From the Perspective of Network Sociology, Deciphering the Role of Crypto-Globalism in the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict

In February 2022, we are witnessing a Ukrainian-Russian dispute that is no longer limited to a "traditional military uniform war". In addition to Kharkov's infantry fighting vehicles and self-propelled artillery, communication networks, camera lenses, social media, and cryptocurrencies have opened up the battlefield of cyberspace ultra-restricted warfare.

In the interpretation of the concept of "unrestricted warfare", Qiao Liang pointed out that the "generalization" of war is the inevitable outcome in the future. Network warfare, resource warfare, media warfare, financial warfare, and cultural warfare will all be fierce in the future. White-hot battlefield. Obviously, this assertion has now been proven.

The analysis of traditional issues such as Ukrainian and Russian geopolitics, ethnic issues, and politicians' interests is well prepared. This article will discuss the role of crypto-globalism in this conflict from the perspective of the sociology of networks.

Information Guerrilla on Social Media Networks: From Marcos to Zelenskyy
At the turn of the last millennium, Manuel Castell analyzed the role of information networks in social movements in his "The Power of Identity" against a background of globalization provoked by the unilateral logic of a minority of stakeholders. Resistance based on "identity".

As a network sociologist, Custer keenly captures that the logic of "network" is profoundly changing political struggles around the world. A typical case is what Custer calls "the first information-based guerrilla movement" for The Zapatista struggle broke out to defend the interests of the Maya.

Marcos, the leader of the Zapatista movement, is well versed in sociology and communication. He uses Internet media to build a bridge of communication, and uses unique clothing designs—masks and pipes to build a popular image of revolutionaries. The Movement Manifesto of the Heart, spread widely on the Internet, reshapes the source of identity: resistance is not because of a single race, but because of a common situation. "In this new world order, information is the most valuable commodity, and that same information can kill more than bullets," Custer commented.

Twenty-eight years later, in the Ukrainian-Russian conflict—specifically, the Ukrainian resistance movement led by Zelensky, we see the information network tactics of the Zapatista movement of yesteryear: Internet-based distributed, multiple The dimensional and real-time network communication structure, social media shapes the "sense of presence" of the global onlookers with open and open information flow. In the article "Appearance is Essence, Performance is War", Teacher Shi Zhan has a specific discussion on this mechanism.

Zelensky and the No. 1 figure in the Ukrainian military & Putin and the core figure in the Russian army

Unlike President Vladimir Putin, who is sitting alone in the Kremlin gambling on national fortunes, Zelensky, in body armor, used political performances to initiate national and even global mobilization in front of the selfie camera. Through his actor's intuition, Zelensky mobilized the camera to bring the Ukrainian struggle to the global public, supplemented by high-frequency text updates on Twitter, and footage from the first perspective of Ukrainian frontline soldiers, sparking more and more on social media. more empathy.

According to a report by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on the 28th, a sociology group conducted a poll of 2,000 Ukrainian people, and 91% of the respondents supported Zelensky. One after another, Ukrainian propaganda turned comedian Zelensky into a tragic hero as the social media space morphed into an informational guerrilla war that was difficult to quell.

And we have to be aware that social media has made this era loud and loud, giving birth to what Hector MacDonald calls the "post-truth era" - appealing to emotions and personal beliefs is more influential than stating objective facts The state of public opinion. Lenses held by different people frame different stories, each with multiple sides and multiple “competing facts.”

We will be confused by this: Ukraine claims that Russia attacked civilians, but Russia claims that Ukraine attacked its own civilians, and then took pictures and passed it on to the Russian army. Which side is the truth? Even if there are people present, do these distributed information sources really reflect the whole picture?

Both the one-sided truth and the artificial truth are the representation of the position of the information publisher. Therefore, we see that Sina Weibo, Twitter, and Reddit are polarized in public opinion, and each seems to have information and evidence to support its own judgment. Different camps identify "other" and "self" in these voices. The "competitive truth" of the Ukrainian-Russian war was differentiated on social media platforms.

The competition for social media public opinion is certainly one of the battlefields of the Ukrainian-Russian unrestricted war, but the profound meaning of the Ukrainian-Russian conflict is obviously more than that. The involvement of encryption is a completely new variant of the Ukrainian resistance movement compared to past wars.