# The Global Cyber Game: Achieving strategic resilience in the global knowledge society (part 2 of 10)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [143], part 2 of 10. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: document (PDF), 2013-05-08 (from the career record), https://files.howtolivewiki.com/cyber/20130508-Cyber_report_final_U.pdf. Text: document text
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the money step (Global Village Development Bank, 2009), before the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Defence-tier report citing his cyber views; tangential to the build.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - The Global Cyber Game: Achieving strategic resilience in the global knowledge society (2013): Hardin Tibbs's 2013 report of the UK Defence Academy Cyber Inquiry for the Ministry of Defence, which...
  - Blind in the Panopticon: The decreasing marginal utility of access to information as an aspect of cyber policy (2012): Cyber policy essay: past a point, more surveillance data has negative value, because a state can collect... (suggested by machine)
  - Multipolar Realpolitik (2024): Essays arguing that a global truce among a few great powers, with treaties checked by AI, blockchains and... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - cyber and defense: Security work for defense clients, built on one idea: set rivals to check each other. Resilience and Opportunity in...
  - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - nuclear / panflu: Pandemic, evacuation and rehousing plans. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - rich data capitalism: Cheap information changes what a market can carry: price signals hold only a few bits (2013), blockchains cut... (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: The Global Cyber Game (94%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: cyber (660 here; 32 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); Wired (35 here; 22 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); Hardin Tibbs (8 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); DARPA (7 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); jobs (28 here; 85 sources in all, earliest dated 2003, 4 undated); communications (26 here; 81 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 5 undated); DNS (10 here; 23 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Barlow (5 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); ICANN (3 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); realpolitik (5 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): peer-to-peer; Barlow; John Perry Barlow; economic zone; Forbes; Westphalia; real-world assets; DARPA; global commons
- Importance: core-text score 0.19 (1.00 is the top), number 371 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [243] [Multipolar Realpolitik (Omnibus draft) (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/243.md): close in content (cosine 0.92)
  - [851] [Global governance in the era of blockchain. (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/851.md): close in content (cosine 0.89)
- On the same works, just before: [400] [http://hub.coe.int/forum-mondial-de-la-democratie-5-11-oc... (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/400.md); [399] [Council of Europe World Forum for Democracy... (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/399.md); [395] Open Data Ireland 25 October inaugeral meeting (2012)
- On the same works, just after: [319] [A sleepless night trying to find words (2013)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/319.md); [115] [Warlords, Inc.: Black Markets, Broken States, and the... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/115.md); [286] [Ouishare on global democracy and the real sharing economy (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/286.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: The Global Cyber Game: Achieving strategic resilience in the global knowledge society, document, 2013-05-08, https://files.howtolivewiki.com/cyber/20130508-Cyber_report_final_U.pdf; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [143], https://guptaoption.com/texts/143.md.

