#003

greetings. Cybermonk is back, but sadly on the occasion of these turbulent, troubling times. The cyberpunk genre is not for the faint of heart. Nor is it one that sees international affairs, technology, and human existence through the prism of rose-tinted glasses. 

In other words, this is what you signed up for! If you’ve been in a cryogenic chamber for a while or are otherwise confused what this cybercrunk-sounding email is, or what it means...you signed up for Cybermonk in the back half of 2021 to read a spicy, semi-regular tech newsletter written by me, Ryan D. 

And ‘hoh boy were you deceived. Cybermonk sent twice and then radio silence set in. Indulge Cybermonk in a moment of navel-gazing, and allow it to offer a mea culpa for the three-month programming pause. Cybermonk was hatched as its creator departed Morning Brew to start anew at Payload, a space media startup. It will be easy, his inner voice said. You’ll be able to start and scale a daily newsletter about space while also sending Cybermonk every week. Definitely. 

Turns out that voice was a liar. The hubris, the gall, and frankly, the nerve. Where do the writer and his inner voice get off? Having settled into the new gig and after some healthy soul-searching, Cybermonk is back with the caveat that it will send irregularly and at a lower cadence (1–2/month). Less Cybermonks in your inbox is probably a good thing. 

Now, on to the main event. You can probably already guess what we're covering today.

Hot War In a Hyper-connected World

8:49PM CST Wednesday: As Russia fired the first salvos in the largest European ground war since World War II, this writer helplessly watches on, distraught and despondent, like many of you and millions around the world. While my attention is transfixed on the unfolding tragedy, my gaze is split between two glass rectangles: the TV and the phone.

8:51p: My gaze is now focused on the small glass rectangle. Illia Ponomarenko, a defense reporter at the Kyiv Independent, tweets: 

Illia, a friend I met in the Middle East, chronicled the precursor to this war in the Donbas region, where pro-Russian, Moscow-sponsored separatists fought Ukrainian forces for years. Illia’s footage from the front lines used to pop up as blips on my Facebook feed, interspersed with much more anodyne posts. The jarring dissonance of the posts serve as a helpful reminder that most quotidian concerns (at least in the US) are pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things.

11:54p: On Twitter, a map circulates of Ukrainian targets hit by the first wave of Russian missiles. By the looks of it, most Ukrainian military airfields were hit. At this point, the gaze is split between three screens: a laptop beams one cable channel’s coverage; the TV shows another; and the phone relays a live feed of a curated Twitter list of trustworthy sources on the ground in Ukraine. 

1:42a, Thursday: Another sensory input has joined the mix: wireless earbuds, streaming audio of a Twitter Space. A Kyiv resident has joined the Space and come on stage to speak about conditions on the ground in Ukraine’s capital. It’s Terrell Jermaine Starr, who has spent years living in various parts of the former Soviet Union. He says that Putin's dehumanizing language toward Ukrainians has striking parallels to white racists’ language toward Black folks. Starr says that Ukrainians fought “with their blood” for sovereignty and self-rule in the Revolution of Dignity (aka the Maiden Revolution) in 2014. A scared and insecure Putin is trying to undo that, he says. The Twitter Space is buckling under the load of 50k+ listeners tuned in live. Over the course of the 10+ hour Space, the hosts say 1M+ million users have tuned in at various points. In the days that follow, Starr also appears on CNN and other news networks.

[...] There’s plenty more perfectly timestamped digitized diary entries from that sleepless night, but that’s besides the point. This is the point: 

Foreign invasion, replete with air raid sirens, cruise missiles, and tank columns, has become an existential reality for 44M Ukrainians. For the rest of us, a distorted digital stream of it is now playing out. To be sure, it's a bandwidth-constrained stream with latency delays (lag). The world can’t see everything that's happening, nor can it see major developments in real-time. 

The lion’s share of the world is tapped into the stream through small glass rectangles (phones), not medium or big ones (PCs/TVs). The small rectangles are primarily populated with information distributed via algorithmic feeds on user-generated content (UGC) social networks. This stands in contrast to the big rectangles, where information is distributed through the traditional tubes (ie, cable channels) with more of a latency delay.

It’s a paradigm shift, but not one without precedent. This isn't the first time there's been a "stream" of a war, revolution, or major geopolitical event in our connected world. But this time, the stream is the most high-fidelity, high-bandwidth, and low-latency one we've seen. 

