{"id":659263,"date":"2013-05-21T10:15:51","date_gmt":"2013-05-21T14:15:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=624492"},"modified":"2013-05-21T10:15:51","modified_gmt":"2013-05-21T14:15:51","slug":"the-future-of-propaganda-a-qa-with-sean-gourley-about-big-data-and-the-war-of-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/659263","title":{"rendered":"The future of propaganda: A Q&A with Sean Gourley about big data and the “war of ideas”"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2009, Sean\u00a0Gourley, an Oxford-trained physicist, gave a TED talk called \u201cThe Mathematics of War.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0Gourley had been working with the Pentagon, the United Nations and the Iraqi Government to help them better understand the nature of the insurgency in Iraq, and in his presentation he announced something fairly striking: After analyzing the location, timing, death toll and weapons used in thousands of deadly incidents around the country, he and his small team had discovered that the violence actually had a consistent footprint. In other words, you could develop an equation that would predict the likelihood of an attack of a certain size happening at a certain time.<\/p>\n

And this wasn\u2019t just true in Iraq: Gourley\u2019s team had also analyzed insurgent-led wars in other parts of the world \u2014 from Colombia to Senegal \u2014 and had discovered the very same pattern, even though the underlying issues in those conflicts were totally different.<\/p>\n

\"Structure<\/a><\/p>\n

Sean Gourley, Co-Founder and CTO, Quid Structure Data 2013 Albert Chau \/ itsmebert.com<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Gourley has since moved on from war zones. He helped found a company called Quid<\/a> that does big data projects for companies like Intel, Visa and Samsung. In March, he spoke at our Structure:Data conference<\/a> in New York, where he talked about the difference between \u201cdata science\u201d (which is about finding correlations) and \u201cdata intelligence\u201d (which is about solving problems). He said we need to shift our focus toward the latter if we want to tackle the biggest challenges our world is facing.<\/p>\n

I followed up with him after the conference to talk more about big data in wartime. In hindsight, we were fighting the data war in Baghdad with fairly primitive tools. It was before the explosion of social media and the flowering of open-source data. In future battles, he said, governments will be using data not\u00a0just\u00a0to predict violence but to fight \u201cthe war of ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just what does that mean? It means using big data to track the types of conversations that people are having about a war \u2014 and then injecting counter-stories back into the system to change those prevailing ways of thinking. A government like the U.S. could use this tactic in a war zone to, say, try to weaken a violent insurgent movement, but the government could also employ it at home to build domestic support for the war.<\/p>\n

We often talk about companies using data science to get people to buy more shoes or more airline tickets. But just as drones are helping to automate wars, we\u2019re moving into an era where data can help automate propaganda \u2014 and that creates the potential for some pretty potent new experiments in brain washing. It makes dropping cookies on people\u2019s browsers seem quaint.<\/p>\n

Below is an edited transcript of my Skype interview with Gourley.<\/p>\n

Q: How would you use data differently in Iraq if you were doing it all over again?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A: It\u2019s important to remind ourselves in 2013 where the information landscape was at the start of the Iraq war. In 2003, the world was very excited about something called blogging. We didn\u2019t have Twitter. Cellphone coverage at the start of the war was exceedingly low. What we\u2019ve seen over the past decade as the war unfolded was one of the biggest changes in the information landscape from a\u00a0militaristic\u00a0perspective in a long, long time.<\/p>\n

The reporters in the bureaus, from the New York Times, say, would be bunkered down in a fortified compound \u2014 they didn\u2019t get out a lot. I mean, you wouldn\u2019t if you were there, why would you? They would send stringers out on motorbikes with cellphones and they would text in if any attack happened. They would be paid based on their reporting of events.<\/p>\n

\n

A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty :-S\u2014
Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual) May 01, 2011<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Since taliban (probably) don’t have helicpoters, and since they’re saying it was not “ours”, so must be a complicated situation #abbottabad<\/a>\u2014
Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual) May 01, 2011<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

You had a crowdsourced version of Twitter, but it wasn\u2019t Twitter. As the conflict went on, in 2008-09, you saw the first adoption of Twitter coming in. Most of that conflict, it was text-based, written by bureaus, and reported on by collating paid people. And that, in and of itself, gave us a landscape that was more complete and in many ways more accurate than what the military was able to do with their eyes on the ground.<\/p>\n

Now, there is already more information being collected by the collective intelligence than by the\u00a0military\u00a0intelligence. One one hand, we\u2019re moving into a world where you have drones recording continuous HD video. But we\u2019re also seeing an upscaling in human reporting now with the likes of\u00a0Instagram. You\u2019re not just tweeting \u2014 you\u2019re taking pictures that are triangulated.<\/p>\n