## Passages, part 2 of 10
[p. 15 to 16](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/cyber/20130508-Cyber_report_final_U.pdf#page=15) attack by state actors. A number of countries around the world are reputed to have a military malware (sometimes called milware) capability, although they have mostly avoided making any official announcements. However, in June 2012 the German government confirmed that its military has an operational top secret ‘cyberwarfare’ unit. 17 On the same day Google announced that it would be warning 11 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18586681 accessed 07/03/13 12 http://www.symantec.com/threatreport/ accessed 14/02/13 13 http://www.securelist.com/en/analysis/204792216/Kaspersky_Security_Bulletin_Statistics_2011#8 accessed 14/02/13 14 http://www.allspammedup.com/2012/07/blackhole-exploit-kit-used-in-conjunction-with-spam-emails/ accessed 14/02/13 15 Chris Grier et al., ‘Manufacturing Compromise: The Emergence of Exploit-as-a-Service’ The Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), (October 2012) http://www.imchris.org/research/grier_ccs2012.pdf accessed 26/02/13 16 http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/papers/Anderson_WEIS2012.pdf accessed 14/02/13 17 http://www.securityweek.com/germany-admits-existence-cyberwarfare-unit accessed 14/02/13 The Global Cyber Game © 2013 10 www.da.mod.uk Gmail users when it believes their accounts are being targeted by state-sponsored attacks. 18 And in July 2012, President Obama urged support for the proposed Cybersecurity Act of 2012 by describing a dramatic scenario of online attack against US critical national infrastructure (CNI): ‘Across the country trains had derailed, including one carrying industrial chemicals that exploded into a toxic cloud. Water treatment plants in several states had shut down, contaminating drinking water and causing Americans to fall ill. Our nation, it appeared, was under cyber attack. Unknown hackers, perhaps a world away, had inserted malicious software into the computer networks of private-sector companies that operate most of our transportation, water and other critical infrastructure systems.’ 19 State actors may even act against the Internet itself, something criminals have no intrinsic interest in doing. For example, governments under pressure may be prepared to shut down the Internet in local areas or even in the whole country. This happened in 2011 during the revolution in Egypt, when the Egyptian government ordered local Internet Service Providers to withdraw border gateway protocol (BGP) advertisements. These are needed for online connections to be made, and withdrawing them led to the failure of routing throughout Egypt, which disabled the Internet even though the infrastructure apparently stayed up. The outage lasted for five days and, according to an OECD estimate, caused an immediate loss of $90m to the Egyptian economy, plus longer term costs due to loss of trust that Egyptian networks will remain reliable. 20 Similarly, in late 2012, the Internet was also temporarily shut down in Syria, with 77 networks, 92 percent of the country’s total, reported to be offline on November 29th. 21 Iran has also announced plans to develop a national data network and disconnect itself from the rest of the Internet, not surprising given the level of attacks that have been directed against the country. They also intend to export this kind of online isolation to other countries around the world. 22 Arguably, a desperate enough nation could disconnect, and then launch a structural attack on the rest of the Internet, while preserving its own internal network. Of course disconnection would also make it vulnerable to an attack on its entire internal network, without risk to the rest of the

[p. 16 to 17](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/cyber/20130508-Cyber_report_final_U.pdf#page=16) this kind of online isolation to other countries around the world. 22 Arguably, a desperate enough nation could disconnect, and then launch a structural attack on the rest of the Internet, while preserving its own internal network. Of course disconnection would also make it vulnerable to an attack on its entire internal network, without risk to the rest of the Internet. Ironically, given it is the country that leads the Internet supply ecosystem, 23 the United States itself is reported to be responsible for triggering this attempt to Balkanize the Internet, by 18 http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/security-warnings-for-suspected-state.html accessed 14/02/13 19 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444330904577535492693044650.html?KEYWORDS=Oba ma+cybersecurity accessed 14/02/13 20 http://www.oecd.org/countries/egypt/theeconomicimpactofshuttingdowninternetandmobilephoneservic esinegypt.htm accessed 14/02/13 21 http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/11/syria-offline/all/ accessed 30/03/13 22 http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/report-iran-seeks-support-to-censor-internet-disconnect- from-global-network-1.425602 accessed 14/02/13 23 http://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/dotcom/Insights%20and%20pubs/MGI/Research/Technolog The Global Cyber Game © 2013 11 www.da.mod.uk allegedly using the Stuxnet worm to attack the Iranian uranium centrifuge plant at Natanz. (This intrusion is discussed in more detail later, in the context of games that are played on the Cyber Gameboard.) Internet governance At the same time as it is being militarized, there is also a global struggle underway for control of the Internet. This is partly because it was not originally subdivided along national lines. According to Vint Cerf, co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol and now Internet Evangelist at Google, the Internet was designed to solve the military problem of allowing soldiers to communicate without letting the enemy know their location. The solution was to design the Internet to ignore national boundaries. As a result, according to Cerf, most of the Internet’s problems stem from state sovereignty. 