In my heart I know that we have already lost a war.
For decades following the Second World War and as nuclear armament escalated across a global stalemate we were all told that the next big war would be nuclear. Bombs would fall from the sky, cities would be razed by fire, a dystopian dark age would follow as the scattered survivors few and far between fought for limited resources on a charred planet.
Perhaps that is still possible, but I look at the state of the world in 2026 and I think the third world war came and went, and no one realized that the West lost.
Sure, no one wants to cede victory to our adversaries, but in many ways I wish we would simple acknowledge the damage and work to control and contain it’s after effects.
World War Three was not, as it turns out, a nuclear conflict. World War Three was an informational apocalypse.
I remember as the world turned the clocks into the twenty-first century and we were settling into the notion that the Y2K bug had been fixed enough to not destroy our society, news came across the ocean that a senior propagandist and former KGB officer had risen to the heights of power in Russia. After a decade of deescalation we were all feeling as though the remains of the soviet state were our friends now—and not a wounded beast biding its time.
This new power in the east, I believe likely hatched a plan even before his accent to the presidency of Russia. It was a plan to topple democracy and the west.
He was handed the perfect weapon: free, unfettered access to one of humanity’s crowning achievements, the Internet.
As connections expanded, as access grew, as data speeds launched into the stratosphere the eyes, ears, and minds of virtually every person in the world, certainly nearly every person in the western world, were latched into a machine that was designed to connect and entrance us.
For a man who was schooled and experienced in the arts of manipulation through information, a man who had the resources of a once (and still) powerful nation at his fingers, mobilizing an online army to invade and attack the western psyche was almost an inevitability.
In the last decade truth has become a fluid thing. Division has blossomed into dehumanizing shards of left and right. People are radicalized to the point of joining militias to kill. Families rage into hate-filled relationships that are now so common it has become a punchline. Victims of misinformation are so riled by a fake narrative that they are literally working to tear apart alliances, rip apart nations, and destroy their own (and their neighbours’) well being for the grievance and frustration that has come through online radicalization. And all of it seems driven by memes and rage-baited content that burns through social media platforms (often from voices we trust for no good reason) before blindly amplifying ourselves the message and following the dark parade further down the road.
It is of course only a theory, but I can’t see how any of this is not purposeful. I can’t see how this effort to undermine truth, to corrupt the social contract, to break democracies, and to shift us to an infighting smattering of tribal assholes is anything but an act of war by a man bent from his earliest days on destroying us in revenge for his country’s collapse.
Facebook and Twitter are not platforms, they are vectors.
Influencers and shit-posters are not media, they are artillery.
That thing you believe, yes you, no matter which side of the equation you are on, is not truth—it is a shockwave from an explosion that has shattered your critical thinking, an atomic information explosion that is threatening to destroy the western world.
You are not informed. You are the victim of an informational attack.
Stand up. Touch grass. Find reality (and hint, it is probably not online). And fight back against the real enemies: misinformation and propaganda.