The crowdsourced info is still going to be more complete and at a higher resolution than even the stuff that is done with the advent of drones and sensors by the military.<\/p>\n

Q: You\u2019ve said that what was missing in Iraq was \u201cnarrative structure\u201d to the data. What do you mean by that?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

A: The stories being told in Iraq and around the world about why we were going to war, how the war was going. Numbers are one thing, but stories and being able to analyze the stories is another.<\/p>\n

Now in 2013, we\u2019re just now at that phase where we can start to process narratives, and that\u2019s pretty exciting. Because as much as wars are fought with bullets, they\u2019re also fought with stories.<\/p>\n

There is a DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) contract out at the moment that is looking to South America particularly to track the formation of new ideas. Part of that is to inject new ideas back into the system. {You could say, for example} I don\u2019t like the way people are talking about this, and then inject a new idea {into the conversation}. And not one based on my gut intuition or a random story, but one that recombines existing ideas and is positioned to nudge and manipulate a conversation in a particular direction. It means fine-tuned control of the stories people are telling each other about why the war is happening. We\u2019re going to get a lot better at getting those stories and language adopted.<\/p>\n

From the standpoint of how you stop these wars and bring them to a resolution \u2026 One thing there is watching the language (in conversations) change from an \u201cus\u201d to an \u201cus\u201d and \u201cthem.\u201d As soon as you have an us and them, you can have a war. You can\u2019t really have a war without an us and them.<\/p>\n

The second piece of that is the stories that are being told by the different insurgent groups essentially as a recruiting tool. If you want to disrupt an insurgency, one key piece of that is a story that attracts them away from those groups and into jobs that are paying that don\u2019t involve killing. So combating insurgent narratives in a way that allow people to gravitate toward a different kind of activity.<\/p>\n

There are patterns in the stories that are told. We can\u00a0track\u00a0them, and we can start to have narratives compete against each other. Exactly how that will be used and how it will unfold, we\u2019re in the process of trying to figure that out.<\/p>\n

Q: Would the government use this tactic of story manipulation domestically as well as in the war zones themselves?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"cnn_headlines\"<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

A: You could have a much higher-resolution storytelling for convincing a nation to go to war. As the war progresses, you see words like \u201cquagmire,\u201d \u201ccivil war\u201d and \u201cintractable\u201d \u2014 that language starts to pop up.<\/p>\n

Could you change the story of civil war and quagmire to something that was made it seem more positive\u2014 like the story of the underdogs fighting back? I don\u2019t know how that would play out, but it was the Americans\u2019 willingness to go to war that the insurgents were fighting against. So they\u2019re killing people to change a narrative that America holds. The violence is targeted against that idea. This tool is more likely to be used by political parties inside the country going to war than inside the country at war.<\/p>\n

Q: It seems like the U.S. government had a pretty good handle on the marketing of the war. The problem wasn\u2019t the lack of messaging \u2014 it was that over time, it simply became a harder sell. Do you think the government could have been more convincing if it had better data?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A: (Laughs) I don\u2019t think I would have gone and advised the government on how to sell their conflict. But a hypothetical person using mathematical tools, yes, absolutely. It becomes a more difficult sell as you go on, but there is basic stuff. Like once 10 people die in an attack, there is a big bump in news coverage. So if you\u00a0stabilize\u00a0below 10 in an attack, you can keep the news at a lower proportion. Just how the news of the attack resonates \u2014 you can start to see those patterns and then play around with them. That\u2019s one piece of it.<\/p>\n

The other is we constructed stories at the start, and then the war got more difficult and the stories that we were telling didn\u2019t evolve and adapt to keep resolution. Was there a story that the American people would have bought half way through the war? Yeah, quite\u00a0possibility. \u00a0Would data have helped us get that story? It wouldn\u2019t have come up with it for us, but I think it definitely would have helped us get to it.<\/p>\n

You would try 10 different stories, 50 different stories, and see which started to get resonance. You would\u00a0monitor\u00a0those that were already out there to see which were getting traction and start to collect those to get a broader narrative. The monitoring and tracking of that stuff would have helped massively.<\/p>\n

You could think of a war now using the simple tools of Facebook and Google and targeting ads, pictures and stories. How would you target those things using social networks? You could have hundreds of different stories. A war unfolding in a media landcape like we have today would have a very different set of tools available to manipulate public opinion.<\/p>\n

\"On<\/a><\/p>\n

Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Q: So it\u2019s like the old-style propaganda campaigns, but supercharged by social networks and open-source.<\/strong><\/p>\n

