Outer Edges (Session 1)

Hello and welcome to the first session of Outer Edges with Nick Ryan. So, this will be a two part course where we discussed the first seminar last week. So if you haven't seen that, it's on our archive. And yeah, so without that, without saying too much, I'll pass it to Nick and Nick can begin. Thank you Nick. Thank you. Okay. Thanks Tony. Everyone can hear me okay? Yes. Okay. There was a sort of introductory talk that we did last Sunday, so I won't repeat that

material more than I strictly have to unless things are nudged. in that direction. I was thinking that what I would do this time is rather than splurge a giant monologue at the beginning, I try and break things up a little bit and talk for maybe 10 minutes, see how things go, leave some ammo in the bunker to bring out if everything grinds to a halt. So last, in the introductory session, I apologize for immediately now violating the principle

that I started off saying I wasn't going to violate, but I will just repeat this, is that But there's two sides, I think, to this course. One of them, which I gave the name catabolic geopolitics to, is a hypothesis that there There is a fragmentational dynamic dominating the current world situation. And as I said at that point, this is something, if it was to become completely foregrounded, it would swallow the cause. It's I think lots of fascinating stuff there.

And so I'm going to try and put a lid on that to some extent. But having said that, I think I will start off this initial session by saying a little bit about that. And the second side to the course, which has the name in the title of spatial metapolitics, is a more strictly philosophical topic, and it's to do with a certain set of trends. I've got the key names associated with this in associated bibliography, which is to do,

if I put it in a nutshell, it's to do with the dissolution of dialectics into space. to say instead of a political model based on the completion of an argument, it's instead a political structure based on the fundamental option of walking away, what's called exit. And we'll obviously get into all of that. The place that I think we're going to be predominantly focused here is with Patrick Friedman's work where I think this is brought to its kind of climax.

On our syllabus I have Scott Alexander's essay on which is called Archipelago and Atomic In case anyone hasn't seen that, which I think I've thrown at people quite a few times, but I'll just stick the link to that one more time in the comment box here. It's from my point of view, I think a fairly compromised piece, but that compromise is interesting in its own right. He's a very ambivalent, I mean, if one was being critical, which I'm definitely not in this way, you could say slippery character. I mean, people find him very difficult to place on various kinds of spectra, political

spectra in particular, which are the ones I think primarily at issue here. And the glue on both sides of this set of topics is critique, which I will always want to gloss as diagonal argument. And obviously we have some new people here. I sort of strongly suspect we might have to get into a discussion again about at least the rudiments of what is meant by diagonal argument, why that should be considered a synonym of critique. And I hope that we're going to be able to explore certain specific diagonal arguments

in relation to both sides of the course. And there's one in particular that I have lined up, I think quite complicated and interesting one on the catabolic geopolitics side which I'll try and introduce in this session. So why would people think the world was entering into a catabolic phase? something. I mean, I'm wanting to treat that as an assumption, but I realize that there's no way I can get away with that, so I'm raising it as a question.

And I think one way to introduce this that quickly becomes, I hope, interestingly elaborate is by looking at where we've been over the last half millennium. Obviously, a very simplified view of that. And I've taken as a kind of clue, a very suggestive clue, I think it's just one sentence from a text by Karl Marx It's very scrappy text actually, basically a set of notes and small comments but it's

quite interesting. It says, Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63, Part 3, Relative Surface Value, the section Division of Labor, Mechanical Workshop, Tool and Machinery and I'll throw a link to that too. I'm really, there's quite a lot in it that's interesting, but I'm just going to try and restrict myself to one sentence, as I say, which is this, quote, gunpowder, the compass, and the printing press were the three great inventions which ushered in bourgeois society. It's two sentences, sorry.

Power to blew up the nightly class. The Compass discovered the world market and founded the colonies, and the printing press was the instrument of Protestantism and the regeneration of science in general, the most powerful lever for creating the intellectual prerequisites." Now there's actually tons about this short little passage that is interesting. It appears in Marxist text as almost a kind of aside, and he ends up talking much more about two indigenous technologies, European indigenous technologies, the mill and the clock, which we may or may not have course to explore in this, but to stick with what

we've got right here. One superb irony of this is that these three technologies all appear on what the Chinese have formalized as what they call the four great inventions, of course Chinese inventions. They add paper as well. And weirdly in this Marx text there's actually a long digression on paper, but I don't think it adds much because I think the printing press will do all the work we need for that. So the irony here obviously is that modernity, the epoch of occidental global domination, was initiated by the European assimilation of three Chinese technological innovations.

And the kind of patterns that come out of that I think are highly suggestive and might to a paranoid mindset, which of course I will do my best to encourage, be considered ominous in the sense that China was obviously fairly unambiguously the dominant global civilization actually late into the modern period in most strictly quantitative terms, but the dynamics were clearly running against it. And its innovations become in the hands of another civilization the triggers for a complete

transformation of global dynamics such that it enters into a period of massive decline, cultural torture, what it caused in the late stage the century of humiliation. And obviously this, what we now assume about modernity is its structure of Occidental domination. I think we will have to, further down the road, be more specific and really say Anglophone domination but I don't think we need to make that move right at the moment. Now all three of these inventions I think have important analogues today as technological

innovations that are on the same scale as transformative technologies and which also come as a suite tied together in this tight packet of time. Like it's very interesting obviously that you get a military transportation and media revolution together as a kind of catalytic event in the early stages of the Renaissance. And I think right now we have a comparable suite that tracks these three different lineages of military robotics, new space, which I think I'm willing to accept needs to be bracketed

as the more speculative and problematic, though I think our purposes will be an indispensable reference, and of course the Internet. So we too have a military, a transportation geographical revolution and a media revolution. And so it's tempting from that to say, well, what does that, just given that nutshell, what does it say in terms of our expectations about continuity and discontinuity? I mean, is it not that we're simply extrapolating something that we've seen from the dawn of modernity and therefore we would expect neatly an extrapolation of modernist trends?

And bimodernist trends relevant to this course, particularly state consolidation. So I think we can see in all of these cases to greater or lesser extent. Let me once again just bracket the space thing because I think we need to look at the peculiarities of that. But certainly the new military technology, the age of gunpowder, and the new media technology, the age of the printing press, together clearly inaugurate the age of mass politics. On the military side, as Marx says, blew up the knightly class.

There's a cliché there, but I think it's an important one, and it's one that is not lacking in real historical insight is the fact that you stick a musket in almost anybody's hands and they are able to certainly knock some armoured guy off a horse. So there is a certain demographic egalitarian consequence that comes from that fundamental transformation of military affairs that you get with the age of gunpowder. From that point on, from the age of the rifleman, military power is based upon basically mass armies and then later with the French revolution particularly with conscript armies and therefore

you can see obviously there's a massive trend towards state consolidation. If you can put the most rifles in the most people's hands, you will amass a type of power that in terms of geopolitics will put geopolitical power in the hands of large integrated states and domestically will tend to encourage a kind of democratic domestic trend because the fact that an individual person with a gun is more or less as dangerous as any other individual person with a gun. And the consequence of that is that a lot of unhappy people just purely quantitatively

becomes a massive political problem, and you can already see in early political theorists in Masciveli that there is a trend towards thinking that you have to fundamentally treat the enraged masses as a fundamental criterion of political survival. If you can't stop a lot of people turning up in the center of your city with muskets wanting to overthrow the state, you have a huge problem. And obviously the internet, the printing press, you standardise national languages, at exactly this time there's the fall away of Latin as this international cosmopolitan language of

high culture and instead a trend towards the consolidation of vernacular tongues and a The notion of ethnicity as the basis of a state that's based upon language, on the vernacular language, which becomes completely dominant within a few centuries. So these two things together, I think, it would be hard to argue that their basic implication is not directed towards state consolidation. I bracket off navigation because it has an important ambiguity.

The great creation of oceanic navigation, the magnetic compass, is twofold. Because on the one hand, obviously, it contributes hugely in combination with these other two factors towards European global superiority. But on the other hand, it leads also to our first taste of geographical schism and separation and the birth of the United States. So the United States is a highly ambiguous figure in this history. It's both a schism and it's also a consolidation. I mean, global hegemony passes after going through the Venetians and Dutch to the British.

It goes smoothly to the Americans on the one hand, so you can see a continuous process here. But on the other hand, the fact that the identity of the American state is based upon a war of independence, I think is a foretaste of the kind of things that we're going to be looking at. in this course. So I think this new spatial technology is intrinsically more complex and ambiguous than the other ones. So racing forward to our current analogues of these processes,

Just asking the simple question, what do military robotics, new space and the Internet say about the prospects of a continuation of state consolidation in the current epoch? And I think it would be very hard to say, purely from the most buzzy level of news, that we're seeing some smooth continuation of a deeply established modern trend. I mean, the news is full at the moment, clearly, that the EU is in crisis, the international

order in certain senses is an explicit crisis. And the Internet in particular is denounced for its contribution to cultural schism and fragmentation and all the trends that come. Sorry, I will just go into an extremely quick internet digression here because I want to just introduce this quote everyone knows already from John Gilmore in 1993 where he says, the net interprets censorship as damage and roots around it. I think this is an utterly crucial quote.

It's quite rightly parodied and made fun of. There's a leftist version of it, it's a parody I guess, that I think is also good and very interesting, which translates it into capitalism, interprets morality as damage and roots around it. I think that's a – it's not that I'm vastly sympathetic, but I think it's an extremely perfect leftist critique. It's the perfect leftist critique of all of these trends. And I think what we're seeing in this quote is the fact that this possibility of rooting around through the Internet, of simply bypassing the political process, bypassing regulatory

restrictions, that when the Internet hits an obstacle, it, like water, goes around it. I think that this is an inherently, deeply fragmentational dynamic. But we'll come back to that. The phenomenon we were talking about last week, bubbling, is another huge one. The collapse of the common culture in economic terms, disintermediation, I think we can say that's the economic expression. But in a cultural form, it's the end or at least the deep challenge to all the systems of curation. You know, we're very used in all of these different fields as they've established and

as the common culture has been built and institutionalized. We're very used to these very solid curational roles and their relative guilds and professionalizations. So just to take the most crucial but by far not by any means the only example of this is the role of editing in the media. So we expect there to be large broadcast media entities that are curated for us. There's a body of experts, we'll choose what the important stories are which will apply editorial expertise to that and we'll curate the news and that will be accepted. That's the modernist model.

We accept that professionalism and accept a curated narrative from the media. And I think the disruptive role of the Internet in this is just beyond any kind of dispute. I can throw a whole bunch of examples at people if they want but I'm assuming it's not hugely controversial. The tendency of the Internet is to go around systems of curation. You have a huge range of options, so you just simply don't have to accept the editorial decisions of these large media organizations. And I think, again, it's not an exaggeration, it's not hyperbolic to say this produces an obvious crisis for the established media system and that its implication is it seems straightforwardly

fragmentational. Okay, I'll say one last thing about this, which is just to introduce at this point the structure of the diagonal argument. I won't try and develop it too far, but I think I should introduce it. So I think there are two things that we need to introduce and hold together and explore, and that is economies of scale, because if you have economies of scale, you have a trend towards concentration. So whether we're talking in industry or in politics, if a mega state makes more sense

than a small state, it's because there are significant economies of scale for a large state. It's able to do stuff in some ways better or more efficiently just because it's bigger. The second concept that I want to introduce here, which is also, of course, huge, is network effects. Network effects, I think, is more... You can trace it back, there have been network effects in all kinds of previous systems, but I think it is more clearly contemporary, that it's been... I don't think the term itself is very old. It's been catalyzed partly by the Internet and it's basic models of the Internet.

So that for instance, when someone is trying to explain what a network effect is, the most obvious example is a networked communication system. If you're the only person on a particular networked communication system, it has zero value. If there are two people, it has very limited value. And with every additional node that's added to that system, the value to every user in the system becomes greater. So the thing I want to say about this is that network effects seems as if it is almost a synonym for economies of scale. It seems as if those two terms can be treated as being synonymous.

And that apparent equivalence, the fact that they seem to be, I would say, quasi-coincidental concepts is a temptation to diagonalization. I mean, either we resign ourselves to the fact that they are ultimately coincidental, in which case you have no possibility of diagonal argument. Or if they are not quite coincidental, if they are in fact quasi-coincidental, then you have something like the classic relation of, for instance, the analytical and the a priori in Kant. Two terms that seem as if they are coincidental, but Kant's whole system is developed out

of the fact that they are proved to be, in his work, non-coincidental. They're only quasi-coincidental. And that is the opening for a diagonal argument. And my sort of preliminary proposal here at this point is that between economies of scale and network effects there is a similar relation. There is an opening to a diagonal argument and that that diagonal argument is going to be, is going to directly address the fundamental trends of the contemporary world. If it turns out that we can't draw such a diagonal line and that network effects actually just collapse back into economies of scale, then I think we would have to say that we're

just looking at a new configuration of modernist concentration and we just have to work out there will be minor adjustments to that, but the fundamental dynamics will be the same, and it will be completely implausible to then argue that we are entering a kind of catabolic phase of history. So the bet that I'm making here is that it's possible to diagonalize between those terms, And in that diagonal, one will find the catabolic dynamics of the present period. So I'm going to just pause at least at this point and see whether there's anything people

want to throw in to this. I give people 20 seconds, if not I'll just add another little bit about pushing into these dynamic structures a little bit more. Actually, I was slightly bullshitting and since I haven't been timing everyone.

