that simply emerged, drawn from the other cultures, including gaming, that many early internet users knew.

A lot of that culture informs sites like Boing Boing today. For them, the culture of the internet has been about information being free. But now nations like China and Russia make it their business to have a say in what kind of information is published online, how the conversation progresses, etc. The goal is to shape the internet-using public’s views.

The second issue: in this new world, internet users in the the US, and other open democracies, constitute a kind of outpost in a global environment not so tolerant of Western standards. As I’ve argued before, one upside is that this may offer a meaningful way for Americans to think about the internet. After all, a hostile, unknown terrain, rife with unforeseen danger (cyber aggression) and opportunity from afar are themes of the explorer and frontier days. They speak to a Wild West of sorts.

This concept could provide a cultural shorthand which American stakeholders from all walks can rally around online. It would mark a change to the existing libertarian techno culture that prevails today and that is dominated by ‘heroes’ such as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange. But judging from the current US election, Americans themselves may be tiring from the grandiose promise of libertarianism.

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