Weaponizing the Internet and World Wide Web for Empire-Platforming Capitalism, Data-Veillance, Public Diplomacy, and Cyberwarfare (original) (raw)

2019, Media Imperialism: Continuity and Change

This chapter is a holistic overview of the US empire’s instrumentalization or “weaponization” of the internet and the World Wide Web to act upon users, communities, and whole societies in pursuit of its strategic objectives. It highlights the US state’s support for the economic dominance of US internet and social media firms around the world and addresses the US state’s use of the internet to achieve geopolitical and cultural-ideological goals. It identifies the convergences between the US Department of State, the National Security Agency (NSA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Office of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs (OPDPA), the Department of Defense (DoD), and US internet corporations to show how the geopolitics of the US state intertwine with the economics of “platform capitalism” (Srnicek 2017). In an age when the prospect of US global internet domination is challenged by Chinese state–platform corporations (Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, and JD.com) and some European states push for a “third way” between US and Chinese internet ecosystems (van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal 2018, 27), the US state and US internet corporations are aligning to protect and promote a global internet order in which a US-centered capitalist model rules, over which the US state presides, and wherein American media-culture prevails.