Okay, I'll say something more unless people are going to stop me. So military robotics, new space and internet as factors of a new catabolic phase of modernity. I think all three of these things have very distinctive, or when I say distinctive I mean simply, they have accessible dynamic patterns to them.

I would say they have cybernetic tendencies. Military robotics, I'm obviously introducing that in reference to the age of the rifleman. And my argument here is that if there's a single factor that has been the linchpin of mass politics, it has been the figure of the rifleman, the democratic military, the mass armed body of the populace, which has then found political expression and in finding political expression you have mass society.

So how does military robotics affect that? I think obviously in the sense that a long process towards the industrialization of military capacity crosses a crucial threshold with military robotics. And I think we are teetering on that threshold. I certainly am not suggesting yet that we've passed it, but I do think we have reached a point that it's already becoming an influential historical factor. And what is this historical factor? The historical factor is that capitalism, industrial capability, becomes able to preserve its own security directly.

This is something that we haven't seen in a previous age of modernity. It's needed a social pact in order to do that. even if you're one of the 19th century robber barons, if you're an immense plutocran, you have no security capability that comes off that of any real significance. You can hire a few thugs or whatever, you can hire some security people, But fundamentally you are dependent upon the state to secure your socio-economic position. Capital cannot directly provide its own security.

Now obviously between states, industrial capability becomes ever increasingly important as a military factor within that period. But it's still the case that the state becomes the agent of geopolitics or maintains its state as the agent of geopolitics. And the state that is more or less compatible with rapid industrialization will tend to prevail over states that are unable to do that, tend very strongly to that. But that doesn't mean that capital itself is able, except indirectly, to provide for its own security.

And this is what I think the age of military robotics is challenging. As soon as you have a robot, a robot is a piece of capital. A robot is not a citizen that has been drafted into the military and been equipped with various gizmos and gadgets and bits of military apparatus. A robot is something that you can buy and sell on a market. I'm sure those markets are in some ways going to be restricted or controlled or face kind of obstacles, but as we've seen, the tendency that we're dealing with this is rooting around all of these kind of obstacles. So in the age of military robotics, the armed infantryman enters into Eclipse.

And we can argue about how fast that Eclipse is going to be, but I think it's surely clear how radical the implications of that Eclipse are going to be. That the armed citizen becomes, at the asymptote, nothing in this new calculus. The new calculus is purely about industrial capability, technological advance, there is at the end no consequence at all to mass mobilization of the populace in armed defense of the regime. That model I think has a horizon. And I mean just to be repetitive, of course we can argue about the limit of that horizon,

Nothing in history tends to happen that you just cross a cliff. I mean, I think there's very realistic arguments that could extend or delay this kind of transition or its major consequences for a long time. But the fundamental trend seems to be completely undeniable, which is the fact that the foundations of military capability as we have known them during the modern period are drawn to a conclusion by the potential of robotic military capability. And if I'm going to sort of, if we're going to push into the cybernetic fact,

I think we're simply talking about the core dynamics of capitalism or capital automation. Just quote Marx again, this is in itself not a fantastic interesting quote but it's I think highly suggestive, this is from the same text where he says, the first machinery depend on hand labour, on manufacture, for its construction. Once the machine had been invented and of special importance here, once a form of power completely at man's disposal and applicable in any amount such as steam had been discovered, set the machine in motion, the production of machinery by machinery became possible. So this is ultimately the bedrock of Moore's Law. It's the fact that if you have robots

running your chip plan, you can produce more chips and better chips and you put your resources towards innovation, increase your efficiency of chip production, end up with better robots, better chip factories, etc. The dynamics are completely obvious, highly non-linear, they're based upon industrial automation and they lead absolutely inexorably to the curve that Moore's Law characterises. I mean Moore's Law is just about transistor density but it's emblematic of modernity because it's the result, the inevitable graphic result of a positive feedback in industrial capability.

And this is what military robotics is feeding off. New Space, I think, has also extremely fantastic cybernetic profile. This is introduced by Elon Musk, who introduces this term. his favorite and I think it's really excellent and useful, which is what he calls forcing functions. Forcing functions is really about, it's within the big family of network effects and it's

tied up with the problem, the threshold problem of how you actually get from A to B when B has certain prerequisites that seem to pose an obstruction. So if you look at the network effects phenomenon, it has two sides to it. If you're a big successful internet business, network effect. Every user is finding it more and more useful. The more it's adopted, the

positive feedback dynamics are extremely obvious and so you have this whoomp phenomenon of take off and obviously a concentrational effect on the people. But if you look at it on the other side, network effects is a barrier. You know, if before a technology has any use to anybody at all, any significant threshold becomes an obstacle. It's stopping that technology being... So it's exactly the same dynamics in both cases.

We're not crossing from one type of phenomenon to another. The same phenomenon is a barrier, it's an obstacle, and on the other is this self-exciting means by forcing function. It's susceptible to this basic pattern. like people doing stuff in space, then it's our way. If you're providing, then you've got this niche out there in orbit that should follow

this same extremely explosive dynamic trend. But when nothing's happening in space, when you've just got a few people sitting around in the International Space Station to be supplied or this extremely minimal level of activity, then crossing that initial threshold is almost impossible. What does a private space business do? This is what he means by forcing functions, where he says you have to cross this threshold, you have to, by whatever means, make sure that there is enough that space becomes a market

a business opportunity. Obviously in using this expression, a threshold, and he's also wanting to say the kind of deeply pessimistic economic analyses about the potential of space businesses are seeing things from a certain side of this threshold, of this fence. And from the other side, it looks the opposite. Once you've crossed over that line, you have this massive takeoff dynamic for it. And then we're onto the Internet.

And I think the Internet, we've already, it's so vastly the driver of all of this stuff that it's already been mentioned. I would just simply take us back to network effects on this. And in doing so, return us to this basic question, which I think is the intermediate philosophical and political problem we have is that are network effects always going to do the same sort of things as economies of scale and therefore are we just being naive in thinking the internet

is not ultimately going to be an arena of concentration in a new sphere. So what I'm really wanting to diagonalize in this thing is on the one hand economies of concentration and dispersion over against a dyad of greater or lesser network effects. I think that that is the critical structure of this thing. Can we find a diagonal slot that is to do with a dynamic of dispersion that is driven

by accelerating network effects. And I'm wanting to suggest strongly with the military robotics side that that seems to me just intuitively obvious that that's happening. With NewSpace we have to talk about it a lot and we're back on this ambivalence about opening a new frontier. It seems to me at least that opening a new frontier is going to be problematic for existing existing structures of political integrity. And for the Internet, the questions should be held open as much as possible.

On the one hand there is the whole trend towards disintermediation, the fact that as a peer-to-peer system, any two agents in the whole system can start doing business with each other, whatever kind, can engage in some commercial activity, rooting around all existing institutions of mediation and curation. So that is the libertarian Internet, and I think it's totally real, but I think also the other side of the Internet is totally real. It obviously produces these new massive forms of concentration of economic and political power. I don't think anyone could deny that.

These new giant internet companies ride network effects, turn them into economies of scale if that is even necessary, and produce these new Goliath concentrations of social power. So the last thing I want to do is try and dismiss that. I think it needs to be turned into a question. Okay, I'll give people another opportunity now to get argumentative. Don't feel shy.

What was that, Tony? That sounded like robot speak. I said, don't feel shy. The sidebar has, in the last five minutes, gone through about ten different kinds of diagonalization between... Oh, yeah. No, I've totally missed everything happening on the sidebar. I'm sorry. I've just been rabbiting away. Yeah, now you've... You had your own. Yeah. I don't know. that besides all of that, since everybody could bring up different things that they had already brought up in the sidebars, that this also, I don't know, at risk of unnecessarily

historically complicating it, but also adding another example of this sort of anabolic-catabolic cycle, is that the same thing arguably happened in the eastern Mediterranean in the classical period with the invention of the hoplite military formation, which allowed horse-mounted aristocratic warriors to be reliably overcome in a face-to-face battle, which is also linked to metallurgy, because you could build the spears that were able to not bend or splinter and so forth upon coming in contact with a charging horse. But with the Hoplite Formation, you get more city-states, you get more commerce and so forth, and so the wealth and communication, diffusion, transmission going on in the Greek

peninsula rapidly increases, you see the formation of the Delian League, they start conflicting among themselves, and then they shatter, impoverish themselves, and get taken over by the Romans and Persians. Right. Sure. And then that diffusion of nothing comes out of that. And you get citizens. You get citizens. Right. Yes. Which is, I don't know, sort of skipping ahead to, or just suggesting a skip ahead to when we're sort of discussing this competitive governance model. The city-state model of the citizen as a property owner, as a military fighter, and as a political voice, and the three intrinsically conjoined by this Hoplite formation and its ability to sort of stabilize a community in which what we've come to call democracy, what democracy

was at that point was possible is potentially a model for the successful the mega herb in the sort of coming fragmentation as a successful model for one of these dynamic geographies yes I think one I think this is a really good reference and I think one additional thing to say about that is and then this obviously serves as the model for modern republicans you know that they explicitly then refer themselves back to this classical model in which all the elements that you're talking about are present a certain notion of an armed citizenry

taking political responsibility for their society and with these at least proto-modernist traits of commercial openness and then we get the disruption of that as well by military robotics where it's no longer the individual citizen who has to be armed it's your ability to procure manufacture of and control of or access to the control of military robotics and the schemata for creating them the network power to control their behavior their potential for autonomy is sort of a complicating factor there relative to the sort of like

agriculturalist you know you have a farm you have rifles and this community of farmers with rifles is therefore somehow autonomous and rises against the popular state yes I mean this is obviously one stepping stone thesis And I guess it should be treated as a stepping stone in the sense that it's a good place for people who want to immediately start questioning the direction this is going on. Because, obviously, I think it's reasonable to say, in particular, American conservatism, in its kind of reference to the founding and to the War of Independence and to this particular matrix of Republican virtue lying in the hands of the armed citizenry.

the implication of a certain invocation is to say that that whole formation is bookended historically it's simply however attractive it might be it has these structural bookends to it that mean that it becomes increasingly, first of all, hopeless and ultimately farcical as a reference point because of the fact that it's drawing upon this kind of military and demographic structure that we simply are departing from at extraordinary speed.

And so it's simply not helpful to us. I mean, this is not at all to, I mean, I'm sure a lot of people probably want to just diss it and deride it, but I don't want to do that. I mean, I can totally see the attractiveness of this notion and this particular complex, and it's very structural to American identity in a certain way. But it just seems to me that you can see its historical limits. and its historical limits on one hand are gauged by the fact about how serious is the quantification of political power by the number of men under arms in a society and as that becomes first of all

unreliable and then increasingly just hopeless as any kind of indication of real power then that whole formation ceases to have application I mean the American example is obviously totally crucial because it's so explicit in the sense that it basically says in the experience of the war of independence where you simply do muster the citizenry under arms to bring about a political regime and the founding fathers in setting up the constitution and everything They always have that as their basic reference point, you know, that at the end of the day

there are these guys with guns who've created this independent society, and we need to sort of, everything makes sense in terms of them being there, in terms of the fact that they still have the capacity to, they have a fundamental veto on the regime. Like, you know, the whole force of the Second Amendment in the United States is about this. Like, if the guys with the guns don't like what's happening, at the end of the day, it's not going to happen, or it will be undone again. You know, so your principle of legitimacy is really explicit, and it's really clear, and it's tied up with this particular historical complex to do with military technology.

and its translation into mass politics. So if that complex is coming to pieces, then the political consequences are immense. Well, right, and it's also in parallel, quasi-parallel, is outstripped by the coincidence of capital and the development of military technology in the 20th century, particularly in the U.S. above all. That happens, especially with the arms race and with the way Keynesian economics is leveraged to dump enormous amounts of money into this military-industrial complex, while at the same time that invents the Internet, which leads to this resurgence of popular network effects

among potential weapons holders and so forth. And so rather than it being, to me, to my eyes, a conflict between, I think this is in support of what you're saying as well, rather than there being a conflict being set up between the legitimacy of a central and popular government versus the network effects among many individual armed citizens of like mind, it's really between the totally unilateral ability of this military complex to make war versus the fact that if they do so, they completely devastate their own economic base, which is at the same time sort of taking advantage of the uncontrollable network effects that they've spurred to start

fragmenting. So you have like catabolic processes plus this giant trade-off in power versus vulnerability. I think Stiegler refers to it as hyperpower and hyperpower leading to hypervulnerability. Right. I think from the side of what people like the Empire, I think that's totally right. So one optic of this is how are all these trends playing out on the side of this already concentrated massive amalgamation of geopolitical power. On the other side, I think there is a recurrence of these old, early modern debates.

I would particularly refer to Machiavelli again, where so much of the prints is about mercenaries. It's about the complex negotiation at that point of, can you buy yourself an army and all the problems the opportunities and the problems that come with that and obviously Machiavelli is notoriously suspicious about mercenaries and in that is very prophetic in the sense that obviously that was not the way things went the age the classical age of the mercenary in early modern Europe was very short lived and the French Revolution provided a far more robust model of what these basic dynamics are about which is the citizenry in arms so that the deal

is that basically the citizenry is is allotted unrestricted sovereignty as a as a criterion of political legitimacy and in return they will patriotically sacrifice themselves without reservation to the interests of the state. But with obviously robotic military, once again we have this question returning about an off-the-shelf national security option. Can some microstate now, in a way that has been unthinkable since the early Renaissance, simply buy themselves a military? If a… what are the restrictions on that?

