LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media - Hardcover

Singer, P. W.; Brooking, Emerson T.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1328695743 ISBN 13: 9781328695741

Publisher: Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018

Synopsis

Named a Best Book of the Year
By Amazon and Foreign Affairs Magazine

Through the weaponization of social media, the internet is changing war and politics, just as war and politics are changing the internet. Terrorists livestream their attacks, “Twitter wars” produce real-world casualties, and viral misinformation alters not just the result of battles, but the very fate of nations. War, tech, and politics have blurred into a new kind of battle space that plays out on our smartphones.

P. W. Singer and Emerson Brooking tackle the mind-bending questions that arise when war goes online and the online world goes to war. 

Delving into the web’s darkest corners, LikeWar outlines a radical new paradigm for understanding and defending against the unprecedented threats of our networked world. 

About this title

Review

An Amazon Best Book of October 2018: Were you looking for more reasons to worry about the future, or the present? LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media will fuel your nightmares. P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking’s treatise travels well beyond the disinformation and fake news we’re all now familiar with (right?), addressing the ways the internet and our social networks will be deployed in actual war: recruiting terrorists, inflicting sabotage remotely on a vast scale, and even Matrix-grade reality manipulation.

Backed by over 100 pages of notes, LikeWar is sober, deeply researched, and still compulsively readable. Comparisons to On War and The Art of War are apt, while likely optimistic—given the accelerating pace of technology, any reasonable futurist can expect to see their predictions become obsolete in three to five years, or maybe two. But even if the specifics change, the principle holds: Disruption is coming, and we are not ready. It’s frightening, but as individuals, we are far from helpless. As Singer and Brooking conclude, “Social media is extraordinarily powerful.... Yet within this network, and in each of the battles on it, we all have the power of choice.” —Jon Foro, Amazon Book Review

From the Author

P. W. SINGER is a strategist at New America and a consultant for the US military, the intelligence community, and Hollywood. He is the author of several best-selling books, including Wired for War and Ghost Fleet.
EMERSON T. BROOKING is a Resident Fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council. His work has been published in Foreign Affairs, the Atlantic, and Rolling Stone.

About this edition

• Publisher: Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1328695743
• ISBN 13: 9781328695741
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 416