PerspectiveSecurity and the “Holographic Society”

Published 12 July 2019

Cyberattack is slowly becoming the preeminent form of international engagement, so much so that it’s simply been assumed that current U.S. retaliation against Iran includes cyberattacks. That just makes it part of an ongoing, “larger pattern of cyber exchanges” between the two adversaries, as Brandon Valeriano and Benjamin Jensen phrased it recently in the Washington Post — and of the growing presence of cyber operations in global conflict.

Cyberattack is slowly becoming the preeminent form of international engagement, so much so that it’s simply been assumed that current U.S. retaliation against Iran includes cyberattacks. That just makes it part of an ongoing, “larger pattern of cyber exchanges” between the two adversaries, as Brandon Valeriano and Benjamin Jensen phrased it recently in the Washington Post — and of the growing presence of cyber operations in global conflict. Eric B. Schnurer writes for Stratfor that the cyber world is dissolving distinctions between war and non-war, between what’s “inside” a country and what’s outside it, between the state and society. In fact, the very distinction between the virtual and physical worlds is itself dissolving. So perhaps we ought to be thinking about security in the physical world as we do in cyber. “In the siege mentality sweeping much of the world, including President Donald Trump’s “American carnage” worldview, safety lies only within territorially defined, demographically homogeneous nations with autochthonous economies and not just firm, but also largely impenetrable, borders that keep all threats at bay. This outlook may have it backward, however, putting America and its interests at greater risk. Physical security as well as cybersecurity in the 21st century increasingly lie not in becoming a fortress nation, but in doubling down on being a holographic one: promoting greater global integration, sending our people and products abroad more aggressively, and welcoming a more diverse array of the rest of the world’s peoples and products within our national borders,” Schnurer writes.