Attended on [[2022-03-09]]❌
[[russia-ukraine-conflict-2022]]❌
regional war in ukraine over nato membership. re: nato expansion: done without forethought, how do you onboard russia/china? networks: plausible promise. allows disparate groups to come together to advance a single goal. open-source pattern. different kind of decision-making than we’re used to / have vocab for. took us a long time to get our hands around this kind of system. unbounded (by morals) beuracracies can do awful things - nazism. the us uses mixed organizational system. beuaracy for government. markets for some things, etc. with ukraine: global OS (open source) network emerged overnight. trump insurrection was OS. it wasn’t due to the perfect coordination on trumps part - he selected things that worked for him. there’s what countries are doing, what corporations are doing, local groups, individuals, etc - all to “disconnect” or attack a nuclear state. the scale of this is unseen in history. the open-source attack upsets the standard deterrence used previously (more one-to-one). we had figured out a way to prevent escalation to nuclear war. an etiquette. one thing: if one side is all in, you may not have any options aside from watching from the sidelines - or else it’ll inevitably push to nuclear escalation. russia is disconnected in a way that we see with NK or Iran. but russia is a major power with 6,000 nukes. if they’re connected, they can’t go too far (Blackrock previously said, “we’re not worried about russia, we can see their money in our system”) the network on our side is sprawling and maximalist, tribal, won’t stop; there’s no way to turn it off. Putin didn’t expect this level of network attack back. wasn’t expecting this level of disconnect. Perma-crisis since 9/11. more like WW1 than 2. all of thse connections and new decision-making processes involved (swarm) and we’re blundering into this conflict. in WW1: just started moving modern beuracratic machinery to mobilize a nation; major financial institutions were just starting out (taxation at scale) - all of a sudden able to finance massive armies. got a war on a scale they never expected. were anticipating an 1800s-level war. no-fly zone or NATO troops inside ukraine is an immediate step to escalation. and would probably lead to tactical nukes. and then up up up the escalation ladder. “I don’t think there’s any way to slow down the network from disconnecting russia. the leaders are sort of one-upping each other” demand is shutting off at the corporate level too - because it’s against what the network wants. See apple example. worry: the network won’t shut off, even after the conflict in ukraine somehow ends. the focus to disconnect russia won’t stop - promise being putin removed from office; or russian nuclear dearmament.
My Q: Do you think there is similar swarm activity coming out of russia? perhaps starting off top-down, but dispersing out into a network which is partially located in the west? for context: seeing pro-russia information (not taking a stance of whether or not it’s true) coming out of western accounts. where does that fit into this model?
response: russia will try to use its own networks. but it can’t exploit the moral angle. they’re also outgunned. dissenting accounts are often being suppressed and muted. “hey, is what we’re doing actually right?” (ie standing up to covid measures). there has to be a dissent function to make sure the main network doesn’t go too far. in war, those dissents can be turned off. pushed to the margins. labelled an enemy.
Q: does russia maybe want to be cut off? maybe have his opponents ruined? maybe to build a separate (from SWIFT) system?
last time russia got into hot water: they built a stockpile; ramped up china trade; etc. he thought he could do this quickly, work his way back out of limited sanctions - but the response was more than he anticipated.
virtual/tangible divide: virtuals: largely generational, younger, live on the internet, rewired mentally; mcluhan-style medium-rewiring. virtuals are war-like and aggressive onliine, but are vulnerable to physical conflict. they don’t want to risk themselves physically. lots of tribal dynamics. automatic empathic triggers (videos that create connection to the victim - like Floyd video). fictive kinship. it’s not actual empathy, it’s mental modeling - you feel that knee on your own neck; you feel the outrage or anger in the video. This creates a tribal connection.
normal ingroup/outgroup works with empathy - you feel for you ingroup but not for your outgroup. tribalism online isn’t just ingroup/outgroup with empathy - you don’t just not feel for the outgroup - you actively hate them.
Q: what should I do? I was thinking about my startup a week ago, but now i’m thinking about the baby on the way and where I should move to not get nuked.
resilient communities - thinking about a wind-down in the west; supply chain problems, electrical supply issues, etc.
tougher with nuclear warfare. “I don’t think I can out-game it. can’t outrun it.” also: “would you want to live in a post-nuclear environment?” It’s not worth the dislocation for me. I just live my life. “I’m in new england, so there’s not really anywhere to go… maybe upper-state Maine.” “I’ve lived through a couple airplane crashes as a pilot.”
