John Robb's Blog

Written by an anonymous friend who also senses the arrival of the long night of networked tyranny:

"Today is the final day of 2018. As years go, it was adequate to its purpose, which was delivering us in one complete orbit about the Sun. Enough with retrospectives: let us understand what is coming in 2019.

The coming year will be an exceptionally difficult one for the republic, perhaps even uniquely so. Two major streams of events will at their confluence yield extraordinary outcomes: the advent of the 2020 Presidential-campaign cycle, and the nearly inevitable impeachment of the President by the now-incoming Democratic House. (Impeachment by the House will likely succeed, conviction-and-removal by the Senate will likely fail.) The mechanisms of it all will yield imperatives for maximal behavior by all parties. It will become impossible to compromise without communicating fatal weakness to the other side, impossible to retreat without being immolated by your own.

Imagine, if you will, the momentary hysteria of the Kavanaugh nomination — momentary because its principal perpetrators did not actually believe their own proximate case — revived and extended into a permanent state, with a real sense of existential threat animating all participants. That is our probable 2019.

This doesn’t stay inside the Beltway. This means heightened ideological conflict as a permanent feature of ordinary American life. We haven’t seen much of this before — the strife of the 1960s and 1970s being fairly localized in many ways, and that of the 1860s being mostly regionalized — with one major exception. That exception is the American Revolution itself, when neighbors really did turn upon one another in the name of political theory in a process more brutal and merciless than popular memory recalls. Even that, though, is not wholly the template for now, because there does not seem to be much by way of partisans for liberty in 2019. More apt, probably, is the example of France with its own tradition of ideological self-terrorization, devoid of any good guys, whether in 1792-1794, 1870-1871, or 1958-1962.

In our lifetimes, the single most significant threat to the life, liberty, and property of the average American citizen has always been the federal government. The danger in 2019 is that a consequence of that federal government’s crescendoing dysfunction will be the replacement of that most significant threat with one far more grave, far more vicious, and far more relentless: our own neighbors.

The perfected expression of democratic society is, after all, Twitter.

This is the probable 2019 and you should prepare for it. In times past one avenue of preparation and protection was withdrawal. That avenue is closed. There is no retreat, no refuge in federalism or community; no “Benedict option.” We have made our public square inescapable and pervasive — we even have electronic 大字报, although we generally lack the wit or perspective to grasp what that implies. Preparation therefore isn’t the seeking of the safe harbor. Nor is it the girding for combat and surrender to the awful machinery of mass democracy at its lowest point. Let the fanatics do that: there is no victory in their game.

The only preparation that matters is in conducting yourself and your family as if it were another era entirely. You cannot change what 2019 will probably be. You can, though, be an example in memory and history when the time comes to rebuild."

Sincerely,

John Robb

I spent a good part of the last year writing about the arrival of the long night over at the Global Guerrillas report.   The war for the future is already here and you have been drafted.

Yesterday, on the 19th of December at 9 PM GMT, a drone overflight shut down Gatwick airport, the UK's second busiest, stranding tens of thousands of holiday travellers.

Six additional overflights between 9:15 PM and midnight kept it closed.


A planned 4:30 AM opening was cancelled by another overflight at 3:45. Regular overflights at 7, 9, noon, and 3PM has kept it closed all day, causing the cancellation 760 flights and stranding 110,000 travellers.


The police are now deploying snipers, jamming equipment, and a laser sniper system (2 mi range) to destroy the drone if it appears again.

This is a good example of what is possible with low cost and low risk systems disruption. Some additional thinking:

Cost of drones: ~ $100. Disruption value: ~$40-60 million (110,000 x $400 per ticket). ROI = $500,000 for every dollar invested in the attack.


Method of attack: simple runway/terminal overflights. Easiest to plan/accomplish.


Timing of overflights maximized impact.  Initial flurry of overflights demonstrated it was a serious threat.  Infrequent but constant overflights showed the threat was still present.  No rapid return to business as usual possible.

Here's some thinking on the countermeasures being deployed the authorities and how they may run into problems.

....

Read the rest, for free, at my Global Guerrillas Report website.   

Sincerely,

John Robb

Over the last several weeks we've seen a rapid diminishment in the fictive kinship that unites us as Americans.  In fact, many of us don't just disagree with other Americans.  We see them as existential threats.  

Here are the existential threat narratives:  

"crypto-fascist science deniers demanding a return to the racism and misogyny of the 1950's, while stripping away the rights of immigrants, on the way to sending brown people, LGBTs, and muslims to concentration camps" 

"crypto-Stalinist thought police demanding compliance with fake science and virtue-signaling identity performance from all, on the way to Gulag World with straight white males at the bottom. Ideally killing millions along the way"

These threat narratives appear to be contributing the growing belief we are headed towards a civil war as this new poll shows:

"Thirty-one percent (31%) of Likely U.S. Voters say it’s likely that the United States will experience a second civil war sometime in the next five years"

"Democrats (37%) are more fearful than Republicans (32%)"

PS:  I'm writing this month's GG report on how repeated and intentional disruptions are driving us towards collapse.  Here's a teaser.

