Research Project Proposal

20 March 2022

Since the Enlightenment, the failure of epistemologists to establish a shared reality has led to the evolution of a degenerative brain disease called Information Disorder Syndrome (IDS). That disease was weaponized by twentieth century authoritarians such as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. IDS has since been mass-produced at industrial scale by Vladimir Putin and he is currently using it to wage a war against all of humanity. He can do this because of advances in information technology. The internet, social media, and smartphones – all very recent inventions to which the human brain is not yet adapted – have allowed Putin to infect unsuspecting populations using targeted epidemiology. The best way to inoculate against this method of psychological warfare is to construct an IDS intervention strategy. I propose to use this research assignment to build such a strategy through computational thinking. My aim is to demonstrate how disordered information spreads like a virus and can be managed like a virus. To do so, I have used the major concepts of computational thinking to construct an eight-step process that I call the Computational Thinking Cycle. The final product will be an interdisciplinary framework for understanding, identifying, and defeating Information Disorder.