Parallel Realities and the Cold Civil War

We’ve been moving toward two parallel realities for a long time prior to Covid. And before Trump.

Out of both a desire for nostalgia and in an honest effort to learn from past mistakes, I often dive back into things I wrote a long time ago. I count myself fortunate that I now have about 14 years worth of published writing to draw from. It will be helpful to quote myself here to help you recall just how far back our divisions go.

The Road So Far

In October of 2008, I wrote:

Playing these partisan games […] produces a vicious cycle where the attacks become sharper and sharper, distracting everyone from the facts on which a decision should be based. This problem has gotten so severe that humane and even reasonably intelligent discourse of politics between conservatives and liberals has become almost non-existent. Commentators on each side have become more and more brutal in their attacks on the other point of view.

Then in February of 2013, I also wrote:

That discourse is so poisonous today is a result of two idealistic groups both twisting “facts”** to fit their ideology. As a result, anyone listening to the debate can hear “facts” supporting their point-of-view, and feel very justified in their beliefs. The more justified one feels about his or her beliefs, the more virulent their belief is, and the more they rise from a practical human… to an idealized zealot. Those who listen to only one side of the debate get brain-washed. Those who listen to both sides get confused, fed-up, angered, et cetera. Ultimately they disengage. Those left clamoring are the ideologues. When we look at a distribution of who is actually engaged in politics, we see a very different picture from [a normal distribution]. This is where our politics are today, and it is a very dangerous place.

It should not surprise you that my views on polarization and information didn’t change all that much with the arrival of Donald Trump. In early 2017, I wrote:

We now transfer information more efficiently than any other life-form we know of by tremendous margins. To do that, we use systems that we’ve created: first mass production of print, then radio and TV, now the internet. However, our recent jump to the internet has made information transfer much faster and much more democratic. These factors are driving an increase volatility in the information we consume and translation of that information is diverging and creating the polarization and instability we’re seeing today. That trajectory is unsustainable.

And I don’t want to belabor the point - the themes expressed above have continued and been sharpened as Wokeness arose as a formidable force in 2018 and 2019, and then as Covid took the stage in 2020. One writing, from September of 2020 does capture both these effects well:

The details/particulars aside, we have a world where our two sides can't even see a global pandemic in the same way. When you speak to someone on the other side of the "virus divide," you find yourself incredulous that someone can view the world that way when dealing with questions of life or death. How long can we remain as one country when that is the case?

Hopefully this all provides a degree of credibility that I have been “on this beat” for a while. At the least, it has been reassuring to me that my views here largely stand the test of time.

But having given it all some thought and hearing from other voices furthering similar fears, it is time to advance our theories a few more steps.

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Parallel Realities

It should now be beyond dispute that there are at least two different realities that people inhabit with very little overlap. Again here, Covid should make this clear: one side sees a deadly pandemic that arose naturally, that requires reorienting society, wearing masks everywhere, and mandating vaccinations. The other side sees Covid as a bad flu that was engineered in a lab, that we can live normally, that masks don’t work at all, and that the vaccines cause more harm than benefit for a substantial subset of the population.

Whichever option of these you fall closest to (or that I fall closest too) doesn’t really matter. The point is this: they both can’t be true! From my other writings you can easily figure out where I stand on it, and I do believe that view is thoroughly backed by the best available evidence and data that we have.

But back to the point: what is important to the topic of realities is that a division in cultures or realities used to be below the surface but is now above the surface and, quite literally, staring you in the face (in the form of “mask or no mask”). We can’t simply brush these differences behind some polite discussion. These differences now are simply too profound and too public to be easily resolved.

And if we trace this back to Information Volatility, which I wrote about in 2017, this all makes sense. The internet led to such an increase in the sheer volume of information being put out there that an explosion of different beliefs was inevitable, which would also lead to a larger degree of volatility (change) in information than existed prior to the internet.

The building blocks for forming different realities were already in place and likely inevitable prior to Covid. Instead of uniting us against a common threat though, Covid basically threw each side a knife, rang the bell, and sat back to watch the carnage.

5th Generation Warfare

I’m going to quote myself one more time, this time from a book that I am writing called God - The Democracy. Yeah, we’re going all over the map here. But trust me, there’s a point to this! In it, the main character Sam is asking an agent of Heaven about the situation between Heaven and Hell:

“How can you have war, I mean, people can’t die here, can they?”

