Read it Later: January 2022

Friday, January 14, 2022

Fwd: Crypto Capital vs. The Gunpowder Revolution

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Date: Fri, Jan 14, 2022 at 2:04 PM
Subject: Crypto Capital vs. The Gunpowder Revolution
To: Steve Scott <stevescott@techacq.com>

January 14, 2022

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"The objective," Prince Hans-Adam said, "must be to transform all states into peaceful service companies."

Crypto Capital vs. The Gunpowder Revolution

By Chris Campbell

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What if?

What if crypto succeeds as a major socio-economic force? What major paradigm-shifting trends would erupt in its activation?

How would they shift the locus of political and cultural influence away from Bigness… Big Tech… Big Government… Big Inc.?

All week, we've been asking ourselves, in one way or another, these questions. If crypto is as powerful as we suspect, these might be the most important questions of the 21st century. And if history is any indication, these questions aren't as crazy as they seem on their faces.

Consider, the nation-state rose to power largely because of two social and technological forces:

1.] The Gunpowder Revolution

2.] Collective bargaining for armies

According to futurist and former CTO of Coinbase, Balaji Srinivisan, the immense power of the nation-state will wane because of these two things:

1.] The Crypto Capital Revolution

2.] Collective bargaining

Meaning, if crypto is indeed successful in its mission to "eat the world"...

(Which, of course, we think it will.)

Balaji believes we could see the rise of Crypto Capital — a collection of distributed powers in direct competition with the prevailing superpowers: Western "Woke Capital" and the Eastern "Red Capital."

This next iteration of power — what Balaji calls "the network state" — will be distributed networks of people with shared values and enough capital and social clout to make its dent in the Universe. Unlike traditional nation-states, these network states will have the luxury of organizing first on a location-independent basis and then second physically. (Clout first, physical second.)

Crypto, through this lens, is an inversion of the Gunpowder Revolution and a reversion to reputation-based culture (a digitized chivalry, if you will). It weakens military tech's ability to effect change on a socio-political level, strengthening "sovereign networks."

Let me explain.

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The Gunpowder Revolution

As mentioned, the rise of the centralized nation state is a result of a quantum leap in military technology — beginning with the Gunpowder Revolution.

This technological tour de force gave powerful monarchs the ability to overpower the decentralized age of feudalism.

In fact, the very concept of citizenship began through collective bargaining with hordes of fighting-age men.

The burgeoning nation-state, because of its newfound immense power and wealth, could strike a bargain directly with the mass of common soldiers who would fight in its uniform.

This method was far cheaper and less troublesome than negotiating with a decentralized mess of lords, notables, and knights. These external, sovereign actors could resist the nation's agenda, whereas the citizen-soldier would find it far more challenging.

This trend spurred a massive wave of "mergers and acquisitions" of feudal lords, marking the end of feudalism.

The citizenship scheme depended on the fact that no large groups within its ranks could resist the nation's agenda and get away with it. Over time, a sense of patriotism helped to ensure that citizens would self-police, lowering the need for public hangings and other forms of capital punishment.

(Nation states began transitioning from hard power to soft power.)

Later, nations capitalized on the Industrial Revolution through centralization of industry and regulatory capture. While centralization is estimated to have peaked in the 1950s, we are now witnessing the slow decline of the nation state and the rise of something else entirely.

But what comes next?

The Network State

Balaji suggests that the same sort of collective bargaining that built the nation-state can and will be used to create the "Network State."

This is also in line with the Sovereign Individual thesis: With the rise of individuals able to take full custody of their wealth through cryptographically-protected cyber currencies, nations will move — out of necessity — from a centrifugal (or ballistic) model of governing to a centripetal (or magnetic) model.

Meaning, the paradigm would slowly shift from trying to control populations to trying to attract them. The nations with the most to lose, of course — like the U.S. and China — might find this transition harder than those with the most to gain. Such as the El Salvadors, the Estonias, and the Lichtensteins.

Liechtenstein, in fact, is a great example.