All of these other criteria, like they're called by Ibn Khaldun, obviously, Abyssiyah, you know, this sort of notion that you need some strong sense of loyalty and commitment and solidarity among the populace is the foundation of military capability. That was missing in the age of the mercenary, and it seems to me it's missing again in the near future. One digressive thing, because there's a lot here and there's so many potential digressions, But I think this whole current thing about the F-35 is a really crucial, sort of suggestive

point about this. How much of a disaster is the F-35? And people argue about it, but it seems to me that what we're seeing with the F-35 is this threshold, this horizon appearing, where human biophysics are just not compatible with the kind of things that are required to be flung around, the incredible g-forces, the sort of capabilities of aviation are so far beyond what the human body can cope with now that the notion of a piloted airplane is just producing insoluble contradictions for people.

You know, we're going to have this machine and we're going to stick a person in it and that immediately means, well, you know, humans pass out at whatever, 7 G's or something. You simply have the mechanical capability to do incredible things in space with this machine. You can do kind of hairpin bends and crazy turns and all of this stuff. But the pilot would die if you got even close to the kind of aeronautic performance that these things are potentially capable of. And so faced with that, we're determined to stick a guy in it because that's what the Pentagon's telling us to do.

You end up with this horrible, compromised mess of an airplane that just doesn't make any sense. And I would bet anything that the next generation is the notion of a piloted airplane is just going to be absurd. It's like a piloted missile. Why would you do that? You simply… So once you take that step and you just simply humans are just actually inhibitory factors on the military technology, then you really are back in this thing that buying a military

is buying a bunch of extremely frightening technological kit. And all of these old questions about loyalty and solidarity and patriotic feeling and all of this stuff is completely irrelevant. You just need secure lines of command and control tied up with kind of solid cryptography. Everything else is a relic from the modern age. I mean I just say as a sort of footnote to that, now of course that in itself I'm sort of assuming in a way that it's disintegrative. I'm just assuming any microstate now can just by itself military security in a way

that was not possible before. But you could take the other route of that and say, well, there's still a dynamic that puts economic and industrial power in the hands of megastates, and so they will benefit from this more than anyone else. And so you just have a continuous Leviathan-style historical trend rather than the kind of catabolic processes that I'm trying to introduce. Well, I'm pretty sure Orwell argued, I'm pretty sure there's an essay by Orwell where he argues that nuclear weapons are very much a centralizing technology, that gunpowder gave this sort of democratic character, you know, along the same lines as the Marx argument

that you shared, but that nuclear weapons mean you have these massive power blocks dominated by the states that couldn't afford to build nuclear weapons. And then, so, I mean, the question is, is the sort of robotics, you know, military stuff that you're talking about, which is, you know, it's certainly coming, you know, you can see drones are already dominating at the moment. Is it better suited to the huge structures of a large state, or is something like, you know, a sort of medium-sized corporation more effective? is something like Tesla to pick a company off the top of my head, a more effective structure for doing that.

And if you can get away with doing it with just 10,000 people instead of 300 million, then that's exactly the sort of fracturing dynamic you're talking about. Yeah. You can argue that nuclear weapons set the stage for that because at the same time that they promote this centralization, they ultimately calcify and paralyze those massively centralized military apparatuses. They're unable to use their biggest weapons, and then one more level down, they're unable to go to mass land war because of the risk of using those weapons, and this sort of opens the space for guerrilla and decentralized warfare and for all of these smaller entities, which then capital comes in at the last minute and provides the military robotics to hyper-enable. right and the F-35 is also a fantastic

example of this complete bureaucratic dysfunction of the military industrial complex right it's like it's the link I shared is saying it's the perfect sort of weapon for the current military industrial complex because it'll never be finished all it is is the perfect vehicle that's generating these contracts after contracts because they're trying to build a Swiss army knife plane that could never exist, whereas they could just buy, you know, like 1,000 A-10 tank killers or like 10,000 drones with the budget and it would be much more effective. Little did we know at first,

like multimodal machine capital intelligence was just going to sit there and gobble military money through contracts until it died. Yeah, that would be a great bootstrapping mechanism, right, as long as you can separate it from the effective part of the organization. There's a lot going on there. One is obviously this virtualization, like once you have this whole process that global thermonuclear war can't happen, so major land war can't happen, so going down that cascading impossibility, then all of this military contracting must be tempted to move into fiction, isn't it?

Like, if you can put together a convincing narrative, none of this stuff will be tested in any way. But it can still absorb money on the narrative. Yeah. So whoever can provide a kind of plausible narrative can at least hope that they'll walk away with the money without any testing of this stuff or, you know, it's just taken for granted that it's purely theatrical in its use, really. Right, which also, like, directly is relevant to space travel because, like, overcoming the gravity well, it's not like that independent actors don't have the possibility of the military and government and so forth could not leverage so much capital as to rapidly overcome this problem,

maybe by now, is that there's this massive military embargo and restriction on entry into space and on the technologies you can use to get to orbit and all of that. And the basis of that is the idea that the Russians are going to use a railgun to destroy Washington, which, I mean, I'm inclined to call mostly fiction. I think I might be missing a few stages in the argument. Is there a regulation against private production of rail guns? Well, certainly the installation of them in orbit. I mean, I would imagine that... I mean, beyond explicit regulation, there's also... People don't like... Oh, we're just sort of hypothetically building

an orbital installation-capable rail gun because of the, I think, probably accurate perception that the military would very prejudicially do something about that. Yeah. There's, you know, just in control of the technology. You know, I mean, it's analogous to encryption and its sudden release and binding and so forth. It's just, I mean, there was curation, like very highly prejudicial military curation of the technologies and usage of, you know, manufacturing technologies required to get into orbit. and if we see that as slowing down us breaking out of the gravity well or as what is holding the line between the flat line of the ISS and the take off curve of asteroid I mean I might be being a bit naive about this because

my tendency is to think that the whole new space thing is on a really vibrant dynamic right now and that whatever these regulator restrictions are they obviously are so restrictive that, you know, after this giant lull of kind of going to the moon and then basically just fiddling around doing nothing, that suddenly every plutocrat on the planet has to have a space program, you know. The Cold War ends and the curve starts. Right. Well, sort of. It seems more recent than that, isn't it? I mean, you know, the whole thing where, like, all of these, like, Like Bezos's space, if it wasn't for Mars, it would be blowing people's minds, you know.

He's also managing to kind of land rockets again. This was just totally comic book science fiction. So recently, the notion that you could launch a rocket and just land it vertically like something out of a 1950s SFX. And now everybody's doing that. You can't even get into a kind of cool Silicon Valley cocktail party now if you can't land a rocket in that way. It's fantastic. Function on it, for sure. Which is, of course, he makes his money off of the Internet, like, identically and rapidly, and then starts applying his own forcing function to the issue of space travel. Yes. Yeah, well, everything Musk does, I think, is driven by this.

And this is, again, getting ready for this sort of diagonalization discussion, because obviously the previous wave, Bill Gates' basic thing is that he understood network effects better than anyone else when he was putting Microsoft together. He just saw that once you've got enough people using Windows, you just lock in this platform and these dynamics become absolutely inexorable and unstoppable. And I think Musk has the same, he's got the same basic cybernetic vision. Like everything he does is to do with forcing functions.

This whole electric cars thing, he says that everyone treats it as if there's a mental problem with an electric car as opposed to an internal combustion engine. It's nothing. I'm talking as Musk now. I'm not making this argument. That's for other people to do. But just talking as Musk, it's not that there's some fundamental technological problem here. There's just this threshold. And you have to force it across the threshold. And then in an electric car world, everything becomes easy. The efficiency of all these things are going to become huge. The advantage of using electric cars is going to become huge. Money going into electric vehicles is going to be huge. And you just will switch over in this massive tidal, historical, techno-economic fashion.

And that's his vision of that. And of course, there's lots of skepticism about it. But it's exactly the same thing I think he's bringing to all of his businesses, is that you've got this cybernetic puzzle that you have to solve. You have to just get to a certain critical mass, and while you're getting to that critical mass, everything looks ridiculous. The technology looks implausible, the economics looks like they make no sense, it looks like you're just simply sucking at the government tip. It all looks like nonsense. And then when you're on the other side of that threshold, suddenly everyone's saying why the hell did we wait so long before doing this stuff?

And I think his space vision and his car vision and his solar electric network vision, they're all the same basic industrial thing. And, I mean, just to be repetitive, I think, you know, I totally get the Musk scepticism, but I think the Musk scepticism can at least in theory be enveloped within this model. You know, I think if you're not, when you don't cross the threshold, then that scepticism is almost automatic. It's almost like spontaneously that it has to look absurd. And I think, you know, I credit him with seeing that and in a certain sense being, you know, having enveloped those critical, skeptical viewpoints on his business activity.

But of course there are more cynical angles you could take on that. Thank you. So, do anyone, like flipping over to the other side of this, which is where we should actually

be, does anyone have any responses to the Scott Alexander piece that they want to throw on the table. I think it's a really weirdly ambiguous thing, and I go through massive shifts about it. Sometimes it just seems so flawed, and other times it seems just fantastic in its slipperiness, and it seems to me it should be discussed a lot. And these simple things like, you know, where on any plausible ideological spectrum do you

place it? You know, it's like at times it looks like the most extreme kind of liberal argument in the American sense, and I would say the collapsed sense of that term, you know, whereas As we were saying last week, you know, that this, it's all about the children argument kind of gets extended into this just thick meta level of social concern and redistribution. And on other terms, it seems just way out on the frontier. And I think it's kind of weirdly doing both of those things, which adds to the intrigue

of it for sure. I mean, maybe I'm missing out, but I don't think it's been discussed a lot yet. I mean, has anyone seen any secondary commentary on it? If people need, you know, it's going to be with us, so if people aren't ready to talk about it yet, we can kick that can down the road. It's basically the reason it's on, I think everyone will see after they look at it, the reason why it's on this syllabus.

It's like a model for political dispute resolution through fission into these micro-communities that all... I'll even quote a little bit, actually, like towards the end in particular, which I think it gets more and more like that. Yes, sorry, guys. I mean his quote

I guess is the key one this is in part five of this where he says as a kind of little mantra type thing. If people want to do their own thing in a way that harms no one else, you let them. That's the archipelagian way. And then there's a big Scott Alexander style kind of tortured, bracketed paragraph about all the bad things that could mean. And then he goes back into basically defending that framework. And at the end of it, his final paragraph,

which has all of these things bundled up into it, he says, but I think the end result is that the closer you come to true freedom of association, the closer you get to a world where everyone is a member of more or less the community they deserve, that's very Nozickian, that would be a pretty unprecedented bit of progress. So, it's a, I think it's an intermediate utopia on our course, really. Intermediate as in like, on the way to selection among these? Like we get the ones we deserve and like some of us deserve to fail and some to succeed

or so you see like mid-level conversions, like that kind of... Intermediate. Intermediate because it's quite gentle. I think the what about the children argument is obviously crucial. Like, you know, if you take... It's one that should torture anyone who both wants to do things Scott Actors does and take this question seriously because the tension between them is just huge. And he ties himself in the central parts of this that say utterly in knots about it. Because obviously, you know, he's starting what is, people want to have different modes of social organisation, so why not just sort everyone out

into their own ideological preferences? You don't have to thrash them out in some integrated political forum. But then he says, ah, but what about the children? And then once he's away with that, it's all about, oh, you need a whole set of kind of controlling system level things that can make sure that children aren't being oppressed within different societies and that their options to escape their societies are fully respected and they're not being brainwashed and all of this terrible stuff that could happen to them. And so you're basically on that, you're sliding back to the Rawlsian interventionist compassionate state extremely fast.

But then he pulls himself out of that again with what coherence, that's up to everyone to decide, and ends up back in the mode of those quotes that I've just given. So intermediate because he's trying to do these two things. He doesn't want anyone in this archipelago system to suffer. He's a nice guy to a fault. So the key, I think, to all of this, I'm sure people will find other keys, but my candidate for the key is that he says early on in the piece, liberalism only works when it's clear to everyone on all sides

that there's a certain neutral principle everyone has to stick to. Now that's to me the absolute epitome of the intermediate claim because, you know, I will say all of these terms can be readjusted. So I'm just going to use them in a way that might be annoying and seem crude. But I think on what I say to the left of that is a deep suspicion about everything that's trying to be done there. It's so thin, you need much more substantive set of norms in play here. This whole notion of a neutral playing field that will just allow everyone to do their

own things is obviously problematic from that point of view. And then from the other side, which I call a right, I think, with some more vehement, is that there is no neutral principle everyone has to stick to. There is space. I mean, that's what we're doing in this course. Space is the neutral principle. You do not have to agree with space. Space does not ask for your agreement. geographical separation with whatever that means historically in terms of economic and technological capability and the ability to actually maintain and defend geographical separation.

