Event Response #3: The Internet as a Weapon

Last night I attended the Jepson Leadership Forum presentation called “The Internet as a Weapon.” The speaker, Yasha Levine, is an investigative journalist whose family came to the United States as political refugees from the Soviet Union when he was nine. He started his presentation by talking about how the internet was used to interfere in the 2016 election. For many people, this represented a turning point in the role of the internet in society because it was the first time that the internet was used to influence a political outcome. However, Levine said that in reality there has never been a time that the internet was not used as a “weapon” of influence. I found this really surprising because I always thought of the 2016 election as an example of the internet’s increased capabilities, but according to Levine the internet has always been able to have such significant influence. He talked about technology being used to influence military operations as early as the 1960s, which was crazy to me.

Something else that stood out to me was that Levine talked about how in his community of immigrants growing up, the United States and its technological developments represented a new world of possibilities for the future. However, we have not lived up to these ideals. To demonstrate this, he showed an image of a new Apple facility being built and a homeless man sitting in front of it. He showed this picture several times throughout the presentation. I thought that this picture was very powerful because it shows that even though technology has created so many opportunities, these opportunities haven’t been available to everyone.