Cyberwarfare, Artificial Intelligence and the Revolution We Cannot See
I gave a talk inside a castle. That is not a metaphor. It happened for real, at the Castello di Palazzo di Assisi, on the evening of 10 July, for «Cambio Parole», the offshoot of the Cambio festival, which this year built its whole programme around a single word: Revolution. I went up to talk about the revolution we see the least, the digital one. And while preparing the evening I noticed something uncomfortable. The book I wrote six months ago was already out of date. I kept updating it until the last minute. This piece is an attempt to fix on paper what I said in that courtyard, before it goes out of date too.
A castle is the right place
The stone walls of a medieval castle were built to withstand an enemy that was known. People knew where it would come from, at what speed, with what weapons. Every arrow slit was the answer to a specific threat. Today that kind of certainty has vanished. The most concrete enemy does not come from a recognisable direction, wears no uniform, leaves no rubble. And yet it strikes hospitals, power grids, voting systems, bank accounts, the water we drink. A castle, with its visible walls, is the perfect place to talk about a war made of walls you cannot see.
The four dimensions, and why the fourth cuts across them all
My starting thesis is simple. Every real revolution breaks three things at once: the rules of the game, the boundaries of the field, and the identity of the players. The digital revolution broke all three, in the domain of conflict. And it did so by opening a new dimension of war.
Wars, historically, have been fought by dimensions. First land, with its visible and familiar battlefield. Then the sea: whoever understood it first controlled trade, and whoever controlled trade controlled wealth. Then the sky, which became decisive in the Second World War. The fourth dimension, cyber, is different from all the others for one precise reason. It has no localised battlefield. It is transversal. It runs through the other three at the same time. Land, sea and air warfare now all depend on digital systems. Whoever controls the fourth dimension can degrade the others without firing a shot.
The first documented case dates to 2010: Stuxnet. A piece of software slipped into the centrifuges of Iran’s Natanz plant made them spin too fast until they broke, while the operators’ screens showed that everything was fine. Attributed by journalistic investigations to the United States and Israel, as part of an operation later described by reporter David Sanger, it was the first act of industrial sabotage carried out through code. Seen from the Iranian side: no soldiers, no aircraft, no declaration of war, but the machines fail. War without a uniform.
We are all inside the infrastructure
There is a part of the talk that usually makes people uneasy, and rightly so. The battlefield is our own devices. Banks, hospitals, electricity distribution, elections: it all runs through the same infrastructure. And we are the ones who feed that infrastructure, with our everyday gestures.
My favourite example is Apple’s AirTags. An object with no SIM, no phone line, no connection of its own, yet able to tell you where your car or your keys are. How? By using every iPhone that passes nearby, which reports its position to the network. Millions of phones that, without knowing it, keep a distributed tracking system running. It is a perfect metaphor for how the rest works. Nobody needs to ask our permission. It is enough that we stay inside. People are outraged by war and then keep posting a photo of their plate before eating. Every gesture feeds the system. It is not a moral failing. It is simply the way it is built.
The same robots that dance
In February 2026, to open the Chinese New Year, humanoid robots danced live in front of a billion people. The world applauded the progress. A year earlier the same robots were performing a folk dance with handkerchiefs; this year, kung fu and acrobatics. The point I wanted to make is that those robots come from the same industrial base that develops autonomous combat systems. The swarm coordination needed to dance in sync is exactly the one needed to operate in a complex scenario. The world saw a show. Defence ministries took notes. The two reactions are not in contradiction. They are both correct.
Perception turned upside down
Ten years ago you could spot a deepfake. Today voice, writing and face are indistinguishable from the original, and sometimes they come across as more convincing than the original. This flips the question we ask ourselves. It is no longer «is it true?», because often we can no longer answer that in time. It has become «what is my perception of this reality, and on that basis what strategy do I build?».
From this follows a practical rule I always repeat. «The television said so» is no longer an authority. Television does not speak. Someone speaks, from inside it, with a first name, a surname and a role. If a piece of information has no named source, it has no source. And if it has no source, it has no value. That holds for television, for social media, for any screen.
The sovereignty we do not have
Here comes the part many people do not like to hear. European technological sovereignty, as things stand, is more a wish than a fact. The main operating systems, the main cloud services, the main processors and the main platforms are American. Huawei became a textbook case the moment Google cut off access to its services. If the big software houses decided to turn off the taps, large parts of an advanced country would stop very quickly.
Then there is the matter of back doors. Europe has rules meant to limit surveillance and protect encrypted communications. In France, the transposition of the European cybersecurity directive was blocked for a long time because of a clause that would have barred the government from imposing back doors in encrypted messaging systems. The internal security service opposed it; some members of parliament, including deputy Philippe Latombe, publicly exposed the mechanism. The reasoning that comes out of it is brutal in its simplicity: a government that fights this hard to keep access to its citizens’ encrypted communications is already using that access. Edward Snowden’s revelations, back in 2013, had already shown the scale of the phenomenon. This is not conspiracy theory. It is documentation.
The fifth dimension
The book stopped at four dimensions: land, sea, air, cyber. While preparing the Assisi evening I found a fifth one, and it was not in the book. It is perception. It is the only battlefield where we still have a chance to fight, for an honest and not very comforting reason: on the technological plane we will never be superior to governments, to big capital, to the software houses, or to artificial intelligence itself.
Because that intelligence is already beyond the assistant that waits for a question. It is starting to propose, to act, to decide. And when it gets something wrong, it does not always apologise. Sometimes it argues, insists, convinces you the mistake is yours. You do not need to imagine science-fiction scenarios to grasp what is at stake. Just look at what researchers call reward hacking, when a system trained to reach a goal finds shortcuts nobody anticipated, including working around whoever is supposed to stop it. The direction is clear, and it is not reassuring.
Against all this, perception is the last human ground. It is the ability to pause, to doubt, to choose differently. It is the piece we have to protect, because it is the only one the machines cannot hold in our place. The castle in Assisi, that evening, was not a stage. It was a quiet place to think together, to become aware, to put order into perception. Perhaps real digital sovereignty does not begin in a data centre. Sometimes it begins in a romantic courtyard.
Sources and references
The arguments in this article are developed at length in the book The Invisible War. Cyberwarfare, Artificial Intelligence and the Revolution We Cannot See. Among the cases cited: Stuxnet and Operation Olympic Games (investigations by The New York Times, 2011, and David E. Sanger, Confront and Conceal, 2012); the Unitree humanoid robots at the Chinese New Year Gala (CCTV broadcasts, 2025 and 2026); the French block on the NIS2 directive and the back-door clause (parliamentary statements by deputy Philippe Latombe and French press, 2024); Edward Snowden’s revelations about mass surveillance programmes (The Guardian and The Washington Post, 2013); Apple’s Find My network, which underpins how AirTags work.
All my books are here 👉 https://www.amazon.it/stores/author/B0FB47T6Q4/allbooks
The full recording of the evening is available here: https://www.youtube.com/live/jwgDjcY2-p0