That's what does the work. That's what does the work of actually keeping yourself out of arguments that you're not interested in pursuing. So obviously he's not going there. If you go there, if you say, look, space does the work, then the children in the other part of the archipelago is just like, that's not your problem. I mean, it's just cold. Like, you know, you've got your own patch over here. It's running how you like it. There aren't people living there that aren't in consonance with those principles. And what's happening elsewhere in the epilogue is of some security consequence, you know,

you want to make sure that you're not going to be invaded, but otherwise is basically irrelevant. So Scott Alexander absolutely doesn't want that. The whole system has to meet some minimal norms of ethical tolerability as far as he's concerned. So looking at it from one side, it looks like hopelessly, a hopeless integral statism and obviously from the other side, it looks like an irresponsible, fragmented libertarian fantasy and it depends what you're... The fact that it can look like both of those things is sort of weirdly to its credit, I think, in my opinion.

And you can definitely bring the transcendental. Like, this is an easy place to bring the transcendental into play, which is probably like the one thing that Rawls is useful for, because the right side there is to forgo, like, the space does the work, is to completely forgo Rawls' sort of transcendental political question of like behind the original position so pre-empirical like I don't know which of these I want, I don't know what the distribution of these polities is like where do I come into the world which is basically a question of time versus space like the sort of the absolute past of all histories or of all living things or then it's absolute future which is all of the possible births, places in the

world that I come into and it's obvious that Hegel or at least Hegel and Rawls I mean I think that Rawls, the only good thing about Rawls is like sort of setting up this transcendental political question and then everything after that is just kind of dross but like something a little more robust would be Hegel as this spirit, mind whatever, as neutral principle and it's evolution in time and like constantly working out the question of like how does mind come into the world, who would be the other successor of Kant or of the transmental condition who would be on the side of space? Is there one? I'm sort of reaching at Fichte, Schopenhauer. Well, I obviously think it goes down that dark Schopenhauerian-Nietzschean line.

I mean, I think there's something that is really important coming out of what you're saying for sure here. if this course was infinitely expansible then Rawls would definitely have to be on it maybe it would all sort of somehow be coming from there because the Rawlsian the Rawlsian problem really it gets to people and so there's this question why does it get to people there's a certain stance which is on one side of what I'm trying to say I mean it's the one that I would try to promote but without naively thinking that that is easy

which is that you should just ignore that rules in problem, like why do you care about it? You know, why care at all about this original position problem? It's a kind of deontological, moral claim it's I think ultimately and this is where we're getting to a crucial thing it's ultimately a religious problem you know that your fundamental assumption is a universalistic axiomatic compassion we're all human beings but why it gets extended you go into the rationalistic community and it's like this thing about insects what are we going to do about the fact that certain pesticides have insects dying in act, shouldn't we care about

that? Like, you know, what kind of weak, crappy, humanistic original position do you have if the torture of insects being killed by a kind of cheap pesticide is not torturing you? And I'm taking the piss out of it, but I mean, it's like, philosophically, you don't need to take the piss out of it, and some people don't. And so, I think the thing is, it's like there are these religious lineages that are absolutely crucial here because on one hand I can say almost as a critical thing it's not sufficient for a critical thing but it kind of gets close this just genealogical thing of just saying Rawls has a religious

commitment that he's trying to share with us and that religious commitment is that we should care about the fate of other human beings irrespective of their geographical location and the original position game is just meant to say, you could be them, you know what I mean? Just because they're not in your nice well organised patch but they're in some hellhole mismanaged idiotic disastrous patch on the other side of the world, their fate should still trouble and concern you but obviously sorry, just one And one last thing to say about that, you know, the thing that makes this critical and nonlinear

and complicated is the fact that all the examples of assorting that have happened in history have been religious. You know, and we're back to the United States again. Like, where have people ever actually got on a boat, left their society, started a new society, joined with other people in order to be in a zone of ideological comity with their fellows. The only cases that has ever happened have been religious. It's the Puritans going to the United States. I don't think there are any examples that it's been attempted.

Obviously there's that whole libertarian free state project to try and get everyone with libertarian orientation to move to New Hampshire and turn it into a… But the free state project is still, to put it generously, a work in progress. Whereas the United States, New England did happen. The Puritans got on the boat. So I think that there is this weird circuit. It's impossible to treat the fact that certain axioms are arbitrary religious commitments as a reason to just dismiss them when the fact that actually arbitrary religious commitments have been the only driver of ideological sorting that we've ever seen.

And so we have to engage with that, I think, much more intimately than any kind of dismissal would. Yeah, absolutely. And maybe in a slightly larger sense, like the theological apologist, or the apologist for this theological line would say, in a kind of like crudely it parallels the atheists can't have ethics argument, but more interestingly is that if you disavow the universalizing imperative, then you're left with the choice of either we don't care about our own children, and it just falls apart into a hellhole, or we have to have some kind of particularism, some sort of essential way in which we only care about our own children, which could be argued to

various forms of ethno-nationalism, which when you inevitably do have an uncontrollable traffic, pre-political between different kind of states in the form of refugees and migrants, etc. And fragmentation of politics generationally within a polity can lead to all kinds of bad stuff, or maybe good stuff from a conservative perspective. You want that sort of ethno-particularist, that's the way to set up a community. Or you have the pilgrims who go across on the basis of basically a religious imperative to have all of the children be raised in the proper way, and then they go and they conquer North America or they war in the British Isles for this. You're pretty much left with three choices, nihilism, ethnoparticularism, or

conquering universalism. Well, the thing is that even though Rawls doesn't, like it does lead very naturally to a universalist sort of view where you say, well, of course it's all humans and should it really just be humans and shouldn't it be the artificial intelligences and the insects and everything as well. You can go that way, but actually the problem applies at every single scale of political structure, which is sort of your point, right? So, like, it applies at the scale of your family with just, like, you and your kids. It also, like, applies at the village level and at the city level. And the problem of justice is fairness,

or, like, how do we even construct? And one of those differences in purely together it applies at every scale, so you can't escape it in that way either. As soon as you have a polity, you have this problem of how to construct it. And so you can de-universalize it by putting it around particular qualities, I think. I don't think that Scott is actually interested seriously, in this case, in a universalist ethic. And I think that the archipelian framework is maybe noteworthy because of the fact that you can get there without either that or even

Nozick's sort of libertarian ethics. And in a sense, I think that's revealed at one part where he says, at what point are national governments rendered most irrelevant, mostly irrelevant compared to the norms and rules of the groups of which we are voluntary members. Because you can get to the archipelian framework not through the libertarian ethic or through universalism, but perhaps through the failure of liberalism to compete with the resurgence of ideological, ethnic, and religious identities as primary modes of political expression and organization. Something that came up for me in the

other reading, which I think also applies to the archipelago reading, is, and someone just mentioned this, was it Jake or James, maybe? That the scale of the individual person is arbitrary. I could be equally concerned about the personality fragments of children in other archipelago islands as I could be about some hive mind in my local island and there's I don't think there's any absolute way to set that level of scale of which scale of unit we're valuing as a political actor I suspect I don't know it's difficult because it all goes

super non-linear doesn't it you could have a bunch of different fragments in this archipelago that would themselves make separate decisions about this. You know, let's say, you know, on our current model, that's all we would have. You know, like these various kinds of schisms of Protestant Christianity set up all of these different units, and that therefore gives you a ground plan of the kind of moral frameworks that are going to count in those things. so let's just push that a bit make it a bit more diverse and just say that you've got some fragments that make it a point that they just do not give a shit about anything that's

not happening in their fragment and other fragments that are just absolutely tortured to death by any suffering happening anywhere in the archipelago and doing whatever they can to ameliorate I mean it just expands the limit of the cosmos, which is fine. It's a religious imperative to universal compassion. But obviously if you take that route, you get into problems, which I think Alexander gets into because he doesn't think that it should be permissible all for any unit within this patchwork to completely disassociate itself from all moral

concern for the fate of individuals and other parts of the patchwork. I should find the actual quote that I think is totally crucial. He says, there's one more problem, Unigov, which is perhaps the unfortunate name he has for the system as a whole, has to deal with. Malicious inter-community transfer. Suppose that there is some community which puts extreme effort into educating its children, an education which it supports through heavy taxation. New parents move this community, reap the benefits.

No, sorry, hang on. I'm misleading. This is interesting, but it's not what I'm trying to get to. Yeah, here we go. This is what I'm trying to get. So the wizard and Unigov's most important task is to think of the children. And obviously by the children he means, this is the old libertarian argument, it always falls to grief with children, doesn't it?

Because they're not for agents, they need looking after, all kinds of, children need nannying and libertarians don't like nannying and all their social models are based on zero degree nannying and children without nannying die in gutters. So this is the kind of problem and this is now sort of brought out up to the level of this whole patchwork system where he then, sorry I'm slightly inhibited by the fact that it's hard to sort of have a succinct quote. This is happening in Section 3 of this thing, and he's got this whole complicated thing.

You know, this is not nearly enough to fully solve the child problem. A child is abused, maybe too young to know that escape is an option, or maybe brainwashed and think they're evil or guilted into believing they're betraying their families to opt out. So their exit options, you know, need to be absolute, And there are things that could happen in particular patches that could inhibit the exit options of children within that patch. So he's demanding some universal level of political attention to the fate of children throughout this whole system. Sorry, now I've got to the point where I've slightly just broken with the thing that you

were saying here, Antos. There is one point where even if you can pinpoint the behavior or the treatment that children are getting in a particular patch, even that sort of becomes controversial very quickly Because if you're talking about the way some other ethnicity perhaps has been treating their children, I mean, I can bring up examples. Yeah, we can think of like the, I don't know if a particular example would be helpful at this point. But think of the South African judge, for example. They're just talking about the child abuse, the rampant child abuse that she claims is happening in the sort of cultures in the South African communities.

And she's gotten a lot of backlash against this and perhaps she's been asked to resign from her position as a judge and all of this kind of thing. So there's a point where it's like, and there's even places in Australia that you can talk about where there's rumors or even much evidence for sort of childhood, where there isn't the the ability to actually go in and to change anything. In fact, it's almost like you should look away from it, and that's sort of the way that things are done on a large scale. It's sort of just a norm. Yeah.

We talk about some kind of moral imperative to go in and try to do something like this. This is a structural torment of liberalism, isn't it? Liberalism is in a very wide sense, exactly this. Like, you know, which is its highest value? Is it universalistic moral concern for every member of the most widely extended possible sense of the social collectivity? or is it respect for difference and heterogeneity and multicultural tolerance of different practices? I mean, these two things clearly,

even without going into these hypothetical political structures, come into intense conflict. I take it that's uncontroversial, isn't it? I mean, you know, I'd be interested if anyone said that that isn't a contradiction or that isn't a tension that is really... I'm looking for some way where you can talk about the preference and the sorting. If you had it in a perfect way, I guess there is unlimited specs in a sense.

But doesn't that just mean worse things could happen? There's a really extreme version. Well, yes. We were talking last week about Ian Banks, and I don't know whether people know this novel. It's pretty interesting, I think, because he's an extremely sort of committed, flamboyant leftist you know that's his that's his thing and so he explores this contradiction very explicitly in this book called pattern recognition I think it, no what's not called pattern recognition it's called pattern

surface detail that's what it's called, surface detail where this is about artificial hells so you know on the one hand what is the liberal trend on the one hand the liberal trend goes down this Star Trek route, prime directive you don't interfere with any other cultures, you let them do their own thing you know, this is when people started using the notion of multiculturalism this is what they meant, you know, non-interference respect for the difference and diversity of cultures and the other is this is Rawlsian universalistic morality, where you don't discriminate in your moral concern on the basis of

time, maybe you can you don't have to care that much about people in the past, but in theory, it just universalize your moral concern so that anybody, anywhere is equally worthy of your full moral consideration, and these two tendencies which are both fundamental to this kind of evolution of liberalism, concretely as we know it, irrespective of its kind of future extrapolation. Ian Banks then draws this universe which has both of these things. So it's massively moralistic and

universalist. And it's also massively respectful of autonomy and the principle of non-interference and there are some kind of factions within his universe that create artificial hells this is why I'm taking off on your virtual reality thing where they have beings subject to theological scale torture and so this whole book is about well what does the culture that's his kind of liberal utopia sci-fi liberal utopia do with this situation

you know does it respect the fact that these cultures if they want if it's part of their tradition to torture people in these synthetic hells that they can get on with that or does it does it intervene mean does it go whatever neoconservative and sort of do some kind of war of liberation to rescue these people. And so it's a super dramatized model but the basic quandary that it's dealing with, I think it's absolutely concrete and realistic. I mean it's in examples that you've given, it's in examples all over the place where Do you respect the culture or do you respect the situation of the individuals within that culture according to some universal principle of moral consideration?

and I think that the archipelago is right on that borderline you know everything interesting about that text is it really wants to run both of those things and it's trying and you get on the other sides you just split you know so that on the hard edge it's just like if outside your patch, the boundaries of your patch is the boundaries of your moral universe and outside your patch is just sound, honest business practice fair dealing, whatever and so that's one resolution of the thing

that obviously to the moral universalist is awful you're saying that people could be doing hellish things to each other in the patch right next door and you would just carry on your pleasant life in your patch and not care about them of course that is what it means but the option to that the alternative yeah sorry you need some kind of way of knowing what they're going to do anyway where they have a certain security and surveillance and all sorts of stuff.

