Angry Planet - Likewar and the Weird National Security Implications of Musk's Twitter Takeover

Episode Date: November 4, 2022

I’m sorry, we have to talk about Elon Musk one more time. Or, as Jason said. “Twitter: Now With More Musk!”But seriously. This episode is about more than Musk. It’s about how conflict has gotten … weird. We start with a conversation about a new podcast about the weird future of war. Then we asked one question about Musk and things spiraled out of control.Has conflict gotten …weirder? Have the lines gotten blurrier? Why are cartoon Shiba Inu dogs yelling at Russian officials online? Why is the JAVELIN weapons system a saint? Why does that HIMARS system look … horny? When is an innocent meme not an innocent meme and what has the internet done to the way we fight?War … was has changed. Shitposts, disinformation, trolls farms in Macedonia, and Telegram channels full of gore videos that would make the average Ogrish visitor weep. (That was for you very old heads)So much of this feels like war …. Not exactly war but … something close. If only there were a podcast that explored these various phenomena and explained the recent origin of them.Well … it just so happens there is. It’s called LikeWar and returning guest Peter W. Singer is one of its hosts. He’s here with us today to talk about the show.Listen to Likewar on iTunes.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world with their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello, welcome to Angry Planet.

I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Fields. Has conflict gotten... Weirder. Have the lines gotten blurrier? Why are cartoon Shiba dogs yelling at Russian officials online? Why is the javelin weapons system a saint? Why is the Haimars system look horny? When is an innocent meme, not an innocent meme? And what has the internet done to the way we fight? War. War has changed. Shitposts disinformation, troll farms in Macedonia, and telegram channels full of gore videos that would make the average ogreish visitor weep. That was for you old internet heads.

So much of war now feels not exactly war, but something close. If only there were a podcast that explored these various phenomena and explained the recent origins of them. Well, it just so happens that there is. It's called Like War and Returning guest Peter W. Singer is one of its hosts. He's here with us today to talk about the show. Peter, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet. Thank you for having me. And wow, I wish I had answers to all of those questions. Man, although it made me think of the video game, though, where it said war, fall out, never changes. So, um, my favorite. Yeah. Which one are we going to go with, which of course,

that then became a meme. Yeah. I mean, I mean, there's so, yeah, I mean, there's so many places to go. But I think like your book really, well, the book and the podcast now, like, I know you don't answer some of those directly, but they are the things that I was thinking of as I was listening. to the podcast and like going through the book because the podcast so far is really like it almost feels like an origin story now. So the book came out in 2018. Why is now the time to do a podcast and what has changed in those intervening four years? Oh gosh. So for those that haven't read the book, Like War is a project that Emerson, Brookie and I did together. And essentially we looked at the way that social media was being used. by originally we were looking at conflict groups around the world, but very quickly we discovered that you had this strange place where ISIS's top recruiter was copycatting Taylor Swift or in turn Lady Gaga fans were copycatting Russian information warriors. And then, of course,

you had all of the effect of it on not just celebrity, but politics as that comes together in the story of Donald Trump. And so what we found when we looked at these cases, everywhere from Iraq to Chicago street gangs, you name it, was that cyber war now had an evil twin. We called it Like War. And the idea was that if Cyber War was about the hacking of computer networks, like War was about the hacking of people on the networks by driving ideas viral through their likes and their shares. But it would also sometimes elevate lies. And so that was the book.

And then what we've done with the podcast is that it's a little bit like a cross between an audio book and one of those old radio shows. So it's a limited run, so to speak, to use the technical term. It's just seven episodes, highly produced. So it's not like a free-flowing conversation like you and I are having, but rather we try and tell an overall story. Where did it start? How did we get here? but we're also blending in everything from clips of interviews with some of the key players to old radio footage from the German use of it back in World War II to audio of real events like January 6.

So it's essentially what we're trying to do with it is explain how did we get here with social media and its effect on the real world? What are those effects? and then also what can we do about it? Can you take us back to World War II? I thought this was really interesting because you kind of make the case that, like all this stuff is new, social media, etc.

