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46 - How Did the Taliban Win?
4.3k Plays2 years ago
Even among smart dissident types, the default explanation for the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan is basically just “grit” and “sticktuitiveness” and “giving 110%” (plus maybe “asabiyyah”, which is a $10 dissident word for “teamwork”).
But if that was the secret sauce, it doesn’t explain why ISIS collapsed under comparatively light military pressure, never to return; or why Al Qaeda is basically a dead meme.
Out of the Mountains doesn’t set out to answer that question — it was published in 2013, when Afghanistan was nearly pacified, al Qaeda was still a going concern, and ISIS was the new hotness in Sunni extremism.
In fact, Kilcullen’s thesis is that urbanized, internet-savvy, transnational guerrilla movements will be able to access power flows, and it’s a pretty persuasive thesis — but with a decade of hindsight, it turned out to be the comparatively rural, isolated, local movement that defeated the empire. So what happened?
The short answer is that they auditioned to replace the state across the spectrum of control — including punitive violence, but also the pedestrian tasks of recordkeeping and adjudication and governance. They wove their legitimacy into ordinary people’s water rights, their inheritances, their personal disputes — so that even people who were indifferent to the Taliban’s ideological program became invested in the Taliban’s stability and growth.
This is also, by the way, exactly how the American diplomatic corps conquered the world — by becoming the broker and underwriter of international agreements that even unaligned (or even unfriendly) countries come to depend on. That authority requires global force projection to be credible, of course, but force projection alone is not enough.
In this episode, I explore how non-state groups hide within, and eventually capture, the power flows that make a state a state, and what we can learn from it.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Out of the Mountains'
00:00:18
Speaker
Hey everybody, welcome to the Exit Podcast.
00:00:19
Speaker
This is Dr. Bennett.
00:00:20
Speaker
This week I finished reading Out of the Mountains by David Kilcullen.
00:00:23
Speaker
From the cover it looks like it's this pretty narrow treatment of a particular new type of guerrilla warfare.
00:00:31
Speaker
Basically networked, urbanized, non-rural guerrilla warfare.
00:00:35
Speaker
But really it's just a book about power.
00:00:37
Speaker
It's about how power is being renegotiated in the face of new communications and transportation technology all over the world, including here.
00:00:47
Speaker
And some of that power is being renegotiated through violent insurgency, which is a lot of what he describes.
00:00:53
Speaker
But what I found so interesting about it is that even those violent insurgencies are predicated on a full spectrum of economic, social, political capacities
00:01:03
Speaker
that don't involve violence, that don't involve breaking the law, but that all of these groups, he calls them non-state armed groups, that all these groups need to succeed.
Urban Guerrilla Warfare Dynamics
00:01:11
Speaker
So Kilkillon's thesis is that these guerrilla fighters, these groups, are coming out of these places into highly urbanized, very dense, highly networked environments, partly because people everywhere are just flooding to cities, especially in the developing world.
00:01:25
Speaker
So conflict happens where the people are, but also because the wilderness and the mountains just don't provide the security that they used to.
00:01:32
Speaker
with satellites and cell phones and drone overwatch, it's just a lot easier for a state to come and find you in your cave in the mountains.
00:01:38
Speaker
But in the crowding and the noise and criminality and electromagnetic interference in a large city, these irregular fighters have a much easier time.
00:01:47
Speaker
Partly because these dense, chaotic, vertical environments are just harder for modern surveillance tools to penetrate, but also because cities are home to all kinds of things that states need to protect.
00:01:57
Speaker
Big capital investments, sensitive infrastructure,
00:02:00
Speaker
and lots and lots of innocent civilians.
00:02:02
Speaker
So if you're out in the middle of nowhere in Afghanistan, everything about you sticks out.
00:02:06
Speaker
You're the only thing moving, you're the only thing throwing off an electromagnetic signature, you're the only car on a country road, and if they need to drop a smart bomb on you, they don't have to worry much about collateral damage.
00:02:17
Speaker
But if you're a face in an enormous crowd and your headquarters is on the middle of the fourth floor of a nine-story apartment building in Baghdad, anyone who wants to come get you has to choose their tools very carefully and think a lot about the rules of engagement.
00:02:30
Speaker
If the state wants to control your movement or your communications, they've got to simultaneously control the movement and communications of thousands of other people who are just trying to get to work and do their jobs.
00:02:39
Speaker
The more these groups insinuate themselves into the state's power flows, the people, the money, the goods, the information, the
00:02:46
Speaker
all of which converge in the city, the harder they are for the state to target without damaging stuff that the state itself
Power Shifts in Developing Cities
00:02:52
Speaker
needs.
00:02:52
Speaker
And since most of these third world cities are growing explosively, the government is usually too weak to monitor and absorb all these power flows.
00:02:59
Speaker
So power leaks out.
00:03:01
Speaker
And it nourishes these alternative institutions.
00:03:04
Speaker
If the state can't adequately pay and monitor police, the police start taking bribes and reporting to criminals.
00:03:09
Speaker
If the state can't keep a neighborhood safe, protection rackets emerge to fill the void.
00:03:14
Speaker
And these non-state armed groups are more than just explicit anti-government insurgents.
00:03:19
Speaker
It's also partisan political machines, criminal gangs, even tight cultural groups like soccer hooligans.
00:03:25
Speaker
And if there's enough power leakage,
00:03:28
Speaker
These groups don't just hide in the city's power flows, they actually begin to seize control of them.
00:03:32
Speaker
They start to take on the character of a proto-state or a parallel state.
00:03:35
Speaker
The Taliban is obviously up against this.
00:03:38
Speaker
There's a tweet making the rounds right now about a Taliban fighter complaining that they now have to sit at a desk from 8 to 4 and
00:03:44
Speaker
Answer emails.
00:03:45
Speaker
He says,
00:04:03
Speaker
If you don't go, you're considered absent, and the wage for that day is cut from your salary.
00:04:07
Speaker
We're not used to that, but it was especially difficult in the first two or three months.
00:04:10
Speaker
There was another thing I dislike, and that's how restricted our lives are now.
00:04:13
Speaker
Unlike anything we experienced before, the Taliban used to be free of restrictions.
00:04:18
Speaker
But now we sit in one place behind a desk and a computer, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
00:04:23
Speaker
Life's become so wearisome.
00:04:24
Speaker
You do the same things every day.
00:04:26
Speaker
Being away from the family has only doubled the problem.
00:04:29
Speaker
In our ministry, there's very little work for me to do, therefore, I spend most of my time on Twitter.
00:04:34
Speaker
We are connected to speedy Wi-Fi and internet.
00:04:36
Speaker
Many Mujahideen, including me, are addicted to the internet, especially Twitter.
00:04:41
Speaker
Well, one sympathizes.
00:04:43
Speaker
But what's interesting about it to me is the challenge of creating order before the existing order has collapsed or been overthrown or has passed the torch.
Coercion and Media in Power Maintenance
00:04:51
Speaker
In almost all of these cases of a weakening central government, there's at least one institution, usually several,
00:04:56
Speaker
that have either been consciously getting ready to take the wheel or just because of the activities they were already engaged in happened to be ready when the time came.
00:05:05
Speaker
And it's a delicate dance because they have to exert power, but they can't exert it in ways that trigger the immune system of the larger authority, whatever that is.
00:05:14
Speaker
If it's the narcos, they don't want to attract the attention of the Colombian government or the Mexican government in the early days.
00:05:20
Speaker
And then once they had captured, essentially, or at least severely compromised the Colombian and Mexican governments, it was a question of not getting the attention of DEA.
00:05:28
Speaker
But they obviously still have to compete with other drug cartels and other power bases, and so they're playing this game of chicken constantly, where they need to be coercive enough and cruel enough and theatrical enough to intimidate their local rivals, but not so cruel and theatrical that it makes the news, at least not our news here in the States.
00:05:46
Speaker
And he frames this as particularly the problem of these underground non-state armed groups, but he kind of glosses over the fact that states have to do this too.
00:05:54
Speaker
I mean, the reason why there's rubber bullets and tear gas and water cannons is so that the state can deploy coercive force in a way that doesn't make the news.
00:06:02
Speaker
It looks as clean and boring and telegenic as possible.
00:06:05
Speaker
Basically, you don't want to see any bodies and you want to see as little blood as possible.
00:06:09
Speaker
So a bullet is worse than a nightstick.
00:06:12
Speaker
A nightstick is probably worse than a rubber bullet.
00:06:15
Speaker
A rubber bullet is probably worse than a water cannon.
00:06:17
Speaker
Water cannons are definitely worse than like loudspeakers and heavy metal music.
00:06:22
Speaker
Whatever you use to deter and repulse and punish...
00:06:26
Speaker
can't create any kind of visceral visual stimulus that can be passed around in the media.
00:06:31
Speaker
Sort of like beating somebody with an orange inside a sock so it doesn't leave a bruise.
00:06:35
Speaker
The latest and greatest is this active denial system, which is basically a truck-mounted microwave to cook protesters with, which, you know, maybe it gives you cancer in 20 years, but it won't leave a mark that you can post on social media.
00:06:47
Speaker
But how careful the state has to be about this kind of thing largely depends on how much control that institution has over the media.
00:06:53
Speaker
You might remember back in 2020,
00:06:56
Speaker
when the media was up in arms over Trump deploying nerve gas against American citizens in violation of the Geneva Convention because the police used tear gas in the Floyd riots.
00:07:05
Speaker
Now, Kilcullen doesn't articulate this himself, but he's describing the ways that both states and non-state groups obtain and maintain power under conditions of
00:07:13
Speaker
Information warfare, psychological warfare.
00:07:16
Speaker
But since he's writing to and presumably himself from this kind of blue-pilled State Department international relations think tank class, he's telling stories in pretty clear good guy, bad guy terms.
00:07:27
Speaker
The narcos are bad.
00:07:29
Speaker
The terrorists are bad.
00:07:30
Speaker
These parallel states like Hezbollah are bad.