If you know what they're doing exactly, then I guess it's a question of knowledge. Also it's about the halo effect. the halo effect you can think of things like if there was two children and they both had like one comes from a broken home because their parents were like criminals the other one came from some loving home where their parents died in some tragedy which kid would you adopt? you'd definitely go for the nice kid that was loved in a nice home instead of adopting some sort of broken home child that's just going to bring all the problems into your house as well.

Which is literally how it goes down with, like, Russian orphans and stuff, and the adoption is everyone, like, I've heard so many, like, really just, like, uncomfortable to listen to conversations among people, like, talking about adopting, where it's like, obviously I can't adopt from anywhere, like, east of Berlin, because they're all going to have, like, drug problems from their mothers and, like, stuff like that, and everyone is looking for, like, East Asian kids because they're extras, but from a culture which nurtures them as far as they are secure in doing so. And then on the topic of communication or surveillance as a form of communication, communication and security is the empirical arbiter of this issue of your neighboring polity and what you do or don't do about it. I was sort of saying in the sidebar that another orthogonal

or potentially orthogonal aspect of the child abuse figure in relation to dispersion is isolation. So, like, if abuse is something which is ultimately only possible in isolation, because even if you as a neighbor to this hellhole policy, policy, are going to resolutely not do anything, somebody, another neighboring polity, may think completely differently. And if communication is inevitable, security is imperfect, that's like an ongoing negotiation, then that kind of, like, friction and attempts to enforce norms or to form cross-border norms will always be ongoing. And so there's another, which is like this exact, like this question of can you secure against surveillance of the things that you're doing in your policies so that nobody else knows what you're doing in order to want to invade you. This question of the isolation of patches.

Like, are patches really isolated? And if they are isolated, do they not necessarily promote abuse? Yeah, that's crucial. And it's obvious there isn't going to be a simple answer to that. We were again slightly talking about this last week in the sense that the notion of informational isolation seems, I mean, I'm not sure I've got a consensus on this, so I'll just say it from my own point of view, seems preposterous, you know. It seems so obviously dysfunctional that it's not possible. And so if intervention was extended to simply mean that you would pronounce your disapproval of certain practices going on in other places and they would eventually hear about it,

then those sort of interventions, of course, would take place. And that's not total isolation. But hard intervention, in the sense that you can actually stop somebody doing something if you morally disapprove of it. I mean, everyone stop me if you think I'm going wrong here. but that just seems to me to be neoconservatism. I mean, it's just like, you know, we will take whatever steps it is necessary to do to impose our moral norms. You know, and I think it's a red herring to say, oh, we don't agree with your moral norms. You know what I mean? You're too red state or you're too Christian

or you're too something arbitrary. I honestly think that's missing the point of this. I think the point of it is the same as with the in-bank scenario. It's the same with all of this stuff. Do you have what's now called an R2P and a responsibility to protect? you know is it that at a certain point you are morally constrained to use whatever military force is at your disposal to end sufficiently draconian human rights abuses in other territories

you know and this is a kind of you know i'm not trying to simplify into a boolean issue it's not going to be neat one way or the other. But I mean, it would be disingenuous of all of us to pretend that these issues are just abstract. They're not at all abstract. And we've had one philosophy which actually is quite bipartisan. You know, I think that what I'm calling neoconservative, and it sounds like it's a right-wing or republican thing. I don't think it is. I think what we're calling neoconservative is muscular moral universalism. You know, and I don't think muscular... Right, so Kosovo, Sierra Leone, it's exactly the same justification fundamentally.

Yes, exactly. I think so. And I think, didn't Bill Clinton say he deeply regretted the fact that he hadn't intervened in Rwanda to stop the not who to Suzy genocide in Rwanda so I agree with you I think it's actually not a partisan issue in this simple sense what do you think is the legitimacy of muscular moral universities and I think the thing is I guess it is. Sorry, I missed that.

I'm saying that it depends on sort of where you make the choice to, in what universe you're in, in some way, where you're trying to draw the lines and the boundaries are. It goes from two different ways. One, you're talking about this concentration, the higher integration, you're going to actually get the more these boundaries are crossed and you have these cross-boundary norms, that's really going to actually concentrate on another sort of geopolitical unit or geopolitical sort of group.

And in some way that's like more free. So I don't know, it is sort of like a catch-try in some sense. But in the other way, it's the . Yeah, in a way, yeah, you have like this boundary where you don't know, well, of course, you have black people who talk about what we should be in nature. of course, to stop the lines in all the suffering that we see in the natural world and things like this. Right. We just want to stop it, and it's like, well, what kind of human beings we can think of? We don't want to just make an entire state a huge state for everyone, because that's

not really going to work. Right. Your audio is kind of rough, but... Yeah, it's true, Brendan. It's weirdly fritzing your audio. I'm just trying to close on things. But just, I guess, like, on that topic, I guess, like, the question, I found a way to crystallize it, the question that I was trying to ask is, what is an archipelago where some elements inevitably choose to defect look like? So, like, if some elements are first, like, and it's a two-stage defection, like, first it's an abstract or ideological defection from, like, an ideology or plan of fractionation or fractionalization and then it's a hard defection

by invading someone else in pursuit of, I mean, the neoconservative thing is a good example of how it's not always or maybe for the most part going to be an actual universalist ethical intervention. It may be a commercial hardpoint intervention that covers itself as something universalist and ideological, whatever the reasons are. Like an archipelago is always going to evolve and need to be lived in as any particular polity or a member of a polity, somebody who's making decisions about what kind of polity you're going to be here on the basis of assuming that there will be defector polities from the archipelago model itself, I guess. Yeah, well, I think defection goes in two directions.

And it's probably very different issues arise in the two directions. Like, one direction of defection is towards harder independence. I mean, Alexander's archipelago even has economic redistribution mechanisms. So, I mean, on one side, independence would just be, okay, look, we can secure our independence. Anyone who messes with us is in trouble. and the notion that we are going to pass resources to Unigov for its moral agenda is farcical and forget it.

So that's one direction of defection, which is just towards stronger fragmentation. The other side of defection, the one that you've used, is military aggression. and I mean I think they both raise totally different kinds of questions but they're sort of related to each other because they're kind of mirror images aren't they like the only thing that would stop the first kind of defection is the threat of military aggression and the only thing that would protect against the second kind of defection is the ability to defer, deter

or repel military aggression. So I mean they both I mean maybe there's some other answer to this and I'm being too cynical but I mean it seems to me that in both sides it's a hard security issue that's at stake. If you can protect your independence irrespective of the opinion of the rest of the archipelago then you would have no reason to accommodate your policies to unigov whatsoever and unigov would become meaningless um but and on the other side if any member or at least you know what it was to be a kind of independent unit of the archipelago was that it had security

capability then aggression would be impractical. I mean I think we're quite close to it. This is where I probably veer onto a territory that can be accused of utopianism because I think we're quite close to this already honestly. I think the age of territorial military aggression is kind of closing in the sense that how much deterrent capability do you need to stop someone actually benefiting from territorial aggression? It declines all the time. In the kind of pre-modern epoch it was huge.

the costs of military aggression are negligible, or even, you know, it's even that as a prince, the only thing you had to do was territorial aggression. So, like, that's just your pastime. It made no sense to be a king. If you weren't going to engage in territorial aggression, why be a monarch in the first place? And then slowly it's escalated, and, you know, in the modern period, there's very little very little classic territorial aggression anymore you know like what conflicts anywhere in the world is really about people thinking they can amass resources by aggression against a neighbouring state I hardly see any it seems to me the

source of conflict now are independent struggles ideological conflict none of it really seems to be like if we grab this chunk of territory next door we'll have an oil field you know Saddam Hussein's Kuwait thing was the last thing like that I can remember I guess it is the opposite now the real act of now that this will be to succeed even if you think of something like California with Mexico Mexico, California, Mexico. But in some sense, they just redrew their borders around it, around where all the Mexicans

are, all the Trumps, and things like this. and things like this. And that's the sort of thing where you could actually, I guess, this sort of exit itself or something like this would be, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't think that that's become widely accepted, but I do think that is the tendency. You know, I think that geopolitics as flight rather than geopolitics as acquisition is definitely where things are tilting.

Like, you know, why would you need more than a moderate chunk of territory? it's much better to have a very moderate chunk of territory populated by people who want to be there and are not a political problem than some vast inchoate empire that is just full of internal political turmoil and dissent it seems to me, for sure like which is preferable Right, because who really controls that empire when it comes down to it? You don't really have that control and command structure that allows you to make decisions that are integrated in a sort of political or socio-political whole.

whole. But that's against why you want all these stalking structures and all these like the ability to digress at every point where it is like a, also comes down to like a scarcity of resources as well in some sense. You've got to think that if you could have like a If you have a group and you're sharing resources, you can't really have a very big group and share all these resources equally because you're still going to have scarcity. There's always going to be scarcity. So the more you share it, the more you share it.

You can have a large group sharing equally where everyone gets very, very little. little, you have a smaller group with inequality and things like this where that's kind of a different way of moving things. Talking about like with the monarchy, you have like edges, sure, like you have like of the boundaries. Things like this, you know, where it does kind of... It doesn't really matter if you have a few peasants across the right back at the boundary until it's all plays. That's all really good, so... Is my microphone working?

Yeah, Brendan, your audio is still really choppy. I think the connection... I'll get down and come back and get ready. I wanted to comment that you guys seem like political philosophers, and I'm a psychologist, so you guys are thinking in a really different way from how I usually think about this stuff. My eye tends to be much more towards thinking of it in the world today or in practical terms, and so it occurs to me that an ethnically sorted, or like people sorted geographically by political preference is not likely to happen anytime soon. So what about virtual space versus physical space?

Backing up into virtual spaces while staying in the same physical space. Both of the readings raise this point that if you're already living somewhere, someone changing the policies and telling you to leave is kind of unfair and also impractical. So virtual space has become a place to back up into. Yes. I think this is crucial, but it's also, you can see the inadequacies of that in the sense that while you're in someone, some regime's physical territory, you're subject to all kinds of forms of coercion within that territory. I mean, so the degree to which you can exit from the decisions of that territory that you disagree with,

and not nothing, of course. I was actually going to begin this thing with, I think it is interesting, I would, if I can just do a plug just for my own space, just because I've gathered this together. Sorry, one second. but a guy who's always super interesting on this is Balaji Srinivasan and he did a little thing that is totally on the wavelength that you

are on And I know this is a thing with him. He thinks that virtual reality is going to be a crucial technology in this thing. And it's not like I disagree. I think he's on to something important. Obviously, you can have elective online communities which have a strong sense of freedom of association. We already see that on the net. but what is limited there is exit to give a very sort of strong example of it if you're in a society that has universal conscription that decides to fight a war that you totally disagree with

you can be in whatever kind of virtual community you like but you're still subject to being drafted and sent into battle against people that you've got no problem with if you happen to be in the political territory that mandates that. The coalescent crowd is starting to be able to apply coercion. Like when someone hurts a cat and then they get tons of mail and hate calls and even threats of violence. But what are you saying, you're saying that would apply to something even like the military-industrial complex of the society whose territory you inhabited?

dead? That seems to be a little bit hopeful. Yeah, it's hopeful that there's a potential for large groups of freely associated people to begin to be able to wield types of authority or coercion against land-bound authorities. Right. I mean, I don't at all want to dismiss this. I mean, it's partly that I'm going to back myself into a corner where I have to fight certain arguments as a devil's advocate, if nothing else, just because I've called this spatial metapolitics. And so if someone's saying, forget space, cyberspace, you know, software's eating the world, cyberspace is the arena that matters. I'm actually not unsympathetic to that. But I think that it's important to hold on to the reasons

why people would think physical territory was important. And the main reason is that it draws a boundary around the potential for extraneous coercion, you know, so that you can't be drafted, you can't be taxed, you can't stop smoking your favorite herbal remedy or whatever it is, that is your particular model for coercion. But I mean, within an integrated political territory, all of those things are enforceable. And the fact that you spend a lot of time in VR doesn't protect you against that.

Although I take your point that you can build a constituency that could maybe push back against that. Right, I mean, it just makes me think, is this working by the chance to be here? It's so crap, Brendan. I'm really sorry, but your audio is just a disaster. Why is, do you know why it is? I've not had this problem with you before on these things. Have you got some new horrible computer or something like that? Yeah. So how do we deal with this idea of ethnic homogeneity

or political homogeneity that I don't think is the case anywhere right now, but a higher degree of it would be demanded to instantiate this archipelago. I think that the word ethnic is just both fascinating, crucial, and hugely gets into all kinds of troubling areas. I don't think it can be avoided. and I'll tell you first of all why I don't think it can be avoided this is not going to be anything new to you but I just think it needs to be said which is that the politics of geographical separation have obviously been hugely driven by certain configurations of ethnicity

and it used to be straightforwardly a liberal or even leftist cause, maybe it still is even, you know, like Wilsonianism you know, the great age of universalistic moral geopolitics was deeply attached to the notion of ethnic self-determination and you can say, well what does Wilsonism mean by ethnic and I think that question which I'm not going to push too far into right now because it kind of gets edgy in all kinds of different ways. But I think this question, what is meant by ethnic, is huge.

