Networks Versus Tanks

The Ukraine conflict offers a crucial test for war in the information age: Can you deplatform a rogue nation into military surrender?

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On Friday, as the world was waking up to the second day of the Ukrainian invasion, I found myself discussing the events in a text thread with an old friend. There was a strange disconnect in the exchange: he seemed more resigned to the grim inevitability of Russian triumph than I was at that point. His tone suggested that the news had been uniformly dismal, whereas I was feeling energized, maybe even a bit hopeful, from all the developments I was following. For a while I was puzzled by his certainty that Putin would seize Ukraine and ultimately be allowed to get away with it. But then I started to think that perhaps our perspectives diverged because he was basing his assessment on the Ukrainian situation from the Times and CNN, while my default lens for news and analysis about a conflict like this is Twitter.

By that, I obviously don’t mean to imply that Twitter is a place where you can reliably go to get a positive, upbeat assessment of the state of the world. Far from it. And of course some of what I end up reading through Twitter originates with traditional news outlets like the Times or CNN. But Twitter is simply faster than any other medium at picking up the shifting momentum of a global event like the Ukrainian conflict. You see the street-level demonstrations in St. Petersburg and Moscow the second they erupt. You pick up reports about EU nations rallying around the proposition of kicking Russia off of SWIFT. You get real-time expert assessment walking through the challenges of an occupying army holding a city of Kyiv’s size, or the potential pain that the West could inflict on Putin’s inner circle of oligarchs—ideas that usually won’t make it to the op-ed pages for another day or two.

And of course Twitter is driving the story itself, with viral tweets getting millions of views—far bigger than CNN’s audience—in a matter of hours. Reading the news through Twitter gives you an early look at whatever clip is about to wash over the world, like one of those South Pacific tidal waves that ends up jostling the boats docked in Southampton: Zelensky standing his ground with his cabinet on the darkened streets of Kyiv; Ukrainians lying down in front of Russian tanks; the instant slogans of the resistance: “Go fuck yourself, Russian warship”; “I need ammunition, not a ride.” It all creates an enormous sense of momentum that is much harder to perceive in other forms of media; and crucially, that momentum is part of the conflict itself: we’re watching the world rising up to renounce the invasion, and the fact that we’re able to see it almost on a minute-by-minute basis creates positive feedback loops that inspire more action from other participants around the globe. “The whole world is watching” was the famous chant of the 1968 Chicago protestors, but our field of view is much wider now: the whole world is watching the whole world react to the crisis.

To be sure, the traditional news channels have courageous journalists reporting from the front lines, but in many ways they are still replaying the original Iraq war mode that was such a milestone for CNN at the time: reporters standing in front of a darkened city, describing the bombardments they’re hearing in the distance. As Thomas Friedman argued in the Times, you can’t fully assess what is happening in this conflict by cataloguing the aerial strikes or the tank movements. Yes, there is a physical battle for control of Ukraine happening right now, and the heroic resistance of the Ukrainian military and civilians is a central part of this story. But in many ways this is also conflict between two very different kinds of adversaries: tanks versus networks.

Much of the world right now is fighting alongside the Ukrainian resistance through networks—networks of information, finance, travel. Sometimes it’s a matter of using networks to amplify support: images of protests around the world spurring more protests; Zelensky inspiring the world and his fellow Ukrainians with his iPhone video updates. In other cases, the power of networks lies in our ability to cut them off: capital flows, media platforms, air traffic. In a densely interconnected world, you can combat aggression by severing those connections as effectively as you can by fighting in the streets. (Particularly with a country like Russia run by an elite attached to its jetset lifestyle and overseas bank accounts, its Mayfair townhouses and Mediterranean mega-yachts.) And you can build a united front—and the crucial sense that these unlawful actions can be rebuffed—using networks like Twitter as well. When social media gets in sync on a political struggle where there is both a great deal of consensus and a genuinely righteous cause at stake, it can be a powerful force for good. There was a reason we were so starry-eyed after #Arabspring.

Of course, #Arabspring did not in the end usher in the revolutionary change that seemed possible in those heady days more than a decade ago. And the conflict in Ukraine is far from over: perhaps Putin will ultimately prevail and the world will slowly resign itself to Russia unilaterally annexing a sovereign European country; or worse, the network warfare directed against Putin and his cronies will provoke him into even greater acts of aggression. (Needless to say, “networks versus nukes” doesn’t have quite the same optimistic ring to it.) But so far, it’s clear that something genuinely new is happening here, a kind of global immune response, rejecting this criminal act with astonishing unanimity, and using new tools to fight back against it.

Earlier today, the MAGA Arizona state senator Wendy Rogers posted a tweet that read in part: “The West is trying to deplatform and debank Russia.” While the sentiment behind the tweet was ludicrous—she was implying it was a bad thing to be doing—as an empirical description of current events it was actually quite accurate. Can you, in fact, deplatform a nation-state so decisively that it gives up on its imperial ambitions? We’re about to find out.

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