00:07:33
Speaker
The protesters in Tunisia and Libya and Syria and Egypt are good, but obviously there was a huge involvement of both radical Islamists and criminal gangs in those movements.
00:07:42
Speaker
So really what he's describing there, the distinction that he's making, is just what does it look like to operate with Western media air support and what does it look like to operate without Western media air support or with a hostile media.
00:07:55
Speaker
He frames media attention and specifically the broadcasting of atrocities as this weapon
00:08:00
Speaker
that any disenfranchised people can pick up and deploy.
00:08:03
Speaker
And just by virtue of posting the bloody shirt, the dead protesters, the starving children on social media, it'll automatically generate outrage, popular outrage, which will then weaken the regime and cause everyone to band together and fight.
00:08:17
Speaker
Of course, that's not what happens.
00:08:18
Speaker
To the extent that it's about popular coordination at all, the social media companies decide how much of that to allow.
00:08:23
Speaker
And they do so under the explicit direction of U.S. intelligence and law enforcement.
00:08:27
Speaker
More importantly, the media uses those images to provide U.S. and NATO politicians with top cover to declare a no-fly zone or freeze the regime's assets overseas or even in some cases authorize military intervention.
00:08:40
Speaker
It's about providing optionality to policymakers, and they don't have to exercise that option.
00:08:44
Speaker
Everybody knows there's been slave markets in Libya since 2011.
00:08:47
Speaker
The media has reported on it.
00:08:49
Speaker
The Bahraini secret police got up to the same shenanigans that the Tunisian and Egyptian secret police did.
00:08:55
Speaker
but somehow the popular will just didn't materialize in a US ally.
00:09:00
Speaker
There's an obscenely brutal proxy war going on between Iran and Saudi Arabia in Yemen right now, but that doesn't rise to the level of
00:09:07
Speaker
any kind of action.
00:09:08
Speaker
Now obviously I'm not saying that it should, I'm just saying the media gets to decide what rotting carcass they're going to hold under your nose to horrify you and disgust you.
00:09:17
Speaker
So anyway, I'm really interested in how some of these groups have operated without friendly media top cover because I think that's essentially our situation.
00:09:23
Speaker
And obviously you and I aren't going to do anything violent or illegal, but actually most of the ways these groups build power
00:09:28
Speaker
are neither violent nor illegal.
00:09:30
Speaker
Kilcolin calls his model the theory of competitive control in which the state and various other institutions compete, not exactly for resources or territory, but for compliance from the population.
00:09:41
Speaker
Each of them has a normative system, a set of rules or consequences that they want the population to abide by.
00:09:47
Speaker
and they use a variety of tools to secure that compliance, some of which are on the coercive end, some of which are persuasive or positive incentives.
00:09:54
Speaker
The goal of these groups is to create an environment that's profoundly safe on the inside of their rule set to all the people who are following the rules, and profoundly unsafe on the outside.
00:10:04
Speaker
Pablo Escobar had his system of incentives called plata o plomo, which means silver or lead, which was, it's not rocket science, it's you can either accept the bribe or I'll kill you.
00:10:14
Speaker
But basically it's just reflective of his understanding that a system of competitive control can't be strictly coercive.
00:10:20
Speaker
It can't just be do it or I'll kill you.
00:10:23
Speaker
And people's attitudes toward Escobar, average people, their attitude toward him was complicated because he actually did a fairly good job, at least in the beginning, of targeting the violence to people in the game while spreading out the beneficence as broadly as possible.
00:10:37
Speaker
And he was able to convince, you know, not everybody, but a lot of people that basically the Colombian government was attacking him and therefore responsible for all this violence because they were stooges of American foreign policy, trying to deal with an American drug problem.
00:10:50
Speaker
And like, yeah, Escobar's drugs were causing a lot of problems in the U.S., but if I'm a Colombian and he's building schools in my neighborhood—
00:10:58
Speaker
Sound to them a little bit like an activist trying to get you to throw away your iPhone because of what's happening in lithium mines in Africa or China or something.
00:11:05
Speaker
So again, an effective system of competitive control is about keeping the inside of your system very, very safe and orderly and predictable and secure.
00:11:14
Speaker
and the outside very crazy and dangerous.
00:11:16
Speaker
So if, for example, you're trying to run an organized crime syndicate in a relatively low crime, relatively safe environment with strong institutions, number one, you're not really making the inside of the bubble much safer than it already is.
00:11:29
Speaker
And number two, the only way you can make the outside of the system meaningfully unsafe is to basically threaten people, to be the danger that you'll protect them from if they comply.
00:11:38
Speaker
So competitor institutions have a really hard time growing in a well-governed state because all they have to offer is extraction and punitive violence, which is very obviously parasitic and brittle.
Gangs and Political Influence in Kingston
00:11:49
Speaker
One of the more interesting portraits he paints is that of Christopher Koch, head of the Shower Posse gang in Kingston, Jamaica.
00:11:56
Speaker
In Kingston, the two major political parties are locked in this totalizing struggle where when one party wins an election, they actually go into the neighborhoods controlled by the other party and they bulldoze houses, turn off the water in the sewer, they have mass forced evictions.
00:12:12
Speaker
And so the geography of the city is like this tic-tac-toe board where they've walled off their own friendly enclaves, and there are seams in the structure of the city where the party lines are drawn, and those seams are constantly moving as the elections change.
00:12:26
Speaker
So this guy, Christopher Koch, he's a warlord, he's a drug trafficker, he's like, from our perspective in the States, definitely what you would call a criminal, but he's also an integral component of the political system.
00:12:37
Speaker
The reason his actions are criminal is because his role in distributing the state's benefits and handing down the state's punishments is off the books.
00:12:43
Speaker
But he's definitely an agent of the state.
00:12:45
Speaker
In fact, he's, in some sense, a part owner of the state.
00:12:48
Speaker
It's very much like a feudal relationship.
00:12:51
Speaker
Christopher Koch's job as one of these dons connected to the Jamaican Labor Party is to get out the vote for the JLP in exchange for his neighborhoods getting favorable public housing, government benefits, lucrative government contracts, which, in many cases, is the only kind of work that's available in Kingston.
00:13:07
Speaker
And so he's in this interesting position of actually outsourcing the violence of redistribution to the state, because obviously it's the state that collects taxes and imprisons tax cheats to the extent that anybody's prosecuted for tax evasion in Jamaica.
00:13:21
Speaker
It's also, in most cases, the state that does the bulldozing and the evictions and the shutting off of the water and the sewer.
00:13:26
Speaker
So Christopher Koch threatens people and sells drugs, yeah, but the majority of his day-to-day power
00:13:33
Speaker
is actually gained by being the good guy in his community.
00:13:36
Speaker
He's handing out benefits, punishing evildoers and criminals, and acting as a shield between the civilians and the other partisan gangs.
00:13:44
Speaker
But it's interesting who actually does catch direct violence from the Don in this normative system.
00:13:51
Speaker
And when we say a normative system, we mean a set of rules and their consequences.
00:13:54
Speaker
So any government, any non-state groups exercising power over a community, they have some normative structure.
00:14:00
Speaker
They have, these are the things that you are forbidden to do, and these are the penalties if you do them.
00:14:05
Speaker
Or these are the things you must do, and here's what happens if you don't.
00:14:08
Speaker
Anyway, the only crimes that carry a direct death sentence from the dawn are welching on a loan,
00:14:14
Speaker
informing to the police, or going rogue as one of the Don's enforcers.
00:14:19
Speaker
So when one of his deputized shooters goes off the reservation and hurts somebody that they're not supposed to hurt.
00:14:26
Speaker
And you can see the common thread linking all of those crimes, all those people who get whacked, is that they strike at the Don's legitimacy.
00:14:33
Speaker
And obviously if the Don fails to punish those kinds of violations, he won't stay the Don for very long.
00:14:40
Speaker
These power flows are almost like a fact of the terrain, and if you don't occupy and protect them, then somebody else, maybe somebody worse, will take them.
00:14:48
Speaker
And I'm not making a value judgment about this person in particular, but you can imagine a decent person in that seat saying,
00:14:55
Speaker
Well, it's not that I like whacking people who cross me, but if I don't, the people who depend on me for protection will doubt whether I mean what I say.
00:15:03
Speaker
And there'll be a very chaotic and violent struggle where all these power claims will have to be re-litigated.
00:15:08
Speaker
And Kilcullen makes a pretty compelling case that these non-state groups don't survive unless they have at least the ability to credibly execute violence.
00:15:17
Speaker
But in Kingston, something started to happen in the 1970s where
00:15:20
Speaker
The violence and the criminality drove lots of people from Jamaica into the States.
00:15:24
Speaker
And normally they couldn't afford to take their entire family out of the country, so they went a lot like Latin American migrants do.
00:15:30
Speaker
They find a job in the States and then send money back to their family in Kingston.
00:15:35
Speaker
So now you've got this flow of American dollars into Kingston.
00:15:38
Speaker
And basically what all these dons said is, we want a piece of those remittances.
00:15:42
Speaker
We want a piece of that money coming in, or else we're going to harm your family that's still in Jamaica.
00:15:48
Speaker
And so what had been a partisan street gang, a paramilitary arm of the local government, actually begins to transform in
00:15:54
Speaker
into a transnational crime syndicate.
00:15:57
Speaker
Because they're exercising power not only over Jamaican expatriates, but to the extent that they're involving those expatriates in drug smuggling and violent crime in the U.S., they're starting to project power into the U.S. and attracting the attention of the DEA and the FBI.
00:16:12
Speaker
And of course, locally, American dollars spend real good in Jamaica, so this flow of remittances allows them to buy heavy weapons, pay more extravagant bribes, and actually outgrow the local political establishment that used to be their main power source.
00:16:26
Speaker
Because that had been how they got all the benefits that they then distributed to their populations, essentially through political patronage.
00:16:32
Speaker
But with these outside cash flows coming in, it's suddenly a lot like the drug cartels in Mexico.
00:16:37
Speaker
They just have more money, more resources than the government, and
00:16:41
Speaker
And it's really interesting.