But things like this have happened before. Technology, new technologies have been used by regimes and militaries to kind of push ideologies before. And it shocked people at the time. Can we tell that story? Sure. And so what it does is it makes a parallel a little bit between what happened with ISIS utilizing what seemed like this new technology of social media as part of its original invasion of Iraq, where it wasn't that ISIS outclass the Iraqi defenders with more soldiers or better weaponry.

In fact, if people recall, it was a little bit sad in that the Iraqi army had been armed by the United States. It was the one with Black Hawk helicopters and Abrams tanks. It had more soldiers in ISIS. And yet ISIS completely collapses it in this rapid move. And part of what happened is fear in front of it, fear in the local populace, but also fear among the Iraqi soldiers. And that contagion of fear is what led to, for example, the fall of Mosul. And that fear was primarily spread through social media, at the time, seeing novel and skillful use of it. Now we see the pattern again and again. In many ways, it had a parallel to what

the Germans did with the Blitzkriek and the fall of France back in 1940, where back then they were using radio to not just coordinate like ISIS did its units using computer networks, but also to spread that contagion of fear. And so it also goes a little bit further than that in that parallel with the radio. And that it's also a means that leaders could use to manipulate and control a population. And so there's a bull talks about, and the Nazis taking over. I think the exact quote is, we couldn't have done it without the radio. And it's much the same if you're looking at the role of social media and everything from

authoritarian regimes right now seeking to control their own populace, what we see in China or in some of the, what you might think of as authoritarian democracies, to also using it to control or shape discussion outside. So mission interventions into not just U.S. politics, but over 30 different elections around the world. So what we're trying to say is that it's like that saying that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. It's happening here with social media. So let's learn from it. Also, you get to tell these amazing, fascinating stories as part of the podcast. So I guess a different way putting it is it's not just a podcast about social media. it gives you some history that I hopefully will engage people.

Well, and just like Twitter, the Nazis used to drop bombs with leaflets in them that were used to indoctrinate people with various things. Surrender were coming or they used to try to split off black soldiers from white soldiers as well, saying, if you surrender to us, we will give you great food and we treat black people better in Germany than they do in the United States. They're wonderful. I don't know. It just reminds me very much of misinformation on Twitter right now. So there's definitely that parallel of, and there's a long history. I mean, it goes back earlier than World War II, right, of government spreading propaganda, trying to both enlist people in their cause, but also divide their foes. And maybe they're targeting

the civilian populace. Maybe they're targeting the soldiers in the field. So there's a long history. of it, but also what we try and show is there's a modern twist on it because of the very nature of social media. One is it's all about whether we're doing marketing to sell a soft drink or, let's use a good cause, ice bucket challenge. The whole idea is to not just reach your target audience, but turn your target audience into an ally, into a fellow combatant. So different with just dropping the leaflet, it's the idea that I want you.

you would that tweet say, I don't just want to reach you. I want you to retweet it out so that it reaches out to your network, your friends, your family. I want you reacting to it. And that's how I make it go viral, so to speak. And then there's the other part, which is the dose of the profit motive, which is at the end of the day, the social networks while they are, they're public. We're talking right now. They're free to use. We'll see what turns out for Alain Musk on Twitter. But the point is, at the end of the day, they're a for-profit aspect, which is where the algorithms come in. They're designed. The companies make money off of engagement, off of time on platform.

So those, we'll use your example of tweets. Algorithms are also elevating them, steering them beyond just you doing it in your own network. And that's, hey, this is of interest. Hey, this is trending. And so that's what also makes it more effective than the old versions of propaganda. And then there's the final part of it is that you can gain so much information about your targets, their likes, their dislikes, so that you can both macro target on scale, but also reach out to individual targets.