Fuck off, Russian warship

In an algorithm-mediated, UGC-dominated world, information wants to be set free—and very fast. That comes with tradeoffs. Disinformation is spread by malicious actors and amplified by their bots (which are in an arms' race with platforms' robots seeking to identify and ban them). Mis/disinformation is also spread by useful idiots and those without malicious intent who repost unwittingly. 

TikTok, the most popular online destination in 2021, is rife with scammers and grifters who are capitalizing on the war to make money, grow their followers, or get a quick hit of that dopamine drip. But you can't write off TikTok as just a cesspool of scams and grifts, as many are wont to do. TikTok videos have been a primary data source on Russian troop movements, and more recently, Ukrainians have posted TikTok DIY tutorials on how to drive abandoned or seized Russian military vehicles.

Take two other top-of-mind examples: Fuck Off, Russian Warship and The Ghost of Kyiv. Both became legendary, uber-viral stories before being confirmed. The audio of Fuck Off, Russian Warship was vetted and verified, with the Ukrainian government and countless news organizations reporting that the border guards on Zmiinyi (Snake) Island were all KIA. But in the last 24 hours, word is that the soldiers may be alive and in Russian captivity. Meanwhile, the Ghost of Kyiv seemed like a battlefield tall tale...a story too good to be true. Eventually, Ukraine’s Twitter account confirmed the ghost's existence. Is that ironclad proof? Probably not. Does it mean the Ghost is real? Probably! 

The hub and the spoke

Even on traditional cable networks—where longer latency delays are partially explained by newsrooms vetting information, rather than just letting it rip—photos and videos shared on air from Ukraine right now are mostly vertical, not horizontal. The content has an aspect ratio that conforms to the screen dimensions of a small glass rectangle, not a big one.

What does that mean? That news organizations are sourcing videos from UGC platforms. The content being aired is filmed through the cameras of the small glass rectangles, hence the vertical orientation, and was originally shared on messaging apps or UGC networks. 

It’s a hub and spoke model. Local journalists (like Illia) and foreign correspondents (from CNN, BBC, Fox, ABC, CBS, etc) are concentrated in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Lviv. They’re primarily reporting from these Ukrainian cities, aka the hubs. From those perches, publications and networks don't have a direct line of sight into everything that's happening. They're relying on the spokes, ie citizens in Ukraine's major cities, its towns, and the countryside.  

Fog of war

Approximating the ground truth is impossible unless you’re living it. The “fog of war” expression exists for a reason. 

There’s hand-waving among the commentariat about the trash lining the feeds of our glass rectangles: propaganda, grift, god-awful takes, and the aforementioned issue of false information spreading like wildfire. Then, we have the dystopian phenomenon of ads being served against this content (which is not unique to social media). Finally, there’s the issue of these UGC platforms’ gatekeepers being unable to adequately moderate everything spewing out of the firehose. 

But let's not miss the forest for the trees. This content has dominated the mindshare of an attention-addled society. It’s from a privileged perch of safety and relative security that we can scrutinize wildly imperfect AI/human moderation practices and debate social networks' trust & safety governance decisions, as they relate to this conflict. We can chide the platforms' gatekeepers for biding their time before clamping down on Sputnik and RT and demonetizing them, but the EU also didn't pull the plug on the Moscow propaganda mouthpieces until this weekend. In a similar vein, the financial and political powers-that-be deliberated for days before taking decisive action (booting Russia from SWIFT, sending more arms into Ukraine, etc). 

Don't get it twisted 

This is no apologia for the tech giants. Rather, it's a tribute to Ukraine's whole-of-society, bottoms-up approach to stemming the tide of a Russian invasion and marshalling support from the international community. 

UGC just happens to be one key tool at the country's disposal. While first shared on small screens, the content is recirculated on big ones—and in important places. And in an age of institutional skepticism, the content makes it easier for media organizations and governments to show, not just tell, their audiences and constituencies what's happening on the ground. 

While it's easier to flick the remote and turn the big rectangle off, it's harder to tap, type, or swipe past UGC on the rectangle where we spend the most time. Each incremental iPhone-filmed video of atrocities against civilians make Moscow’s bald-faced lies more and more absurd on their face. Photos of the fallout from indiscriminate shelling make institutional postures of inaction more and more indefensible. Ubiquitous mobile cameras make it easier for victims of the invasion to show—and for the rest of us to see—that the emperor has no clothes.