00:16:42
Speaker
He frames the anti-corruption efforts in Kingston that followed as this high-minded good governance thing.
00:16:49
Speaker
But what he's describing, removing the threat of election violence, reducing urban organized crime, professionalizing and depoliticizing the police,
00:16:59
Speaker
is essentially exactly the same thing that the Don is doing, his like capital crimes that he's whacking people over.
00:17:06
Speaker
The state is telling these gangs, you're not allowed to demand bribes because those bribes really ought to be taxes and fines paid to the state.
00:17:13
Speaker
And you're not allowed to beat up criminals because the prosecution of violence rightly belongs to the state.
00:17:19
Speaker
And the Kingston government used to be fine with guys like Christopher Koch operating as a paramilitary arm of the state.
00:17:25
Speaker
But the problem is now he's too big for his britches and causing trouble with the neighbors.
00:17:30
Speaker
So it's just centralization of power.
00:17:33
Speaker
And frankly, just like in Columbia, it's being done at the behest of U.S. intelligence and law enforcement and with massive logistical support from them, who basically told the Jamaican authorities, you need to get these people under control or we will.
00:17:48
Speaker
But what's interesting is, even with DEA breathing down their neck, the Jamaican authorities really dragged their feet extraditing this guy, partly because
00:17:56
Speaker
For the obvious reason that it'll mean war in the streets, his people will defend him.
00:18:01
Speaker
But why will so many people defend him?
00:18:03
Speaker
If he's just this parasitic, drug-dealing gangster, why wouldn't the ordinary people in his community celebrate the police coming in and taking out the trash with the support of American money and American weapons?
00:18:16
Speaker
There are actually situations and places in the world where American law enforcement intervention actually is welcomed, and I'll talk about one of those examples in a minute.
00:18:25
Speaker
But for one thing, his rival political party, the People's National Party, is full of people just like him who, the moment he's gone, are going to move in and start settling scores.
00:18:36
Speaker
He really is standing between his people and a huge amount of violence.
00:18:40
Speaker
In other words, the world outside his bubble is extremely dangerous.
00:18:44
Speaker
He's also nested himself within the legitimate, necessary power flows of the Jamaican political system.
00:18:51
Speaker
Or, I mean, as legitimate as anything is in the Jamaican political system.
00:18:54
Speaker
But he goes and gets out the votes that keep the JLP in power.
00:18:58
Speaker
He'd throw these big block parties where he'd hand out school supplies and take care of people's problems.
00:19:03
Speaker
He'd get people jobs and good public housing.
00:19:05
Speaker
And, of course...
00:19:06
Speaker
The tax base that he's drawing all those resources from would still be there when he was gone, but if you knew where you stood with Christopher Koch, you'd be reluctant to take your chances on the next guy, especially because he would absolutely definitely be the same kind of guy.
00:19:21
Speaker
even if he acted in a more official capacity as an agent of the state.
00:19:25
Speaker
So when the Jamaican government comes for him, his people barricade the neighborhood with trucks from his construction company, they take over the main hospital, they close the airports, and essentially shut down Kingston for several weeks.
00:19:37
Speaker
while the Jamaican army mortars its own people.
00:19:40
Speaker
Again, to enforce a U.S. extradition request.
00:19:44
Speaker
And anything that shuts down all economic activity in a city for a matter of weeks is an extraordinarily disruptive step to take.
00:19:54
Speaker
Enough to potentially upend the government of a country like Jamaica.
00:19:58
Speaker
So again, Christopher Koch lasted as long as he did because he had made himself an integral part of the political and economic system of the country,
00:20:07
Speaker
And you couldn't extricate him without essentially putting the capital of the country on life support for a month.
00:20:15
Speaker
There's just no way that would have ever happened without substantial investment and security guarantees from the U.S. And John P. Sullivan calls this state of affairs a criminal insurgency.
00:20:27
Speaker
A global form of neo-feudalism linked together by cyberspace, globalization, and a series of concrete, ungoverned zones.
00:20:35
Speaker
Of course, they're not ungoverned.
00:20:36
Speaker
They're just governed by these warlords.
00:20:37
Speaker
But he argues that this system of neo-feudalism will spread to more and more cities as communications and transportation technology allow...
00:20:46
Speaker
Even these street gangs in impoverished third world countries, let alone terrorist movements and transnational corporations to blur the lines between crime and war and the lines between foreign and domestic to act across jurisdictions in ways that states aren't technically legally allowed to do under the present system.
00:21:06
Speaker
Like it's supposed to matter an awful lot whether an American intelligence agency is working inside or outside the United States.
00:21:14
Speaker
with citizens or non-citizens.
00:21:16
Speaker
That's why we have a CIA and a separate FBI.
00:21:19
Speaker
And it's supposed to matter tremendously whether an action is a military action or a police action.
00:21:25
Speaker
But basically, the speed of communication and transportation has rendered those boundaries incoherent.
00:21:31
Speaker
So, at the same time, in response to that, when you hear feds talk about international law enforcement cooperation or international intelligence cooperation,
00:21:42
Speaker
They're basically just assuring everyone that they have no intention of letting those rules stop them.
00:21:47
Speaker
And they kind of have to.
00:21:49
Speaker
These threats jump back and forth across these boundaries so quickly now that security forces like these have to scale up or just surrender to these upstart power structures that are more agile.
00:22:02
Speaker
And Kilcullen says that these big states, in fact big empires like the United States,
00:22:07
Speaker
have scaled to the point that they're at because that's the scale you need to field these insurmountable weapons like tanks and strategic bombers and surveillance satellites.
00:22:18
Speaker
So that's Joe Biden telling you, we're going to smoke you with a predator drone anyway, so you might as well hand in your AR-15.
00:22:26
Speaker
That's how, according to them, the state keeps everyone in line.
00:22:29
Speaker
But in Kilcullen's view, the circumstances of the urban littoral, these urban areas close to the water, make the big industrial weapons that used to keep everyone in line a lot harder to use.
00:22:40
Speaker
He talks about how cities are very tall and narrow and crowded.
00:22:45
Speaker
And so something like an M1 Abrams tank has a hard time navigating and targeting inside an urban environment.
00:22:52
Speaker
Helicopters have trouble finding a place to land.
00:22:55
Speaker
Soldiers have to go from house to house to find the bad guys.
00:22:58
Speaker
And basically, he argues that a modern army can't really deploy within a city without massively disrupting the life of the city.
00:23:07
Speaker
These types of weapons are just too destructive and disruptive.
00:23:11
Speaker
And so I guess he's making a case that like the value contained in leaving the city intact is so great that it doesn't make a lot of sense to just blow holes in it until you find the bad guys.
00:23:22
Speaker
But crowded cities near the water have been around for a long time, and this problem is relatively new.
00:23:28
Speaker
And by way of a counterexample, the IDF, that's literally what they do.
00:23:32
Speaker
They burrow through apartment blocks, through people's bedrooms, through their living rooms, so they don't have to expose themselves on the street level or assault a guarded entrance.
00:23:41
Speaker
which of course in an impoverished urban environment like Gaza or the West Bank hurts a lot of feelings and doesn't make them any friends.
00:23:49
Speaker
But again, you come back to the media attention thing.
00:23:52
Speaker
The IDF really genuinely seems not to need to make a lot of friends in Gaza or the West Bank or even the Western press.
00:24:00
Speaker
Similarly, they profile openly at airports.
00:24:02
Speaker
They judge you by what you look like.
00:24:04
Speaker
And if you look like you might be a terrorist, you get some extra screening.
00:24:07
Speaker
And that actually seems to be pretty effective.
00:24:09
Speaker
you can almost view the approach of Israeli state security as an example of what a modern state might look like if they really didn't have to consider the opinion of a hostile media.
00:24:21
Speaker
Anyway, that's the first big principle of this system.
00:24:24
Speaker
You want to make the world really safe for people who follow the rules and really unsafe for people who refuse to follow the rules.
00:24:30
Speaker
And ideally, for propaganda purposes, you want to be seen making the world safer.
00:24:35
Speaker
If you live in a particularly dangerous environment, you may not need to take any direct coercive action at all.
00:24:41
Speaker
The threat of withdrawing your protection all by itself is coercion enough.
00:24:46
Speaker
And that's one of the advantages of being in a scary, chaotic, contested environment.
00:24:51
Speaker
All you have to do is tell people there's a big scary world outside your bubble and things would be very dangerous for them if they didn't have you.
00:24:59
Speaker
You're sort of outsourcing all of your disincentives to the environment.
00:25:04
Speaker
There's a scene in Django Unchained where the German white guy who's befriending the escaped slave says, I must admit I'm at a bit of a quandary when it comes to you.
00:25:13
Speaker
On the one hand, I despise slavery.
00:25:16
Speaker
But on the other hand, I need your help, and if you're not in a position to refuse, all the better.
00:25:21
Speaker
So because this guy has no good options, Schultz is able to extract compliance, for lack of a better term, just on the basis of like, come with me if you want to live, I'm the only friend you've got.
00:25:31
Speaker
Now, is that actually morally significant?
00:25:33
Speaker
Does that actually make Schultz the good guy?
00:25:35
Speaker
Or is he just a guy with good optics?
00:25:37
Speaker
Well, I'll leave that to the reader, but it certainly makes him look like the good guy, which in the context we're talking about of media war changes pretty much everything.
00:25:47
Speaker
And the second big principle, which is related, is what Kilcullen calls the fish trap.
00:25:52
Speaker
A fish trap is basically just a net, the finer the better, with a barbed entrance.
00:25:57
Speaker
So the barbs point inside and it's really easy to swim in and hard to swim out.
00:26:01
Speaker
When you're in a system of competitive control, you're always trying to peel people off from somebody else's system, whether that's a gang trying to initiate a new member to break the law or law enforcement trying to turn an informant.
00:26:14
Speaker
The process is basically the same in both directions.
00:26:16
Speaker
You want to make it really easy to come into your sphere and you want to make it hard to escape.