A: That\u2019s right, but it\u2019s also supercharged by an understanding of how people hold ideas in their heads. It\u2019s not just, we can organize a protest via Twitter and we can have a lot of people show up in one place. It\u2019s that we can actually change what they are thinking. That\u2019t the\u00a0algorithmic\u00a0side.<\/p>\n

With all the sharing of information, we can process that\u00a0algorithmically\u00a0and determine the stories that people hold to justify different political beliefs, different idealogical beliefs and different reasons for why they would take certain actions. That\u2019s the big difference. The real breakthrough here is the natural language processing that enables computers to understand stories.<\/p>\n

Q: Does the government acknowledge that the majority of useful data now comes from open sources? <\/strong><\/p>\n

A: A former director of the defense intelligence agency said that\u00a090 percent of our data comes from open sources. It\u2019s the 10 percent that is the James Bond stuff. That\u2019s the stuff that people get most excited by, but the reality is that most of the data is from open sources. They (the government) may be slow to the punch, but they\u2019re not stupid.<\/p>\n

Q: This war of ideas \u2014 you can fight it from some desk in a some office building in some random city, right?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Precisely. You can do a lot of this remotely. Yes, it\u2019s very conceivable it would be done in Arlington, Va., it wouldn\u2019t be done in Baghdad. The people making decisions off this stuff are still the higher ups. They are going to take these recommendations and combine with their gut instincts for what\u2019s going on the ground, their feel for the political, and maybe a conversation\u00a0they had with a young kid that morning.<\/p>\n

This is not a machine that is going to be making all your decisions. The human side of it is still going to combine with recommendations. I don\u2019t think if you were designing this thing you\u2019d just have a computer spit out a message and immediately accept that. Although it might spit out a message that says \u201cexperiment and see what resonates.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"President<\/a><\/p>\n

Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Q:\u00a0<\/strong>How much money would it take and how many people to create this kind of idea-shaping machine for wartime?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A: At the moment, you\u2019d have to do a lot of R&D to get this stuff up and running. There is as a lot of custom fitting that needs to happen. But I\u2019d be\u00a0surprised\u00a0if in five years there isn\u2019t something more off the shelf. At the moment, a team of a 100 could very feasibly do this. Maybe if it\u2019s in\u00a0government\u00a0it\u2019s going to be 200. But in Silicon Valley, a team of 100 could certainly do it. And that\u2019s today. In five years, that could be cut in half.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re probably going to invest $20 million or $30 million in a team that does this.<\/p>\n

Q: How close is all this to being a reality?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A: I don\u2019t think we\u2019d be\u00a0surprised\u00a0if in 2016-17, this stuff was at the same\u00a0place\u00a0that the self driving was at 2008. As far as the militaries of the world are concerned, this is still near-term science fiction. It\u2019s certainly not stuff they\u2019re running here and now today. The state of integrating open source isn\u2019t done in s particularly coherent fashion or a particularly smart fashion. The models they\u2019re running underneath this have little or no impact on the data they\u2019re collecting. Any kind of analysis they\u2019re running on top of the narratives are cutting short at the length of sentiment<\/p>\n

The brightest minds in the world out there \u2014 they used to be at the NSA. They aren\u2019t now. They used to go to finance. Now they don\u2019t. They come out here to the Valley. The brightest minds doing these\u00a0linguistic\u00a0techniques are out in this part of the world \u2014 they\u2019re not working for government. So we have a pretty good barometer in this Valley for what is possible.<\/p>\n

Q: Propaganda and spin, of course, are nothing new. But now governments have the power to take it to a new level. Should we applaud that or be scared by it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A:\u00a0Technology is neither good nor bad \u2014 but then it is also never neutral. We as technologists have the responsibility that comes with creating this technology to ensure that it is used to make the world a better place. This, of course, is very difficult \u2014 you make bets to give the technology only to one government and not another, and you may end up on the wrong side of an unjust war. Don\u2019t give it to anyone and you risk extending a conflict that could have been ended much sooner.<\/p>\n

My own take here is that you ultimately have to believe in the goodness of humanity \u2014 that on average, there are more good people in the world than there are people that want to harm it. Thus, the more accessible a technology becomes, the better people will use it, and more good people will do good things with it than bad people will do bad things. A simple equation \u2014 but perhaps the right one \u2014 and one that requires us to distribute the technology as widely as possible.<\/p>\n

As a final note, we already give corporations a huge amount of control over the information we share and in turn allow their algorithms to process and ultimately influence the information we receive. Should we be more or less wary of giving it to a government?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

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