Cognitive Dimension of Security

Abstract

The present article is devoted to the analysis of the algocognitive culture, the new reality that humanity has already entered, but remains far from being understood. Today we can speak about dissolution of the concept of privacy: almost all actions of a person, including his daily movements, his social circle and values it shares, his corre­spondence and purchases are automatically observed, and completely transparent to information corporations. The problem of fake news has become insurmountable: its appearance in the information cascade is immediately converted into an event, making later investigations and refutations almost obsolete. A “cancel culture” has emerged, within which there is a priori no criteria for good and evil, where it has become pos­sible to “delete” any arrays of knowledge that do not meet the requirements of the self-proclaimed “new ethics” from the information circulation, and to ostracize people as­sociated with them. The authors compare the current state of affairs with the era of the dominance of sophists in ancient Greece, when the truth was determined depending on the situation, and finds relevant parallels. In this context, the authors formulate the concept of “cognitive vulnerability”: the new reality makes it possible to control of the masses, manipulating both their consumer and political behaviour. The authors define network reality as an alternative system of socialization, where the “network” ontol­ogy and values turn out to be more competitive than real ones, and therefore de facto displace them. The latter becomes possible due to a kind of “splitting” of the personal­ity, when the emotional reaction is de facto separated from real goal-oriented activity, and connected with virtual reality. Ruling algorithms in social networks are aimed at achieving this goal: as an example, the authors turn to the recent investigation carried out by The Wall Street Journal regarding Facebook: the MSI algorithm used by the latter provokes disputes and splits on every occasion. De facto, this leads to a situation where American information corporations are moving towards having sovereignty over the consciousness of external societies. This challenge has already been met by China, which nationalized algorithms on September 1, 2021, and handed control over them to the Communist Party. The authors analyse the steps taken by China and comes to the conclusion that, if this tactic works, China will become not only an economic, but also an ideological alternative to the United States, thereby making a bid to restore a bipolar world political system.