The New Age of Intelligence
Page 4
That said, networks of power and enforcement through networks is not without alternative. Counter-cultures (which exist and will continue to form) deliberately take back control of dependencies and hidden influences. But this alternative is not without cost, it requires that those participating in alternative models must break with social expectations. (“Go to college, get a job, get a mortgage, buy a house, do what you were told and what everybody else is doing.”) Instead they require personal risk and the acceptance of challenges.
How Network-Based Enforcement Works
Let's examine the fundamentals of using network-based power, beginning with two introductory points:
Both civil society and market are networks, not command-and-control structures. Personal relationships and low-level commercial relationships are decentralized... and they reach everywhere. Furthermore, these networks cannot easily be removed; attempts to do so (by, for example, the socialist states) have failed miserably, often involving mass starvation.
These networks of civil and market relationships, however, do feature hubs; that is, nodes that mediate between nodes. And we are all familiar with these: banks, insurance, welfare, electrical distribution, transportation systems, and so on.
So, once the castle acknowledges this to be true, adapting these networks to transmit power – enforcing the castle's will in the network way – requires these actions:
Strengthen society's reliance on the hubs. Undermine alternative implementations of systems, increase the economics of big networks, amplify network effects through selection of implementation by key players (state bureaucracies, state-controlled corporations).
Regulate the hubs. This is done by getting the hubs to support indirect regulation. This is done, for example, by pushing banks to accept anti-money laundering reports, know your customer rules, and so on. It is done in dozens other fields by defining product standards.
Incentivize the hubs. That is, give the hubs special benefits for supporting regulations: Grant them tax breaks, status, access to inside information, protection from foreign competitors, offer to do favors for them, and so on. The applications of this are myriad.
Punish and disconnect disobedient hubs. The bank that doesn't comply has its banking license revoked. The business that produces products that don't meet the new standard is wide-open to lawsuits, and so on, at great length.
Produce propaganda supporting the regulatory regime. This is done every day, via media networks, educational systems, and dozens of other outlets. It doesn't take people long to see what the system wants them to do and will support them for doing. And so, they rely upon the regulatory regime, portray it as righteous and necessary, and even punish those who question it, treating them as if they were crazy.
And so, networks of power are easy to use, deliver power directly and discretely, and are self-reinforcing. As we noted about Google and Facebook's massive abilities, the castle-dwellers would be abject fools not to use this type of power.
Using Networked Power
There are two basic actions whereby individuals and groups gain special power over networks:
To constitute networks. To set them up, program them (set the rules of operation), and to reprogram them.
To connect networks. To join, separate and ensure the cooperation of different networks. To set up strategic cooperation. To combine resources and fight competing networks.
If you create a network, you get to create it your way; you get to put key pieces (nodes) where you want them and key people where you want them. If you connect between networks, you become a powerful gatekeeper.
This is true for networks of services and machines and it is true for networks of people and corporations.
Manuel Castells of the University of Southern California describes the components of modern networks in his paper A Network Theory of Power:
Network-making power is in the hands of a small number of conglomerates and their surrogates and partners. But these conglomerates are formed by networks of multiple media properties operating in multiple modes and in multiple cultural and institutional environments. And multimedia conglomerates are intertwined with financial investors of various origins, including financial institutions, sovereign funds, private equity investment firms, hedge funds, and others.
He goes on to say that the power holders are “networks of actors exercising power in their respective areas of influence through the networks that they construct around their interests.”
Castell's work explains the race to setup extra-governmental networks of power: If you create the network, you gain long-term and oversized power within it. And the past 15 years have been a prime time to create such things: the internet has come of age, the public mind has been at a peak of unquestioning compliance, and governmental cooperation has been easy to attain.
Moreover, once a network is created, the power behind its creation is obscure. And in daily operations, the gatekeepers are unknown as well. And so, we stand amongst elaborate networks of control, but we know almost nothing of the people and organizations that use this power.
One close examination of these networks has been made, The Network of Global Corporate Control, by Vitali, Glattfelder, Battiston, et al, in 2011[17]. Some of its results were illuminating. For example:
… we find that only 737 top holders accumulate 80% of the control over the value of all TNCs.
“TNCs” are trans-national corporations. So, just 737 entities control 80% of nearly all the largest corporations.
In the image below (from the aforementioned paper) we see 1,318 nodes and 12,191 links displayed. And please note that the circular nodes are sets of companies in which every member owns directly and/or indirectly shares in every other member. That's a lot of interconnection, which allows for nearly invisible control through boards of directors.
Uncomfortable though it may be, what has risen in this 21st century has been a separation of the naïve from the elaborate.
