Shi Zhan, "The First Metaverse War"

Shi Zhan, “The First Metaverse War”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Shi Zhan (b. 1977) is Professor of Political Science and International Relations and Director of the World Politics Research Center at China Foreign Affairs University.  He is an extremely interesting and prolific young scholar committed both to rethinking traditional notions of what “China” means and to assessing the impact of algorithms and Internet platforms (i.e., the metaverse) on the world economy and the power of the nation-state.  For an introduction to Shi’s work, I recommend a short review I wrote of his most recent book.
 
The text translated here first appeared on Shi Zhan’s WeChat channel, to be read by people who subscribe to that feed, but was subsequently republished on website of Exploration and Free Views, which is a fairly major journal with, presumably, a substantial readership.  Thus Shi’s text is not an example of something that managed to slip by China’s (often fairly slipshod) censors.  The editors of a major publication decided that what Shi had to say would probably interest their readers.  If you read Shi’s piece, I think you agree that this is worth thinking about.
 
Like most of the texts I have translated dealing with the war in Ukraine, Shi Zhan’s post does not engage directly with the issue as framed by the regime and by propaganda organs, by which I mean he neither defends nor condemns either Russia or Ukraine.  Instead, Shi looks at the war from the perspective of platforms and networks, observing the interaction of online and offline worlds in the fighting and the depiction of the war.  These observations lead him to certain interesting conclusions.
 
First, networked communications have the power to make the war an individual experience, because images from battlefield can be delivered directly to anyone’s cell phone without the mediation of a government or a media enterprise.  This is surely not the first time such a thing has happened, and much was made of the power of social media in the course of the various Color Revolutions that occurred over the course of the past few decades.  That said, I am old enough to remember when the George W. Bush administration forbade photographs of the caskets of the American war dead returning from Iraq, only one among many efforts to control the images and the narrative of the war.  Networked communications “put the cards on the table,” in Shi’s apt description, and may ultimately make the one-way television messaging strategy employed by Russia obsolete.
 
At the same time, networked communication also enhances the role of values—through the story-telling that accompanies the distribution of images, and through the “gamification” of the conflict, which encourages participation and mobilization throughout the network.
 
Finally, networked communication encourages intelligent strategic choices when David faces Goliath, at least in this instance.  Shi Zhan is not the only commentator to contrast the agility of Ukraine’s strategy and tactics with the plodding, World War II style of the Russian army (see here for an example from The Atlantic).  Ultimately, Shi Zhan seems to suggest that his readers might sympathize with Ukraine less because they are right than because they are smart.
 
Translation
 
The Russian-Ukrainian war is unfolding both online and off, the two dimensions being highly integrated and mutually shaping one another, with the characteristics of being highly networked.[2] We might say that it is simply a metaverse war shot through with metaphors. 
 
In my most recent posts (“Performance is War,” “Everybody is a Talk Show,” “An Age to Put Your Cards on the Table”) I have repeatedly talked about how the networked participation of the social media age is returning war an individual experience—instead of a collective experience—which means redefining war.  This in turn transforms politics.  Politics requires telling a good story, as well as the performance of that story, and in social media terms, Zelenskyy's two-way interactive performance in a small theater was better than Putin's unilateral, centralized performance on the big screen, because when Zelenskyy staged his play for the world, he made war into a process his fans could follow, which seems to be a metaphor for the metaverse.
 
In such a scenario, the power of values becomes greater than ever. At first glance, values appear to be just words, like floating speech bubbles, but it is precisely the values guiding the networked order that can reach individuals who would never have the chance to meet offline, mobilizing them online in different forms of collective action, turning them into a force that is everywhere and nowhere, constantly reshaping the behavioral boundaries of the parties involved (this is analyzed in my post “An Age to Put Your Cards on the Table” through various cases), which is unprecedented. Many people think that the metaverse is just a gimmick, nothing but a lot of hot air, but they do not understand that in a networked age, the power of this "hot air" is greater than that of our traditional imagination. The era of the metaverse is built on this, and will re-engineer our traditional understanding of elements as basic as water, earth, and fire.
 
Ukraine's thirty-something Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Data Transformation, Mykhailo Albertovych Fedorov (b. 1991), was the owner of an Internet marketing company before entering politics, and is very familiar with the skills employed in network communication. What at first seemed to be a strange choice by Zelenskyy turned out to be a brilliant stroke in a metaverse war.  Fedorov is extremely imaginative, and understands how to use social media to transform tragedy into comedy, how to gamify what is really happening, following the basic logic of communication in the metaverse.   Let’s look at some examples.
 
Zelenskyy is in the heart of the battlefield in Kiev, but he can speak to the U.S. Congress, the European Parliament, and to others, gaining huge support without taking a step outside the capital, which in itself is a kind of metaverse-style integration of online and offline realities. A brief video released after his speech to the U.S. Congress contrasted the beauty of the city of Kiev city prior to the war with the present misery, and this plus the moving background music brilliantly conveyed the tragedy underway in artistic terms.