Lichtenstein is one of the world's smallest nations but has the highest per capita GDP on the planet. I met the country's Prince Hans-Adam II in Washington D.C. at a convention. His book The State in the Third Millennium is a guiding light for all nations that want to catch this trend early.

"The objective," Prince Hans-Adam said, "must be to transform all states into peaceful service companies." It's an old concept, he says, in many monarchies that you service the people. This is why, he points out, the crown prince of England, Prince Charles, has in his coat of arms, "Ich Ding" or "I serve."

Hans-Adam admits he was moved in the past by Kennedy's famous speech when he said, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."

And yet, after decades as a head of state and businessman, he now believes this is not the right question. We should instead begin asking what the state can do for its people… and how it can do it better than any other entity.

So how could Crypto Capital influence this shift? In the same way the nation-states started… and the same way major corporations function today: collective bargaining.

Thursday, January 13, 2022

Fwd: Debatable: Is all this civil war talk overblown?

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Date: Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 3:00 PM
Subject: Debatable: Is all this civil war talk overblown?
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January 13, 2022

Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by Christine_Kohler and demerzel21, via Getty Images

By Spencer Bokat-Lindell

Staff Editor, Opinion

In January of last year, shortly after the storming of the Capitol, the pollster John Zogby conducted a national survey that yielded a troubling finding: A plurality of respondents — 46 percent — believed that the United States is headed for another civil war.

According to Barbara Walter, a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego, who studies civil wars, that belief is perfectly within the realm of reason.

"No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war," she writes in her new book, "How Civil Wars Start." But "if you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America — the same way you'd look at events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela — you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory."

Should Americans take the prospect of another civil war seriously, or do such warnings constitute a misguided, perhaps even dangerous form of alarmism? Here's what people are saying.

The case for concern

Walter served on an advisory committee to a C.I.A. task force that monitors countries and evaluates their risk of civil conflict. According to the data on which that task force relies, the United States during the Trump presidency regressed, for the first time since 1800, into what scholars call an "anocracy": a system of government somewhere between democracy and autocracy. (The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance in Stockholm also recently listed the United States as a "backsliding" democracy.) Countries that bear this designation face a high risk of violence, including civil war.

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So what would a 21st-century U.S. civil war look like? As David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, writes, it would "bear no resemblance to the consuming and symmetrical conflict that was played out on the battlefields of the 1860s." Instead, the worst scenario would be "an era of scattered yet persistent acts of violence: bombings, political assassinations, destabilizing acts of asymmetric warfare carried out by extremist groups that have coalesced via social media."

In the months before the Capitol attack, experts estimated that there were about 300 militia groups in the United States with a total of 15,000 to 20,000 active members, up to 25 percent of them veterans. These groups experienced a period of relative inactivity, according to a report by the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council, but have resurfaced in recent months with a focus on local policies and government.

"Altogether, the threat of political violence in the United States may be diffuse, but it is growing," the report reads. "Though extremist movements face more exposure and scrutiny, the threats they pose to the nation's security and democratic foundations remain a paramount concern."

In the view of Lilliana Mason, a Johns Hopkins University political scientist who studies polarization and political violence in America, the country could soon experience a conflagration "like the summer of 2020, but 10 times bigger."

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Even elected Republicans have been invoking the prospect of civil conflict. In December, before she was suspended from Twitter, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia conducted a Twitter survey to gauge interest in a "national divorce" between Republican- and Democratic-leaning states. In August, Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina said, "If our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen, then it's going to lead to one place and that's bloodshed."

Civil war, or ordinary crisis?

Certainly Walter's argument has skeptics. The Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, for example, points out that the list of contemporary anocracies that have fallen into all-out civil war consists without exception of countries transitioning from authoritarianism to democracy. "It's not clear, however, that the move from democracy toward authoritarianism would be destabilizing in the same way," she writes. "To me, the threat of America calcifying into a Hungarian-style right-wing autocracy under a Republican president seems more imminent than mass civil violence."