24 The flip side is that some of the problems of sovereign states stem from the Internet. One of the overarching themes of the Global Cyber Game is the struggle for control of the Domain Naming System (DNS), the one hierarchical aspect of what is otherwise all network. This struggle goes by the more refined name of ‘Internet governance’, and pits the UN’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) against the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) which maintains the DNS system. The United States and its allies would like Internet governance to stay under the control of the existing group of technical nonprofit and volunteer organizations who have been associated with the Internet since its inception, most of them based in the United States, but with many international members. ICANN is a non-profit organization with representatives from more than 100 countries on its advisory boards, but it does remain technically under the control of the US Commerce Department. This is a source of concern for a group of countries led by Russia and China, who would like to see DNS under the control of the UN’s ITU. It also happens that this group of countries is interested in seeing controls over Internet content, which the United States opposes. The United States upholds the idea of Internet freedom, which former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton describes as the right to use the Internet to ‘express one’s views,’ to ‘peacefully assemble,’ and to ‘seek

[p. 17 to 19](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/cyber/20130508-Cyber_report_final_U.pdf#page=17) of the UN’s ITU. It also happens that this group of countries is interested in seeing controls over Internet content, which the United States opposes. The United States upholds the idea of Internet freedom, which former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton describes as the right to use the Internet to ‘express one’s views,’ to ‘peacefully assemble,’ and to ‘seek or share’ information. 25 The last round of talks of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) held in Dubai in December 2012 did not resolve this issue, so for the time being there is an uneasy stalemate. Summary As things stand, the Internet is seriously insecure, largely the consequence of past decisions about features of its technical architecture. Internet militarization followed by indiscriminate outbreak of ‘cyber war’ in, or spilling into, a medium with such enormous potential and high vulnerability, clearly puts everyone's long term interests at risk. y%20and%20Innovation/Internet%20matters%20- %20Nets%20sweeping%20impact/MGI_internet_matters_full_report.ashx p.25, accessed 12/09/11 24 http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/05/internet-regulation-war-sopa-pipa-defcon-hacking accessed 14/02/13 25 Ibid. The Global Cyber Game © 2013 12 www.da.mod.uk The ability to determine an optimal strategic approach to cyber security concerns would greatly benefit from a way of mapping the positions of the players and the kinds of effects that they can exert on each other, and on the Internet as a whole. This is the purpose of the Cyber Gameboard, which allows the Cyber Game to be analysed in terms of game-like moves. Two dimensions, power and information, come together to form the Cyber Gameboard and the next two sections look at them in more detail. The Global Cyber Game © 2013 13 www.da.mod.uk The power dimension of the Cyber Gameboard As already described, the Cyber Gameboard has two dimensions, power and information, reflecting the hybrid character of cyberpower. The specific features of these two dimensions in large measure determine the nature of the Cyber Game and how it can be played, and it is therefore important to consider them in more detail before looking more closely at the Cyber Gameboard itself. The structure of power Power is the first dimension of the Cyber Gameboard, and power in geopolitics depends on a number of factors. Geopolitical players are traditionally nations—though the Cyber Game expands this—and the power of nations is usually considered to be a function of several types of resource. The classic formula used by Ray Cline (the CIA official responsible for assessing the balance of American and Russian power during the Cold War) took into account population, territory, economic and military strength, and multiplied them all by strategy and will. 26 Unfortunately, this did not always produce the right answer, as it failed to capture the weakness and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. The idea that power derives from physical resources is convenient, as they are relatively easy to assess, but whether they are effectively deployed depends on complex social and behavioural factors that are much harder to assess. This leads to an alternative view of power as the ability to achieve preferred behavioural outcomes. According to