And I think it's a question that we cannot avoid. I think it's just coming at us like an express train. And I think the fact that we, as a civilization, are so neurotically incapable about talking about it means that we end up with really horrible answers to that question. I think we really are just building a cultural grave for ourselves in our inability to talk about this stuff. So in Wilsonism, I think it's probably, if you force people, they'd say it's language. That's one of the possibilities for it, you know, that people shouldn't live in a society against their will if they speak a

different tongue, that defines them as a separate ethnicity. And we've already seen this religious one. This is also totally huge. As far as the New England Puritans are concerned, they had a kind of form of pure Christianity that meant they shouldn't have to live with people who were inconsistent with the culture implied by that set of religious commitments. So that's another side of ethnicity, for sure. And there are other much more troubling notions that we could take on this. So I don't think we can get away with ethnicity.

I think because an ethnicity just is a culture, and almost if you're serious about this kind of archipelago model, you're saying that you have an ethnicity. It almost goes with, it's a horrible pun, which is totally unintentional, goes with the territory of saying that you've won a microstate, is that you are laying claim to some kind of ethnic specificity that is not respected in the social ensemble that you're wanting to escape. So, you know, if you say...

everyone's going to be ethnically blemanged I would say I don't know I think that that is itself to be heterogenized you know I think that there's room there's in a kind of fragmented system there's going to be places that are massively ethnically complex and there's going to be zones that are massively inclined to ethnic simplification and those aren't going to go away all through history that's been true hasn't it there's been zones of swirling

ethnic ferment and there's been zones of ethnic purification and we clearly have that at the moment and so you're down to the thing of saying well one of those options is wrong and I talk to people who have both attitudes that ethnic ferment people need to be whipped into line or the ethnic simplification people are evil and need to be squashed I mean I get both of that and it seems to me my traction to this patchwork archipelago model or hard archipelago model is that you don't have to make that decision because it's a

universalistic decision. I really do not believe that there is a universalistic solution to the optimum level of ethnic complexity that a society should have. Like surely there is room for a whole bunch of different options on that. Yeah, going back to what I said earlier about how the level of what an individual person is is arbitrary, and you could set it as smaller scale or larger scale than one body. Combining that with what you just said about ethnicity and language, you've got this one primary branch of human culture and language, which is then split off to the slightly genetically

different with different linguistic and cultures and so you're really talking about these different cultural minds which are all fighting and mixing with each other so how do you morally judge any of that yeah but the archipelago is the alternative to moral judgement I mean I think this is the crucial point you know a good archipelago is one where at least some of the bits are utterly morally repulsive to you I would say if that isn't true you're not thinking the thought if you've got some system of fragmented political possibility and you don't absolutely abhor some of the things people are doing with that system I think you've not reached

you've not reached that and you're hoping that you can impose your own however widely when I say however widely spread the thing is that it just is a tragedy of this stuff it's a tragedy of the new england puritans that they cannot actually convince the whole of the world that they are right you know and there's a certain point that they they have to accept that or the alternative is just endless eternal neoconservatism and i take it that we've had enough of neoconservatism that's why i think the world has term, you know. Like, however much we love New England purity and its moral values,

it's just burnt itself out in these battlefields all over the world, and it is not going to persuade the world that it is the answer to everyone's problems. And that means we have to do something else. We will do something else, whether we like it or not. And so are we going to do that with what degree of reluctance are we going to do the other thing? If we do it with a minimal degree of reluctance, then we jump into this kind of thinking. If we do it with a huge degree of reluctance, we get it anyway, and it will hurt more. Yes, I mean, bringing this back again

to how I can think about this stuff, So if I were actually able to see from all of the political systems which are being applied to me right now that I hate having to participate in, I would be perfectly happy allowing, and other people were free to do the same, I'd be perfectly happy to allow them to embog themselves in whatever horrible situations they were in. But on the other hand, if I see someone getting mugged in front of me and they ask me for help, how can I not help that person? how is a bunch of people asking for help over the internet halfway across the world any different how can I not go help those people, it's not about a moral universalism, it's about someone standing in front of you asking for help

well I don't know, I think it is about moral universalism, I mean if they are not within your political territory if they are halfway across the world and they say help me what does that mean concretely I'll throw in some links and stuff and we can talk about this what is now the liberal case I'm being kind of an old folky talking about new conservators what the new language is R2P responsibility to protect so you have a duty if you have the capacity to intervene a military capacity This is now the left liberal mainstream case.

You know, it's the philosophy of the current American administration. If you have the military capability to help, then you have a moral duty to intervene. Now, I'm not deriding that in the sense it's not obviously stupid or anything like that. You know, there's no cheap way of just dismissing it. And the hard cases is like Rwanda, you know, where, you know, America at that point didn't intervene and 800,000 people were macheted to death. And, you know, people looking back on that think, well, maybe with a relatively manageable level of social cost at our end, we could have prevented this vast humanitarian disaster happening somewhere deep in Africa.

So I'm not pretending this is just like an obvious, you know, no problems kind of issue. Of course, I can see why people would take these different cases. But the point is, if you do take the R2P case, if you do say, you know, given the ability to intervene, given our moral judgment about what is happening, we should, we're morally obliged to intervene, then you are getting into something deep. You can't pretend it's something trivial. You are saying that you will use your national armed power to impose a moral decision in another society

that is in conformity with your beliefs. There's no getting around that. That is the minimal statement that is being made there. And so, you know, when people are being chopped up with machetes, that's pretty easy. But drawing the line, there's going to be a line where it's hazy and difficult. Totally, you know. I mean, as Brendan has said, there's a lot of practices that happen in other societies that mainstream European societies find extremely problematic. You know, is non-voluntary sexual abuse of young males an acceptable social practice?

I mean, in Europe, it's not considered acceptable. In large parts of the world, it's considered totally fine. How many people are prepared to drop fragmentation bombs on to impose your sense of sexual propriety on these societies? And that's this huge, bloody, messy zone that anyone who's pretending that that isn't difficult, I think is not looking at the situation. Here's one more thought I had that might possibly be able to throw a little wrench

into that logic. Because it seems like we're almost ending up with an opposed physical space to virtual space and projection of between the two. So what if I were walking around the world and I get stopped by some border-controlled guy and I say to him, who are you? Why are you stopping me? What authority do you have over my sovereign body? suddenly it sets up as I'm a citizen of some invisible empire and this person is some enforcer of some physicalized empire and it's all coming to a head in that type of confrontation and this is how I feel

every time I go through the airport security who are you and what you don't get through but you don't get into another country unless you follow the protocol, I mean those guys however much you contest their authority I mean again I'm not deriding that but they will stop you going somewhere where they don't want you to go I mean physical physical borders are defensible I mean maybe that's a controversial argument now but let's I think we could say hypothetically certainly at an airport if someone's not going to let you on a plane they don't let you on a plane. If they're not going to let you out of an airport, they're not going to let you out of an airport.

And whatever virtual communities and virtual collectivities you're part of isn't going to get you through that secure barrier if the security forces controlling it are not willing to let you through it. Can I try and link that back to a definition of space, Nick? Sure. Or sort of like, if I follow, you're sort of focusing on space is important because there's lots of properties of geographical space which are sort of cheap in an economic

sense, right? It's cheap to navigate. It's cheap to project power across a geographic space, even today with our technological level and so on. Whereas these other forms of organization which aren't based on geography are, you know, like, you know, all the Star Trek fans on Facebook or whatever forming some sort of independent polity. But how do you tell that they're a member of that polity? It's expensive, right? you have to go and look up your phone to sort of work out what legal system they're under or something like that. Sort of space is still really cheap to navigate and project power across, and that's why it's so fundamental to these sorts of political units.

Is that where you're coming from? I don't know. That's interestingly, I think that's really interesting. But I would have naively almost thought it was the opposite, you know, in the sense that you can make barriers in space that work a lot more effectively than barriers in other areas. Sorry, is that horrible sound coming from me? So, you know, if you want to seal off a unit of territory against gross coercion, leaving aside all these more subtle kind of informational effects, you can do it.

A small country can do it. of 5 million people can have secure borders, secure airports, it can control its demography, so its territorial control on that area is facile, whereas these virtual collectivities are difficult to... Sorry, I'm sort of repeating your thing, and I'm trying to go the other way around with it. I'm concentrating on space because if you want to protect yourself against coercion in anything other than physical space, it's complicated. Right, so there's like a cost…

Sorry. Yeah, go. There's like a cost gradient there, right? And so it's like if you're trying to use these political structures as linked to force and a legal structure and the rest of it, then it's expensive by comparison to just organizing around a geographic space that still… Yes, expensive at least, and to a large extent, even though I'm very interested in the trends involved, perhaps still highly impractical. Right, so I was trying to use expensive in a really very general way, like sort of expensive

in terms of mental effort and time and sort of all of the things that I, yeah. And it's because you can't project force and organize in that way that you can't make the sort of psychological links or sort of sort of units are powerful in the same way that even a city is sort of powerful today. But maybe there's leakage there. Or maybe that's interesting. there is and there's a spectrum for sure like you could draw a whole bunch of things like this one very interesting intermediate is this charter cities

notion which is itself a kind of spectrum in that it goes from models that are basically just like outsourced urban management within a straightforward system of territorial sovereignty to highly autonomous city-state or quasi-city-state model. So there's a big chunk of that spectrum that is taken up by that thinking. But it's interesting that if several people have said this, but I'll credit you for sure with the whole thing, that

if it was the case that the virtual option really was just washing over us and we could just forget this territorial question then we wouldn't be talking about cities at all would we I mean I think the fact that these intermediate cases are still city models is a sign that the territorial model is extremely resilient and you know that a patch of space is still something that really matters in this discussion. And it matters because of the possibility of expelling coercive agencies.

Like if you can't control a territory, you can't actually be confident that you are not still subject to coercive authorities. So I do actually buy that basic argument, but there's an interesting thread in the history of the state about how well into the modern era the state didn't really have very full control of the territory that you would sort of think of today as the way that countries work on a map where you sort of like draw a line and you colour it in and that's

you project power across all of that like the government at the capital does that, well that's actually a very late modern sort of phenomenon you have for a long time I would only say about that that seems to me to work both ways in the sense that if something very interesting was happening in these murky confused spaces, then the state would suddenly take vastly more interest in it. You know, like within the boundaries of modern Russia, I'm sure there are huge tracts of space that, you know, no government official has ever set foot, you know what I mean? And now with satellite mapping and all of that, they probably know what it looks like.

But if you had a thriving city in that area, then it would be knee-deep in government agents within minutes. I mean, it's like... So there's all kinds of hazy borderlines, but they become important when people really want to do something. and I think that's again why this yeah no I think that's true I think Southeast Asian Hill Tribes was another example I really had to mind where they would find these sort of liminal spaces where it was hard for

pre-modern states to project control and so you would get like swamplands and like difficult mountainous areas and deep forests and stuff like that, that they would effectively control and move through without a lot of state interference, well within the borders of, like, the official state borders that you would draw on a map and color in. And it was very much determined by altitude. It was a huge factor. So basically you could draw a second map of most, you know, pre-modern states or even, like, into the modern era in Southeast Asia where basically what states controlled was this area below the altitude of about 500 meters.

Yeah. Yeah. No, totally. And I would take this as another opportunity to bring back this city thing. You know, just take the city from a kind of ergo-centrist kind of point of view as the unit of truly important social process. And, you know, like hill tribes above these altitudes can grow a bit of opium. And I'm sure, you know, from all kinds of point of view, like interesting stuff can happen in those things. But in terms of historically significant social process, that you need a city

to do history in. And as soon as you've got a history, then people are going to take an interest in what's happening there. It's certainly not going to occupy some liminal zone. I guess I would really agree with the centrality of cities. It's really hard to argue against the city as a meaningful political unit, Brian. there's really few examples of like well this isn't even a city or like are you in that city or not right it really like it's really unambiguous but I'm probably going to chew on the hill try point as well because I think there's an interesting intersection here too but probably certainly

in parallel I mean I'm not even sure whether I'm wanting to be committed to contesting what you're saying about that but I guess what I'm predicting is a level of visible geopolitical fission and fractionation you know so whatever have been these interesting marginal zones and limits to state authority we're moving into a period where more directly confrontational questions of geographical order are coming into play. Okay.

So I guess but if you're talking about for instance structures of capital being very influential in terms of you know because that gives you access to robotic military hardware and so on, you could even get these sorts of fractured spaces or, you know, around capital formations. I know this is a sort of cliché about, you know, corporations being independent and they, but you know, I think that that would be an interesting place that you could see stuff like that turn up too. So anyway, I'll keep chewing it. Yeah, actually, sorry Adam, I would like to just push you on this a little bit, because

I lost the connection about... Was this point about corporations connected with this sort of hillside type? I was trying to think of an example which, to me it is connected because it's this idea of a recognizable organization which is tied to geography in many ways, but it's not so limited to geography in the same way that a territorial state is.