Over the past five days, the "stream" has moved the needle by piercing through the fog of war, elevating the urgency of Kyiv's emotional appeals to the international community, and forcing the hands of leaders sitting on the sidelines. It’s tough to say what sway, if any, that small glass rectangles have had in the court of public opinion within authoritarian societies, given their hermetically sealed digital ecosystems. But those ecosystems' censors are definitely working overtime. And more firewalls are going up, with access to Twitter and FB being throttled within Russia. Moscow, infamously having used information warfare on the West through its own open digital platforms, is now itself losing an information war very badly. 

Fin, for now…There are many disparate threads here that can't be spun into a cohesive narrative or conclusion. Everything is messy. Let's just close by saying fuck war. Ukrainians are bearing the brunt of Putin’s megalomania. But Russians will suffer, too, as their country is wholesale iced out of the international system. 

Слава Україні.

Other Observations

Cyberwarfare: It doesn’t seem that hyperbolic to wager that anything with an internet connection is at increased risk of being hacked right now. Of course, state and non-state actors on both sides of the conflict are training DDoS attacks, espionage probes, and malware on specific hardened and unhardened targets. But the fallout of cyber campaigns often metastasize far beyond their initial targets. 

• While not definitively connected to the war or attributed to Russian-originating attackers, Nvidia, a massive US logistics company, a huge European wind turbine operator, a satellite broadband provider, and more have fallen victim to cyberattacks and/or jamming efforts in the last ~6 days.  

Winning hearts and minds via memes: One of @Ukraine's most popular tweets is a crude political cartoon from late last Wednesday, with a follow-on post saying “This is not a ‘meme’, but our and your reality right now.” But @Ukraine has also tweeted memes in recent weeks (and months). It's not making light of a horrible situation—It's conveying a nuanced messaged in a compressed format that can resonate quickly and cross-culturally. 

Crowdsourcing: Ukraine is home to a thriving hacking/cyberphunk underground collective. Kyiv has directly pleaded with this community to take the fight digitally to Moscow and Minsk, Reuters reported Thursday, and they appear to be answering the call. 

• Around the world, Anonymous and its offshoots have also allegedly joined the fray alongside Kyiv. Last week, RT was knocked offline after being pummeled by a DDoS attack. RT attributed the attack to Anonymous, but who knows? It could have been US Cyber Command. But it's not hard to see a globally dispersed group of hackers lending their services pro bono to Kyiv and inflicting real damage. 

New payment rails: Prior to the actual outbreak of a hot war, Ukrainian NGOs and volunteer groups solicited cryptocurrencies to “crowdfund war” (and cyberattacks) against Russia. These groups, believe it or not, were taking a page out of the enemy’s playbook: The Donbas separatists have accepted crypto donations for years.

Since Russia declared war, tens of millions in crypto have been donated to Ukrainian causes. This isn’t just a crypto story, as regular payment rails (bank wires, online payment services, etc.) are also a conduit for financial inflows to Ukraine. 

Most notably, it's not just Ukrainian non-state actors soliciting donations. At the time of this writing, the country of Ukraine’s pinned tweet is a call for donations pointing to its bitcoin and ether/USDT wallets.

• With regards to the war, there's online Web3/crypto/"bitcoin fixes this" discourse out there that's cringe, horrible, and tasteless, as shown and cherry-picked in this one-sided article. 

• But the government of Ukraine clearly sees some utility in sidestepping the friction of traditional payment rails and simply requesting crypto transfers. They've opted to use valuable digital real estate—the pinned tweet—for BTC/ETH/USDT donations.

Finally, this isn’t “unprecedented”: There are a lot of newspaper editorials, TV punditry, and social media posts making the claim that this is the “first war” of the social media era or hyper-connected epoch. It's 1) not true and 2) smacks of a US/Eurocentric, colonial worldview. The Global South and many non-white countries have, quite frequently and quite recently, experienced their own revolutions and wars in the internet age. For further reading on the matter, Cybermonk recommends Zeynep Tufekci's Twitter and Tear Gas. 

• One possible factor for the discrepancy of attention and ubiquity of UGC content flooding our feeds right now = the prevalence of smartphones. Ukraine’s internet penetration is roughly 3.7X that of Afghanistan. 

That's it for now. Hope y'all are doing ok. Thanks for reading! –Ryan