And by that, it's the idea that it's not just, oh, I drop the leaflets and hope anyone just picks them up. It's that, no, I'm going after this type of person with a Subaru driver who makes between 30 and 40,000, who likes the St. Louis Rams, but dislikes this politician, can I have that message hit just them? And so that micro-targeting makes it almost like a smart bomb. Wow, you nailed me. Oh, my God. It is not just, I want to be clear here, it is not just like Russia, other authoritarian regimes that are doing this. As you said, in August, we learned that I'm trying to remember exactly who was doing it, but the U.S. had propaganda operations that were working in Russia, China, and Iran kind of doing similar stuff,

this targeted kind of advertising, influence campaigns on social media platforms, some of them using like generative adversarial network generated AI images to, create like fake posters, trying to kind of steer people in a certain ideological direction, right? This is the way the game is played now, right? Yeah, someone got caught with their hand in the cookie jar, someone in DOD. And so for those that aren't familiar with the episode, essentially it made news because for several years, we've seen the platform companies start to out use of their network in a manner that breaks the community rules. And among the community rules,

are not having networks of artificial accounts, et cetera. And so whether it's Facebook or Twitter, every so often would say, okay, we found this network that was pushing misinformation on the Spanish election or pushing this information that's false on whatever pandemic. And the key in it, and this goes to hopefully there's a certain new owner of a social media platform company listening to this, the key was not that it was false information. the key was that they were violating the rules. They were not following the agreed upon rules of the network.

And so that would happen. And then they changed over the last couple of years besides doing this kind of policing. And again, you got to remember, go back in time, like we were talking about ISIS's early use of it. I mean, it was like the Wild West, right? I mean, you had ISIS, you had neo-Nazis. It was this free-for-all. And that's, I think, why people are a little bit concerned. about a must plan for Twitter is that he seems to think this period was a good one,

whereas the rest of us were like, whoa, it was not just a bad experience on the platform. The platform was leading to real world harms, like literally deaths. Okay, but what happened is first we went from free for all, then to this kind of moderation, and then they started to identify who might be behind it. So it was not just, oh, it's someone targeting the Spanish election. And we've traced it back in. It's a Russian actor. So that's what's played out.

What made the news a couple months back is that for the very first time, they said, hey, someone's violating the rules in this manner. They're going after, if I recall, in particular, Iran. And hint, hint, it's probably U.S. government, defense department. Yeah, I think they could never quite make the fingerprints explicit, but it was probably the DOD, if I recall. Yeah. And what was then interesting. is other parts of the Defense Department, the Undersecretary for Defense for Policy, essentially a week or so later, sent a – and this is all out in the public. I'm not giving anything away.

sends a memorandum out to every office saying, hey, let us know what you're doing. We want every office that's – you know, in command that's engaging in this to tell us what's essentially saying what's going on. So you could put two and two together and essentially conclude, one, we had some part of the system doing something from reading it. They were trying to shape discourse in Iran. But second, it seems that other parts of the system, maybe we're not fully on board or at least aware of it, or basically saying, hey, the very fact, not just that you're doing

this, but you got caught, means we probably need to coordinate this a little bit better. All right, Angry Planet listeners, we're going to pause there for a break. We'll be right back after this. All right, Angry Planet listeners, we are back talking with Peter W. Singer about the new podcast Like War, which is based on the book from 2018 of the same title. All right, so before we jumped out, we were kind of talking about U.S.-led influence campaigns. But there's so much of this stuff, it's so funny because time moves so quickly now. 2018 feels like, even 2016 feels like a thousand years ago.

But there's this really great episode of the show where you kind of explain how Macedonian brothers are responsible for the model that is used to spread disinformation and how a lot of it began not as necessarily influenced campaigns, but it's just people trying to get money. Can you run us down, like how that happened, what that story is? Yeah, it's a flashback to the 2016 election. Oh, God, we all just got sort of something went off in our spine from saying that. But it's also a great illustration of what we were talking about before of the cross between the very nature of the network politics, but also the profit motive. And it's this fun but very important story of how it's the origin essentially of the disinformation industry. And it starts arguably in, this Macedonian town. It's one of these very post-Cold War steel town. There's not the jobs have left. And however, the youth in the town essentially figure out a valuable side hustle. And that's making money off of clicks. And they're posting things that essentially are giving them primarily add dollars out of it. And it starts out with a handful of kids and then word sort of spreads that this is a great way to make easy money. Word also spread.