There is also good reason to doubt that a substantial share of Americans are willing to commit political violence. In a recent working paper, a team of researchers led by Sean J. Westwood of Dartmouth argued that polls showing otherwise are in fact "illusory, a product of ambiguous questions and disengaged respondents." As it stands, political violence is quite rare in the United States, accounting for little more than 1 percent of violent hate crimes. "These findings suggest that although recent acts of political violence dominate the news, they do not portend a new era of violent conflict," the authors wrote.

The Times columnist Ross Douthat agrees: "Despite fears that Jan. 6 was going to birth a 'Hezbollah wing' of the Republican Party, there has been no major far-right follow-up to the event, no dramatic surge in Proud Boys or Oath Keepers visibility, no campaign of anti-Biden terrorism. Republicans who believe in the stolen-election thesis seem mostly excited by the prospect of thumping Democrats in the midterms, and the truest believers are doing the extremely characteristic American thing of running for local office."

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Beyond public opinion, there are other limiting forces in American political life that make a civil war unlikely, William G. Gale and Darrell M. West of the Brookings Institution write.

Private, not public, militias: When Southern states seceded in 1860, they employed police forces, military organizations and state-sponsored militias. Today's violent extremist groups, by contrast, wield no state-backed power.
No regional split: True, cities tend to lean Democratic and rural areas Republican. "But that is a far different geographic divide than when one region could wage war on another," they write. "The lack of a distinctive or uniform geographic division limits the ability to confront other areas, organize supply chains, and mobilize the population."
The federal justice system remains intact: "Although there has been a deterioration of procedural safeguards and democratic protections, the rule of law remains strong and government officials are in firm position to penalize those who engage in violent actions."

As all these authors write, one can be skeptical of the civil war hypothesis and still be profoundly concerned about the state of U.S. democracy. "I know a lot of civil war scholars," Josh Kertzer, a Harvard political scientist, tweeted recently, and "very few of them think the United States is on the precipice of a civil war." But, he added, "The point isn't that political scientists believe everything is fine!"

The danger of warning of war

In The Atlantic, Fintan O'Toole argues that prognostications of civil war, even when justified, can be dangerous, a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. For once belief in the inevitability of conflict takes root, so does the logic of the pre-emptive strike: "Do it to them before they do it to you. The other side, of course, is thinking the same thing."

Drawing on his boyhood experience of the Troubles, he writes that 1972 "was one of the most murderous in Northern Ireland precisely because this doomsday mentality was shared by ordinary, rational people like my father. Premonitions of civil war served not as portents to be heeded, but as a warrant for carnage."

Invocations of foreign-seeming forms of political disorder can also exoticize the present, concealing its continuities with the past, as the historian Samuel Moyn wrote in 2020. The notion that the United States risks losing its status as a full democracy only now because of Trump-era political violence sits uneasily with the history of slavery, the women's suffrage movement, the racial terrorism of the post-Reconstruction era, the civil rights movement and the assassination of Martin Luther King, or even the domestic terrorism of the 1970s.

At best, Moyn wrote, bad comparisons that "abnormalize" the present are intellectually dishonest; at worst, they are politically useless, "delaying and distorting a collective resolve about what steps would lead us out of the present morass."

At the time, Moyn was writing about warnings of fascism, but O'Toole applies a similar argument to warnings of civil war. "The comforting fiction that the U.S. used to be a glorious and settled democracy prevents any reckoning with the fact that its current crisis is not a terrible departure from the past but rather a product of the unresolved contradictions of its history," he writes. "The dark fantasy of Armageddon distracts from the more prosaic and obvious necessity to uphold the law and establish political and legal accountability for those who encourage others to defy it. Scary stories about the future are redundant when the task of dealing with the present is so urgent."

Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.

"We're Edging Closer to Civil War" [The New York Times]

"A new book imagines a looming civil war over the very meaning of America" [The Washington Post]

"We don't need a civil war to be in serious trouble" [The Harvard Gazette]

"Mainstream presence of Proud Boys, other extreme groups creates mass radicalization fears" [PBS]

"Is the U.S. really heading for a second civil war?" [The Guardian]

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