Robert Mandel’s fifteenth book is about information overload. This is a timely topic in an era of fake news, spin, post-truth, and Russian active measures. Indeed, the 2016 US election was full of ambiguous strategies, deceitful cybercampaigns, and surprising outcomes. Although Mandel may not leave readers with a clear interpretation of what it all means, he does demonstrate how complex the problems of disinformation and misinformation can be.

These are not new problems. Marshall McLuhan complained of “an age of information overload” in a 1969 Playboy interview. The dark side of information abundance has been addressed within the framework of international relations theory by Kristin Lord (The Perils and Promise of Global Transparency, 2007), and Randall Schweller (Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple, 2014). Even though the challenges of political disinformation were dramatized by the 2016 US election, Russians—and Americans—have been manipulating elections for decades. Mandel’s book is distinguished by a more eclectic conceptual approach and a narrower focus on the problem of intelligence analysis in the presence of adversarial deception. He argues that the former is growing harder and the latter is becoming easier because of technological trends in the global media environment.

Technological determinism comes in optimistic and pessimistic flavors. Optimists expect technical innovation to promote political and economic prosperity. Pessimists foresee a dystopia that undermines human well-being. Mandel falls into the latter category. His bête noire is “big data analysis optimism” (p. 12) or the idea that more sophisticated machine-learning techniques will be able to compensate for the shortcomings in the glut of information now available online. Mandel argues, by contrast, that the volume and unreliability of national security information are both increasing, while defensive responses are being hobbled by the frailty of human cognition and the inflexibility of organizational decision making, all in a global context of diverse cultural values and international anarchy. These three factors (or six, or dozens?) combine to increase the potential for strategic manipulation—offensively by providing more means for deception and gullible targets, and defensively by enhancing vulnerability to foreign manipulation.

The precise argument can be hard to parse out from all the lists, tables, and diagrams that Mandel uses to admire the complexity of the problem. Sometimes he talks about “ambiguity, deception, and/or surprise” (p. 58) as a sort of unified dependent variable, but at other times he treats them as a serial chain of causal events that begins with global data shock (p. 36). He offers little discussion of alternative explanations or conditions under which we might expect information overload to lead to different outcomes or not to matter at all. When might foreign cyber influence change the course of history, and when is it just lost in the din of a divided yet prosperous nation? Although much is confusing about the world, this reviewer is struck by the unprecedented availability of reliable information about a vast number of topics. Travel, banking, shopping, research, and precision bombing have never been so easy. Fact-checking is readily feasible, and voluminous scientific literature is ready to hand for those who are inclined to critically evaluate political claims online. When, therefore, does the problem arise that there is too much information of varying quality, and when are people just too unmotivated to seek the truth? It is well known that strategic incentives to misrepresent information can lead to poor political outcomes, but Mandel never considers this alternative explanation to information overload.

The book does contribute to the new direction taken by the conversation about cybersecurity in the wake of the 2016 election. Early work focused on technical information security and critical infrastructure vulnerability while paying less attention to the content layer. Even when an information system is technically secure, however, the complexity and volume of data on that system might still enable manipulation and inhibit understanding. Yet even as Mandel forges ahead, he still makes some familiar deterministic assumptions. Most prominent is the assumption that information technology empowers offense over defense. This idea is particularly problematic in the context of this book. Why should information overload, cognitive frailty, organizational dysfunction, and cultural diversity create problems for the target but not similar or worse problems for the initiator? The assumption that the attacker can craft subtle and effective deceptions while the target is haplessly vulnerable to manipulation seems unwarranted: deceivers can be deceived too, including by themselves. Like many books that are first on the scene with a topic newly arrived in the public consciousness, Mandel prioritizes timeliness and relevance over analytical precision and empirical rigor.

Indeed, there is a certain “ripped from the headlines” quality to much of Mandel’s discussion and his treatments of recent cases, such as Trump’s 2017 foreign policy, the 2016 Brexit vote, the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea, or the 2011 Fukushima disaster. These cases are still wrapped in controversy and mystery, which means that there may not yet be enough information available, ironically enough, to test his claims that too much information is to blame for undesirable outcomes. Even more curiously, “much remains unknown” (p. 114) and “extreme secrecy” (p. 115) surrounds the 2007 Israeli strike on a Syrian reactor, yet Mandel interprets the lack of information as “typical of information overload’s impact” (p. 114). The problem in this case appears to be too much secrecy rather than too much information. Similarly, the intelligence failures surrounding the 2003 invasion of Iraq have more to do with questionable analytical commitments (as argued by Robert Jervis in Why Intelligence Fails, 2010) or the politicization of intelligence (as argued by Joshua Rovner in Fixing the Facts, 2011) than a glut of information.

Mandel’s 10 case narratives in chapter 3 attempt to tease out the consequences of information overload for both sides of a crisis. They are interesting but unpersuasive. Despite the assertion that the cases are “carefully chosen to be highly representative” (p. 57), case selection criteria are far from obvious. Mandel codes all 10 cases as examples of high information overload (p. 148), so there is no variation on the primary independent variable. The book argues that the Internet “information explosion triggered a dramatic change…with data interpretation much harder today and manipulation much easier than before” (p. 11). Yet all but one case (Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait) are drawn from the twenty-first century, which rules out any systematic comparison across time. Without any synchronic or diachronic variation, it is impossible to say whether information overload is really to blame or whether there are other more important factors at play. Chapter 4 then breaks out “twenty indicators” (p. 146) across cases that are variously descriptive or evaluative but that lack any systematic relation to the discussion in the conceptual chapters. This is hardly surprising given that the explanatory theory presented in chapters 1 and 2 is itself too complex and imprecise.

The final chapter, “Managing Global Data Shock,” is full of useful practical advice and should be of interest to practitioners in knowledge-intensive fields. Mandel recommends interpreting data cautiously with more wariness and realism, deepening one’s understanding of the predicament with more sensitivity and empathy, refining threat assessment with better analyst training and policy-maker advice, responding to adversaries with more agile counterintelligence, and improving learning and resilience to recover from surprise. It is hard to disagree with these recommendations. This advice would have been just as valuable in the nineteenth century as it is in the twenty-first. Mandel offers an interesting entry point into the important problem of deceptive influence in cyberspace, but much work remains to be done to clarify the mechanisms and conditions that lead to undesirable outcomes.