ads that the best target of all is Americans, because not only are their cliques more valuable, but also they're the most gullible. And there's this sort of funny, they're doing everything from diet fad ads to false news stories. As more and more jumping in, there's a little bit of a worry that they're going to water it down. And then along comes a 2016 election. And essentially, the Macedonian kids figure out that Americans will click on almost. anything related to that election and in particular anything. Now we can get into the partisan side, but no matter how horrendous it is, you can push the most outlandish things. And so they're the ones behind, for example, Pope endorses Donald Trump. That's verifiably false. The Pope did not

endorse Donald Trump. But it actually turned out to be not just the most valuable for those teens, it got more clicks than the best performing New York Times article on Facebook for the election. And so it's a great example of how there's a profit motive, but also a model that, of course, other actors are using. Similarly, whether the other actors are Russian information warriors to political campaigns, to now you have an entire new industry of companies that are effectively sort of copying what these kids did on the slides. it's called the Disinformation as a Service Model, which we here again have seen work on behalf of regimes. We saw a number of the Gulfie states hire companies to go after their foes with these to we've seen them target other corporations. You want to drive down the brand of arrival.

Is the best way to do it hacking them, the hacking for hire, or is the best way to spread misinformation about them online? That really makes me think about what Ellen Musk might do with Twitter. Twitter, right? Because something's preventing it from getting as bad as it was, or I don't know, there are 7,500 people who work at Twitter and a bunch of them moderate content. If 2,500 of them, which is the latest number that I just heard, go away, what changes? How does the environment change? And how do those Macedonians feel? And if you charge $8 for credibility that anyone can get for $8, right? Yeah, there goes my blue checkmark.

I am not giving him $8. Well, I mean, neither am I, but it's even worse than that, right? Because it's like, who's to say all these bots that he's afraid of and keeps talking about all the time that he doesn't want to the platform? Why wouldn't you spend the $8 to make, to make a bot verified on Twitter, right? So I'm smiling because I literally right before a conversation wrapped up an article on this. It's actually for a defense one. So we've got to give credit to them. So if you forgive me, I'll go into exactly what you're saying.

Essentially, it's over the five cyber security risks from his purchase Twitter. And again, this is five. And they're primarily more on the cyber side, the hacking of network side versus the information warfare side, but let's walk through them real quickly. The first is the transitive property. Musk may own Twitter, but China and Saudi effectively own him. Now, what I'm getting at here is his fortune comes from owning Tesla to the extent that he actually had to sell off Tesla stock to be able to pay for the Twitter buy. However, Tesla depends on the Chinese Communist Party's good graces, not only for its manufacturing,

its gigafactory in Shanghai makes over 70,000 cars a month, but also for 24% of its overall revenue as well as its primary growth. That is, Tesla saw 65% growth in sales in China amid much tougher sales in the rest of the world. So what we have now is a, communication network owned by a man who's both business and personal fortune is beholden to the whims of an authoritarian government, which has proven itself perfectly happy to turn the screws on companies for its own political ins. Oh, but it gets even more concerning because you also have authoritarian possible pressure on the off-market decisions of this firm in a direct way. And this is, again, due to Musk's interesting status as being the world's richest man, yet being

relatively cash poor because of his dependence on Tesla. That is, because any major sell-off by him of his Tesla stock risk tanking its overall value, he actually needed aid even more from other investors to get the cash to complete the Twitter buy. And so you had a number of these other traditional investors opt out. And we know about this from actually the private texts that surfaced during his court case with Twitter. And so the ones that filled the gap was first the Saudi who's actually an intermediary for the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. It's now the second biggest owner of Twitter to the tune of roughly $1.9 billion, closely followed by the sovereign wealth fund of the government of Qatar. So you have two different authoritarian regimes with direct influence of the private company and then China with major influence over the owner.