00:26:22
Speaker
And that can involve the cliche Hollywood ways that a gang will initiate somebody, requiring them to commit a brutal crime or get a face tattoo, something that makes them no longer welcome in polite society or compromised in some way so that it's really dangerous for them to leave the system.
00:26:39
Speaker
And that can get pretty gruesome.
00:26:40
Speaker
There's death squads in Yugoslavia that would force civilians to kill all their neighbors of other ethnic groups, both so that they would feel morally complicit in the militia's actions
00:26:50
Speaker
and so that the militia became vital for the village's protection, because the people of the other ethnic group in the other towns would know what you'd done.
00:26:58
Speaker
And those kinds of tactics are especially common for the groups that are the most nakedly parasitic and coercive.
00:27:05
Speaker
Because for people like that to be your best option, the rest of your world has to be just so insanely screwed up.
00:27:11
Speaker
Kilcullen tells a story about al-Qaeda in Iraq, how they would come into a Sunni neighborhood and start extorting people and cutting their fingers off for smoking cigarettes and that kind of thing.
00:27:22
Speaker
Pretty much all the Sunnis hated them, but they would go into a Shia neighborhood and they would kidnap a kid and torture him to death and then leave them in the street for the Shias to find.
00:27:33
Speaker
And the purpose of doing that was to convince the Shias to mob up so that they could then come back to the Sunnis, who had no other reason to get in line behind them, and basically say, well, look, now if we're not here, the Shia militias are going to come murder everybody.
00:27:47
Speaker
And in fact, that was largely true.
00:27:49
Speaker
These terrorist groups and death squads had a symbiotic relationship where the threat of sectarian violence increased both sides' control of their own population.
00:27:59
Speaker
Now, Kilcullen was apparently one of the architects of the 2007 surge in Iraq, so take it with a grain of salt.
00:28:05
Speaker
But he argues that the surge provided coercive capacity...
00:28:09
Speaker
to credibly protect the city's population, both from the Shia militias and from Al-Qaeda.
00:28:14
Speaker
And then because Al-Qaeda hadn't built any organic buy-in into their system, any reason why you should support them other than do it or I'll kill you, once they took away that threat, they were fairly brittle and it was pretty easy to break up their network.
00:28:28
Speaker
And supposedly, since then, that's become the orthodox response to an urban insurgency.
00:28:34
Speaker
You just flood the zone with soldiers on every street corner
00:28:39
Speaker
And the goal of that is both to eliminate the insurgent as a threat to the population and also eliminate the demand for the insurgent by eliminating all the other threats in the environment.
00:28:51
Speaker
So if the only thing the insurgent provides is violence, then the army can come in and basically solve the problem of violence.
00:29:01
Speaker
Just take that off the table.
00:29:02
Speaker
Most governments can't actually afford to do that on the kind of timescales that they would need to, but Uncle Sam can.
00:29:09
Speaker
So why doesn't that work all the time?
00:29:10
Speaker
Well, there are much more subtle versions of the fish trap that aren't so coercive and maybe aren't even unethical.
00:29:17
Speaker
For instance, in post-Soviet Afghanistan, the Taliban started keeping parallel records of people's property ownership.
00:29:25
Speaker
So particularly in a lot of these rural parts of the country, either the records had been destroyed by war or there were some sort of conflicting claims because people moving around and squatting and things like this.
00:29:37
Speaker
But if you came to the Taliban and you presented your land claim or your assets, whatever they were,
00:29:42
Speaker
they would adjudicate between you and any potential competing claimants.
00:29:47
Speaker
And if they determined that you had a legitimate right to the land, they would go record it in their secret illegal ledger, basically a shadow county recorder's office, and it would be their job to back up and validate your claim on that property the same way that any legitimate state does.
00:30:05
Speaker
They also did a lot of what we would call civil or commercial law, where they're issuing birth certificates, resolving inheritances and divorces, and especially settling questions like water rights.
00:30:17
Speaker
So how is this a fish trap?
00:30:18
Speaker
Well, basically, it meant that there were farmers and shepherds all over Afghanistan whose property rights only exist as long as the Taliban is in control of their area.
00:30:28
Speaker
If you hold the water rights for your farm on the basis of the Taliban's authority and the Taliban's records, you'd better hope they stay in power because especially if those water rights are disputed, one of the ways that an upstart warlord or even the national government might incentivize your tribal enemies is
00:30:45
Speaker
is by taking up the other end of whatever dispute you're involved in.
00:30:48
Speaker
So when the Taliban tells your son to pick up a rifle, they don't have to sell you on their ideological catalog because he doesn't have to go fight for the global caliphate.
00:30:58
Speaker
He's just fighting for the family farm.
00:31:01
Speaker
Everybody understood the Taliban to be ruthless and extreme, even by the standards of the region, but they gained this very strong reputation for being even-handed and predictable, which turns out to be a lot more important than being likable.
00:31:15
Speaker
Kilcullen tells how in one province, the Afghan government had been complicit in drug trafficking, child prostitution, routine ransom kidnappings for many years, and it was right next to the capital, so you couldn't really make a case that it was a lack of state capacity.
00:31:31
Speaker
But the Taliban makes a public declaration that all that stuff was against the law now.
00:31:37
Speaker
Taliban law.
00:31:38
Speaker
And then they publicly executed four kidnappers and left them swinging from a tree in the provincial capital.
00:31:44
Speaker
Again, 40 minutes outside of Kabul.
00:31:46
Speaker
One witness said, It proves the Taliban have no problem with ordinary Afghans.
00:31:50
Speaker
They only have a problem with those Afghans who work in high government positions who run crime in the city.
00:31:56
Speaker
Kilcullen writes, Via placards on the executed kidnappers' bodies, they sent a message of consistency, predictability, and order by which they distinguished themselves from corrupt officials.
00:32:07
Speaker
The locals clearly understood this.
00:32:09
Speaker
In contrast, Afghans whom I asked about their perceptions of the national police or the government court system just laughed and said that government courts take months to resolve the smallest dispute, cost thousands of dollars in bribes, and render judgments that always favor the most influential power brokers who can simply ignore the judgment anyway if they don't like it.
00:32:29
Speaker
By contrast, the Taliban come from the local area, so they understand the issues people are dealing with.
00:32:36
Speaker
Their justice is free of charge.
00:32:38
Speaker
Judgments are rendered quickly, sometimes in as little as half an hour.
00:32:41
Speaker
And unlike the Afghan national police, who are often seen as corrupt and in the pay of local elites, people expect that the local Taliban underground cell will consistently enforce the court's judgment.
Taliban's Rule and Local Support
00:32:52
Speaker
And just to reiterate, these are underground cells in areas that are thoroughly controlled by the Afghan national government.
00:32:59
Speaker
So this isn't like a deep Taliban stronghold.
00:33:03
Speaker
This is a place where they're essentially bandits.
00:33:06
Speaker
But they're bandits who punish the criminals that the Kabul government won't.
00:33:11
Speaker
And these law enforcement actions have nothing to do with trying to seize the territory or the resources of that region in the near term.
00:33:17
Speaker
They're about the people, trying to establish normative control over the people and threaten people who break the Taliban's rules.
00:33:26
Speaker
and essentially showing ordinary people, you'll be safer with us because we are going to punish these people who are hurting you.
00:33:33
Speaker
Back to the quote, Many people don't like the Taliban, a businessman from Kandahar told me, but at least you know what you're getting.
00:33:40
Speaker
They're consistent and fair.
00:33:41
Speaker
You know what to expect from them.
00:33:43
Speaker
So these very vivid scenes of vigilante justice against pedophiles and kidnappers won them a lot of friends, as well as a fair amount of redistribution the same way that Escobar and Christopher Koch did.
00:33:55
Speaker
There's not a whole lot of wealth to redistribute in Afghanistan, but ironically the flow of Western aid and development money, which was intended to strengthen the Kabul government and the U.S. occupation, had the opposite effect.
00:34:06
Speaker
Because the Kabul government was too weak and corrupt to actually absorb and monitor all these power flows, they leaked out all over the country and they nourished this whole ecosystem of competitor institutions, most importantly the Taliban.
00:34:20
Speaker
Obviously the most extreme final example of this phenomenon is all those pictures of Taliban fighters patrolling in brand new American Bradley fighting vehicles with
00:34:30
Speaker
M4 carbines and night vision goggles, which of course goes well beyond the weakness and incompetence and corruption of the Afghan government.
00:34:37
Speaker
But back to this question of being likable and winning hearts and minds, one of the things that Kilcullen points out about the Taliban's popularity was that it didn't grow in areas where they had done the most propagandizing, or where they had already had maybe the most affinity with the local religious leadership.
00:34:54
Speaker
They gained the moral and popular support of the people in those places where they developed the greatest military strength, where it was the least practical to contest their rule.
00:35:03
Speaker
And there's a really cynical way to look at that, right?
00:35:05
Speaker
Which is, you know, people are just sheep and cowards and bandwagoners and they'll do what they're told.
00:35:11
Speaker
And maybe there's some truth to that, but I think it's more like most people aren't political.
00:35:16
Speaker
Their aspirations and desires are not political, and so the thing they most want government to do is dispose of political questions for them.
00:35:25
Speaker
People will take a political system where those questions are settled, even if they're much less than ideal, over a world where they're constantly in flux.
00:35:33
Speaker
And that's in the Declaration of Independence.
00:35:38
Speaker
Why is that?
00:35:45
Speaker
Because for an ordinary person, chaos is tyranny.
00:35:49
Speaker
They have no ability and no desire to influence the broader course of events, so a constantly changing political system, especially a dramatically changing political system like a civil war or revolution,
00:36:01
Speaker
is one where they have no idea how to get what they want in the world, and where they're constantly being blindsided by punishments that seem capricious and they don't even know necessarily which power structure they're coming from.
00:36:12
Speaker
And that's also, by the way, why conservatives in America are liberals driving the speed limit.
00:36:18
Speaker
They don't actually care where the cultural rules settle, they just want them to settle.
