The key letter in "IT" is the "I."

Russia is losing the IT war with Ukraine, and it's not because of a technological disadvantage. In fact, Russian hacking groups have a well-deserved reputation for effectiveness. It's not even an issue of lack of expertise in disinformation campaigns: while they didn't initiate conspiracy theories in the US about vaccines or stolen elections nor were they the only ones to fan them (it was, by and large, an inside job), they were very effective at helping them spread.

Yet Russian cyberwarfare capabilities have proven remarkably weak in the context of their invasion of Ukraine. Attacks against infrastructure, where successful, don't seem to have seriously diminished Ukraine's defensive capabilities, and their influence campaigns, both internal and overseas, are an unqualified disaster.

What happened?

The first failure was tactical: all the satellite imagery and IT resources of the Russian military were unable to model how far and fast they would be able to move into Ukraine. Their maps, we can assume, are impeccable, but we can also assume that in an authoritarian militaristic kleptocracy there are no short-term incentives to have a realistic understanding of your own resources and capabilities. Pretending to have a powerful military is a good way to gain accolades and divert some money to personal accounts — and it might even fool other countries — but battlefields are harder to lie to.

This failure of understanding led to a longer war than they had planned for, which in turn gave a window of opportunity for other countries to weigh in through sanctions, supplies, etc. It opened a diplomatic front — in the most general sense of the term — where Russia is finding itself not stalemated but in a frank rout. There's a certain symmetry between Ukrainian advantage and Russian disadvantage here: Ukrainian politicians and individuals in general have much more interaction with and understanding of Western (and to some degree global) assumptions and semiotics, while Putin in particular, and Russian communication in general, has been entirely out of sync with the beliefs and thought patterns of the relevant political constituencies.

It's possible to chalk this up to a technical failure — that's what a diplomatic corps is for — but at its root it's a problem of a blinkered worldview starting or perhaps manifesting at the top. If Putin and the military as an organization are true believers in an ethnocentric conflict-of-civilizations view of the world, then all the sensors and databases in the world will not give them an accurate understanding of how other people will react and what they will be able to do.

This is a weakness of racism (or, if you will, nationalism) rather than any specific country. In a rough historical order, and just picking some recent examples, the Russian misjudged the Japanese, the Germans misjudged the Russians, the French and the US misjudged the Vietnamese, Russia misjudged the Afghans, and the US misjudged the Afghans again and then the Iraqis.

In every case there was enough data to make the right call, and over time the amount of data has grown exponentially, but the strategic misjudgments keep piling up. The response to failure tends to be not just more weapons but what Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein have termed Big Dick Data, the idea that if you have more data and larger AI models then you don't need some snowflake multiculturalism to understand what — those people — are thinking or going to do.

In short, it's the concept of power, and a fetichistic view of data has also become a new aspect of power, as a replacement for empathy and let's call it a healthy respect for science (which is by its very nature a cosmopolitan, individualistic, liberal enterprise).

It doesn't work, but because the response to its failure is to double down on it, it turns from a weak spot into a systemic weakness. It might be an exaggeration to say that a failure to understand themselves and the rest of the world has been the main cause of catastrophic failure in modern societies, but it wouldn't be a ridiculous one.

The takeaway is that the main purpose of information technology is understanding, not surveilling or hacking. Those can be useful tools, but if you are working with a very inaccurate model of the world (and within a cognitively inflexible political structure) having more data will not get you better long-term results, and might in fact deepen a false sense of superiority.

Whether you are running a superpower or a mid-sized company, IT (from data to software tools to AI models) can give you a competitive advantage only to the degree to which your understanding of your environment and of yourself is accurate. In leaders and their organizations, empathy, introspection, a healthy respect for deep expertise, and sincere openness to getting bad news as early as possible aren't qualities irrelevant to IT competitiveness or that can be substituted by it. They are prerequisites to effectively exploiting those technologies.