So you have this sorts of, if you're talking about the abilities of states to sort of push their influence or throw their influence over very large areas and very large political units, fragmenting, then that opens up other liminal spaces. and maybe something's maybe a corporation is one place for that liminal space could exist but I think I have I guess I would push this like when you say corporation it's an interestingly abstract notion of corporation so to make it more concrete I would push it in the direction of industrial capability

you know now I'm assuming I think the trends of this are arguable and I can definitely see someone saying the trends are such that you could push industrial capability up into these high altitude problematic liminal spaces. So I can see that connection being made. You're getting very science fiction-esque but that's totally fine. But as things stand, the sort of moral compact and the modern compact is about that fundamentally there's a kind of expectation of state control over industrial capability

and the notion of industrial, despite everything about multinational corporations and all of this kind of stuff, it's all worked out within the framework that at the end of the day industrial capability is under the purview of the nation state yeah okay so I'm not trying to argue for this sort of view about Microsoft and Exxon are direct competitors to the nation state I think that's kind of boring it doesn't fit right but what if you have

I guess at the same time I want to sort of say there's a little bit of a non-state space there. If you think about a mercenary company So if we think about a highly effective robotics corporation as like a mercenary company, then they're not aligned to a state. They have to fit within the state system in some other way. And they have some independence of political power, which is non-state political power. and maybe isn't even tied to a geography in the same way.

You know, if they have, like, multiple centers of production which they can move between depending on which state they're contracting with. So, again, that's a science fictional scenario, but it's a place where there's a liminal space in this sort of area. And it's also one that has a clear analog in cities themselves. I mean, if you look at, like, cities as concentrations both of, like, physical plant industrial power but also the capital required to outprice, or one way or another, outprice industrial centers elsewhere and therefore draw their resources to the usage of the city and the people who live in it. And not just industrial resources, but kids, right? Your children able to travel to leave a place where they don't like the culture or the opportunities available

and come to these places, which is something that rural territories find threatening. and then New York is this big giant America kind of example but if you look at South America where you have relatively smaller, weaker states and so forth places like Rio de Janeiro or Buenos Aires have a great deal of autonomy they function almost like autonomous administrative regions in a way that only doesn't come into conflict with the territorial demands of the nation state because they have a shared economic imperative. They share people. Like, it's quasi-coincidental. Not something that couldn't come apart, but something that just doesn't. And I have an increasingly strong feeling that the urban and territorial

sort of lines of politically drawing together time and space are very much orthogonal, are two separate lines. because you see with, like, pulling people of different ethnicities and people of different places into cities, you see this, like, patchwork of neighborhoods, and you see this sort of there are internal norms to different places in a city, and then there's sort of a larger, loose, technocratic system that makes them all be able to work together, and it's more or less emergent, but it's based on convergence in space rather than divergence, but at the same time will tend to expand and, like, gobble up smaller, or municipalities outside of it, that sort of thing. So you see a lot of these same dynamics that we're talking about with regards to patchwork diffusion,

but in a reversed and more complex temporal and spatial register. Maybe not more complex, just differently complex. Yeah. And if you've got corporate-owned cities, cities that are identically corporations, or, you know, I mean, then we get science fiction and we'll go into AIs and war machines and things like that, but... I mean, my immediate sort of skeptical response to that is just, you know, what really is the bounce of power in municipal and national governments? And it seems to me that the national, you know, I'm trying to think of an example where a city government really seems to have substantial political power

in negotiation with the national government and I mean that that sort of tests me a bit I mean I don't know whether obviously with a city state that doesn't arise but even like you know London or New York like they're influential but they have to use their political influence very indirectly don't they Like, if the New York mayor gets into an argument with the White House, like, it's just a total David and Goliath thing, surely. Well, I mean, that's also kind of an artifact of the organization of the U.S. If you looked at individual states versus the cities that resided in them, I think you'd probably find a smaller scale but broader wealth of examples.

I don't know, popping to mind are probably water and land resources, stuff like municipal broadband infrastructure, and places where corporations have different relationships of incentive with city administration versus state administration. London, I mean, Brexit is an interesting issue, again, where you've got a huge portion of the country that wants to leave, and then you have London, whose core of power, everything that makes it work is the city, the financiers, who suffer disaster, potentially, from Brexit. And so the national government is more the stage on which those conflicts play out than necessarily the other side of the negotiating table. I mean,

I'd spin a kind of a quick historical narrative here, which would be like, in the early modern periods, the cities had huge autonomy and influence. You know, before the consolidation of the state system, you know, as centres of capital, as zones of political autonomy, and there was this early modern heyday of the city where the city really was the kind of basic political unit. but as nationalism evolved that urban power was progressively

attenuated and we're now at a kind of cusp phase where on one conspicuous level urban political power is at a nadir and the national government in theory, can make decisions that are just grossly deleterious to the influence of a city without any comeback from the city that matters whatsoever. And again, just to simplify and crudify this model, it would be that on the same armed masses model, that as soon as the city ceases to be a kind of unit of defence

and all military capability is organised at the level of the nation state, then any urban privileges are just a matter of national state discretion. You know, like the city has no real capacity to resist the will of the nation. it has a purely sort of normal dialectical capability to say oh this will scrub the economy if you do this or whatever but it's not a unit of sovereignty anymore which I think is changing I mean I think we're back on a new age of the city I mean I think the city state the reason, you know going back to this whole thing

I think that we're talking about cities much more than we have for centuries, for good reason. Because I think that the... Looking at sort of like the little bit of future narrative coming from there, sort of accepting the historical narrative, which I definitely do, would be that so if what has simultaneously happened is that the cities are enormous centers of sort of commercial still, and even more so than they were in the early modern period, centers of capital, commercial, and industrial, especially techno-industrial capability, and the translation of that into self-defensive capability, which would make them properly

autonomous in principle, is this sort of persisting power of the giant agglomerated military nation state. The very same trends that would lead to diffusion into patchwork, either the hard way or the slightly easier way and to sort of incentivize that are also ones which provide the opportunity for cities to reassert themselves and in some ways reassert themselves for the first time as in one circuit techno-industrially and defensively autonomous entities. This is something that necessarily has to happen against territorial diffusion and in fact it seems as if they could assist or set the stage for one another. sorry what are they

they as it like patchwork versus megaherb right autonomous megaherb yeah I mean this might just be deficient on my part but I mean I'm agreeing with you a lot in the sense that I cannot really think of these diffusive networked geopolitical architects except through cities you know the notion that some chunk of random rural real estate would become a node in a geopolitical system I'm just not getting my head around so I'm very willing to try to do that but it's not something

the entire time was that it seemed like that was being treated as at least in principle as just as possible as cities being the fundamental sort of touchstone of architecture for these things, which is probably just, I haven't read much of the archipelago. Whereas in reality, like, there's no way, you couldn't have, like, a further shattering of the heartland into the 150 states, like, that would never work. You'd have warring tribes, tribes of foreign coalitions, like, I mean, that that's sort of the basis of the nation-state all over again, and city organizations seems like the only alternative. So, sorry, I don't know where that's exactly going from there. I agree with you.

The more rural and conservative movement towards these patches of land without already being urbanized, and that already being urbanized, that already having the capital to succeed, already having the basis for not only defensive, but also techno-industrial independence, that that sort of military dissolution without the capacity for techno-industrial, for long-term monopolism would set the stage for existing cities to sort of take a foregrounded place. Yeah. No, I mean, I think this is really where, in particular, American political mythology collides with historical reality,

in the sense that there are all these rural areas I'm sure that have a lot more guns than many American cities. You know what I mean? If you're still in this thing of the armed citizenry is the bedrock of sovereignty, then you can probably cut out some chunk of rural Virginia and say, hey, we have more firepower here than New York City. you know what are you doing condescending to us like this. So I mean I would just you know concur with what you're saying like you know what sustainable techno-economic capability do you have to assert independence in a serious security

environment you know the fact you've got a really good shot with your long-bore rifle It's just not, that's not the age we're in anymore. Yeah, and Virginia is like an interesting example of that considering a good third of Virginia is in or like rapidly being incorporated into the endless sprawl from Washington, D.C. And like they're building a couple of new like full-scale city centers further west in Virginia. And then if you look at that extension process as commercial well before it is military. I mean, it's cartoonish to imagine the rural resistance against Washington, D.C. gentrification or suburbanization. But I don't know, it seems like the more relevant process

is that kind of expansion of these urban areas plus dissolution of control over resources elsewhere than the Plymouth model, like running off a dead somewhere. Yeah. I mean, it would be nice to have someone who was a rural chauvinist to counterbalance. Yeah, I'm kind of hoping for somebody to speak up and tell me I'm full of shit. Like, come on. I mean, I can find that elsewhere easily, But I think that this whole thing is a lot to do with urban centres, for sure.

I think the fact that the discussion around it is about urban centres. And just to come back to this charter city model, people think they can make cities work as units of effective political autonomy. clearly you know and they I mean it's hard to know again how sceptical and cynical to be about this discussion in this intermediate but it's highly developed and these like these Honduran this whole thing about these Zeds however you pronounce that Z-E-D-E-S that they've got going in Honduras it looks like there will be an implementation

of some of this stuff. Maybe not at a full level of sovereignty, but at a substantial level of sovereignty. But I don't think there's any rural equivalent of that. I can't even imagine what it would look like if there was one. Sorry, I'm looking at Honduras stuff. Yeah. I don't know what, if you fit in Zeds now, I would think there was a lot. Let me see. 103,000 results. Yeah, it's not nothing. And actually, the other thing I didn't want to totally get lost

is when Adam was talking about the mercenary thing. That is also really relevant. and what's Eric Prince's thing? He keeps changing the name of his company. Obviously, it used to be Blackwater, but I think they've changed the name now, haven't they? It's Z, I think. X-E. What is? The name of Blackwater. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So these two things are interfering with each other. Not Zeds. We're now talking about X-E, yeah. X-E. His company, yeah, yeah. But that's it, but it's crucial, isn't it? It's like a lube in this whole thing.

Like we're not going straight from a state military to some robot flotilla being sold off the shelf to an independent city-state. is the lubricating dynamic is this commercialization of security through these private, we can say mercenary businesses, who just set up the whole notion of commercial security. So at the moment you go, there's a bunch of guys, ex-military guys, and you pay them for some security tasks. But once you've set up the institutional structure for that, what has been settled is the fact

that you write a big enough check and some corporation will solve your security problem. So it's a completely smooth glide path from that to any level of autonomization in terms or weapon systems or, you know, it becomes a kind of arbitrary question in a sense how many robot drones versus how many ex-SAS mercenaries do I get for my 50 million dollars or whatever. You're buying a security solution commercially. Right. It's just nice to know like both of them are catabolism, like people want to say catabolism,

of military hyper-training and resources and so forth, whether it's the ex-SAS people pulling them out and turning them into mercenaries or drone technology. And there's an interesting parallel to the cartels, too, to the Zeta cartel being started by a massive defection from the Mexican Special Forces, who learned from American Special Forces, and forming their own sort of autonomous military commercial unit. yes totally totally I mean that's another question about how would you think the relation about territorial independence and these kind of

criminal autonomy I was going to raise this earlier actually as a question obviously when you know this question about how how important territorial space is to this question. Because if you don't go for territorial independence, you go for criminality. I think almost by definition. That that's the fork in the road, isn't it? If you're going to forego an independent territorial zone of control, then you have to establish a criminal organization, an armed criminal organization that establishes whatever level of autonomy

you're aiming for and I think by necessity it can be kind of you can try and cover that up and make it look nicer but fundamentally if you're trying for autonomy in one territory then you are taking this path of organized crime to put it hard I mean that's the legal definition of it you're simply defying the state authority through some organizational mechanism that is competent to resist the coercive apparatus of the state

so I mean it would obviously They look nice if it was more oriented towards hackers and cryptography and cyberspace stuff, but the legal definition of what you're doing is quite straightforward, and it's the same as if you're putting together an armed drug gang. Right, which is exactly the way that the Hill tribes were treated by the Southeast Asian States, right? It's exactly that relationship. It's the criminal sort of interlopers on the territory and even you have the drug connection in more recent times.

Yeah, totally, yeah. Which is also, I mean, if you look at the development or the spread specifically of drug trafficking in devastated communities, whether due to ethnic repression or just the rust belt, economics moving on, or whatever it is, it becomes the best option for establishing autonomy whenever catabolism starts to set in, in your area. And so there's a sort of link where the embrace of criminality or the retrojection of criminality onto groups who end up with no better means of autonomy

once catabolism has set in. I mean, the Zetas are not a good example of that. They're more like trying to get ahead of the curve, you could say. Yeah. But that's the VR thing. We can't move in physical space, so we're going to move in virtual space. How do we make autonomy meaningful when we're moving in virtual space? Well, we sell drugs. Duh. That's what everybody else does. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Neurochemical warfare? Neurochemical commercial warfare? Yeah. I mean, the whole... You could construct the whole thing through that

so easily, for sure. I mean, I take it that what massive amount of what ends up as being the reefs of neoconservativeness is just they end up in these fights with foreign drug gangs in places they don't understand supposedly on the base of some ideological principle but on the ground I'm sure absolutely it doesn't look like that It's an amazing crystallization of the fate of neoconservatives. I would not have expected that to be so true until you said it.

So I think Tony is not making himself very manifest, but it's now, by my estimation, 10 to 2. So unless my arithmetic is completely out, we've been going for almost three and a half hours. Is that possibly right, or am I just in some weird paranoid psychosis about it? No, no, that's my calculation too. I'm speaking. So. So I'm slightly tempted to drunk give Tony a nudge with it if he's on the system somehow.