Networked power is not democratically controlled, and in the 21st century, everyone is not on the same level of power. Furthermore, the decisions that matter are not made in Parliaments. Journalists, activists and politicians are finding that they are far less relevant than they had believed, even though most don't know why.
In this new situation, the state is mainly important as a provider of societal inertia. Normalcy must stand, expectations must remain within acceptable limits, there must be no “outside” to run away to. By providing that, the state and its friends (Hollywood, media, Wall Street, etc.) remain important.
A financial acronym that has arisen in recent years applies well here: TINA: There Is No Alternative. And so, as there is now no practical alternative to Wall Street for retirement funds, the role of the state is to see that there is no alternative to itself for human organization. So long as that belief reigns in the minds of the populace, networked power can reign inviolate.
To close this chapter, we turn to Alan Bloom, and a passage from his The Closing of The American Mind:
The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.
This, and little more, is the role of the state in the 21st century.
4
El Cid and
The Westphalian Order
Alive or dead... I must be on my horse, at the head of my soldiers.
– Don Rodrigo, El Cid
At the end of El Cid, an epic film from 1961, a dying Charlton Heston (Don Rodrigo, aka El Cid) is strapped to his horse and heads into the final battle with his great opponent. Don Rodrigo promptly dies, but remains strapped to his horse in an upright position. The enemy then sees him, and panics. As a result (and in the best Hollywood tradition), the opposing general is trampled by the Cid's horse and his army wins a great victory, with the dead Cid strapped in place all the while.
The system of sovereign states that we know was created by the Peace of Westphalia of 1648. At that time the legitimacy[18] mechanism of the previous era, the Divine Right of Kings, was failing. At the same time, Protestantism was ripping Europe apart, technology was revolutionizing the economic order and new continents were being settled. And so, the castles of Europe, normally in a state of tension and conflict toward each other, had no choice but to cooperate and reach a restructuring agreement. Their other option was to see the entire understructure of rulership, for all of them, fall apart. That, of course, was perfectly unacceptable. And so they did cooperate.
The main tenets of the Peace of Westphalia were these:
Each prince would have the right to determine the religion of his own state.
Christians were guaranteed the right to practice their religion in public during allotted hours and in private at will, whether or not it was the same religion as the ruler.
The signers agreed to recognize each other's sovereignty over their territories, to grant diplomatic immunity to their agents abroad, and not to interfere with each other's shipping.
Items number one and two on the list are now taken for granted and forgotten, but number three remains the foundation of the modern state and is held to, fervently, by almost every authority on the subject.
This Westphalian Order, however, while it reigns in the academy, has lost its force. Networked power, as we noted, has overtaken it. Not only is networked power faster and more effective, it leaves the users of power almost completely unknown, and thus immune from deadly repercussions, such as those faced by the Romanovs at the Russian revolution.
Moreover, networked power has the advantage of resting upon unseen enforcement. The Westphalian state rests upon direct legitimacy and the ability to coerce its citizens. Networked power has neither of these weaknesses, resting on social, systematic and technological (inter-)dependencies. It is hardened by cultural inertia, which, again, is created and maintained through networks, and can hardly be blamed on any particular user of power, and only with difficulty on any power-wielding group.
Networked power, to the people of the village, is simultaneously the power of everyone and of no one. The Westphalian state, on the other hand, is roundly blamed for daily ills, and by more or less every villager.
What Killed El Cid
In the film, El Cid is wounded by an arrow and slowly dies. Approximately the same thing is happening to the Westphalian state. Networked power removed allies from the state, but did not wound it; something we call a sovereignty trap, however, was an arrow that wounded it badly. It works like this:
By hiding in a state that can't or won't hurt them, non-state competitors are insulated from the other states of the world.
Al Queda, for example, hid for a long time in Sudan, and then in Afghanistan, behind national borders that protected them. To cross a border militarily is to transgress the Westphalian order.
This is probably best defined as a hollow state strategy. A hollow state is one that exists in all outward ways, but that is 'hollowed-out' and used by criminal organizations for cover. Criminal organizations need safe havens, and hollow states provide them. These organizations make massive amounts of money from data theft operations, product piracy, traffic in humans, weapons and illegal drugs, or in other ways. They can afford to create and support corrupt states, and do so.
Aggrieved nations might want to stop criminals that are stealing their data and pirating their goods, but they are reluctant to bomb another sovereign nation that has committed no aggression.
Essentially, criminal groups rent a hollow state’s infrastructure and hide behind their sovereignty.
Moreover, a sovereign state, if it takes over another state, even a hollow one, becomes responsible for it. It must be seen to maintain some type of “social contract.” If it does not, it will be seen as a mere conqueror and lose legitimacy in the eyes of its tax-paying subjects.
