In this Climate Genn episode I am speaking with Chad Briggs, professor of Disaster Risk based in the Philippines where vulnerability to climate disaster is a very current issue. His recent published paper, titled, ‘The Gorgon Trap: Entropy, Cognitive Paralysis, and the Mechanics of Cognitive Warfare’ linked in the notes, looks at how cognitive warfare is being waged on all if us around the world. The result is disorientation, polarisation and a spiral of bad decisions.
There’s a direct link between what Anne Applebaum is saying in her speech to the ERSTE Foundation and Chad’s findings. The whole address is linked below.
“It essentially breaks down into three attacks. So the first is… white noise… that’s just the flood of disinformation… it’s just the sheer volume of it that we lose our orientation, we lose our ability to figure out where we are. The second attack, which we found out was really the most damning, is black noise… where you’re actually cutting out key pieces of reliable, verifiable, trusted information… and if you can disorient people… then they’re going to be caught in this endless loop of trying to reorient themselves.”
Professor Chad Briggs
Transcript – Nick Breeze Discusses Cognitive Warfare With Professor Chad Briggs
[Nick Breeze – Genn.cc]
Chad, it’s great to see you. We’re going to talk about cognitive warfare, the Gorgon Trap, and what this means in a contemporary context, because it seems from what I’ve read is so relevant. Can you just start by giving us your definition of cognitive warfare, and how it relates to the overall concept of the Gorgon Trap?
[Prof. Chad Briggs – Disaster risk]
Yeah, it’s good to see you, Nick. Cognitive warfare is something I started working on. In some ways, it goes back to my dissertation, when I was talking about disinformation, use of science, or misuse of science and policy.
But I got much more into it because of the Ukraine War, and my colleagues, especially Yurly Danyk, retired general. And what it really focusses on is that the traditional model of information warfare is assuming that you give out information and people react on it, and you’re trying to persuade them. And it’s usually a binary, either people believe it or they disbelieve it.
But what we found with cognitive warfare is that you can actually shape people’s perceptions. So it’s not information-based, you’re actually working on how people think, how they receive information, the sort of emotions that they feel. And by working on that, it doesn’t matter what information you throw out.
It’s more the volume of information or what key information is left out. And ultimately, what Yuri and I were arguing in an earlier paper was that it led to paralysis, that that was the goal, that you’re just trying to keep people from acting. And I always recognised that this had a link to climate change, because that was what oil and gas companies were doing for years.
And definitely the work of people like Naomi Oreskes, talking about the New York case versus ExxonMobil and everything that they found, it was pretty explicit. But what’s new is that I realised that that wasn’t the only outcome. This is partly because in doing this formal model, and I was honestly going crazy doing this, because advanced mathematics is not my comfort zone, but I’d sort of seen flashes of what this was, because a number of things had come together at once, having to do with NATO, having to do with disinformation.
But ultimately, I come back to biology. So my metaphors or analogies are more biological. And I realised that in physics, if you increase entropy in a system, then it just dies a heat death, and it kind of slowly, passively stops working.
But in biology or ecology, that’s not what happens. Biology fights, a dying system will fight against that sort of entropy. There’ll be inflammation, there’ll be sepsis, there’ll be poisoning of the system, things will not work properly, but it won’t just go quietly.
And I was realising that I think that really applies to institutions as well, that we’re not simply looking at institutions just passively not working anymore, but they can actively act against themselves. And that this is even more insidious, this is more dangerous. And not just in environmental issues, we were looking at this in the context of the Ukraine war, it essentially breaks down into three attacks.
So the first is the most obvious and the one that any climate scientist or activist knows about, which is white noise. And that’s just the flood of disinformation that comes out. And that’s not a new thing.
But I think because of generative AI, we’re just seeing a massive increase in the amount of disinformation that’s out there. But like I said, it doesn’t matter what the information actually says, it’s just the sheer volume of it that we lose our orientation, we lose our ability to figure out where we are. The second attack, which we found out was really the most damning is black noise.
And black noise is where you’re actually cutting out key pieces of reliable, verifiable, trusted information. And this is very much what we’ve been seeing this last year, especially in the United States, although it’s been happening for years, you can go back to climate gate in 2009, where scientists are being attacked. But now we’re losing key parts of the EPA, of NOAA, NASA, USGS.