00:36:23
Speaker
And so they're constantly saying, now, wait a minute, you said you just wanted to be able to visit your boyfriend in the hospital and file your taxes jointly.
00:36:30
Speaker
I thought we had a deal.
00:36:32
Speaker
And I'm actually extremely sympathetic to that perspective.
00:36:35
Speaker
It's just we're up against an ideology that is opposed to the concept of equilibrium that can't possibly equilibrate.
00:36:42
Speaker
And that's why people love a good dictator, like an effective dictator.
00:36:49
Speaker
They tell everyone in the system, I am the guarantor of the deal.
00:36:53
Speaker
And as long as I'm around, nobody's going to change it on you.
00:36:56
Speaker
That's one of my favorite quotes from Lee Kuan Yew.
00:36:59
Speaker
Whoever got, I'm going to try not to do it in his accent.
00:37:02
Speaker
Whoever governs Singapore must have that iron in him or give it up.
00:37:06
Speaker
This is not a game of cards.
00:37:07
Speaker
This is your life and mine.
00:37:09
Speaker
I've spent a whole lifetime building this and as long as I'm in charge, nobody's gonna knock it down.
00:37:14
Speaker
Now the greatest weakness of guys like this is that this mindset is difficult to transmit to their sons.
00:37:20
Speaker
But if you could solve that problem, I don't think sane people, healthy people would ever wanna be governed any other way.
00:37:26
Speaker
So anyway, the U.S. really did flood Afghanistan with troops and equipment and surveillance.
00:37:35
Speaker
I mean, they had great situational awareness with respect to where the Taliban was and what they were doing.
00:37:42
Speaker
And it's not like the Taliban were a match for U.S. troops in combat.
00:37:46
Speaker
It was not even close.
00:37:48
Speaker
So why was the Taliban so much more powerful and so much more lasting than a death squad or Al-Qaeda in Iraq?
00:37:55
Speaker
In my opinion, it's because they genuinely offered something to the people, even the people who disagreed with their ideological program.
00:38:02
Speaker
If all they had was coercion, then these outside shows of force would be able to knock them loose.
00:38:07
Speaker
Now, on the other hand, if all they had was the persuasive and moralistic reasons for people to support the regime, and they were unable or unwilling to use coercion, then it's not just that the bad guys will beat you, it's that the mass of ordinary innocent people won't trust you to keep them safe.
00:38:23
Speaker
So they didn't rise to power through the force of their arguments.
00:38:26
Speaker
People found their arguments more and more persuasive as they grew stronger.
00:38:30
Speaker
And we've seen that here with the culture war.
00:38:32
Speaker
The whole thing has been the story of normal, conventional, conformist people gradually flipping as they notice which direction the wind's blowing.
00:38:41
Speaker
At least in my church, it's exactly the same people who, when I was a kid, would have been measuring girls' skirts to make sure they were sufficiently modest for the church dance or worrying a lot about explicit content labels on CDs and R-rated movies.
00:38:55
Speaker
It's in many cases the exact same people who are now enforcing the rules in the new regime.
00:38:59
Speaker
They basically just like to enforce rules.
00:39:02
Speaker
And there's a sense in which for these people, morality is indistinguishable from propriety.
00:39:07
Speaker
They're essentially the same thing.
00:39:09
Speaker
These are the people you went over with stability, and it turns out that's most people.
00:39:13
Speaker
And while they can be really annoying to deal with if you're on the wrong end of them, the good news about those people is that you don't have to convince them of anything, ever.
00:39:24
Speaker
You just have to win.
00:39:25
Speaker
But you do have to win across the spectrum.
00:39:27
Speaker
You have to win in the coercive domain.
00:39:29
Speaker
You have to win in the governance domain.
00:39:31
Speaker
It certainly helps to be effective in the propaganda domain, but that's primarily about building a vanguard.
00:39:37
Speaker
You certainly don't have to convince everybody all the time.
00:39:40
Speaker
And the proof of that is that America in the 20th century lost wars.
00:39:44
Speaker
Basically, all of America's enemies during that time were on the back foot in the propaganda game.
00:39:50
Speaker
If America has a single insurmountable domain advantage, even more so than 11 carrier strike groups, it's narrative control.
00:39:59
Speaker
The ability to control the flow of information and maybe more importantly, to influence the interpretation of the information.
00:40:07
Speaker
Now, is that advantage receding from its zenith?
00:40:11
Speaker
It does seem to be.
00:40:12
Speaker
It seems like social media is allowing a lot of people to at least complicate or poke holes in the narratives that the U.S. would prefer to see out there.
00:40:21
Speaker
But the problem is that there's no serious competitor paradigm, no serious alternative ideology, much less a serious competitor in terms of a normative system of control across the spectrum.
00:40:33
Speaker
People who are...
00:40:35
Speaker
ready to govern and collect taxes and hang criminals.
00:40:38
Speaker
So when you publicly catch the government or the NGO complex or the media in a lie, you are successful in weakening a lot of people's loyalty to those institutions.
00:40:48
Speaker
But that's definitely not the same as replacing them.
00:40:52
Speaker
I think Moldbug is right about this when he talks about the need for a dissident information source, and he was talking about Twitter when I heard him say this,
00:41:00
Speaker
but how a dissident information source, an alternative information source, has to be absolutely, unimpeachably correct all the time.
00:41:08
Speaker
in order to become a serious competitor or a successor to a mainstream source.
00:41:13
Speaker
Like Tom Cruise was right about some things, about the way psychiatry works, but that hasn't translated to anybody taking Tom Cruise more seriously in any kind of generalized way.
00:41:25
Speaker
Certainly not to Scientology becoming any kind of mainstream load-bearing knowledge institution.
00:41:31
Speaker
Same thing with Alex Jones.
00:41:33
Speaker
Alex Jones is something like a poet or a shaman or something.
00:41:37
Speaker
We all go to the mainstream media for general information and those of us who distrust it obviously read it more critically, but we still read it first.
00:41:46
Speaker
You know, maybe you take the mainstream media narrative and you adjust from that baseline like, okay, what lies are they telling about this particular story?
00:41:54
Speaker
But that's still the baseline.
00:41:55
Speaker
That's where you start.
00:41:56
Speaker
And I mean, with Alex Jones, that problem's tenfold.
00:41:59
Speaker
Like you have to figure out what the hell he's talking about first.
00:42:03
Speaker
And instead of parsing it for a lie, you're like, okay, in what sense is this craziness maybe kind of true?
00:42:10
Speaker
And again, that doesn't touch the American empire in terms of governance or coercive power.
00:42:15
Speaker
American diplomats in the 20th century did an incredible job of taking over the world the same way the Taliban took over Afghanistan.
00:42:22
Speaker
They placed themselves as the impartial broker and recorder of the entire international system.
00:42:29
Speaker
And so all of these agreements between all of these countries are underwritten by U.S. power.
00:42:35
Speaker
As long as there's no credible alternative, no credible challenger to the United States international order,
00:42:41
Speaker
an increase in foreign policy turmoil actually makes the US stronger because while it doesn't make the inside of their bubble any safer, it makes the world outside their bubble much much more dangerous.
00:42:52
Speaker
Europe was a lot more aggressive and frankly rebellious toward
00:42:56
Speaker
the US government back when the big enemies of the international system were Iraq and Iran and North Korea.
00:43:03
Speaker
But with Russia invading Ukraine, at least potentially, at least theoretically trying to renegotiate the power balance in Europe, all of a sudden everybody's lined up behind Biden like it's September 12, 2001, because it turns out that the American security umbrella has actually been pretty cozy for Europe, particularly the European leadership, but also the population.
US Influence and Narrative Control
00:43:24
Speaker
They don't want the deal renegotiated.
00:43:26
Speaker
And even if they don't think Putin has any serious ambitions deeper into Europe, just the idea that the security umbrella could be called into question, that somebody might need help and not get it, is enough to make a lot of people circle the wagons.
00:43:39
Speaker
And viewing the system through this lens, things that don't make a ton of sense from a pure ideological perspective actually make a lot of sense.
00:43:47
Speaker
Like the fact that you've got normie, centrist, D.C.
00:43:50
Speaker
liberal types waving a flag with Nazi runes on it.
00:43:54
Speaker
Like, it's weird.
00:43:56
Speaker
Here at home, the number one domestic extremist terror threat is neo-Nazis, right?
00:44:01
Speaker
Meanwhile, they're watching actual neo-Nazis in an open military occupation overseas.
00:44:07
Speaker
and they're cheering and clapping like it's a Marvel movie.
00:44:10
Speaker
Because that ideological conversation, that propaganda conversation is just completely irrelevant.
00:44:16
Speaker
Here in America, a neo-Nazi is someone who is on the side of disruption and chaos and unpredictability and change.
00:44:24
Speaker
But in Ukraine, the neo-Nazis are on the side of everything going back the way it was, everybody following the rules, and everything staying predictable and safe, and everybody knowing where they stand.
00:44:34
Speaker
Now, it's not just that.
00:44:35
Speaker
NATO does have a significant propaganda advantage in that Putin shot first.
00:44:40
Speaker
And as long as you can keep the conversation focused very narrowly on that, you can argue that all the other stuff is immaterial.
00:44:47
Speaker
Whichever party escalates the situation to violence is the aggressor and therefore the bad guy, regardless of whatever preceded the act of violence.
00:44:56
Speaker
Of course, the Russians would argue that what the United States is doing is a classic case of kick the dog until it bites and then shoot it.
00:45:03
Speaker
If Ukraine has demonstrated anything, it's that Russia isn't capable of projecting power, even to the extent of the old boundaries of the Warsaw Pact.
00:45:11
Speaker
But still, there's this very easy argument to make that they picked a fight with somebody smaller than they were that they thought they could bully.
00:45:18
Speaker
And so the United States is the big brother stepping in to protect the innocent, the weak.
00:45:23
Speaker
And that's ultimately how the big dog always launders their big dog status to remain the good guy.
