The Art Of Conjuring Alternate Realities : How Information Warfare Shapes Your World

By Shivam Shankar Singh| Anand Venkatanarayanan

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About the book

HOW DO POLITICIANS IN TODAY’S world attain power? How do nations become powerful? Why do human beings follow others unquestioningly, even if it is to their own detriment? What factors determine which politicians, nations and organizations will dominate the modern world?

Through much of human history, societal control was determined by militaristic strength. Individuals and tribes fought to control vital resources and land. In the next part of evolution marked by colonialism and the emergence of mega-corporations, money determined power. In the recent decade, the key to supremacy has shifted again. The power and control individuals, leaders and nations have is now determined by their ability to mould the information environment.

In The Art of Conjuring Alternate Realities, Shivam Shankar Singh and Anand Venkatanarayanan dive into the operations of political parties, cyber criminals, godmen, nation states and intelligence agencies from around the world to explain how the power to manipulate your thoughts is being harnessed, and how information warfare is shaping your life and world.

Pages: 292

Available in: Hardback

Language: English

Shivam Shankar Singh

Shivam Shankar Singh is a data analyst, campaign consultant and author of the bestseller, How to Win an Indian Election (2019). He started out in politics as a legislative assistant to a Member of Parliament Fellow and went on to witness the process of conjuring political realities while managing data analytics for some of India’s largest political parties. He is a panelist on national television and writes for several news publications on data and politics. He is also a 2021–22 Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua University, Beijing.

Anand Venkatanarayanan

Anand Venkatanarayanan is a cyber security and privacy researcher who also dabbles in financial modelling. He has over twenty years of experience in designing and developing system software. He was called as an expert witness before the Supreme Court of India for the Aadhaar case and has deposed before the Kenyan High Court for the country’s digital identity project. He writes extensively on cybersecurity and was one of the first to break the story on the hacking of the Kudankulam nuclear reactor in 2019. He studies reality creation techniques deployed at population scale.

A stellar examination of how modern conjurers apply the art of perception management to shape reality that uses Indian epics and pop culture stories to convey complex information-warfare concepts like reflexive control, cybercriminal psychology, and how authoritarians exploit the information environment to solidify power. A breath of fresh air showcasing information operations topics outside typical Western case studies, relevant to a global audience of laypersons and experts alike. - CODY GENTRY BARROW INFORMATION WARFARE EXPERT, FORMER SENIOR INTELLIGENCE OFFICER, THE PENTAGON

A beguiling and fascinating story of the worlds we have created and now live in ... The authors show us why we should fear the power of the gods that rule these new worlds ... Their ability to shape our reality is perhaps greater than any more earthly, geographical and physical power ... Perhaps the most important battle of the century ahead will be the one for people’s minds, the victor the one best able to conjure a reality people want to believe in, real or not. - GROUP CAPTAIN KEITH DEAR FORMER INTELLIGENCE OFFICER, RAF, FORMER ADVISOR TO THE PRIME MINISTER (UK) ON DEFENCE MODERNISATION, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

As societal interactions get digitized, a crucial bastion of human agency–the ability to interpret reality via information–comes under attack… Increasingly sophisticated methods are utilized to influence the thoughts of people, and nation states turn into forces trying to shape the information environment. The machinery of a state is repurposed to target its own citizenry and create alternate realities. This book is a critical re-evaluation of the cognitive forces shaping our country and its digital architecture of information. - PUKHRAJ SINGH CYBER INTELLIGENCE ANALYST, FORMER CYBER OPERATOR, GOVERNMENT OF INDIA