And that has a really, really massive effect in terms of institutional trust, the ability of people to orient themselves. And part of this is based on an old Air Force theory called the OODA loop, which is related to a former fighter pilot named John Boyd. And we taught this in emergency management to start business schools sometimes, but the OODA loop refers to observe, orient, decide, act.
And in the military terms, you’re trying to shorten the OODA loop. But John Boyd also always recognised that you can disrupt that loop as well. And especially the key part, sometimes you can prevent people from observing, sometimes you can prevent them from acting.
But if you can disorient people, if you can disorient your adversary, then they’re going to be caught in this endless loop of trying to reorient themselves. And right now, that’s what’s happening. We’re losing our orientation, we’re losing our ability to know exactly what’s happening.
I think a good example of this is a friend, not in any way related to climate change or environmental sciences, but living in Florida. And I asked her last year, how are things? And she just answered simply, I don’t know what’s real or who to trust.
But that’s how politics had gotten in the US. And I think with climate politics, that’s a dangerous place we’re in right now. Not just the scientists themselves, because we can figure out what’s happening.
But we don’t know how to place ourselves. We don’t know where the intervention points are. We don’t know how to look.
How do we talk to the public? And then the third attack is called pattern injection. And this is where an adversary can take someone who’s disoriented and then feed them something that will give them a new orientation.
And in climate politics, this relates to, well, let’s just wait and see what happens, or carbon capture will save us, or it’s too late to act. All of these things we’ve been hearing, which just lead people to doubt whether the sort of warnings that we’re giving out, as whether we’re climate scientists or activists. And it just means that people fail to act.
They fail to come to agreement. And ultimately, the system breaks down. And we found that this is very time dependent as well.
So trust can continue to break down even long after attacks have started. And there’s a certain point after which it’s impossible to rebuild the trust in an institution, because it becomes state dependent. The only way you can rebuild the trust is to use trust that is no longer there.
So I really worry that some of our key institutions are not just being physically or financially pulled apart like NCAR, but we’re also losing the public’s ability to trust what we say. And that’s really worrying, especially now that we have not just our background climate issues coming up, but we’re going to get hit with El Nino. And some people will say, well, let’s focus on the probability.
It’s only 79%. Look at the sea temperatures in the Eastern Pacific. It is bad.
I don’t see any scenario under which it’s not going to happen. And if it doesn’t happen, then we can all breathe a sigh of relief. And sitting here in the Philippines, it’s scary.
[Nick Breeze – Genn.cc]
It’s really scary. Obviously, it’s all of this stuff together, because even as they’re happening, people are sort of not convinced they’re happening or why they’re happening. You have these sort of different arguments, which relates to exactly what you’ve just been saying, because we’re saturated with so much information.
Just going back to when we had all these people on stage at the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, and there seemed to be a coming together and a plan to go forward. And then you get to today. Cognitive warfare inside of all of this seems to have led us to this place of absolute chaos.
And how does it play out? Is anyone orchestrating this in an ordered way where we can see that the oil and gas companies have benefited in some ways, and certain regimes who benefit from them are benefiting and so on? But is it, would you say, orderly?
Is it serving those needs well?
[Prof. Chad Briggs – Disaster risk]
I think in the past, it had to be ordered, just because it was difficult to do. Disinformation in the past required a certain amount of effort. It required time.
It required a long-term strategy. And so whether it was the oil and gas companies doing it, whether it was the Soviet GRU, then you required personnel, you required investments. And it wasn’t easy to disorient people necessarily, especially because we used to have very reliable information.
Everyone was watching the BBC. Everyone was watching certain news networks in the United States. Everyone could read the New York Times and trust that the science that was talked about there was reliable.
And now we see an event happen, and to use a very non-climate example, the ballroom shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. And everyone’s immediate reaction of just not knowing, well, is this a conspiracy? Was this a setup?
But we don’t even know who to turn to for information on whether it was true or not, what to believe. And yes, I would really blame a lot of it on social media, on generative AI. It becomes organic, and it doesn’t have to be a single person.
Groups can start it, and then it becomes organic. And it doesn’t even matter at that point who started it or who’s organising it. The Lego videos that the Iranian government put out mocking the United States government is a good example of that.