00:45:30
Speaker
The US government over the last century or so has just mastered that art of perception.
00:45:35
Speaker
The art of making sure the fight happens and making sure they're in a position to win that fight without appearing to be the aggressor and furthermore taking all the spoils in second and third order economic effects so they don't look like spoils.
00:45:50
Speaker
In the world wars, the US wasn't trying to conquer and loot Europe.
00:45:54
Speaker
They were coming to the rescue of poor little Belgium and Poland
00:45:58
Speaker
And they just happened to end up occupying Europe and monopolizing the world's undamaged industrial capacity and essentially buying Europe out from under starving people for chocolate bars and nylons and soap.
00:46:11
Speaker
You see the same phenomenon in the approach to family law or anti-discrimination law.
00:46:15
Speaker
They're not ruthlessly eliminating all of the associations and institutions whose power they can't capture.
00:46:21
Speaker
They're coming to the rescue of the oppressed, the downtrodden, people who just want a seat at the table.
00:46:26
Speaker
And this works because it's a really simple argument.
00:46:28
Speaker
Putin can make the case for encirclement and provocation, just like the Germans did, that the big guy wanted a fight, and the only way for the little guy to survive that fight was to strike when and where he had the advantage.
00:46:40
Speaker
And very smart books have been written in hindsight about how, you know, the Kaiser wasn't the monster he was made out to be, but
00:46:47
Speaker
That's a much more complicated case than you invaded, nobody invaded you, you started the fight, you're the bad guy.
00:46:54
Speaker
So in this game of information war, psychological war, it really pays to not be the one who threw the first punch.
00:47:00
Speaker
And it works right down to the individual tactical level.
00:47:03
Speaker
Kilcullen describes two modes that an individual soldier can protect themselves in a hostile environment.
00:47:09
Speaker
There's direct protection and indirect protection.
00:47:12
Speaker
So direct protection is cover, body armor, heavy plating on an armored vehicle, things that allow you to get hit and survive.
00:47:20
Speaker
Whereas indirect protection is speed, lethality, stealth, situational awareness, rapid target acquisition.
00:47:28
Speaker
which is the ability to find and kill the bad guy before he finds and kills you.
00:47:34
Speaker
While indirect protection is maybe sexier, Kilcullen argues that it's much, much more disruptive and destructive to an urban environment because it means you have to shoot first and ask questions later.
00:47:46
Speaker
You have to create lines of sight and thwart ambushes by blowing holes in expensive things and
00:47:51
Speaker
He frames that like the main issue is that states can't afford to damage their own cities, but again, they really can.
00:47:59
Speaker
The danger is in giving a hostile media something to grab onto and deploy against you.
00:48:05
Speaker
Which I think is one of the most important insights for any group that's trying to be independent, that doesn't have the protection and connivance of the media.
00:48:11
Speaker
It becomes really important to be able to absorb a lot of punishment and do your best to make sure that you're the one waving the bloody shirt.
00:48:17
Speaker
You're the one presenting the evidence before the world of all the wrongs that you've endured.
00:48:22
Speaker
Now, obviously, that's still an uphill battle because the media can just choose not to tell your story.
00:48:26
Speaker
But certainly it's easier than unambiguously shooting first.
00:48:30
Speaker
And you can see how much that matters in the story of the battles at Waco and Ruby Ridge.
00:48:35
Speaker
Those situations were so complicated.
00:48:37
Speaker
There was so much going on and so many people making decisions that you could argue were unwise or rash or deceptive or exploitative or aggressive.
00:48:47
Speaker
But it's amazing how...
00:48:50
Speaker
On both sides of the argument, whenever someone's trying to assign blame and say who the bad guy of the story was, it's amazing how much the moral question hinges in ordinary people's minds on who shot first.
00:49:01
Speaker
When the truth is, in both of those cases, the gravity of the situation, and I don't mean the seriousness of the situation, but like the pull of the incentive gradient, the gravity was pulling toward a shootout.
00:49:13
Speaker
And by the time it finally went down, both sides were prepared and intending to
00:49:18
Speaker
to have that shootout.
00:49:19
Speaker
And so the question of who actually shot first is, it's not maybe entirely down to luck, but it certainly doesn't seem like you can just say, well, it's that one guy's fault.
00:49:28
Speaker
None of this would have happened if that guy hadn't fired the first shot.
00:49:32
Speaker
And that leads to maybe a deeper point about the state's propaganda advantage.
00:49:36
Speaker
It's actually not the case that America's media and cultural dominance means the state can do just literally whatever it wants.
00:49:43
Speaker
And the media will take whatever happened and magically spin it into whatever the story needs to be.
00:49:48
Speaker
The state certainly doesn't act like that's the case, or they would just arrest us because they don't like us.
00:49:53
Speaker
They'd take away our guns because they don't think we should have them.
00:49:55
Speaker
They'd shoot Snowden with a heart attack gun.
00:49:58
Speaker
You can certainly believe that they're bad guys who do bad things, but they actually have to take some effort to engineer these situations, right down to developing crowd-control microwave weapons to create the necessary perceptions.
00:50:12
Speaker
So it's not just a question of having the capital and the technology.
00:50:15
Speaker
That's a skill.
00:50:16
Speaker
That's a skill that they've developed.
00:50:18
Speaker
Other people could learn to do that.
00:50:20
Speaker
But it's interesting to think about why they have to do that.
00:50:22
Speaker
Why does the globe-straddling empire that controls all of the media outlets, why do they have to manage perception?
00:50:29
Speaker
Well, it goes back to the theory of competitive control.
00:50:32
Speaker
They have to make a world that is safe on the inside and unsafe on the outside.
00:50:37
Speaker
And that can't happen unless everybody understands what the rules are and what they need to do to be safe.
00:50:43
Speaker
And even those of us who consider ourselves dissident, we still feel the protection of the rules of that system.
00:50:49
Speaker
A lot of our people talk like we're all right on the cusp of being Waco just because the government hates us.
00:50:55
Speaker
But nobody acts like they really believe that.
00:50:57
Speaker
We all own the guns that the state allows us to own.
00:51:01
Speaker
We talk shit about the government in the ways that we're pretty sure we're allowed to talk shit about the government.
00:51:05
Speaker
The truth that we all quietly recognize is that we know exactly what makes us different from David Koresh.
00:51:12
Speaker
We know exactly the lines that his group transgressed that we choose not to transgress, and that's how we keep ourselves from being surrounded by the ATF.
00:51:21
Speaker
I'm not saying that what happened to them was fair or morally correct.
00:51:24
Speaker
What I'm saying is that they unambiguously broke rules that the rest of us acknowledge.
00:51:29
Speaker
We know what the difference is between us and them.
00:51:31
Speaker
It's not about right and wrong.
00:51:32
Speaker
It's about consistency and predictability.
00:51:34
Speaker
Now that's starting to get more complicated, of course, as they increasingly bend and break and selectively enforce the rules out in the open, or at least as we increasingly see them do it.
00:51:43
Speaker
Maybe that's social media.
00:51:44
Speaker
I don't know.
00:51:44
Speaker
But if they can fine Alex Jones a billion dollars for talking shit about the government, maybe the line isn't exactly where we thought it was.
00:51:51
Speaker
And that does seriously destabilize the system by making people feel unsafe inside it.
00:51:56
Speaker
And by inside it, just to be clear, I don't mean everybody who lives here.
00:52:00
Speaker
I mean inside the rules.
00:52:03
Speaker
It makes people who thought that they were following the rules and doing what they needed to do to be safe...
00:52:08
Speaker
feel like that actually isn't going to keep them safe.
00:52:11
Speaker
And so every time they do something like that, the media has the task of contextualizing what the state is doing in such a way that they're actually not violating their own rules.
00:52:23
Speaker
The reason they have to do that is not so that everybody thinks they're the good guys.
00:52:27
Speaker
Like, there's no future where the secret, classified Epstein documents are unveiled and we all realize the government is actually super evil and we rise up as one to overthrow them.
00:52:36
Speaker
That's not what they're trying to avoid.
00:52:39
Speaker
They're not trying to look like the good guys.
00:52:40
Speaker
They're trying to tell the civilians, the apolitical people, listen, the rules haven't changed.
00:52:46
Speaker
This guy broke rules that you already knew about.
00:52:48
Speaker
So you're still safe.
00:52:50
Speaker
We're going to leave you alone.
00:52:51
Speaker
And one of the reasons, if not the reason, why this classical liberal human rights egregore has eaten almost everything is
00:52:58
Speaker
is that it provides a rule set that is essentially optimized for encompassing as many people as it possibly can.
00:53:04
Speaker
Like the theoretical underpinning is the only reason you could be excluded from this system is if you're trying to exclude someone else.
00:53:11
Speaker
That's why non-discrimination is so central to this system of control.
00:53:15
Speaker
They have to be the side that takes no sides.
00:53:18
Speaker
And you can see how that cashes out in America's role in international systems as well.
00:53:22
Speaker
That's the reason why the United States governs the planet without being a territorial empire.
00:53:29
Speaker
The State Department is always playing the referee, peacekeeping, breaking up fights because that's the source of their legitimacy.
00:53:35
Speaker
Our umbrella encompasses everybody.
00:53:37
Speaker
We keep everybody safe and we don't play favorites.
00:53:41
Speaker
Anyone can get on our good side and everybody knows how to get on our good side.
00:53:46
Speaker
And I don't know if it's inevitable that a system like that would dominate under these conditions of media warfare, but it certainly seems to be hyper-adaptive to those conditions.
00:53:56
Speaker
It's just the apex predator of this power ecosystem.
00:54:00
Speaker
Kilcullen spends quite a lot of time on the Arab Spring, and particularly the various governments' response to social media.
00:54:06
Speaker
The regimes that were the most successful in managing the demonstrations and the riots and suppressing revolutionary sentiment were the ones that left the internet on...
00:54:15
Speaker
and used it to disrupt, misinform, hack, track, and so fear among the activists.
