During an awkward lull in what was becoming an impassioned speech, Max Brooks reached forward and grabbed an iPhone from an attendee during a talk in The Loft at Emerson College. Holding it up so the screen faced his captive audience, Brooks pronounced mobile devices as the “nuclear weapon of the new war.”
Coming about a third of the way through an hour-long lecture and discussion on modern information warfare, it was one of many remarks that might have sounded hyperbolic if it weren’t for Brooks’ intense earnestness. The crowd, perhaps realizing all too late that they may be getting a more interactive lecture than they bargained for, sat still as he declared that enemies of democracy are uniquely poised to undermine America in the digital age.
Brooks’ talk, “Disinformation and Democracy,” was organized by the Communication Studies Department, drawing a crowd of roughly 20 students and faculty last Thursday. In it, he charted how informational influence has been deployed from the Vietnam War to the present day, while also championing the ideals of American democracy, governance, and an informed electorate as the antidote to abuses of narrative.
Later on, Brooks asked his audience if they had seen any video depicting human rights abuses against Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region of China on TikTok. After someone said they had, Brooks’ reply was curt: “Probably whoever posted that is in a concentration camp.”
But his blunt, worst-case scenario approach is no accident, surprising as it may be coming from a former SNL staff writer and the son of renowned comedian Mel Brooks.
Max Brooks shares his unique brand of insight on digital and material warfare as a non-resident senior fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point. He has a similar fellowship at the Atlantic Council, an international affairs think tank in Washington, D.C, that encourages cooperation between North America and Europe. As an author, he employs this expertise in national security, disaster preparedness, and a disposition for the apocalyptic in his best-selling novel turned film “World War Z,” and other literature like “The Zombie Survival Guide.”
He described his work to The Beacon as an exercise in imagining “a catastrophe before the catastrophe actually happens.” He said he hopes his fiction, like his talk, will bring a spirit of forewarning to the cultural shift towards distrusting the media—or as he called it, today’s “sucky times.”
While Brooks took many moments to pass on a candid realism, he also called Emerson students and communicators “the new warriors” in the confrontation between truth and misinformation.
“We are moving from the bullets to the bots, and in that battlefield, communication is the most powerful weapon that you can have,” Mohamed Khalil, panel moderator and a senior affiliated faculty member teaching political communications, told The Beacon.
For Brooks, the bullets of the information war really began whizzing during the Gulf War at the start of the 1990s. Before then, he felt “times were awesome,” he added, echoing a sense of abounding post-Cold War liberal optimism at the time.
During Operation Desert Storm, he explained, embedded journalists documenting military shows of force began to allow the spread of deterrence propaganda.
Contrary to the message of strength they were trying to send, Brooks said the military taught “wannabe dictators” not to challenge democracy on the battlefield, but instead to use more insidious means of gathering information, cyberattacks, and economic warfare. He said that, through the technological revolutions of the ensuing decades, these tactics have rapidly developed.
“The goal is not to destroy democratic countries by rolling in tanks. The goal is to get you to choose to give up democracy,” Brooks said. “Within the doubt [disinformation creates], there’s another type of fear, [that] I don’t know what to think…that’s when the dictator comes in and says, ‘I know what to think. I have all the answers.’”
Drawing upon Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, Brooks called his frequent employment of fear-mongering rhetoric “straight out of the dictator’s playbook.” He also pointed out countries like Russia, saying they weaponized internet skepticism.
Brooks distinguished disinformation, which he called deliberate lying, from misinformation, the dissemination of those lies by unquestioning recipients without malicious intent to deceive, often on social media.
“[Through phones], our enemies can do something that no enemy has ever done. They can tell you their lies over and over and over again, every minute, every day, until you believe,” he said.
He told The Beacon he thinks these dual forces of outside influence and a domestic turn toward authoritarianism in America are more connected than people think.
“When I was [a student], we had the Cold War, communism versus capitalism, but that was so much easier because you could wall off the communists. Now, the enemy makes our iPhones,” Brooks said. “We can’t wall off the world anymore.”
For him, worlds began to collide during the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal in the 1970s. He called it a chain reaction that broke trust in the government, followed by the presidency of Ronald Reagan, which further weaponized anti-government attitudes to attack economic regulations for the benefit of the wealthy.
When asked about his stance on big government and the need for regulation, Brooks doubled down that strict oversight of technology and social media is a democratic need. However, he also said that he doesn’t blame tech and AI companies for a lack of oversight.
“Their job is to be irresponsible. They’re supposed to move fast and break things. The blame is on us for not stepping in and saying, ‘Absolutely not,’” he said. “The grownups are supposed to step in, and we are the grownups.”
Brooks said the problem is that social media remains, in many ways, a “Wild West.”
“Unlike tobacco or alcohol or processed foods, which have regulatory bodies, there’s nothing on your phone,” Brooks said. “And the enemies of democracy know this.”
Brooks illustrated this point by comparing how many audience members had been fed videos of starvation and death in Gaza in their social media feeds on TikTok, versus virtually none who saw similar coverage of actions and abuses against the Uyghurs in Northwest China.
“One conflict is being intentionally amplified, and the other one is being intentionally suppressed [by the Chinese Communist Party],” Brooks said. “When the Tiananmen Square anniversary happened, where were the protests?”
Brooks said he saw this suppression firsthand with the publication of “World War Z,” which was never published in China due to a plot point—later removed in the film adaptation to appease Chinese censors—where the zombie virus originated in the communist state.
But this fight is “extremely winnable,” he added. For him, the return of Jimmy Kimmel to his late-night show, following suspension for comments that upset Trump allies in September, marked a huge victory in the war against suppression and censorship.
“It’s not the first time in history this has happened where the enemy gets a leg up,” Brooks said. “The fascists were way ahead of us in World War II. We came back, we won. In the space race, the Soviets were way ahead of us; we put a man on the moon.”
Addressing the students in the room, he challenged them to confront disinformation campaigns wherever they are, and criticized the urge to flee America for other democratic countries.
“Not only do we have the [Trump] White House, there are other democratic countries where they can go this way too,” Brooks said. “The fight is here, and we lead the world. You don’t need a strong man [to fix America], you’re the strength,” he added.
Even as time for discussion ran out, students and professors lined up afterward to ask Brooks for advice in applying these tools to their personal fights against misinformation and injustice. After long conversations, he bade each farewell with a spirited smile and handshake, like a commander welcoming recruits to the ranks of his militia.