Okay. Then we got the second issue, which is the troll and the hen house. As we were talking about, Twitter starts out being this, I don't know, you might. I think of it as sort of like a wretched hive, a villainy and scum, right? And then over time, it builds up policies to limit that. And whether people like those policies or not, it's very clear that it's pernicious effect on the real world has been limited by that. We got a couple issues here.

One, his own personal conduct. I mean, he has a longstanding history as a both a, he's a, he's, He's an originator or spreader of conspiracy theories on everything from people rescuing kids in Thai caves to the one this last week, spreading lies about the victim of a violent crime and the Pelosi attack. He also has a long history of knowingly violating not just internet norms, but the law when it comes to it. And that's why he actually had to, and this is not me saying it, he himself admitted such in a, a settlement with the SEC for fraud. Okay, so we got that personal attitude. Can you, can you like, I really want to be explicit on that one because I think it's super fascinating and really speaks to the way that he operates. Can we talk about, are you talking about the doge coin and like the pumping of

the stock price? No, I'm thinking, actually, that goes back to 2018. That's a different one that you're referencing, right? And so then it was whether he violated the deal that he had made previously. So again, I mean, let's put it this way. He's had a number of. cases. And it's not just, oh, I don't like what he said. Basically, they're violations of what you agree to do when you are a executive and or owner of a public company. And it's not assertion, their settlements, which is essentially there's an agreement on. Okay. So set that as up. But we also have, in this what we're getting at, it's not just that was personal history. It's what he's announced he wants to do. And I think there's a concern of that cross with him saying, I want to go back, or I

want to let the most viral kind of negative actors back on the platform, et cetera, et cetera. But the bottom line is that he's now the arbiter of this. You have another concern, which is his lax history when it comes to cybersecurity. This is more about the traditional cyber threat side. For any company, you're cyber secure only by how much your leadership takes the issue seriously. And unfortunately, Musk has a history on cybersecurity that's worse than Tesla's history with the autopilot. Basically, it's been a hacker right of passage for over a decade to hack Tesla's. And it happens again and again and again. It's every company suffers from cyber threats.

But the fact that it's this repetitious nature of it, the fact that they're only acting on it after people go public with it is really concerning. But then we have the final part that Jason brought up, which is, okay, again, whether you're a fan of him or not, it's very clear that he overpaid. How do we know that? One, Bloomberg reports that there's been a 40% drop in value between when he announced his buy to now. Second, take his own word for it. Or sorry, don't take his own word. Take his own actions. He literally went to court to try and get out of buying the company.

So, okay, now he owns it. and he's announced two pathways to try and turn things around. One is he said, I'm going to cut staff. And it's unclear. Again, he said lots of things. It's at one point it was 75%. Now it seems to be 25%, whichever is. That's a massive layoff.

So that's concerning. One, you eliminate workforce. It just means we have less capability, including to do content moderation and cybersecurity. Second, again, not specific to, Twitter, when any company goes through massive layoffs and its stock price tanks, it's not the best people who stick around. It's just the hard reality of it. So you have a quality issue. And then you have a third, which is when you have mass layoffs, it's like throwing blood in the

water for both insider threats and external actors, right? I mean, this is when bad things happen in cybersecurity. And then you have the final part, which is, is okay, it's not just how we're going to cut costs, it's how we're going to make more money. And he's announced that they're going to try and make money by selling verification. Well, that is concerning because you're basically allowing threat actors to leverage other people's trust that's been built up over years. So it happens in two ways. One, you have the people that are verified who essentially say, yeah, I'm not going to pay.

I'm out. And we've seen a lot of different people do that. And that offers up their trust status, their followers, whether they're in the hundreds or the hundreds of thousands, to some other threat actor to utilize. And then we have the second part, which is the company's efforts to build up trust in verified status. Twitter over the last several, didn't just give it willy-nilly away. You had to prove it. Well, now someone can buy it for it seems to be. 1999, which is actually one, one billionth of what... Went down to $8 a couple hours ago. Oh, man.