00:54:22
Speaker
Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya all made the decision at various points to shut down the internet altogether, and they really didn't account for how much the average citizen, the non-politically active citizen, had come to regard internet access as maybe not a fundamental right in the sense that Westerners think we have fundamental rights, but it was an expectation.
00:54:41
Speaker
And basically, the act of shutting down the internet told those people, you thought you knew what you had to do to be left alone, but it turns out you're not going to be left alone.
00:54:49
Speaker
And it actually created this strong sentiment of identification and solidarity with the protesters.
00:54:55
Speaker
We saw something like that with the COVID mandates here.
00:54:57
Speaker
There were a lot of people who really believed that if they kept their head down and stayed competent and did their job, they'd be left alone.
00:55:04
Speaker
And the messaging from the top on this was, no, here's some new stuff you got to do or else you're fired.
00:55:10
Speaker
And by the way, you're not fired just from here, but you're fired at every Fortune 500 company.
00:55:14
Speaker
You're no longer welcome in the upper echelon of wage labor in America.
00:55:18
Speaker
And I've talked to a lot of these guys, a lot of them joined exit around that timeframe.
00:55:22
Speaker
And the common denominator was actually not any kind of principled objection to the vaccine itself.
00:55:28
Speaker
In fact, many of them came after the vaccine mandate had been rescinded.
00:55:33
Speaker
It was an objection to having the rules changed.
00:55:36
Speaker
All these quiet, competent, conservative guys had basically no appetite for picking a fight at work over gay marriage or affirmative action or any of that stuff.
00:55:45
Speaker
They said, well, you know, I don't like the official company line on this stuff, but I don't really have to agree with it.
00:55:50
Speaker
I can just cash the checks.
00:55:51
Speaker
That's no big deal.
00:55:53
Speaker
But it was like, no, now the condition of your employment, the employment upon which you based your educational plans, your student loans, the job that you uprooted your family for, the work that you put in above and beyond on the expectation of future promotion and advancement, the availability of your benefits and your retirement, all of that, that's all being renegotiated now and you have no leverage.
00:56:15
Speaker
So you can either accept the new terms or you can try to find a comparable position outside the system.
00:56:21
Speaker
Good luck.
00:56:21
Speaker
And a lot of these guys, when they came into the group, said to me, you know, they haven't actually asked me to do anything that I materially disagree with yet.
00:56:28
Speaker
I just know they're going to.
00:56:30
Speaker
I know it's never going to stop.
00:56:31
Speaker
And so I might as well start building an alternative.
00:56:34
Speaker
And that is the power of screwing with people's sense of security and predictability, their sense that the rules are stable.
00:56:40
Speaker
And these guys are right.
00:56:41
Speaker
It's not going to stop.
00:56:43
Speaker
The ideological commitments of the state are on a collision course with basically anybody who believes in anything.
00:56:48
Speaker
So while it's not true that there's going to be some day where everybody wakes up, it is the case that more and more and more people are being sheared off or really expelled from the safe zone as the requirements to stay compliant become more and more onerous.
00:57:03
Speaker
And those requirements have to become more onerous to maintain the system's narrative legitimacy as the biggest tent, the most inclusive, the side that takes no sides.
00:57:12
Speaker
As they try to incorporate more and more people who are just fundamentally incompatible with each other, they're increasingly having to chop people up to fit.
00:57:21
Speaker
So religious attachments have to be dissolved.
00:57:24
Speaker
Family attachments have to be dissolved.
00:57:26
Speaker
With ethnic attachments, they talk out both sides of their mouth, right?
00:57:30
Speaker
On the one hand, we're all going to be this beige soup by 2070, and isn't that beautiful?
00:57:34
Speaker
But on the other hand, certain ethnic groups are more equal than others.
00:57:38
Speaker
But in any case, the process of dissolving all allegiances that might compete is not going to stop.
00:57:44
Speaker
And if you're already outside the bubble, or let's be honest, we're in the outer layers of the bubble, right?
00:57:49
Speaker
Like Snowden is meaningfully outside the bubble.
00:57:51
Speaker
Assange is outside the bubble.
00:57:53
Speaker
You and I are still definitely in the bubble.
00:57:56
Speaker
But if you're in our position, what you want is for a few more cracks to appear.
00:58:00
Speaker
You want it to get a little bit more dangerous inside the bubble and a little less dangerous outside.
00:58:05
Speaker
And this is what people vaguely have in mind when they talk about the creation of parallel institutions.
00:58:09
Speaker
They want you to have somewhere to go when you get kicked out.
00:58:12
Speaker
But the problem is, if those institutions are meaningfully in conflict with the state, with the dominant normative system, eventually the state's going to get allergic, and it's going to attack those institutions.
00:58:22
Speaker
But they have to start getting built before the state declines to a point where it's safe for them to be built.
00:58:28
Speaker
These institutions have to be ready before they're needed, and they have to survive until they're needed.
00:58:33
Speaker
So let's imagine that you live in a country that's like America is now, but you know that it's going to become a country like Jamaica is now, with criminal gangs and partisan violence and
00:58:45
Speaker
extreme corruption, warlordism, privatized security, etc.
00:58:48
Speaker
We call it Jamaicification.
00:58:50
Speaker
If you anticipate that and you start acting like a warlord or a criminal right now, you're going to be immediately detected and destroyed by a normative system that is still very effective at policing its boundaries.
00:59:01
Speaker
But think about all the non-criminal, all the legitimate power flows that these groups are built on.
00:59:05
Speaker
It's not illegal to run a get out the vote campaign.
00:59:08
Speaker
It's not illegal to lobby on behalf of a constituency.
00:59:11
Speaker
It's not illegal to bring back benefits to them.
00:59:13
Speaker
It's not illegal to own a construction company, lots of heavy equipment.
00:59:17
Speaker
It's not illegal to provide lots of jobs.
00:59:20
Speaker
It's not illegal to run an import export business or telecommunications infrastructure.
00:59:24
Speaker
And all of these things are necessary to the functioning of the state.
00:59:27
Speaker
All these power flows have legitimate purposes.
00:59:30
Speaker
It's just that in these disordered societies, those power flows have been captured and exploited by someone who isn't the state.
00:59:36
Speaker
So these power flows become like the internet in the Arab Spring.
00:59:39
Speaker
They're legitimate power flows, a legitimate flow of information that's necessary to the functioning of normal society.
00:59:45
Speaker
which makes it really challenging for the state to cut the blood flow to these competitor institutions without also harming healthy tissue, so to speak.
00:59:53
Speaker
Kilcullen tells stories of humanitarian flights that routinely run drugs and weapons in the Middle East and Africa.
00:59:59
Speaker
And all the NGOs know this, but those planes are also the only planes that bring first aid kits and tampons and bags of beans, so they let them through.
01:00:07
Speaker
And this, fundamentally, is the genius of Chris Ruffo.
01:00:12
Speaker
It's not that Chris uses the right words or has the right carefully crafted normie appeal.
01:00:18
Speaker
I mean, he's great.
01:00:18
Speaker
That's all great.
01:00:20
Speaker
But the genius of Chris Ruffo is that he has targeted a power flow that the state needs to control, and he's daring them to admit that they just don't want to give it to the people.
01:00:30
Speaker
Education funding is an enormous power flow, and not only because it's just a lot of money, but because it shelters an army of activists and professional sinecures.
01:00:38
Speaker
So it's a way of throwing benefits to the state's favored constituencies.
01:00:43
Speaker
It's a way of getting a lot of ideological work done that the market won't support, which in turn finances this massive second-order ecosystem of
01:00:52
Speaker
of activists in academia who run the otherwise useless degree programs that all of these activists come from.
01:00:59
Speaker
And that's to say nothing of the deeper power, the more lasting power of having effectively a monopoly on the raising of middle-class American schoolchildren.
01:01:06
Speaker
Which, by the way, that's how they make good on the threat of being on the right side of history.
01:01:11
Speaker
They say, don't you want to be on the right side of history?
01:01:13
Speaker
What they mean is we're going to write the history books and we're going to teach your kids that history and they're going to despise you.
01:01:19
Speaker
So you'd better get in line or your kids are going to disown you.
01:01:21
Speaker
Anyway, Rufo is just saying, hey, this is government of the people, by the people, for the people, right?
01:01:28
Speaker
We believe people ought to have maximum choice, right?
01:01:30
Speaker
And the teachers work for us, right?
01:01:32
Speaker
The voters, the taxpayers.
01:01:33
Speaker
And of course, that's bullshit, but it's load-bearing bullshit.
01:01:37
Speaker
And so he's giving them a choice.
01:01:39
Speaker
He's saying, you can either admit that that's bullshit and you just don't want parents to make those choices, right?
01:01:46
Speaker
Or you can give right-wing homeschool Christian MAGA moms $900 billion and let them decide where they want to put it.
01:01:54
Speaker
And you can imagine a world in which this massive left-wing academic ecosystem just shrivels and dies while simultaneously the state nourishes this massive private right-wing Christian academic ecosystem.
01:02:07
Speaker
That might actually happen, I think, in some jurisdictions.
01:02:10
Speaker
And in others, they'll probably be able to get away with admitting that they just don't think parents should be making those choices because we trust the experts.
01:02:17
Speaker
But anyway, Rufo is effectively looting the state.
01:02:20
Speaker
He is capturing and redistributing a power flow.
01:02:23
Speaker
And in the act of redistributing it, he's added immensely to his own personal power in exactly the same way that Christopher Coke in Jamaica did.
01:02:31
Speaker
It's not his money, right?
01:02:33
Speaker
It's the taxpayer's money, but we sure love him for going and getting it for us.
01:02:36
Speaker
And I mean that sincerely.
01:02:37
Speaker
He's a hero.
01:02:39
Speaker
And what he's doing is not unethical.
01:02:40
Speaker
It's not illegal.
01:02:41
Speaker
It's not corrupt.
01:02:43
Speaker
But it's the same kind of thing that this gangster in Jamaica does.
01:02:47
Speaker
And as the state gradually loses more and more credibility and control, more power flows like this are going to become up for grabs.
