Which Cyber Side Are You On?

[Commentary] Regardless of how much states want to assert a monopoly on cyber violence, any future conflict — and most conflicts are simultaneously becoming cyber conflicts — will be as much in the private sector as in the public. Could this constant low-grade conflict, made possible by cyberspace, inure decision makers to the danger of real war, making the “real thing” all the more likely? Certainly the lubricating language of “win-win cooperation” has long since given way to what seems to be a chronic irritability and tetchiness among world leaders.

Cyber is part of that, this new period of anxious vulnerability and a lack of endings; cyber undermines the state without replacing it. As one person concludes, in a rather anguished passage on cyber deterrence, “The fact was, no one in a position of power or high-level influence had thought this through.”

[Malcomson is a visiting media fellow with Carnegie Corporation of New York.]