No such requirements face the criminal organization that creates or finds a hollow state and moves in. So long as a titular government remains in place, nothing else is required.
Devotion to the Westphalian ideal of sovereignty and the social contract gives the confirmed criminals of the world a hedge to hide behind. This strategy was held in check under a bi-polar US/Soviet world, but it has since become viable.
Criminals are adapting and are using sovereignty as cover, and very effectively. States, however are prevented from adapting, and are caught in a trap of their own making.
The Response
Westphalian states, the largest ones, at least, did not simply take this blow without a response. They reacted by developing, against their own founding ideals, the doctrine of transnational warfare.
These are not wars between states; that was the old model: Germany attacks France, France takes Egypt, and so on. These, rather, are wars conducted only incidentally through states. By now we’re all familiar with the big transnational wars:
The War on Drugs
The War on Terror
The War on the Cybercrime
All three of these wars are being fought across borders… with just a polite hat tip to those borders as they step over. More importantly, these wars were begun with little or no explanation of how they were modifying the Westphalian order of states. They were well-sold to the public of course, with the typical and always-effective applications of fear, but how these wars would modify the world order and what might come of it was very little discussed.
The Second Arrow
If the first arrow was insufficient to kill our time's El Cid, the Westphalian state, the second arrow will finish the job, even if El Cid remains strapped into his saddle for a time.
The second arrow is the end of the implicit deal made between 20th century states and their obedient citizens. The “working man’s deal” was rather seldom specified, but all of us who grew up in the West through the heart of the 20th century knew it well:
If you obey authority and support the system, you’ll be able to get a decent job. And if you work hard at your job, you’ll be able to buy a house and raise a small family.
This is what we were taught in school and on TV. It’s the deal our parents and grandparents clung to, and it was even a fairly open deal. You could fight for the political faction of your choice and you could hold any number of religious and secular alliances, so long as you stayed loyal to the system overall.
Among current 20- and 30-year-olds, only about half are able to grasp the deal’s promises. That half is working wildly, putting up with malignant corporatism and struggling to keep ahead of the curve. The other half is dejected and discouraged, taking student loans to chase degrees (there’s more status in that than working at McDonald’s), or else pacified with government handouts and distracted by Facebook.
The deal is plainly unavailable to about half of the young generation, though hope dies slowly and young people raised on promises are still waiting for the deal to kick in. It’s all they know.
Under these conditions, the sovereign states will have to take strong actions if they wish to hold things together. Either that or they’ll have to pull back on taxes and regulations, which they cannot be seen doing. If their image of power and confidence fails (as it would if they pulled back), the automatic compliance of the populace would likely fail with it. They are, therefore, forced into measures like these:
Keep the jobless on the dole. People with plenty of food, flat-screen TVs, and refrigerators full of beer don’t often rebel, even if they aren’t employed.
Keep fear alive. That line, “Keep fear alive,” is an actual quote from an FBI official[19], by the way. And it makes good sense in a Machiavellian sort of way. If you want a group of humans to remain dependent upon you, you need to keep them in fear.
Keep them distracted. Unemployed people have often been a problem because they lacke
d structure in their lives and became easily agitated. Distraction tends to solve that problem. And smart phones are, to a very real and a very serious extent, distraction terminals. This is one area in which the needs of the networks and the state coincide.
Retake the narrative. As we complete this book, a new effort of this type – censorship, under the guise of “protecting democracy from fake news,” is making the rounds world-wide. Whether or not this effort works, it is precisely the type of thing that states will have to do if they wish to continue. Network power has no reason to object to this, leaving the response of the public as the only serious obstacle.
With No Vision
The one effective answer that stands in front of the states is to cooperate on a large scale again, and to arrange a coordinated decline.
In order to do this, the field of view for the average citizen must be narrowed consistently. The concept of “outside,” as we noted at the end of chapter three, must be eliminated, and the range of human action moved inward, step by step.
In other words, the people must be deprived of any independent sense of vision, of any sense of purpose, save for that which is authorized.
And, of course, this is precisely what has been imposed upon the general Western populace for the past generation. Great goals have either been relegated to the distant future, appearing only in fiction, or have been rolled into the state and its glorious “democracy.”
Without vision, however (and as the Bible notes), the people perish. People with no sense of vision, no overarching sense of a worthy and righteous purpose, stagnate.
To a very real extent, this process is already underway, but it is unlikely to succeed, as castles always compete vigorously with one another, and a stagnating state is too attractive a target for the others to ignore. Thus competition between states (which unfortunately may lead to war) is likely to doom the coordinated decline strategy.