This reminded me of photos I had seen earlier, pictures taken by Ukrainian photojournalists of legislators fighting in the parliament building, which someone said reminded them of Caravaggio,[3] which says something about the artistic vision of East Europeans.   In the metaverse era, using the tension of artistic forms to convey representations, while at the same time employing social media to achieve viral circulation, allows for the transmission of the essence of an issue, which is a key capability. (I discussed this at length in my recent post on “Representation as Essence, Performance as War”).
 
The point of the metaverse is to gamify reality. Games are a powerful driving force in human nature. Using gamification methods can drive huge crowds to construct the order of the metaverse at low cost and in a networked manner; competition is also a powerful driving force in human nature, and war is the ultimate form of competition. The metaverse will gamify war to stimulate people's desires to participate; we are seeing a beta version of this in the Russia-Ukraine war today.
 
Gamifying war in such a way also compels even more people to brainstorm and participate in a networked way. One Chicago artist has created Zelenskyy Lego figures that are being sold online to raise money for Ukraine. We will surely see many more similar things, and all of the games people play will also surreptitiously spread certain values, subconsciously changing people's understanding of the world, changing the boundaries of the legitimacy of various behaviors, which is what the metaverse does.
 
The metaverse is not just a parallel online world, but exists instead as an integration of online and offline worlds that are mutually constructed.  If we look again at the offline part of the Russia-Ukraine metaverse war, the networked nature of the metaverse is reflected in various ways. 
 
First of all, Ukraine is waging war in a way that is very different from in the past. During the military reforms of recent years, the Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov (b. 1966) disbanded the combat units above the battalion level, so that basic combat units have become extremely dispersed and flattened, and at the same time he has greatly strengthened the digitization and the intelligence capacities of the command system. 

The Ukrainian army’s command system is like a super platform, backed up by integrated aerospace information, on the basis of which the small, dispersed combat units are deployed in flexible attacks, using Javelin and Stinger guided missiles, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, to shoot down Russian tanks and aircraft worth millions of dollars or even tens of millions of dollars. The Ukrainian army does its utmost to avoid concentrated frontal battles, and instead fights the war in a dispersed, fragmented way, a highly asymmetric war of David versus Goliath. The Ukrainian army’s internal operations are low-cost and low-supply in terms of the battlefield, but high-cost and high-tech in terms of the war command system; the situation of the Russian Army is the exact opposite.
 
The concepts underlying this new method of warfare—dispersed, digitized, networked, and intelligent—makes Russia's methods, large-formation warfare like that used in World War II, look clumsy and outdated. The organization of the Ukrainian army makes it completely unsuited for foreign wars, but highly suitable for local wars of self-defense, and the military and political philosophies behind it are in accord with the networked values, in which offline and online match up at the conceptual and organizational levels, which is in turn backed up by online and offline high tech and digital platforms. Technology itself is neutral, but certain characteristics of certain technologies often resonate with particular value orientations or organizational logics, thus facilitating the spread of specific values and organizational forms, which has been seen time and again in history, and today’s metaverse is but another example.
 
This organizational logic also fully mobilizes the population. I recently read something, which is yet to be verified, which said that Ukraine released an app which the public can use to photograph any Russian troops they see, and the app will upload their location, allowing the Ukrainian army to respond.  Again, I don’t know if this is true or not, but if it is true it is extremely “metaverse,” in that online and offline are completely networked, which leaves the Russian army facing forces that are everywhere and nowhere, and are difficult to combat. So even if the app does not exist yet, there is a good chance that it eventually will.
 
Another piece of information is that two American college students, whose names look like they are from Eastern Europe, although I’m not sure if they are Ukrainian, have developed a website enabling Ukrainian refugees and European families willing to take them in to find one another quickly. It's like a war-time version of Airbnb, except that it turns the gig economy into gig disaster-relief, in which networked values can be a great incentive for people to get involved.
 
Online experience can change the boundaries of behavior, but the offline world is still where the rubber hits the road.  The war is far from over, so we can only watch and wait. The same is true of the future metaverse, in that the online world will redefine the offline world, even if the online world cannot escape various responses and constraints of the offline world, meaning that the process is mutually constitutive.  In this sense, the Russian-Ukrainian war can be seen as a beta version of the future, which yet again is very metaverse.
 
The times, they are a-changing.[4] 
 
Notes

[1]施展, “第一场元宇宙战争,” originally posted on Shi Zhan’s WeChat channel, 施展世界, subsequently reprinted online on 探索与争鸣/Exploration and Free Views on March 19, 2022. 

[2]Translator’s note:  The word Shi uses here is 分布式, which literally means “distributed,” as in “distributed computing,” which means little or nothing to me.  “Networked” seems to makes more sense as an English equivalent.

[3]Translator’s note:  Shi is talking about this:  https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/aug/06/accidental-renaissance-photojournalism-italian-painting-ukraine-frank-lampard .

[4]Translator’s note:  No, Shi Zhan is probably not quoting, or channeling, Bob Dylan—he simply says “Times are different.”  But there is an anthemic quality to this and other recent posts by him that recalls Dylan at his most prophetic.