I am not that good at math, so help me out if it was... It's one-one billionth of what he paid for Twitter. Now it's $1.10 billion, but whatever. The point is, for whether it's 1999 or $9.99, a threat actor can get verified status. And the trust that's been built up in having that blue check. for some kind of hoax or one-off. And so I know I've been talking long on this, but there's some major, major concerns here.

And the key is not just to go back to the discussion of like war. It's not just the hundreds of millions of people's personal information. It's the fact that social networks, they're companies, but they're also the public square. So they're in this sort of strange space as a little bit like a, they're certainly critical infrastructure, however you define it. and their critical infrastructure that threat actors have targeted for their own ends for years and years, whether it's the episodes that we talk about and like war, of ISIS using it to drive things viral to what we saw in January 6th to positive examples like Ice Bucket Challenge.

What we see now is company that is going through a series of changes that's going to make it, at least it appears so far, easier for threat actors to use. to manipulate, but also to manipulate the rest of us. And that's why you see the, the, so, and people knock expertise, but guess what? There's years and years of experience built up in it. And just like, I want to see an experience doctor or car mechanic. I want people who are experienced in understanding social media helping to set company policies on it. And there's a reason why they did what they did, not just because they were, they were dumb, which seems to be the attitude of too many of these tech bros. And yeah, the problem is it's not just going to be lost investment dollars. We may see some real dangerous effects for the rest of us. This is a Twitter as a space that we like

to admit it like there's not, how shall I put this? It is a place where journalists and other influential people gather to talk among like a sea of shit posting weirdos. It's not nearly as big as Facebook. It's not nearly as big as all these other platforms. But, It is a place where, like, Zelensky will call Elon Musk out publicly on his bullshit. It is a place where U.S. Central Command will tweet out, hey, we have a nuclear sub in the Arabian Sea, which happened last week of the week before. Like, it is a place where big, important, weird things happen. And now Elon Musk is in charge of it. Will it remain that place?

Is U.S. Central Command going to pay $8 a month to keep its verified badge? And does it matter? Like when you can pay for it, doesn't matter. And I'm not sure. It's just, yeah, it's going to be weird and bad in the near term. I really, I honestly hope that the media stops reporting so much on what someone said on Twitter. I mean, it wasn't so much that Donald Trump said things on Twitter. It was that everybody in the media responded.

Yes. What he said on Twitter. If Musk is going to ruin Twitter insofar as much as Twitter can be ruined, then the most important thing is to stop talking about it. And that's never going to happen. No, there's too many. The financial incentives are too big. This.

You know this intimately, right? So there's a couple of things at play here. One is, I think you hit it exactly right. Twitter may not be the most popular platform by the numbers. However, it is arguably the most influential. in shaping the news. And the reason is, one, it's by design the most well-suited for fast-moving events. Secondly, it's, as someone described it, it's a little bit like a clubhouse. I'm not referring to another platform clubhouse, but it's a little bit like a clubhouse for policy makers to journalists,

to open-source intelligence trackers, you name it. It's where they rapidly find and share information, particularly during timely moments. And that's why it has a heightened effect because going back to the notions of like war, if you can hack Twitter, you can also hack newspaper, TV, radio, because actually one in one survey, over 90% of professional journalists

acknowledged that they used it to help find information for their stories, whether they were someone booking guests for a local radio talk show to I'm trying to find someone to interview for my newspaper article, what story to cover as Jason was referencing. What am I, what are we going to cover? Oh, someone so said this on Twitter or I saw this on Twitter. So it may be not as big as other platforms, but it's highly influential.

