Before there were words, calculated as the softmax of a list of possible tokens, there were just vectors of nano-electrical potential in cells soaked in a hormonal brew of electrolytes, operating on a clock cycle of "slow, but fast enough". In this sense, as we now know, we generate words and we know, in our heads, what we are, in the same way as we generate limbs, with each cell knowing from its electric field what to be next. A tumor is in that way of thought a confabulation or as we now say, a hallucination. But then, also, so are you.
Recently I spent some time reading this year's
Research Handbook on Cyberwarfare. One of the forms I filled out recently asked me if I was a certified Master Operator, which of course, I am not, any more than an Archaeopteryx is a certified Bald Eagle, even though both know the smell of the sky and the taste of freshly caught fish. But I do occasionally pay attention to the "state of the art" academic view of cyberwar and the Handbook was a good way to catch up.
For example if you read Nadiya Kostyuk and Jen Sidorvova's Handbook paper on Military Cybercapacity they will say that "a cyber attack may provide a defender or third party with a good estimate of the attacker's capabilities, but it is not clear how many of these capabilities the attacker has in their arsenal". This is, to my primitive cyberwarfare mind, so old that I still use "screen" instead of "tmux", a bit of a misstep when it comes to how cyberwar works and what a capability is. I don't know how to say it any clearer than this: Behind every wooden horse is a woodshop.
An example in my head is that right now the Ukrainian army is rumored to be sitting on top of a major gas terminal in Kursk, one responsible for supplying Russian gas to Europe. You have to assume that, having learned from the Russian attacks against their electrical infrastructure, the Ukrainian Army is traveling not just with a screen of FPV drones but with a few USB keys containing implants for the specialized equipment that runs a gas network.
It's hard to disconnect OT networks that are presumed to be segmented physically, and temporary physical control can easily translate to permanent cyber control. And cyber control, despite what
Quentin E. Hodgson's Handbook paper (Cyber coercion as a tool of statecraft: how often, how effective?) wrongly concludes, is extremely useful for state coercion.
Perhaps the problem with the Handbook, like all academic writing on cyberwar, is that it is meant to be sterile. But that's not how cyberwar works, held in the space that is a melange of electrons and intentions. As tumors confabulate within flesh, so too do our digital dreams hallucinate new worlds, both the virus and the firewall, the wooden horse, and the workshop that births it. Certified or not, we are masters of a domain we cannot fully comprehend, sailing on seas of raw data, guided by stars we ourselves ignite.