Introducing IIB's Geocyber
The "why" behind what we are doing here.
Longtime readers may recall that I used to pause after every biannual election to consider what to do next. If you look at the Neal Rauhauser Wordpress you will find that after the 2012 election I leaned in hard on food and water security in what turned out to be the maximum extent of the Ottoman Empire. I am pointedly NOT part of the Islamophobic wave that swept the U.S. after the 911 attack, it’s just that the confluence of not enough arable land or fresh water happens to be centered on the homes of the 23% of us who follow the teachings of the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.
Those who’ve really been around for a while will remember that Progressive Congress News was launched two days after the 2010 midterm, eventually reaching a quarter of all Congressional staff with a daily policy intel service tailored to their needs. Our application finished in the top five among seven hundred submitted for the 2011 Knight Foundation News Challenge.
The global war on terror has wound down and Islamophobic cranks no longer have the traction they once did. Domestically, some dead ends are still flogging Anonymous like it’s 2012, but that ship long ago sailed, sank, and was consumed by teredo worms. Today’s international problem(s) are China, Russia, Iran. Domestically the rest of the country has caught up to what I knew in early 2009 - it’s the racists and religious nuts here, the “near enemy”, that are the real danger.
The rapidly evolving confluences of forces in 2023 left me feeling like the captain of a toy boat caught in a maelstrom. This section is my incident response to that feeling.
Overall Structure
Infowar Irregulars Bulletin proper has been focused on the needs of those leading small groups of online partisans. The demise of Twitter as a reality based platform combined with the meteoric rise of LLM AI has meant that this is now a de facto ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) duty. It is very difficult for even a well positioned influencer to set off a cascade that runs counter to an automated opponent’s desires, something that started in the spring of 2012, and which is now broadly understood to be the case.
Tool Time with IIB has done what it says on the tin - focused on the technology aspect of moving around without flying to bits at the first sign of trouble. We’ve covered Linux, burner phones, some tools that should work on all platforms, and Q1 2024 is going to be all about Qubes, and GrapheneOS, subject to my scoring a Pixel 8.
Disinfodrome is a sort of an aside, a hunt for new patrons for my document hoarding problem, so I can turn the lone server doing this work back into a proper high availability Proxmox cluster. There has been one spectacular hit out of these OSS based accessibility exercises, you’ve seen it in the news if you track U.S. politics.
IIB’s conflict oriented material has appeared, when ready, at 0800 PST on week days, a nod to those of you whose careers are in some way enriched by having it. 2023 was a one month “boot camp” followed by a quarter of attention to The Online Operation Kill Chain. This was meant as a doctrine development exercise and that will continue in 2024, but not until I figure out what to do next. Tool Time accumulates new posts on technology, it’s meant to be digestible chunks of stuff you might want to implement for yourself.
Geocyber content is going to be similar in tone to geopolitically focused material in that abandoned Wordpress blog. You guys have seen me complaining about the Disconcerting Inauthenticity of all the Peter Zeihan clones on YouTube. He sees the world through the same lenses I use, but his view is sharpened by demographic knowledge I lack. I’ve picked him as my primary source to follow and now I’m looking for supporting (or dissenting!) work that’s equally rigorous. When I get to a stopping point I am going to sit down and knock out a piece, probably enriching a single area, or fusing research from multiple areas that would be too niche for larger publishers.
Conclusion:
IIB exists for YOU, the company grade officers and NCOs who’ve awakened to the smell of smoke from a world that’s smoldering, much like the 1930s was for my parents. Tool Time is for you or your tech support people. Disinfodrome is my agoraphobic stepchild, full of promise, but not getting out nearly as much as it should be.
Geocyber is … rather different, it’s akin to me stuffing all the “paper” on my mental “desk” into a folder, so I can move on to some new topic. As such there will be posts. They’ll get woven together as the body of work grows. I will periodically make mistake of both fact and inference, I hope not so often, but when I do they will publicly corrected.
And that’s the news for today, January 2nd, 2024. Let the wild rumpus begin …
