Culture is slippery. Colloquially, it circulates as topical memes, tiktoks, tweets, pop music, and podcasts. Canonically, it’s inscribed at museums, music centers, and theaters. Both the high-brow and vernacular expressions of culture operate to the same end: they tell the stories that communicate the shared values which bind social groups. Whether culture articulates the weather of the day (e.g. memes) or the climate of the era (e.g. museum exhibitions), increasingly, both are being weaponized in ways not seen since the Cold War.
This goes beyond framing culture as soft-power or even smart-power. It’s about understanding culture as critical infrastructure of societies and of social cohesion. But as infrastructure, it is vulnerable to acts of aggression from power-seekers. Much like how cyber attacks target digital infrastructures, cultural attacks target social infrastructures. The difficulty is they are harder to pinpoint.
Like other technologies—biotech, AI, and nuclear—culture has civilian applications as well as military ones. As much as it has the potential to bind societies in consensus it can destabilize them with polarization and discord. This dual-use aspect means that culture is strategically harnessed and deployed differently in open societies (e.g. the US, Canada, and Western Europe) vs closed societies (eg North Korea, Iran, or China.)
With the end of the Cold War, the US stopped treating culture as a tool of statecraft. It became a nice to have, not a need to have. The broad-base defunding of cultural institutions and university humanities programs has created a socio-technical debt both in society and in policy which leaves these cultural infrastructures vulnerable to foreign influence campaigns already underway.
For a while it seemed as though the US approach of laissez-faire corporate diplomacy—of letting companies vis-a-vis the market determine cultural products—was working. Corporate cultural Goliaths like Nike, McDonalds, and Hollywood made the US a cultural hegemon. But forty years of post-war mono-polar world allowed the US policy establishment to take culture and the culture industry for granted. Now changes in the cultural sector, at both the high brow and low brow ends of the spectrum, makes this laissez faire approach impossible to sustain.
During the Cold War, the US understood culture as an essential front of the ideological battle between Capitalism and Communism. The government funded, sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly, exhibitions, conferences, magazines, and performances. Conservative policy in the 1990’s eroded the NEA, the US’s primary state infrastructure of support for arts institutions. Today, the primary support museums receive from the federal government is their non-profit status and underwriting indemnity insurance on loaned works. Many argue this shift away from leveraging culture as a tool of statecraft is justifiable because in the mid-century the arts had purchase over public persuasion that doesn’t map to today’s pop-cultural landscape, which has been radically changed by the attention economy and social media.
In roughly parallel, the Stewart Brand’s neologism “information wants to be free” ethos that formed the foundation of this shift is reflected in the chaotic morass of decentralized cultural narratives in the 21st century. The socio-technical debt that arose from the transition from an industrial economy to an internet-enabled services, (and later an attention) economy facilitated the definitive power transfer of our time, from states to transnational tech corporations.
Whereas before, according to brand strategist Eugene Healey, art and fashion “had a monopoly on fiction” now, the access to the mechanisms of culture are being democratized. On one hand, this amplifies and elevates previously marginalized voices. On the other, it creates a chaotic cultural landscape increasingly dictated by black box private algorithms. This breakdown of structures that support and sustain cultural authority has created societal vulnerabilities that countries like Putin’s Russia–which actively weaponizes culture–look to exploit.
Ideally, institutional and vernacular culture should counterbalance one another. While bottom-up cultural movements should be a scrum of competing ideas eventually, eventually the best and the lasting ones bubble up to land at the museum. The museum’s institutional responsibility to the public meanwhile, is to use scholarship, expertise, and resources to determine what gets inscribed in the cultural canon of the exhibition archive which eventually becomes the registry of cultural history. This process isn’t perfect. But roughly the idea is that the museum should be an apolitical arbiters of truth. Now this process is broken down at both ends of the spectrum. As cultural institutions go under-resourced and AI slop on social media eats pop culture, culture as social infrastructure is breaking down.
By minimizing, under-resourcing, and ignoring the role of culture in political science, the US under-estimates the dangers that weaponized culture can present—especially to projects as abstract and roughly-hewn as ideas like ‘democracy’ or ‘the West,’ which adversarial actors use to their advantage.
Cyber attacks against digital infrastructures have become a standard activity of state and non-state actors alike. These attacks leverage the plausible deniability enabled by our increasingly digital societies to infiltrate or disrupt critical systems without clear accountability. They ensure that even egregious operations like the 2020 SolarWinds or the Salt Typhoon attacks send messages without crossing into what would be considered acts of war.