Here's a good example of global guerrilla tinkering and decentralized defense.

Fire Kites

Palestinian guerrillas in the Gaza strip have developed a simple and effective weapon for disrupting Israel.   It's a fire kite.  Here are the details (reuters video report):

A homemade kite, built out of transparent plastic (making it hard to spot).  This is the delivery vehicle.

The warhead is a long tail and fringe soaked in flammable liquid.  The tip of the tail is a burning rag or burning coal.  

The kites drift into Israel (courtesy of prevailing winds along the entire border with Gaza), fall to the ground, and start fires.


Prevailing winds

So far, the kites appear to be working, largely because they are:

so easy and cheap to build (under $3 in commonly available materials),
so easy to launch (get the kite aloft from anywhere along the border and let it go), and
able to do significant damage when they do land (millions in fire damage already reported).

To defend against these attacks:

Israel turned to reservists who are drone hobbyists (this allowed them to stand up a drone defense system nearly overnight),
The drone pilots either tangle themselves up with the kite (with both falling to ground) or they grab what's left of the kite's string and drag it to the ground.  So far, they've downed far more than 500 fire kites this way.
Israel has promised to compensate the drone owners for any broken drones.  

The Real Threat to Israel

However, as interesting as these fire kites are, there is a twist.  It's likely that these fire kites are good news for Israel.  Here's why:

The fire kites provide Israel with a figleaf.   A visible justification for continuing aggressive military action against the Palestinians in Gaza (the kites, although expensive in property damage, are largely non-lethal and they provide dramatic visuals).  This justification provides some protection against an emerging threat to Israel.


Israel has always been vulnerable to a boycott.  An investment, business, and systemic boycott that disconnects Israel from the world.  So far, Israel has been good at working behind the scenes to prevent this.  However, that's not likely good enough anymore.  The world has changed.  


The rapid rise of the #resistance network and surging networked corporatism changes everything.  These networks have both the capability and the disposition to disconnect Israel from the world, nearly overnight, if they are triggered by perceptions of immoral behavior directed against the people of Gaza.  State directed violence, without a meaningful threat to justify it (a threat that these kites seem to provide), could be enough to trigger these networks into action.

PS:  The Fire Kites are also a good opportunity to run through the logic of making big jumps in innovation (ala "making snowmobiles" as John Boyd would say).   I'm writing up my notes on this and will post them soon.   

PPS:  Things are spinning out of control very fast now in the US.  The fictive kinship that held us together as a nation has collapsed.   Nothing but dark skies ahead.  

 

 

 

 

Here's a question you should be asking yourself:

What does 21st Century authoritarianism look like?

Given what we've seen so far, it isn't likely that we're going to see a return to the 20th Century model, with its absolute dictators, industrial scale bureaucracies, paramilitaries, ideologies, ubiquitous/vicious secret police, relentless propaganda, etc... 

That model died when globalization and the Internet hollowed out the nation-state.

The new model of authoritarianism.  The model that is sweeping the world is very different. 

It's networked. 

These networks aren't formal constructs.  They don't rely on rigid ideologies or hierarchies.   They don't even use the left/right spectrum.

Instead, they are open, amorphous, and participatory.   Networks that are in constant motion...  nominally led by political showmen with little real power. 

These networks don't rely on government bureaucracies to coerce people.   They coerce bureaucracies. 

Moreover, they are more effective than bureaucracies in the elements of power that matter.

They are capable of spying on more people than the East German secret police and they can stifle free speech without recourse to a gulag.  

They don't have any need for state produced propaganda or the media to control the narrative.  They can produce a blinding blizzard of spin that can overwhelm official narratives.

In short, 21st Century authoritarianism is very different.   It's not what the experts and the media pundits are warning against and that's why it will sneak up on us.  

Sincerely,

John Robb

PS:  I'm digging into what makes these networks so effective in the next Global Guerrillas Report (as always, thanks so much for your support, it makes the work I do possible).

 

Here are some notes tracking the arrival of what I’m calling the Long Night -- a world run by oppressive social networks that ruthlessly narrow public speech and behavior.   

Covered topics:  Twitter's bubble maximizer.  Enforcing limits to free speech in NYC.  Doxing protesters in Russia.  

I did a long interview with Jack Murphy and Ian Scotto for SOFRep Radio earlier this week (the first 45 m or so prominently features my staccato/machine/Boydian gun style of thinking/speaking).

We talked about many of the topics I'm currently writing about in greater detail with The Global Guerrillas Report.  Topics such as China's tyrannical social credit system, open source political parties (they have already rolled the Republican party and they are about to do it to the Dems), how moral warfare works online (shaming and naming, etc.), and modern Tribalization.

In the last segment, we touched on something I haven't written much about yet: the potential for widespread civil conflict in the US and how that impacts our thinking on resilience.

Why so pessimistic? It's becoming clear that the US doesn't have a shared narrative anymore. A narrative, combined with rituals and traditions, that provides us with us the basis of fictive kinship.