Q: metacrisis has two attractors: Collapse / Totalitarianism. Permacrisis leads to “long night”.
Every event on the perma-crisis accelerates the network. we’re building a social artifact. society as a social artifact. we can build a free society that allows for choicemaking or we can build one that shuts it down (like China). my worry is we’re going to do that here and it’s going to lock us down for a long time. limit what you can think and do and say. that’s stagnation, failure, going sideways forever… if that’s locked in with infrastructure and AI it’s very hard to get out of. We could have went up and out, into space. or collapse into ourselves and naval-gaze and generate new problems to solve. ex: on carbon: the ‘out’ mindset: orbital solar collection. infinite carbon-free energy built with cosmic resources ….but we’re not even looking at that! it shows we’re on this wind-down phase. hoping we get some rights in place to prevent that lockdown into the long night.
Q: why is it bad to use network rather than military?
making russia like NK forces them to take risky actions to get out of it. puts them in conflict with the west. it leads to a path that instigates future conflict, including nuclear. russia is one of those countries that acts badly when their pride is damaged. “if i’m russia, I’ve got 100 ideas for how to leverage my nukes to get out of this. if i’m thinking this, they are; and that scares me.”“
you can’t negotiate with an amorphous network. it doesnt’ do well with partial success, either.
Q: what’s up with the disorganized nature of troops along the ukrainian border? seems like a mess.
in general: russian operations are going to be crappy. not what you’d expect. but they power through and learn. and they have ways to hide that body-count-denominated learning process: ie. portable cremation to avoid sending body bags back. in absence of a quick/easy win: traditional russian approach: beating things to death, firepower heavy. holding back good aircraft so they aren’t picked off. holding back plenty of forces for a potential NATO involvement.
Q: when similar stuff happened to germany post-WW1, they were driven directly into nazism. isn’t there a risk for this here? further radicalization of russia.
yea. “we’ve been wrong, the west has always hated us; this proves it”. That narrative could be huge. could work in putin’s favor, especially if russians are kept in the dark. and there would be anger: putin: “we want to connect, but they won’t connect with us; that’s why the shelves are empty and your western job has dried up. it’s personal against russian individuals.” if he wants to hold a portion of ukraine, it’s going to be a long guerrilla war. and that gets you a country like afghanistan - but this is on a much larger scale. a lot of the “Duginism”, the extremism can come out - the structure of this whole conversation can change over time.
followup: germany’s collapse spun up into an engine of resurgence. could that happen in russia - help it out actually?
so much of what we do now relies on external connections (compared to germany post WW1 ecnomies were insular) and russia won’t be able to do that. China can do this, but russia can’t. so narratively this thing could work out well (see directly above), but less likely economically.
china did this by being connected first. if russia remains disconnected, they’re fucked.
Only way out is to roll the nuclear dice to “break their way back in”.
Q: limberg: Hate is the current version of sex (repressed, and then blows up). deep hate is being projected in these networks.
…how do you break these online tribes? these things are never built around positive stuff. it’s only ever on things you mutually oppose. anti this anti that. communal negative pattern-making. if you fit the pattern, you’re hated.
is there a way to smash through that? the open-source framework allows for focusing on a positive thing - but in this case it’s war - which puts us all at risk.
building a corrective: focus on the positive attractors. build an attractor to work together. hope for crypto: allow people to connect to a financial system in a way they can feel the benefit (compared to traditional financial system - where benefit seems to accrue to not-you.) find ways to get us interested in working together. equity can do that. space development, ocean development. if you’re an equity holder in ocean, and there’s some mining happning there, you might want to cheer it. maximize that income over the long-run. govnment level / network level - all is focused on stamping out deviation, coercing into alignment. force people to face in the same direction. not building a shared attractor to work together. this builds a fascist system that can work very well, but runs right off the edge of the world.
Q: limberg: how to pop someone out of an egregoire - therapuitic blasphemy.
we see that with the dissent function now. no matter what is proposed, there’s always someone out there saying “that sucks!”. if you ban/suppress that, there’s no one there to level-set you, bring you back to reality.
[Dugin on Stoa](https://youtu.be/F9dAPjIfUAc](https://youtu.be/F9dAPjIfUAc)
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/reality-honks-back
https://www.patreon.com/johnrobb
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For example disconnection by Taiwan Semiconductor (half the world’s chip production) and Maersk (massive shipping company).