Today, as culture is primarily consumed and circulated through private tech companies’ platforms, it serves as a form of social engineering with consequences that increasingly do crossover into the real world. Coordinated state-backed efforts like Russia’s meddling in the US 2016 elections and the Brexit referendum are harder to pinpoint. Broadly, the lack of frameworks for understanding how cultural infrastructures affect open and democratic societies vs closed and authoritarian ones amplifies the security risk.
As a Marshall Memorial Fellow, my study tour took me to DC, Ankara, Sofia, Lisbon, and Athens. Throughout the tour, I observed several examples of culture as theater of conflict. In Sofia I visited NATO’s DIANA institute where researchers are monitoring mis and dis information campaigns and witnessed protests against Bulgaria joining the Euro—which were largely considered to be fomented by Russia. In Turkey, authorities surveil and have jailed multiple leaders of cultural organizations, in recognition of the power of the arts to sway public opinion and a desire to silence critics of Erdogan. In Lisbon, the relationship between art and the affordability crisis was delicate as artists are often perceived as first movers and therefore complicit in the displacement of communities caused by gentrification.
One major eruption of culture warfare during our study tour occurred back home in the US, Charlie Kirk’s assassination. His killing immediately engulfed the news cycle and the internet in the ongoing MAGA vs democrat culture war, inflamed over Kirk’s legacy and politics. Provoking comparisons to the assassination of archduke Franz Ferdinand, the fallout was swift and profound.
Late night comedian Jimmy Kimmel was put on leave but later reinstated when it came to light that the Trump appointee FCC chairman Brendan Carr suggested Disney would face consequences if their subsidiary ABC did not take action against Kimmel for his comments about the President’s reaction to Kirk’s death. The affair provoked pundits like M. Gessen and David Remnick to note the parallels to the fate of Kukly, the Russian political satire puppet TV show that Putin had cancelled in 2002 as part of his consolidation of power.
Maga and the Trump administration seem to recognize culture’s dual-use even if they don’t name it as such. They use culture to write and implement policy, to build their base, and lean on their competition much the way that closed societies do. Given their integration of culture in policy, from the way they use AI-slop images to visualize their policies on Instagram and the State Department’s closure of “all frameworks” to monitor foreign mis and dis information suggests a transition from blindness or neglect to complicity.
Shifts like defunding the NEA and the rise of social media began before the second Trump administration. The problem is not just that the US’s defunding of cultural institutions is part of what has led social media platforms to take their place as centers of American cultural life, it’s that this has created new domestic security vulnerabilities that we are neglecting.
The effect on the cultural landscape of social media, which is run by private companies and who have no responsibility to uphold public good, culture-coding everything from [alternative] milks to motherhood, makes the fabric of daily life a cultural battleground. In this context, cuts to cultural reporting, analysis, and criticism only increase the vulnerability of these societal infrastructures to outside meddling.
Social media, and now generative AI, make images and videos cheaper and more abundant than ever by lowering the barriers to production. At the same time, they have destroyed the business models of media and eroded the professional pathways for developing expertise in traditional forms of culture. Increasingly people are forced to use private social media platforms to look for community because it’s too expensive to participate in public life.
As the corporate owners of the means of production increasingly use algorithms and AI models which rely on retrogressive statistical analysis to produce “new” images and ideas, the result is a broad loss of public political, social, and creative imagination directly tied to the flattening of creative production.
The landscape continues to evolve. The affordability crisis pricing people out of participation not just in cultural events but in most third-spaces is only further entrenching the centering of social media as the dominant cultural engine.
Increased adoption of generative AI means that the conditions through which culture is performed on the Internet are changing. Some studies estimate that now more than 50% of web content is AI generated. If we consider social media as the primary forum for colloquial and vernacular cultural expression, it is increasingly cultural production now is dominated by bots, not people. And increasingly it’s getting harder to tell the difference between them. We don’t yet know what impact this will have on societies.
No system that is overly reliant on the government or private sector is ideal. The nature of the art market and of the open market are in many respects incompatible. For society at large to gain from the productive tension that comes from having both the private sector and the government support cultural production we need government support to respond to market failures–just like in other aspects of society. This does not mean that the government should dictate content. It means that the government should support setting the conditions–with funding, policy, and administrative infrastructure–that allows culture and cultural institutions to flourish–not out of regard for aesthetics, but as a bulwark to protect civilian public life.
If we think about culture as a dual-use technology with real security implications, might that change how we understand, resource, study, and implement it? Would reframing culture as a theater of great power competition change how we design the policy and regulations shaping the tech platforms where culture increasingly circulates? If we understand culture as a component of national security would we see artists, museums, and the media that sets conversation about them in public discourse as a more worthy public investment?