A kinship, not based on DNA, that allows us to trust each other rather than as strangers/enemies.
A shared understanding of moral and ethical conduct (the soft elements that make it possible for a legal and regulatory system to work).
An understanding that we are better off together than apart.

Where did our fictive kinship go?

We killed it. We didn't alter it, adapt it, or evolve it.  We strangled it and the rising sociopolitical incoherence we are seeing is the result.

The big question is whether we can survive the future without it? I suspect the answer to that is more no than yes.  If that's true, it makes civil collapse a very viable future.

Sincerely,

John Robb

PS: I'll be writing about the potential for civil conflict in the US and how that impacts our thinking on resilience in a future Global Guerrillas Report.

Here's an interesting though experiment.

The EU's new data privacy law is just about to come into effect (May 25th).

That law makes it very hard for Facebook and other services to collect data on individuals because it has a very high privacy standard.

That's a problem for Facebook and many other Internet companies. 

Facebook, and other tech companies, set up a fake International Head Quarters in Ireland to avoid paying US taxes.

However, since Ireland is part of the EU, all two billion plus Facebook users now fall under the EU's new data protection law (GDPR). 

Facebook is now feverishly working on ways to legally transfer global users outside of the EU back to the US (the major region with the least protection for privacy) while maintaining the tax haven in Ireland.  

This vulnerability points to an opportunity for the EU to radically change the world.  

What if the EU offered to extend coverage under their new data privacy/protection law (GDPR) to anyone who requested it, no matter where they lived?    

Think of it as data asylum. 

It would cost the EU nothing to implement (in fact, just the opposite, it could net them lots of $$ in fines). 

It would also be easy to implement. 

All that is needed is a provision that any big Internet company doing business in the EU would be required to offer the EU's end user license agreement (EULA) as an option for all accounts, no matter where they lived. 

PS:  Or, it might be possible to get the same effect by switching your country of origin/location in Facebook and Twitter to Germany..

 

How does the open source moral network -- the combo of the #resistance, #metoo and #neveragain -- turn lists of violators into something people can easily digest and act upon? 

An online system that can work at scale?

I just saw something published on Twitter that moves this closer to reality. 

It takes quotes that Brexit supporters have made on Twitter and attaches it to their pictures.  Here's the result:

These "tombstones" are a pretty effective way to publish shame.  In this case, speech violations, although it could be a pic of a gun owner or #me too violation.  Here's how this could work at scale:

Tombstone is published.  A blockchain?  
Tombstone is verified/rated by the network.
Facial recognition (or the network) is used to ID the perpetrators.  Or, people are IDed on the fly via smart phone or CCTV.

What happens when a person is IDed in a fully realized system like this?  They are shunned - unemployed, disconnected, ostracized, etc.   

Fast, dynamic, and at scale.  

Last month's Global Guerrillas report used a combination of:

David Ronfeldt's TIMN (tribes, institutions, markets, and networks) framework 
Complex systems theory, and 
Boyd's OODA 

to figure out how we can adapt to the challenges we face without the radical simplification of societal collapse.  

After I wrote the report, I sent it out to my friend David for feedback.  He really liked one of my footnotes.  In that footnote, I used TIMN to do some fun analysis of the struggle between Fascism, Communism, and Democracy in the 20th Century.  

The analysis looked at each organizational form (the three that were active in the 20th Century were tribalism, institutions, and markets) as contributors to a societal decision making process (simplified by Boyd's OODA).  

In the 20th Century, tribes and tribalism made contributions to orientation via nationalism.  The narratives that create fictive kinship.  It defines us and them.  It orients decision making by answering the questions: who benefits?  who with?  by what means? by which limits? 


In the 20th Century, the institutional bureaucracy was responsible for conducting total war.  Bureaucracies contribute to observation (gathering information in a structured way, from the census to the secret police), the structured evaluation of options (cost benefit analysis, plans, ideological dictate, etc.) and action (implementation at scale).  


Markets provide decentralized information discovery (observation) and the means to derive a consensus (price, etc.) on which alternative is superior.   Markets also provide a means of assembling and allocating the resources required for implementation (action) and motivating participation (orientation).  

Through this lens, the 20th struggle between can be boiled down into a struggle between three different types of decision making systems:

Fascism.  Markets (commercial only) and bureaucracy are slaved to tribalism.  


Communism.  Tribalism slaved to bureaucracy.  No markets.


Democracy.  A fluid mix of tribalism, bureaucracy, and markets (commercial and political).

Who won? The system that allowed that used all three decision making systems, the US (UK,etc).  The US (and the brand of democratic capitalism it promoted) was a Swiss army knife of social decision making.  It used what works.  This flexibility provided it with more resilience than its competitors and the ability to exploit the opportunities made possible by complexity (from nuclear weapons to computers).  

Another interesting observation is that institutions (bureaucratic decision making) don't generate orientation.  They are reliant on tribalism for orientation.  As we saw under Communism and Fascism, bureaucracies are equally at home implementing genocide as they are at providing social safety nets to the poor/elderly.