How to Save Yourself from 'Self-Cyborgization'

With the dramatic impacts of global information warfare becoming ever clearer, columnist Heidi Siegmund Cuda investigates how we can best protect ourselves

Image: Skorzewiak/Alamy

Maybe if we called it ‘Spy War’ Western audiences wouldn’t have gotten lost in the code.

If we tagged ‘information warfare’ as spycraft, maybe things would have turned out differently in America and other targeted countries whose democracies are now under water.

On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder calls it ‘self-cyborgization’ — arguing with bots or agents in another country, who deploy programmed responses by political technologists designed to depress and demoralize the real people they interact with. Snyder said being in ‘the company of code’ is ‘desperately sad’.

“The ‘us’ becomes nonexistent if the other thing on the side of the screen is a bot,” he said in a Global Empowerment Meeting in 2018. “You think it’s a ‘we’ but you’re alone—you’re in the company of code—it’s not only desperately sad, but it’s politically significant—it probably caused the Brexit vote.”