For decades, there has been an ecosystem of news, entertainment, and advertising organizations which has influenced and managed public opinion, and controlled the dissemination of information, using techniques of psychological warfare both developed in the military and civilian spheres.
This is a form of manipulation that is very loose and soft, and mercifully allows for pockets of free expression and dissemination of information within alternative circuits, so long as that activity doesn't seriously disrupt the very important worldly affairs of business and finance.
The manipulation of information and opinion was perhaps temporarily democratized through the Internet medium, releasing pressure from the stultifying television and news print mediums, though now as time has passed that democratization has largely been mopped up by a few large tech companies.
The game has largely stayed the same, though the players have shifted.
We see this shift most readily in the alarms being raised about unscrupulous agencies engaging in aggressive advertising and propaganda campaigns, using primarily social media outlets, which tacitly permit the activity as long as a portion of the proceeds pass through their fingers.
And yes this is psychological warfare, and has been thought of as such by theorists of such propaganda systems.
Warfare does not necessarily have to mean physical violence. We speak of economic warfare all the time. With physical violence, you just remove someone with force, either by detaining them or killing them, to get things that you want.
Economic warfare is a little slower and less kinetic, in that you just remove part of someone subtly and slowly to get what you want, and continue to preserve them to continue removing parts of them as long as the relationship holds.
So you further unequal exchange in world trade through unfair trade deals, usurious lending, privatization backed by coups, and the like. And domestically you do it through wage repression, usury, privatization and financialization, austerity and the cutting of social programs, and so on.
Propagandistic media dissemination is tasked with giving people information and the illusion of agency, while utilizing their consent and their advocacy to take or keep power and continue to exploit them through various systems of unequal exchange.
Now, as with all forms of warfare, your opponent is not just going to sit still and accept destruction, no matter how rapid or gradual that process is. Combatants move around, they change tactics, they fight back, and continuously inflict more and more violence around them through retaliatory maneuvers and the like, reproducing the conditions for warfare in a given direction until exhausted.
Movement is the issue here. Violence tends to beget itself as movement. If you take something vital from someone, they're liable to attempt to get that viable thing back, or get it from somewhere else, and so on.
Within regions beset by economic warfare - everywhere basically - is the constant struggle for economic and social security. Some alternatives attempt peace and others yet struggle for the supremacy they've been victimized by, setting ever higher waves of movement in motion in the process.
The class of people doing most of the pushing and pulling over the last couple of decades are the ones wringing their hands about all of the turbulence cropping up that they've had a hand in stirring up. It would be amusing enough to sit at remove and watch the fireworks, but we're all stuck on the same rock really.