[p. 19 to 20](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/cyber/20130508-Cyber_report_final_U.pdf#page=19) eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. The idea that power derives from physical resources is convenient, as they are relatively easy to assess, but whether they are effectively deployed depends on complex social and behavioural factors that are much harder to assess. This leads to an alternative view of power as the ability to achieve preferred behavioural outcomes. According to Harvard Kennedy School Professor Joseph Nye, this concept of power as relational has three faces: commanding change, controlling agendas, and establishing preferences. 27 The first involves overt threats or rewards, the second attempts to restrict the strategic options considered legitimate by the adversary, and the third attempts to shape the adversary’s beliefs and initial preferences. This conception of power leads to a spectrum of power running from hard to soft. At the hard end is coercion by the use of force, and at the soft end is the possibly unnoticed shaping of the adversary’s worldview. In practice a skilful player will combine both hard and soft power elements into effective strategies, an approach that Joseph Nye recommends and calls smart power. 28 An alternative taxonomy of power has been offered by John Arquilla, Professor of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and his co-author David Ronfeldt. He suggests that there are three ways of thinking about power: as resources, as organization, and as ‘immaterial’. The organizational and immaterial forms of power are similar to Nye’s relational view of power, but seen from the ‘supply’ side rather than the outcome side. This suggests that power seen as immaterial is, in effect, the supply or delivery side of soft power. Arquilla and Ronfeldt’s classification is useful, because it combines the 26 Joseph Nye, The Future of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2011) 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. The Global Cyber Game © 2013 14 www.da.mod.uk resource and behavioural aspects, and also introduces the idea that power has an immaterial aspect that gives it an interesting convergence with the cognitive aspect of information. It is perhaps less clear what the immaterial aspect of power would mean in practice; in this sense it might be better expressed as psychological power. In an influential 1989 study of power, economist and systems thinker Kenneth Boulding also set out a three-level model. Boulding proposed three kinds of power which, when categorized by their effects, he called destructive, productive and integrative. The three behaviours that produce them he called threat, exchange and respect. 29 The destructive power category corresponds to military power and the spectrum of coercive power. The productive power category refers to economic power, involving production and exchange. Integrative power introduces the idea of social power, the power to create identification with a social grouping to which people voluntarily give their loyalty. Integrative power differs from traditional ways of thinking about geopolitical power. Nye, and Arquilla and Ronfeldt, for example, both regard power as essentially coercive. Nye’s definition of power is the ability to cause the antagonist to behave in a way preferred

[p. 20 to 21](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/cyber/20130508-Cyber_report_final_U.pdf#page=20) of social power, the power to create identification with a social grouping to which people voluntarily give their loyalty. Integrative power differs from traditional ways of thinking about geopolitical power. Nye, and Arquilla and Ronfeldt, for example, both regard power as essentially coercive. Nye’s definition of power is the ability to cause the antagonist to behave in a way preferred by the protagonist. So even soft power involves subtle and possibly unconscious coercion. This coercive principle also appears to apply subtly to Arquilla and Ronfeldt’s notion of power as immaterial. Boulding proposed, in contrast, that not all power consists of ‘power over’ and that there is an important field of shared power based on ‘power with’. 29 Kenneth E. Boulding, Three Faces of Power (Newbury Park: SAGE Publications Inc.,1989) The Global Cyber Game © 2013 15 www.da.mod.uk This distinction is subtle but important. Austrian cyber analyst Alexander Klimburg, for example, describes a spectrum of power running from hard to soft that he terms ‘coerce, co- opt or convince’. 30 Yet even the soft power notion of ‘convince’ at root involves the assertion of one party’s will over another. In contrast, integrative power is built when behaviour is not motivated by self-interest but by goodwill and genuine respect for the other, and a mutual willingness to act for the common good. Institutions that are primarily based on integrative power include the family at its best, non- governmental organizations (NGOs), charitable and most religious organizations. These organizations are held together primarily by a sense of legitimacy, which is at the core of integrative power. Many other organizations, such as corporations and, at a pre-global stage, nations, attempt to use a degree of integrative power to improve morale and performance, even though they are primarily based on threat or exchange power, but these efforts are increasingly viewed as not fully legitimate. In a period of globalization, when people identify less with their country 31 and more with global issues, and they network freely with friends around the world, it may well be that legitimacy and ultimate integrative power is moving to the global level. This alone makes integrative power a particularly useful extension to the traditional ways of thinking about geopolitical power. Boulding’s three types of power also align with a continuum of human interaction recognized by anthropologists. They correspond roughly to three points on the spectrum of social reciprocity, a concept that Boulding does not explore but which is important in cultural anthropology. