Farewell Infowar, Hello Netwar

Rebranding to avoid Alex Jones.

Welp, it happened again.

Isn't "Infowars" a copyrighted, trademarked term? Are you a part of that organization?

I am usually really good at catchy names, but I am coming to see that I really goofed naming this Substack. This week was the third time someone read no further than the singular “Infowar” and jumped to the conclusion I have something to do with Alex Jones.

The acronym IIB is fairly unique in English, NIB on the other hand is various “national” or “network” or “north” things.

Part of the reason for the original naming choice was to avoid excessive identification with the 1993 Rand publication that inspired so much writing in this general area. There are a lot of Rand studies in the world, this one is freely available just as the rest of their work is, but it also became a paperback textbook available on Amazon. The link in the title below is the much updated free PDF from 2001.

Networks and Netwars

The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy

I have been remiss; this book is NOT on my BookWyrm shelves. I’m not even sure this most influential work even WAS available as a paperback when I first read it back in 2011, but that was well before my Kindle owning days.

I’ve added it just now, but I’m not doing a review there until I’ve actually re-read it.

Taking Stock For Q4:

Third quarter of this year was meant to be focused on two things - revisiting The Insurgent’s Dilemma and exploring frivolous litigation. Instead I count NINE articles in progress. Five of them have been placed with reporters and three of those have to do with Russian influence here in the U.S, the other two are about domestic extremists. The unclaimed four are all Russia related.

On the one hand, I would like credit for what I’m doing - basically serving as not just author, but editor. On the other hand, things are escalating quickly, I hope the DOJ has already seen the things I am uncovering, but they’ve missed enough over the years that I don’t assume such.

And while this is sorta an existential threat for our democracy, I’m not just Ready For More Work, I must find revenue producing activities. Biden passing the baton to Harris is good for the country, but all focus swung to the election, and that included swinging away from some things I had been doing.

Conclusion:

I still feel The Insurgent’s Dilemma is THE most important reading for what’s ahead.

And the litigation angle is going to be big, this is the oligarchy’s tool against democracy. But one of the most interesting things I’ve seen recently involves the plaintiff in Rauhauser v. McGibney. I will not name check any of those people, certainly not before the damages hearing October 17th, and probably not even after that. I don’t want to do a pale imitation of Emptywheel, whatever course I choose it has to compliment Marcy’s work, and Lawfare, and Just Security.

There’s a hierarchy of readers here; from Notes, to articles, to the PDFs in Books, Papers & Video, and then books themselves. There’s a roughly even split - 323 subscribers who presumably read longer form material, and (663 - 323) = 340 followers thanks to my activity on Notes. I am growing … concerned about my Notes usage. It’s too much like the Twitter dopamine hit stuff. I removed that app from my iPad, along with LinkedIn and Reddit. All three are high attention low value cognitive sinks. I am going to try to not contribute to the noise to signal ratio.

So … I figure less than one percent of you are going to read Networks and Netwars … but you’ll spread the wisdom to the other 99%. And that’s a good thing.