But there's a second thing at play there, which is what happens as that platform moves from being a publicly held company to a privately held company. And that means the individual owner can have a greater influence and have a greater influence in ways that aren't going to be evident to the rest of the world because you don't have the open board meeting, stock reports, all that. But then we also have going back to you, is the issue, CENTCOM saying, I don't want to pay whatever it is, 1999, 899. The U.S. defense budget can afford it. Or is it them saying, what is it this place turned into? It's not like parlor or it's, it's all neo-Nazis. or wow and Kanye or wow it went back to the way it was in 2014 and ISIS is being enabled and

this is not the place for us or is it huh this is a little bit parallel to the problems potentially of TikTok to give another social media platform where yeah it's a free for all but you also have the ownership of the company influenced by the Chinese Communist Party because either through direct legal control or through fear of what they might do. Again, there's censorship. There's also kind of self-censorship or there's decisions that you actively make or there's decisions that you don't make because you're like, if I do this, I'll piss off China and I won't be able to sell my cars in China or manufacture my cars in China and I will no longer be the world's richest man. Or I won't do this that potentially angers a Saudi government because

oh, guess what? They're part of the second biggest owners of my company. So there's things that you, and again, that may apply to the overall owner. It may apply to the people now working left working in the company. Do I make decision X on moderating this content out of what makes my boss happy, but also maybe does it create a problem for my boss that I don't want to do? Do I allow this thing that, however, it's relevant to Saudi, China, you name it. So that's the calculations that U.S. government agencies are going to have to go through. But then you have the final part, which is where is all this headed? And I think what we're seeing with the overall space of social media is what's happened with the overall internet. The original idea, again, to go back to these fun stories, we tell them like war, was there was the internet and it was

this connection point between Pentagon-funded scientists. And then it's primarily for scientists to share research. It's a bunch of Sheldons from Big Bang theory. And then it's the rest of us. But then it also goes from being this space for all of us to there's no one single internet now, right? Your internet experience is fundamentally different than someone's in China because of government control and the companies that are allowed or not on it, what you can say or do. It's different than someone in Turkey, in Russia. So the internet's no longer like that. And it's the same thing happening with social media. It's people they're on Facebook or Insta or TikTok or LinkedIn or Parlor or true social because of, for some of them, it's the age profile. A teenager would be caught

on Facebook now other than in their grandparents' pictures. On the other hand, someone who, whatever, someone from the squad is not going to be posting on truth social because of the politics of it. I think the, so that that was happening already. Another issue that moving from public to private for Twitter in particular is did he just accelerate this for his own platform? By taking positions on politics, by pushing kind of right-wing leaning conspiracy theories and the like, he has been. potentially accelerated it from sort of the clubhouse for everyone to maybe being a little bit more partisan. And so, so did you just accelerate a trend that was already happening?

Just to complicate things. And I know we need to let you go. Just to complicate things. I mean, it wasn't complicated enough. I just want to point out that in addition to the geopolitical mess that is Elon Musk does not stop at Saudi Arabia and China. This is a guy that through SpaceX has millions of dollars of American DoD contracts. Two, this is a guy that smoked weed on the Joe Rogan and caused a five million review of the company culture at SpaceX that the taxpayers paid for. This is a guy that NASA and the DoD are like banking on partially. Now, there's, is it Yula, the other, the other rocket manufacturer because SpaceX was the, because Musk was the one that said, I'm going to make booster engines that don't come from Russia. And suddenly that supply chain has become very important. And he's the

guy that he's seemed to have cracked battlefield communication in a really big important way. Like Starlink is helping Ukraine. And it seems to be this incredibly reliable form of communication on the battlefield. As long as he's not geoffencing certain parts of it or getting upset and throwing a tantrum on Twitter, he's a he's a human single point of failure for so many things. I just want to throw out those addendums out there to just make it all weirder and more complicated. Yeah. And then you could add in everything from his legal situations of what he said and more importantly, done with certain employees to this strange oddity of, yeah, at the same time that he was providing Starlink to Ukraine. And then there's a back and forth of what was it out of the goodness of his heart to actually.

by the way, the U.S. government may have paid for most of it to now you've got a dependent. We could have that back and forth. But you also had this strange episode where, you know, essentially over the course of two weeks, he essentially elevated Russia's negotiating stance. And I think what was really interesting about it is that it's relating to Ukraine, it was highly specific on elements that clearly are not in his ex, not in his wheelhouse. There were sort of negotiating points that were very clearly Russian provided because it was down to like some things related to the river navigation and the like. I mean, he's a smart guy, but that's not his area.