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins identified three forms of reciprocity: negative reciprocity, where each party tries to gain at the expense of the other; balanced or symmetrical reciprocity, where people expect a fair and specified return; and generalized (i.e. positive) reciprocity, where giving and receiving is not measured and there is no specified expectation of balance over time. 32 Negative reciprocity aligns with destructive power, balanced reciprocity with productive power, and positive reciprocity with integrative power. Boulding’s formulation is interesting in several ways. First, it is comprehensive, in the sense

[p. 21 to 23](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/cyber/20130508-Cyber_report_final_U.pdf#page=21) expect a fair and specified return; and generalized (i.e. positive) reciprocity, where giving and receiving is not measured and there is no specified expectation of balance over time. 32 Negative reciprocity aligns with destructive power, balanced reciprocity with productive power, and positive reciprocity with integrative power. Boulding’s formulation is interesting in several ways. First, it is comprehensive, in the sense that it spans the resources underlying power, the behaviours involved in exercising it, and the effects produced. Second, it captures the idea of a spectrum of hard to soft power. Third, it extends beyond the concept of power as necessarily coercive and allows for the power of social solidarity. This is important when a shared global information infrastructure is at stake. Fourth, the three types of power capture the full spectrum of human social reciprocity relationships, important in view of the rising power of networking. 30 Alexander Klimburg, ‘The Whole of Nation in Cyberpower’ Georgetown Journal of International Affairs (Special issue, International Engagement on Cyber: Establishing International Norms and Improved Cybersecurity, 2011), pp.171-179 31 ‘Foresight Future Identities – Executive Summary’ The Government Office for Science, 2013 http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/foresight/docs/identity/13-524-future-identities-changing-identities- summary.pdf accessed 08/03/13 32 Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), pp.193-195 The Global Cyber Game © 2013 16 www.da.mod.uk Power on the Cyber Gameboard These different ways of thinking about power all contribute to an understanding of the power dimension of cyberpower. Reflecting insights from all these perspectives, and particularly Boulding’s threefold formulation of power, the power axis of the Cyber Gameboard is sub-divided into three types of power: Coercion, Co-option, and Cooperation. The Global Cyber Game © 2013 17 www.da.mod.uk The information dimension of the Cyber Gameboard Information, the second dimension of the Cyber Gameboard, has always played a role in human affairs, but in the last few decades it has become much more important, as a consequence of the so-called ‘information revolution’. The advent of electronic computers and the ability to network them globally, and now to put one in everyone’s pocket, has transformed the information context in which we all live. Before the era of electronic computers, information consisted mainly of written or printed documents, and paintings. Recorded information was static, passive, scarce, and relatively inaccessible, and, until the telegraph, there was no technology for sending it instantly over long distances. Now there is a seamless information environment, formed from an underlying electronic infrastructure that creates a connection domain in which information of all types (data, text, sound, and image 33) is stored, processed, and flows freely. This instant multi-way connectedness and digital processing has given information quite new characteristics: now it is dynamic, interactive, abundant, and ubiquitously accessible. The global information infrastructure in its current form has come into being over the last 50 years, with the most significant developments in just the last 20 years. The physical information infrastructure consists of the totality of telecommunications networks (the cables, satellites, wireless links, switches, routers, storage devices, and servers) that together link the vast number of computers of