It’s brilliant in its own way, because Legos, it’s kids, it’s innocent. It resonates in a certain way. But what I found was that it’s also brilliant in the way that you have so many people then who have the tools to create their own Lego videos and to mock the United States.
And admittedly, a good deal of the criticism was justified. But suddenly, there are all these videos that are out there mimicking the first, and it doesn’t matter who it’s from at this point. And it doesn’t matter who’s creating it, and it’s not organised.
It becomes an organic, mimemic, it’s a biological pattern where it just starts spreading through the system. So I think at this point, climate change, climate-related disasters. We saw last year after certain typhoon hits in the Philippines, that people were posting AI-generated videos and images that really exaggerated how much damage there was.
There was already plenty of damage in places like Cebu. But I was trying to figure out, why would people do this? And I think it’s just to discredit the government or to just see if they can do it.
There are people who in a psychological profile will just get a certain benefit off of sharing something which they view as their own disaster movie. And social media will promote it then because you get more clicks from things like that. So I think in combination, that’s led to an environment in which we just don’t exactly know what’s real.
We don’t know who’s giving us information. And many of the most reliable sources of information, I tried clicking on BBC News recently, and now I need a subscription internationally to look at it. That hurts, it really hurts.
[Nick Breeze – Genn.cc]
Well, you just described in both the attack on the president and the stuff in the Philippines around the typhoon. You mentioned this a moment ago about this OODA, observe, orientate, and decide and act as a process for taking action, effective action. But the point of your research is you’re saying when people are getting into that orientation phase, that’s where the confusion sets in.
And they don’t know which way to go. And that creates the paralysis, and also the vulnerability where you get the pattern injection, where something else can be inserted in, and you go off in a completely random direction. I mean, I think you can draw so many different examples in society of how this is happening.
Is there a way out of it? Is there a way to react to it? Because in the UK, we’re seeing complete polarisation of politics, for example, into the Green Party versus reform and the centrist parties, which have been dominant for forever, no longer know how to react.
It seems like some of what you’re researching here is in this, the way that they deal with the media and the way that they cut across each other. It’s a more dynamic conversation that they’re having on the fringes, which is capturing the public, in some ways. Can you talk a little bit about the responses to how effective responses to this situation?
[Prof. Chad Briggs – Disaster risk]
First, the traditional fact checking doesn’t really work. It’s necessary. It’s really necessary as a defensive action.
So for example, what Sir David King does with the Climate Crisis Advisory Group, it’s very good. It’s very necessary, especially when you’re working outside of institutions that maybe we look at the UNFCCC as a necrotic institution. It’s just not working at this point.
So you need to create new institutions, new networks of trust. The other way of looking at it, and we’re working on this from the military side, it’s what I would refer to as the Binkowski Doctrine, which says that you actually have to go on the offensive. I’m not saying everyone, because climate scientists aren’t trained for this sort of thing.
It’s just not in our mentality, but activists certainly. It means that it’s not just attacking in a political sense, but it’s narrative disruption, meaning you don’t accept the framework that’s been given to you. I think Greta Thunberg did this to a certain extent, but one of the best recent examples was the 2024 US election, where J.D. Vance, the presidential nominee, was accused of having certain carnal relations with bits of furniture. And it spread as this joke, and you can’t respond to it. It disorients the group that’s actually attacking, and so it puts them on the defensive. But there are historical examples of this as well.
When the 101st Airborne, during the Battle of the Bulge, was surrounded, and the Germans came up very detailed terms of surrender, and gave it to the commanding general, McAllister. And he just sent a one-word reply back saying, nuts. And it so threw off the Germans, because they didn’t know how to translate this.
They didn’t know what to do with it. He was just rejecting all the terms of agreement. And it both moralised his troops, but at the same time, was just kind of throwing off the Germans.
And there was also the example in 2022, when Ukrainians on Snake Island, there were only a few guards, and the Russian navy was telling them to surrender. And they said, and I’m not sure how PG-13 your video is, but I mean, had a very colourful reply, which was galvanising in many ways. And it disrupted the narrative, the Russian narrative of invulnerability, of inevitability.
And this is what needs to happen, is not accepting the current terms of throwing off the current narrative. So you don’t accept the terms of the debate, but you work outside of it. And it may sound absurd.