Posting electoral maps from like 10 years ago and saying that it grew. He was serving as a channel of communication for the Putin regime on what their demands were, but not just privately, but trying to drive a public conversation on it that could potentially and trying to. was also connecting into this sort of fear-mongering on, well, you ought to do what Russia's negotiating stance is because otherwise it's nuclear war and the end of all life on Earth. And then it would get further going back to our discourse of social media, then it would get, you'd see these like other tech bro venture capital becoming nuclear strategists in their side time. And so you have all that.

And then you equally jumped in on the Taiwan taking China's position on Taiwan. And I think, yeah, you put it well. I mean, he's a complex. individual, on the other hand, maybe he's not all that complex because he's all it, id, and ego. And there's both things that he's seeking for himself. But there's also points of pressure that even if he is the world's richest man, there are points of pressure that can and or have been applied upon him. I think the question remains to be seen is how will that dynamic play out in the future, both what happens with his own sort of whims? Which of them can

he put into place because of his wealth and power and which ones run against legal or technical or political reality. I mean, some things he's been able to make happen. And others, I mean, I'm still waiting for the hyper loop thing or what. I mean, again, you didn't get the massive tunnel. You just got a basic tunnel, right? The similar, there's been a lot of these robots that he shown off that are for people who know they're basically the equivalent of the old idea of the Turk, but it's a, it's not real. And it's sort of funny when you think about the technical expertise and yet. Literally, literally a guy in a costume. Yeah. So it'll look like this one day. It wasn't a guy in a costume, but it was basically like it was an equivalent of it was just,

it was it was the physical version of vaporware. I guess is a different way of putting it. So you've got all that at play. But again, I think there's a larger, he's a, he's a fun. We've spent a lot of time talking about it in the same way that. if we were having this conversation in whatever, 2016 or 2020, probably would have been all around Trump and social media. But the thread that runs through it is this broader network and its effect on the real world, whether it's Twitter, whether it's Instagram, going back, whether it was Facebook or whatnot. And it'll be something five years from now that only our kids will know about. But the dynamic is there, and it has very real effects on war, on politics, sort of the macro

level, but all the way down to the individual level, the way that individual fighters and soldiers both use it in their communication, but also are targeted with it. And that was really what we're after and like war, is to try and tell this story. I'm going to give my sort of age away or my soul, and old and soul, is that tell it in a way that's like one of those old radio shows. So it's seven episodes, weaving in clips and interviews. It's a little bit like an audio book crossed with a podcast.

And so you're getting the complete story. But along the way, you're meeting these interesting characters from whether it's a Chicago rapper slash gangster to behind the scenes of what played out on January 6th. And where can people listen to Like War? So they can pull it down through almost any available social or so it's available Apple podcasts. It's done through a partnership with IHeartRadio. So you can get it off their platform and or you should be able to find it through.

I'm not doing a great job of identifying all the others. But those are the, you're showing where IHeart Radio or Apple Podcasts are two really easy places to download it. And people can buy the, if you don't like to listen, you can do the old. old school and read and books are available bookstores and also all the different online booksellers. Peter W. Singer, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and talking way too much about Elon Musk with us, but he's bizarrely important right now. I'm sorry. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on. All right. Thank you. Take care, guys.

That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners, as always. Angry Planet is me, Matthew Gall, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. It's created by myself from Jason Fields. Sorry, we just had to... I mean, the Musk stuff just keeps coming, and it just keeps being weirdly geopolitically important. I won't say this will be the last time, but maybe the last time for a while. We kind of stumbled into it this time as well.

Anyway, if you like the show, please kick us $9 a month at angryplanet.substack.com or angryplanetpod.com. It does help us keep doing the show. It gets you commercial-free versions of the mainline episodes that come a few days early, as well as the occasional bonus episode. We're working on another one right now

that are sure to make a couple people angry. So look for that maybe early next week. As always, we will be back next week. We'll know another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe. Until...