01:02:54
Speaker
And somebody's going to take them.
01:02:56
Speaker
Elon's in a pretty interesting situation from this perspective.
01:02:59
Speaker
He's made himself essential in at least three massive flows of power from the state and from the market.
01:03:06
Speaker
First you got SpaceX.
01:03:07
Speaker
Elon Musk is the only game in town for putting anything into orbit cost effectively.
01:03:12
Speaker
If there were to be any kind of massive disruption to America's space assets that required rapid replenishment, let's say during a war, Elon Musk would be 100% indispensable to the regime.
01:03:23
Speaker
He's also bought Twitter, which if you buy my theory that media top cover matters more than aircraft carriers, that's a pretty big deal.
01:03:30
Speaker
He's also making a play to be the number one internet service provider in most places in the world.
01:03:37
Speaker
And then he owns Tesla, which is hoovering up all this green energy money besides developing a lot of the tech that's going to define the next generation of warfare in terms of self-driving autonomous weapons.
01:03:48
Speaker
So I guess that's four lanes, not three.
01:03:50
Speaker
But anyway, he came by it all honestly.
01:03:52
Speaker
I think it's pretty clear that the regime dislikes him in general, views him as a threat.
01:03:56
Speaker
If they don't, they're morons.
01:03:58
Speaker
But you have to think through, if they really wanted to get to him, how hard would they have to work?
01:04:03
Speaker
How much institutional capital would they have to burn?
01:04:06
Speaker
How many important people's sense of security and predictability would they have to screw with in order to screw with him?
01:04:13
Speaker
Anyway, the point is, he's not powerful because he's got money.
01:04:15
Speaker
He's powerful because he's captured power flows.
01:04:18
Speaker
They can't disrupt him without disrupting themselves.
01:04:21
Speaker
Jeff Bezos is in a similar situation, not through Amazon proper, but through AWS.
01:04:26
Speaker
He's dug in like a tick in both DOD and the intelligence community's IT infrastructure.
01:04:31
Speaker
The problem right now for these guys is that they're in the same situation that the Kingston gangs were before this flow of outside remittances started coming in from America.
01:04:41
Speaker
The government is dependent on them, but they're also completely dependent on the government.
01:04:45
Speaker
And I don't just mean that they're dependent on long-term government contracts and investment from government clients.
01:04:50
Speaker
I mean their ownership of their stuff and their physical security.
01:04:54
Speaker
That's all contracts in American courts and American bank accounts with American dollars in them.
Elon Musk as a Power Player
01:05:00
Speaker
They're much more like the shooters or the muscle in that ecosystem in Jamaica.
01:05:05
Speaker
They have some privilege and some delegated power, but that means they're under much more extreme scrutiny to prevent them walking off with it.
01:05:12
Speaker
And, you know, the state's already looking sideways at Elon.
01:05:16
Speaker
just for dipping his toes into the political and cultural game by buying Twitter.
01:05:20
Speaker
And they're going to look for a reason to burn him, but they can't be seen just outright robbing him because it would mean too many other billionaires and industrialists looking around like, I don't know, Elon was a lot like me.
01:05:31
Speaker
I'm not that different.
01:05:32
Speaker
But Elon is building all of this politically relevant power outside of the political domain.
01:05:38
Speaker
And that's another thing that these Arab Spring activists had going for them.
01:05:43
Speaker
They had substantial air gapping between political actions, militant actions, and economic actions.
01:05:50
Speaker
You had a lot of westernized, poli-sci, NGO nerd types running social media accounts and making signs and passing around petitions.
01:06:01
Speaker
But it was these apolitical soccer ultras, soccer hooligans, who did most of the fighting with the police.
01:06:08
Speaker
These were guys who fought the cops on a typical weekend anyway, so they understood police riot control tactics.
01:06:15
Speaker
They knew what would and wouldn't get them arrested, what would and wouldn't get them charged.
01:06:19
Speaker
Just like cops know that they can't just shoot demonstrators, even in Egypt, soccer hooligans learn how to exercise force within the bounds of the rules.
01:06:28
Speaker
And it's really important that they develop that skill by being drunk and disorderly after soccer games, not as part of some explicit anti-government movement.
01:06:37
Speaker
That made them incredibly valuable to the political guys.
01:06:41
Speaker
It's important that everybody played their role by the rules of their particular game.
01:06:47
Speaker
The political guys played the political game and the leg breakers played the leg breaker game and never the twain should meet until the very last minute when the government was collapsing and the police were joining the protesters and the optics game didn't matter anymore.
01:07:00
Speaker
And obviously none of these groups were alone.
01:07:02
Speaker
They had the cooperation of U.S. intelligence and social media platforms.
01:07:05
Speaker
They were openly coordinating with extremist groups and criminal gangs, accessing material on missile launchers and manufacturing weapons, all kinds of things that if you and I tried to do anything anywhere near that on mainstream social media, we'd immediately catch a ban, plus a visit from the FBI.
01:07:22
Speaker
And that's ultimately how the control is maintained.
01:07:25
Speaker
People aren't controlled with tanks and F-15s and Tomahawk missiles anymore.
01:07:29
Speaker
They're controlled through surveillance and telecommunications technology.
01:07:33
Speaker
If the state knows exactly who's a threat and exactly where they are and how to get to them, then they don't need a missile or a bomb.
01:07:38
Speaker
They don't even need to kill you or beat you up.
01:07:40
Speaker
They don't even need to threaten you.
01:07:42
Speaker
They can just find something wrong with your taxes or, you know, in the case of our friend AJ, sue you for defamation for a billion dollars or lock you up.
01:07:50
Speaker
And, you know, you will have well and truly broken the rules and it won't upset any of their solid citizens because they'll make the case that you're different.
01:07:58
Speaker
You had it coming.
01:08:00
Speaker
The essence of the CIA color revolution phenomenon is basically that.
01:08:05
Speaker
By monopolizing telecommunications and surveillance technology, the U.S. government gets to decide which states have access to these tools and which get targeted by these tools.
01:08:15
Speaker
In other words, they decide which states stay in control of their own citizens.
01:08:19
Speaker
It's the ability of the state to surveil and target enemies and then to recontextualize whatever bad thing happened to them so that either it looks like you were the bad guy and had it coming or...
01:08:29
Speaker
It was a tragic accident or whatever.
01:08:31
Speaker
That's the stuff that keeps people up at night.
01:08:33
Speaker
And that's why guys like Biden and Swalwell love to talk about F-15s and nukes and predator drones and all that stuff, because that stuff's genuinely never going to happen.
01:08:42
Speaker
That threat's ridiculous, and they hope that it makes the whole scenario ridiculous.
01:08:46
Speaker
But the fact is, you can be targeted with much more precision than that in a way that doesn't require the messy and expensive narrative control that that kind of targeting would require.
Strategies for Independence and Autonomy
01:08:55
Speaker
And again, I don't think any of us are currently interesting or important enough for even that kind of public character assassination response to be cost effective.
01:09:04
Speaker
So hopefully that remains academic.
01:09:06
Speaker
But let's sum up.
01:09:07
Speaker
What can we learn from all this as people who want to be more independent and more sovereign without dying in a fire?
01:09:14
Speaker
Well, here's what I see.
01:09:16
Speaker
You need to be essential to as many people as possible.
01:09:19
Speaker
You need to be a job creator and you need to be locally, politically influential.
01:09:23
Speaker
We need sheriffs and judges and state reps who are in their seats because of what we've done.
01:09:27
Speaker
And that can mean money.
01:09:29
Speaker
But in a lot of these races, a little bit of ground game, even the ability to bring 10 people together for a weekend can flip a race.
01:09:37
Speaker
We need to provide critical services that keep normal life running in ways that can't be easily replaced in our absence.
01:09:43
Speaker
We need to cultivate dual purpose capabilities, skills and resources and networks that have political application, but that we acquire apolitically.
01:09:53
Speaker
We need to develop the ability to absorb hostility and violence in ways that make us look righteous instead of weak.
01:09:59
Speaker
We need to engineer situations where we get to be the good guys and look like the good guys.
01:10:04
Speaker
We need to start building bubbles that are safe on the inside and let the outside become progressively more dangerous on its own, as it certainly will.
01:10:12
Speaker
Start collecting the smart, high agency people who are getting chewed up and spit out as the system degrades and build capacity to help them in ways that are really difficult for the state to find a problem with.
01:10:22
Speaker
And I think anything more advanced than that is going to take decentralization of the internet.
01:10:26
Speaker
It's going to require us to be able to share accurate reporting, to communicate and coordinate, to record ownership of money and other assets outside the reach of the state.
01:10:37
Speaker
And if we can engineer a situation in which decentralized encrypted communications technology becomes part of the everyday suite of tools that normal people expect to be able to use, which means they can't be taken away without causing quite a lot of disruption, then we really will have a situation where dissidents will have access to the same tools of activism that the Arab Spring activists had against their governments.
01:10:59
Speaker
Without the cooperation of a foreign intelligence service and that will substantially decrease the state's ability to metabolize power flows in general across the board They've put so many of their eggs in this basket of being able to reliably surveil people and track people and screw with their money on the internet That a world in which they can't do that is almost certainly going to mean more corruption more crime more guerrillas more pirates more bandits
01:11:28
Speaker
but also the prospect of a meaningful frontier for those of us who wanna build something new.
01:11:34
Speaker
Anyway, I hope you found this interesting.
01:11:36
Speaker
This is basically what I'm about.
01:11:39
Speaker
I see these old systems as failing at their most basic task to provide a space where people can live and work and raise families.
01:11:47
Speaker
That's minimum viable for human civilization.
01:11:50
Speaker
And since that increasingly can't happen in the old system, I want to create new systems where it can happen.
01:11:56
Speaker
And everything we do at Exit is oriented around solving that problem.
01:11:59
Speaker
So if you care about that and want to help us build something, check us out at exitgroup.us.
01:12:05
Speaker
Thanks for listening.