But you look back in British history, Monty Python could talk about social issues in a way that no one else could. Or Dr. Strangelove talked about very deep issues of nuclear warfare, but could only do it through dark satire. And I was asked the same question last week, we had a big conference here in Metro Manila.
And I was asked that question, how do we rebuild trust in the system? And the answer, and this is also going back to what Binkowski would say, is you have to start locally. And you have to build it up with leaders who are willing to take risks, who are willing to look out for the community, but you start with schools and libraries.
And it seems small, it seems like it’s just scattered. But I think it also matches with what I’ve seen in post-conflict reconstruction, that when networks have been broken, you have to rebuild them, but you can only rebuild them at a local level and with institutions that serve everyone in the community. And for purposes that bolster trust in information, and the ability to access free information.
[Nick Breeze – Genn.cc]
So from where you’ve been sort of analysing all of this, and you cite a good example in the paper with Ukraine of how, when the Russians invaded, they had been kind of blinded by their own techniques, they rendered themselves ineffectual by overuse of their own techniques. And in a sense, that’s created their own chaos, because they’re now not able to fight effectively. And is that something that we should take for other systems?
So for example, in the UK, where you have an enormously polarised society, no one can really make sense of what’s going on. And people are coming up with quite random roll of the dice solutions, or decision making. Does it mean that we’re going to go through absolute chaos, and somehow we’ve got to try and come out the other side?
Or is this, I think it’s called narrative interruption in the paper, where you’re just talking about how you step outside the context and you just come back straight at them with something that they can’t respond to in the Monty Python-esque way. Is that something that could stop us going into the chaos zone? Or are we just going into it anyway?
I’m just thinking forward from where we are.
[Prof. Chad Briggs – Disaster risk]
I can’t promise that things won’t get bad. I think this year is going to be really tough. The effects of the war in the Gulf, and the blockage in Hormuz, we’re only going to start feeling the effects of that quite soon.
I mean, this is the end of the first week of May. And being here in the Philippines, we’re facing a really serious food crisis, energy crisis, and it’s going to ripple out in a lot of ways. Now, there always can be opportunities available with that as well.
It’s very obvious that we can’t rely on diesel fuel. Many of the islands in the Philippines still rely on diesel fuel for electricity production. And this is so stark now, it’s simply not a model.
We can’t continue on this. And so it means that we need to step outside that frame and just say, look, we need to set up smart grids. We need to start in the periphery and then work inward.
And I’m reminded of when COVID started, I was in Alaska at the time. And in Alaska, the Alaskan natives, the indigenous population have their own healthcare network. And because of their cultural memory of what happened with the 1919 flu pandemic, they started coming up with a vaccine rollout plan long before anyone else, before anyone even knew there was going to be a vaccine.
And their whole plan was to start in the periphery, start in the villages, start with the elders and then work into the centre, which was very counterintuitive to how traditionally rollouts would work. And it was one of the most effective vaccine rollouts that we’ve seen until it finally got to the Sarah Palin era of Wasilla. And then suddenly you get all the deniers.
But I think we need to do the same thing with, say, renewable energy and looking at climate mitigation adaptation. Stop looking at the centre. The centre might be able to take care of itself, but there’s so many opportunities where we can just do technological and infrastructural leapfrogging in the areas that really need it the most.
And it’s fairly cheap investment, relatively speaking, compared to what we’ve been doing. And the benefits of that will be so much better. But it takes a certain leadership to say that, because that’s not where people are going to get their votes.
It’s not where the money is coming from. But I think in terms of rebuilding the and showing what’s really possible for weathering this current storm, I think that’s a workable model.
[Nick Breeze – Genn.cc]
It’s been great to speak to you. Thank you very much. I urge everyone to read the paper, because it’s very instructive in terms of you can quickly see the parallels in our current chaos.
And there is a thread. You can see it from a different perspective, probably the best way to say it.
[Prof. Chad Briggs – Disaster risk]
Thank you. For those of you who are watching and are more comfortable with mathematics, the real formal model is currently under review with an astrophysics journal, which is absolutely terrifying for me. And then we have a larger version, which we’re hoping will submit to the Royal Society.
But it’s a fairly robust, we’ve really been testing it. It’s not just a metaphor that we’re throwing out. But thank you.