How War Went Viral

Joshua Geltzer wrote a review for Peter Singer's new book, LikeWar, for Protego Press.

Every so often, we’re reminded that, generally speaking, less of the world is at war now than in much of human history. But if war is, at least according to some (and there are skeptics), receding from the physical world, it seems to be rapidly spreading across the virtual world—the Internet. From ISIS’s recruitment of foreign fighters to the Kremlin’s attempted subjugation of Ukraine to white supremacists’ post-Charlottesville boasts and threats, belligerents of various stripes are increasingly fighting their battles online. And, in particular, they’re choosing social media as their virtual battleground.

“The Weaponization of Social Media” is thus an apt subtitle for P.W. Singer and Emerson Brooking’s brilliant, gripping, and worrisome new book, LikeWar. (Full disclosure: Singer is a strategist at New America, a think tank with which I’m affiliated, and we’ve met a handful of times.) LikeWar tells in magnificent detail the story of how war swept across the Internet. What’s more, the book raises critical questions about what even qualifies as “war” in a world in which social media appears a perpetual battleground for fights that range from the petty and gossipy to the world-altering and history-changing.