10 to 4am, oh good. I thought actually, Amy, to be honest, you've been sluggish, so I accept that. If you started at 1 in the morning, no, half past 12, and there's now 4 a.m., yeah. I'm almost tempted now to get a 5 just to see what happens to you. But yeah. I'm past the threshold of intelligibility. Yeah. It's been nice sitting back here listening to all you guys bashing out. Yeah, I mean I'm not sure quite where we've reached in terms of organised progression

of discussion, but I've enjoyed this a lot. So thank you. I'm now trying to back my way out of it discreetly, but I think that does require Tony's cooperation. Tony might have just actually passed out. Do you think that's possible? His camera's turned off. Maybe you can answer a question as a way of backing out. I'm having some trouble still trying to figure out the context where all this conversation is happening. Like, are we in a mode of describing or theorizing or intervening?

or what. And so this very abstract, eternalistic, political philosophy approach is very alien to me. And I'm trying to, like you were saying, there wasn't much of a, for me, also an identifiable progression in the topic. So where are we headed, and how is the context supporting some sort of conversation? I'm lost. well I would definitely as I was saying last week in this thing massively dispose to the analytical mode for that because I think everyone's got an opinion, everyone's got an ideological set of preferences and all of this kind of stuff

and that's not uninteresting but you know I definitely feel that you're getting down to something more substantial if you can just actually set up the framework in which that stuff is happening. So if I was to describe what my kind of ideal sense of this course is to be, is to kind of put together a framework for making sense of the kind of crazy shit that is happening on this planet at the moment prior to decisions about what side you're taking in these disputes or even that's before then, what you would do about it given those decisions.

Because I really think, and again people are free to try and dissuade me from this, but But I just think we were in an absolutely catastrophic moment of historical transformation. And all kinds of weird things are happening that people never thought were possible. And it's happening at a whole bunch of different levels. It's happening geopolitically, it's happening in terms of domestic politics in a bunch of countries, grasped on different scales. And I think most of the grids people are using to make sense of that are really not holding

together well. And if I was going to say why, I think they're old modernist grids. You know, they're based upon assumptions about the way things work in the epoch of mass politics and it's the end of the epoch of mass politics that we're dealing with and therefore those frameworks right from the far left to the far right of the political spectrum are not managing to grasp it at all successfully. So none of that is meant to be dogmatically uncontroversial. I mean if people want to say to me, absolutely you're wrong, we're totally still in the era of mass politics and the era of mass politics is not going to be. And that's an entirely legitimate position to adopt and it would probably be highly stimulating

and help to refine us. But just for you to get a sense of where I'm coming from is that I think we're going over this cliff of all our common acceptations of what the political structure of the world it's about and we're entering unknown territory and I'm wanting to drag you guys into mapping that unknown territory. Which up to now, on the last three and a half hours, is going pretty well from my point of view. I just messaged Tony to see where he is but I haven't heard from him yet.

I'm going to ask you a question. Yeah, great. Following on from that, you don't have to answer this since it's on record, but you're obviously working these ideas out in a specific medical space. So, yeah, Amy, you have to repeat that. Your audio just collapsed entirely when you said that. It just went into a set of weird peeing noises. Sorry. Okay, this is clear. So you've been working this kind of set of theories out here quite publicly in a particular political space, and I was wondering if there was a choice, like an active choice that you made to do that there, like a really interesting space to happen as well.

Is it necessitated by the theories or the fact that it came out of a particular blog space with a particular audience already built into it? or is it something else? There is here. There is in this, with you guys now. Is that right? There is what? Yeah, but I mean, previously online with your blogs, with Ceno Systems and the interlocutors there, and I guess coming out of the less wrong blog space, and then that whole kind of crew sort of dispersing? Is it a sort of natural kind of thing that's happened?

Or is there something necessary in this particular constellation of thought that requires it being worked out very visibly on the right? I don't know. I think it's very fractured. I think it's very fractured. And I think my outside in blog is assume, the assumption there is that people think Moldbug is telling us something interesting. So of course people are not banned if they don't think that, but I think that that's basically the automatic filter to a degree. So I get that some Marxist guys and other people flitting in and out.

But the assumption there is that talking about mold bug stuff is important and is some kind of orientational system in terms of this. Other spaces that I'm in don't have the same assumption. I certainly don't think this space has that assumption. In fact, obviously the opposite in the sense that mold bug for the NCRMP is like off the horizon of the thinkable, you know what I mean? It's like, so it has to be kind of inferred as this kind of dark black hole around which

certain of this stuff is kind of revolving. And I think that's okay in the sense that I don't think all of this stuff should be run through Mont Blugge. I mean, I think his patchwork thing is a very interesting development of these ideas, but I think that the lineages are much more fundamental than that. I think that New England was built by people already doing this kind of stuff. Scott Alexander I don't think is a neo-reactionary, despite the fact that he sometimes has a finger pointed at him. In fact, I would go further. I'd say it's utterly insane to say that Scott Alexander is a neo-reaction, but you know,

insanity is widespread. And the less wrong people, of course, also are not, although there's this hilarious thing about Yudkowsky being now tortured by people accusing him of that. So I just think, yeah, in terms of your question, I don't think, I'd like to think it doesn't have to be a kind of lunatic right discussion topic, but I think it is a little bit, I think it is a little bit, and I don't know why that is. You know what I mean? Maybe you guys can help. I don't think there's anything that would normally be considered like the far left of

the political spectrum that seems particularly interested in options, these kind of escapist, fragmentational options of like can we just carve out a little niche for ourselves and do our stuff and protect ourselves and do what we want to do. I don't see that really anywhere and I don't know why. Maybe that Berardi type stuff is that or this communization theory or something, I don't know. But I'm not picking up on it very clearly and I'm not sure why. Is there some inherent affinity between the left and globalization that stops it?

Yeah, I was just wondering, yeah, I guess I've always come at it early seeing that divide. And, like, back when we asked you to speak at PATH, like, years ago, I was completely shocked by the amount of resistance I got from people, personal resistance, like, kind of leading up to it, having to fend all these people off that they didn't realise was so antagonised by it. And then I wondered if it was, like, a purposeful antagonism, which is interesting. But I don't know. Even recently I was involved in, like, a kind of futurist think tank thing here in Sydney, and the discussion really tended towards these anti-universalist, pluralist,

like what you said, even kind of carving out these niche spaces, people talking about cities, but people never as of what they were proposing in relation to, for example, the moral questions that we were discussing earlier. And I threw a couple of standards in relation to that, and everyone was kind of like, oh, what? So, I mean, yeah, I don't know, it's just something I've been thinking about, how these ideas float differently in different spaces. Yeah. So, but what's your conclusion? I mean, like in a sense, I would love to kind of connect. It's not like I would nag them or spam their comments threads or anything like that,

just to be able to see what was happening. On a left version of fragmentational politics, I'd love to see what was going on there. And as I say, I find it really hard to see that anywhere. I mean, I just... Temporary Autonomous Zones, Pirate Utopia, it's just never been developed very much. Or not outside of it. But that seems to have died off, doesn't it? I mean, it's an obvious anarchist theme. So, 100%, yeah, you do get that stuff in stuff going back to the 90s. But

it seems to me have disappeared and I don't see it as a assertive tendency anymore for some reason it seems like I was a little active in like discussion boards for that sort of thing like several years ago and then it seemed like actually really remarkably to decay and die out and I don't know if I had to guess in a diagnosis, it was sort of related to this discussion of, like, it ultimately amounting to organized criminal enterprise. And that the only way to, like, make it work, I mean, the temporary part, like, always deters people because it just, like, devolves into situationism or the situationists or whatever,

and that just kind of bores anyone who really has, like, concrete political aspirations. but then the alternative is the criminal thing and then no one wants to commit to that in public or wants to commit to that to themselves it just sort of like I don't know if it went underground exactly I mean I know in some instances it probably did but or if it just died out the left definitely has a problem in committing themselves to or around this decision about whether to commit themselves to law breaking or not whereas it seems like the right-wing discourse is a lot has existing arch narratives for how it is okay to break the law and how and where that

is allowed to happen whereas the left is never really sure where and when they want to commit to it and can't really, can't agree on anything but can't agree on that Yeah I mean lots of people obviously on the right would be shocked to hear you say that and would imagine it was the other way around I mean, in a lot of the popular imagination, you in turn might be shocked to hear this, but let me just run this past you. In a lot of the popular imagination, the left and criminality are almost synonymous term. And the right and law and order are almost synonymous. So it's not like actually I disagree with you, because I do think...

is most concealed, right? But it's not an uncontroversial thing. But it's interesting that I could find a lot of extremely dodgy, and by dodgy I just mean problematic people who would all be on the extreme right who would be, to me, interestingly pushing this. And the other character that I have to mention because I think he's so fascinating on this, is Keith Preston from this Attack the System site, which, you know, I mean, I'm not going to try and conclude it, and I don't spend a huge amount of time there,

but I find it, I'm just going to put the link there, I find it completely fascinating what he's doing, and on one level a massive agreement with what he's saying he calls it pan-secessionism which again is to just make this absolutely unconditional set of alliances across the ideological spectrum on the sole condition that everyone's just going to split and do their own thing you know but his associations are all Well, he would disagree with this. I won't say it. I'll let people judge out for themselves. But I think he would definitely be considered as a profoundly problematic ultra-rightist

by most people. You can try running it past people and see what they think. So I think it is strange. Why does that kind of edge of anarchism end up being monopolised by the Right? I don't know. Maybe it's a question of definition. Like these kind of anarchist and libertarian and pluralist positions often define freedom which is kind of not necessarily acceptable or a definition that goes far enough

in leftist political thought. It needs to be a constructive, positive type of freedom, which is the main kind of thing, I suppose, that when I bring these things up. Yeah, sorry, Amy, I didn't mean to interrupt you. Yeah, no, sorry. You were just saying a negative definition is not good enough. Yeah. From the point of view of leftist versions of this thought, that it's not enough to be free from coercion, it's not enough to be free from surveillance, it's not enough to be free from having to witness the acts of people whose ideologies you don't with. You have to then have some kind of positive traction

on the way the world is and build that up into a kind of collective or whatever in your patch vision. I don't know, maybe there's a distinction in between those kind of definitions of freedom because that's the thing I see with these anarchist and libertarian versions is that freedom only goes so far and maybe that's not enough for it to float nicely and more, what's the word, robustly leftist spaces. I don't know. I mean, it's difficult because I think this thing about only go so far has multiple meanings. Like, the strict meaning is there's only,

you restrict what you talk about because the principle being defended is that certain things are not to be argued about. You know, like once you have your own patch, it's no one else's business what happens on that patch, so why are we talking about it now? I don't have to persuade you to like what I'm going to do, or you don't have to persuade me to like what you're going to do. And so why would we be having that discussion? That's the dynamic, you know, the minimization of social substantial discussion is part of the principle. You know, it's to get us already adapted to the fact

that we're not going to interfere with what we're up to in our different... So on that level, it's purely in a way formal, isn't it? Like, if you didn't have that formal principle, you wouldn't even be getting started with this idea because you'd be saying that we were going to have some kind of compelling discussion where we would reach some sort of agreement about the way to organize a society and if you're having that discussion you're not doing this thing you're doing something else Yeah I mean if we can sit down And now all of us here. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don't think it necessarily has to be just happening on a purely discussion level as well. There can be a pragmatic aspect to it. It should be manifested. But I don't know how to construct that to argue it convincingly. Someone else probably does, though. I'm assuming... Well, I mean, isn't... Isn't sort of the point of having so much negative freedom distributed in space is that, you know, there is actually... The other side to that is that they have the independence to do what they like. That was the whole point of the conversation before. I mean, you actually...

more negative freedom you have is actually a condition of positive freedom. Otherwise, does that make sense? Yes, although obviously what positive freedom means is I guess controversial, isn't it? I take it probably the right in general has its hackles raised a bit by the notion of positive freedom because if positive freedom means entitlement, then obviously entitlement is a claim upon other people and therefore potentially it's a claim that exceeds this dynamic of fractionating, isn't it?

I mean, I think that, for instance, in the Alexander case, you know, there's a positive freedom as a child to be defended against brainwashing and constraints that would stop you from having full exit potential from whatever society you found yourself in and that ends up being an extremely thick substantial set of claims upon all the other units of the system, of the archipelago like if no child can be in any way constrained within their own society, then there's some weird heavy metal thing going on here

that I'm not quite understanding. I'm sure it's not coming from me. Who are we talking about? I think it might be Brent. Brendan try muting your mic. Oh Brendan, what the hell is going on with your system man? It's like having a kind of experimental noise event going on. I don't know, maybe this is a conversation to be continued in another week when we haven't

been talking for three hours. No, seriously, we're now so deep into overtime. I think I've got to start trying to escape. I mean... Maybe we can, I mean, if we'll just hang up, it'll just... Yeah, yeah, can we do that? Can we do that? Keep recording with tiny ears. I'm sorry if that seems a bit brutal, but maybe if anyone's really desperate to say something, we could do it, but otherwise just simultaneously or just say goodbye and hang up after four hours of secessionist chit chat. All right. Okay. Well, I'm going to go see you guys next week. Thank you all. Yeah. Thanks, Nick.

It's been great. OK, bye bye. Bye. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.