“You are correct that we cannot.” Barty replied, more serious than before. He continued in an even graver tone, “However, just like those who are alive we are very much adept at causing pain and suffering, even without the threat of death.”

While I didn’t know it at the time, this line accurately reflects the ongoing evolution of warfare. Where we are at now is that war is evolving from being somewhat small scale and covert into something mostly characterized by “social engineering, misinformation, and cyber attacks,” or a “war of information and perception” as Daniel Abbott (a leading theorist on fifth generation warfare) has dubbed it.

The quote from Barty captures the essence of this well. In the modern world, it becomes unnecessary to kill your enemy with a bullet in order to defeat them. You can flood them with misinformation, run social engineering campaigns, incite online mobs to “cancel” an enemy. You can bring down any society or any individual with an effective 5GW campaign. We’ve seen it, we are seeing it, and we will continue to see it.

The Cold Civil War

Perhaps you see where this is going. When the history books look back on the 2020’s, they will note that it was Covid that sparked the smoldering flames and started the 2nd American Civil War in the year 2020.

Thankfully, the war has stayed a cold one for the most part. Still though: we have seen deaths. At least 11 individuals died as a result of the George Floyd riots in the summer of 2020, and several people died directly or indirectly as a result of the January 6th riots in early 2021. These skirmishes can be seen as the first spillover battles where the cold war online became so intense that it sparked a hot conflict in the physical world. Sadly, more cases of this are almost sure to come.

But beyond the random real world flareups, what else can we see in a Civil War of 5th Generation Warfare?

• Foreign adversaries picking sides and contributing misinformation on one or both sides in order to destabilize the situation further.

• There will be more and more propaganda (from both sides) and less and less care of what the underlying facts are. The important thing is to advance the narrative/rallying cry.

• Online “mobbings” that go after people “on the other side” and attempt to get them fired or threaten physical violence.

• Unfettered use of political power when one side has it. That power can and will be used vindictively to punish the other side.

• Just like the first Civil War, many people will live through it quite peacefully. If unplugged from the internet, you may not even know it is happening.

And if you are one of those happy people living unplugged: we’ve seen all of the above. This fits the definition of 5th Generational Warfare to a T.

At the end of the day, it is hard to deny that non-trivial subsets of our population are already at war with ourselves when you read a bit about what constitutes 5th Generational Warfare, or again as Daniel Abbot puts it, “war of information and perception.” The war may be small now, but it is impacting all of us, and it is likely to grow so long as that is the case.

Where Next?

Because wars of information are ultimately wars about culture, they are almost impossible to predict as culture is such a distributed system. Even the world’s most powerful super computer wouldn’t be able to predict where cultures will go in a few weeks, let alone in a few years. We can guess certain aspects but we are almost certain to be wrong.

Beyond that, 5th Generational Warfare is sure to evolve as the tools and systems we have, both for offense and for defense, continue to evolve. Right now, battles are being fought on centralized platforms like Facebook and Twitter, but this seems likely to move to decentralized platforms at some point. As Balaji Srinivasan has predicted, people may (enabled by decentralized protocols) resort to working under pseudonyms in order to protect themselves from cancellation. And these decentralized protocols may also provide some method of determining a ground truth which could deescalate the war.

At an individual level, it likely comes down to a) seeing it as the Cold Civil War that it is, and b) determining what part (if any) you want to play and c) determining what your boundaries for neutrality are.

While the vast majority of people would like to remain neutral and live their lives, it’s important to guardrail that. When something starts to come into frame that is outside of those guardrails, it is important to join the push against that incursion.

As an example, let’s say, I don’t know, one side wants to come along and mandate a series of ineffective and risky injections for everyone regardless of personal situation and fire anyone who doesn’t obey. That should hit your guardrail! So speak up!

Or needless to say, if one side starts to advocate rounding people up and putting them in camps… That better hit a guardrail, speak up!

And to be clear, you can expect incursions from both left and right in a situation like this, so the role of protector is an agnostic-but-important one. But it does require courage to face the mobs. And it may be a thankless role, but it is essential to ensure that we don’t lose our way and end up in some kind of dystopian nightmare.