[p. 23 to 24](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/cyber/20130508-Cyber_report_final_U.pdf#page=23) accessible. The global information infrastructure in its current form has come into being over the last 50 years, with the most significant developments in just the last 20 years. The physical information infrastructure consists of the totality of telecommunications networks (the cables, satellites, wireless links, switches, routers, storage devices, and servers) that together link the vast number of computers of all sizes distributed throughout the world. Running on this hard infrastructure is the soft infrastructure of the Internet and the applications it supports and, in combination, they conjure up the global information realm usually known as cyberspace, or C-space later in this report. The essence of the information revolution is that electronic computers and digital communications are acting as powerful amplifiers and multipliers of information. They are driving a fundamental shift from scarce to abundant information that is transformative: as information becomes abundant, the logic of how it acts in situations is flipped. Information has gone from being an output or representation of physical situations to something that dominates and determines them. Abundant information is a game-changer: it is an evolutionary acceleration factor that is transforming the whole global situation, for social, economic and government players alike. The information revolution The information revolution is, according to an analysis by Carlota Perez, the latest of five major technological revolutions since 1770. 34 Its core technology is the microprocessor, which has been developing exponentially since the 1960s. This growth was predicted by Moore’s Law in 1965, which originally stated that the number of transistors on a semiconductor chip would double every eighteen months (the actual figure turns out to be closer to 24 months), and this has turned out to be remarkably predictive for 50 years. The growing power of microprocessors enabled a similar growth in the power of computers and in the amount, and availability, of information. 33 Stan Davis, Lessons from the Future (Oxford: Capstone Publishing Ltd., 2001) (see a useful diagram on p.35) 34 Carlota Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishers, 2003) The Global Cyber Game © 2013 18 www.da.mod.uk As listed by Perez, the successive technological revolutions are: the industrial or machine revolution starting in 1771; the age of steam and railways starting in 1829; the age of steel, electricity and heavy engineering starting in 1875; the age of oil, the automobile and mass production starting in 1908; and now the age of information and telecommunications starting in 1971. Based on the typical trajectory of the previous technological revolutions, the resulting ‘information economy’ is probably halfway through an S-shaped growth curve and will mature sometime between the 2020s and the 2040s. In other words, the first half of the information revolution is now complete and the second half has just begun. Historically, the first half of a major technological revolution, the ‘installation stage,’ involves the installation of new infrastructure and the transformation of productive activity, while the second half, the ‘deployment stage’, involves the transformation of socio-economic organization necessary to fully release the potential

[p. 24 to 25](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/cyber/20130508-Cyber_report_final_U.pdf#page=24) the first half of the information revolution is now complete and the second half has just begun. Historically, the first half of a major technological revolution, the ‘installation stage,’ involves the installation of new infrastructure and the transformation of productive activity, while the second half, the ‘deployment stage’, involves the transformation of socio-economic organization necessary to fully release the potential of the new technology. The mid-point of the S-curve is also its steepest stage, so the information revolution is now at its maximum rate of growth and just about to enter its most transformational phase. The installation stage of the information revolution was focused on technology, and its adoption and installation around the world led to an exponential increase in computing power, storage and bandwidth. The second half, the stage of full deployment, will be focused on social organization, leading to a fundamental reform of organizations and institutions, for the first time enabling society as a whole to harness the full power of the new technology. The Global Cyber Game © 2013 19 www.da.mod.uk The deployment stage, although it is past the halfway point of the whole revolution, involves the most transformative change for society as a whole. The old institutional structure of centralized hierarchical pyramids with functional compartments has been disrupted, while a new networked institutional structure is becoming clearer and is beginning to diffuse across the system. The benefit of being part of a network is captured by Metcalfe’s Law, which states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its users. There is some debate about the exact multiplier value of Metcalfe’s Law, 35 but in broad terms, as more people join the value increases rapidly. This suggests that, setting aside security and other possible limiting factors, the natural economic endpoint is universal connectedness. This forces all players to reorganize in network compatible form, obliging them to devise and adopt corresponding new industry structures and business models. Eventually there will be a new socio-economic pattern encompassing the entire range of organizations and institutions, spanning global, national and local governments, as well as business and civil society. The deployment of the new pattern will trigger a wave of transformative wealth-creation and social development unattainable in the earlier structure. Existing organizations and institutions are, therefore, on the threshold of an acute challenge which may not yet be apparent to them. The first stage of the information revolution has been about installing information technology and this may appear to be enough. Now they face the need to fundamentally reconstitute themselves, which means understanding and adopting the new organizational forms and strategic models that will be essential for continued viability and development. One aspect of the information revolution has become familiar: accelerating, exponential growth in computational power, stored content, traffic levels, and number of participants. But the character of the revolution is about to shift as it is on the threshold of triggering deep socio-cultural changes, which are likely to prove far more disorientating

[p. 25 to 26](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/cyber/20130508-Cyber_report_final_U.pdf#page=25) will be essential for continued viability and development. One aspect of the information revolution has become familiar: accelerating, exponential growth in computational power, stored content, traffic levels, and number of participants. But the character of the revolution is about to shift as it is on the threshold of triggering deep socio-cultural changes, which are likely to prove far more disorientating than the purely technological changes that paved their way. Gaining an understanding of the coming changes will, however, rely on a deep appreciation of the effects flowing from the new infrastructure of information that has been installed during the first phase of the revolution. Information as a game-changer As already noted, computers and communications are acting as powerful amplifiers and multipliers of information. They are driving a fundamental shift from scarce to abundant information that is transformative because information has some idiosyncratic properties that are becoming more pronounced as information becomes more abundant. These properties demand new thinking and adaptive changes by institutions and organizations, if they are to develop effective strategies for cyberpower and excel in the Cyber Game. Information abundance and accessibility are progressively altering the whole context in which strategy plays out, changing the nature of actors and how they organize and interact, 35 http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/metcalfes-law-is-wrong/0 accessed 28/03/13 The Global Cyber Game © 2013 20 www.da.mod.uk and giving rise to entirely new modes of economic value creation, social communication, and national power, all of which are reshaping the security landscape. Some of the changes are clearly apparent and have been widely reported. The new information environment has a number of characteristics that alter the tempo and dynamics of the geopolitical game. These include: • Speed of information transfer—information is now instantly available between any two points around the world, removing the time buffer that once existed and, in many cases, necessitating an instant response. • Breadth of information transfer—information can be instantly replicated and distributed to any number of pre-identified network nodes. • The death of distance—instant global transfer of information eliminates the isolating effect of geographic distance and the autonomy it once conferred. • Empowerment of individuals—near-zero cost access to one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-one communications is giving individuals unprecedented power to influence and organize. • The rise of networks as an organizational form—networks have always existed in human society, but instant multi-way communication at zero marginal cost is giving networks a relative advantage over up-down hierarchies, which had the edge when message transmission was expensive and it made sense to concentrate information and decision- making at the top. • Rapid propagation of reactions to information—the phenomenon of news and ideas ‘going viral’ is a consequence of speed combined with empowerment of individual communications. • Volume of information—automated processing and sending of information, and the rapid growth of Internet connections, is resulting in an exponential rise in the amount of information being generated, stored and consumed. Effort is increasingly being focused on extracting hidden patterns from this data—the ‘Big Data movement’. • Complexity of processing—information in many forms

[p. 26 to 27](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/cyber/20130508-Cyber_report_final_U.pdf#page=26) combined with empowerment of individual communications. • Volume of information—automated processing and sending of information, and the rapid growth of Internet connections, is resulting in an exponential rise in the amount of information being generated, stored and consumed. Effort is increasingly being focused on extracting hidden patterns from this data—the ‘Big Data movement’. • Complexity of processing—information in many forms (numeric, text, audio, image) can be processed and combined in increasingly sophisticated ways to produce ever more complex outputs and new capabilities. • Openness of information—information about all aspects of society, that was once scattered and hard to access, is now readily available (this includes such things as inconsistent statements made by, for example, diplomats in different contexts). • Transparency—the ease of copying and distributing information, combined with inherently poor Internet security, means that whistleblowers have a powerful new tool, as Wikileaks demonstrates. Players must expect even covert actions to become known and that malware will proliferate. The Global Cyber Game © 2013 21 www.da.mod.uk All these characteristics have direct implications for Cyber Game players: responses must be fast, thinking must be holistic and global, decisions must be made in the context of information abundance and transparency, powerful actors will range from organizations to individuals, and capabilities will be relentlessly surprising. These effects largely arise from the technical attributes of the new information infrastructure, and its acceleration and amplification of information. Although this report does not explore each of these characteristics in detail, it is important to keep them in mind, as they condition the pace and nature of Cyber Game play, and set the context for all interactions on the Cyber Gameboard. The information dilemma At the heart of information’s idiosyncratic effects there is a fundamental dilemma related to the value of information, which cannot be eliminated by any purely technological advance; indeed it is being intensified by technology. To be useful, the information environment needs to be as open and interconnected and robust as possible to maximize its network value, both economically and socially and, at the same time, as secure as possible to guarantee the safety of financial transactions, proprietary knowledge and private communications. All users would like these conditions to apply to their own communications, so any lack of these conditions affects all users. No one, not even the most powerful of states, is exempt. At the same time there is a temptation for some powerful users to want these rules to apply to their own communications but not to those of others. As Stewart Brand famously said, ‘information wants to be free.’ What is less well known is that he added, ‘Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine—too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property,’ the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each

[p. 27 to 28](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/cyber/20130508-Cyber_report_final_U.pdf#page=27) be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine—too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property,’ the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.’ 36 Brand is saying that not only can the tension not be eased by technology, but that advancing technology is actually intensifying the problem. This is a textbook dilemma. Information needs to be shared to become useful. If it is never used or seen by anyone, it has no value at all. On the other hand, it is also true that the distribution of information must be restricted if it is to have economic value, at least in terms of conventional economics. If it is distributed freely it cannot also be charged for, no matter how valuable it may be to the recipient. Its utility, however, may be unaffected by being freely distributed, indeed it may be increased, as with scientific knowledge. 36 Stewart Brand, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), p.202 The Global Cyber Game © 2013 22 www.da.mod.uk The coding community know the information dilemma in their bones. In the words of one contributor to the Inquiry, contrasting the cyber age with the industrial age, ‘Techies understand scarcity completely differently. Talent and connectedness are scarce, code is free. Since the birth of the computer age, software has circulated in a commons.’ 37 The pressure of the information dilemma is what explains the free software movement, which finds economic value elsewhere. It is sometimes said that dilemmas cannot be solved, they must be resolved. Somehow the standoff must be transcended by moving to a new position, not by trying to argue for one extreme or the other. Strategic problems can seem intractable when they take the form of dilemmas consisting of two incompatible alternatives, when ideally both would be true at the same time. Finding resolutions is likely to require a reframing of existing thinking. Policy or strategy needs to be based on the discovery of a new vantage point outside the frame of each dilemma which, when adopted, allows both poles of the dilemma to coexist, even if not in their pure form. This type of resolution allows society to gain the greatest overall benefit, as societies that get jammed at one or the other end of a dilemma tend to become dysfunctional. This stance lies at the heart of several institutional innovations from the Enlightenment period, such as patents, which allow a period of monopoly on inventions in exchange for disclosure (avoiding the less advantageous extremes of either an unlimited monopoly or disclosure which could undermine the economic incentive for exploitation). Arguably, these innovations contributed significantly to the rapid material development of Western nations and indeed the entire globe. Some

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/143-3.md (part 3 of 10).
End of [143] The Global Cyber Game: Achieving strategic resilience in the global knowledge society, part 2 of 10. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.