On Aug 25, 2025, at 5:50, Pieter Steenekamp <[email protected]> wrote:
Eric,
There have been many interesting responses, but I think I still owe you a reply
to your question: “What things do you think you see, Pieter?”
Here’s what I see:
1. Some statistics
According to Our World in Data, the frequency of “extrastate conflicts” (wars
between states) has been declining significantly since the early 1800s:
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/conflict-data?Conflict+type=Extrastate+conflicts&Measure=Conflict+rate&Data+source=Correlates+of+War+%E2%80%93+Wars&Sub-measure=All+ongoing+conflicts
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fourworldindata.org%2fexplorers%2fconflict-data%3fConflict%2btype%3dExtrastate%2bconflicts%26Measure%3dConflict%2brate%26Data%2bsource%3dCorrelates%2bof%2bWar%2b%25E2%2580%2593%2bWars%26Sub-measure%3dAll%2bongoing%2bconflicts&c=E,1,6NyGzUnFEYKp7aF1owtmwCsXjx9u_eGdx28EB1ujsN1EzVfo7mTNXhM735PLbRP-_lR-ZSdxBAfPX4G8PdtqV_U8N1gPDuWzowDu0sVLAgUsf4o,&typo=1>
So, despite the noise and the occasional flare-up, the long-term trend line
points downward.
2. A narrative inspired by Harari (on Ukraine)
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I listened to Yuval Harari’s
analysis (I don’t have the exact reference, so this is partly memory plus my
own interpretation). His point — which resonated with me — was that Russia had
already “lost” the war within months, if measured by its objectives.
Even if Ukraine were somehow to collapse entirely, Russia has still suffered
immense losses:
Putin lost credibility and influence in the broader post-Soviet region.
Russia’s economy took a deep hit, and future growth prospects are now stunted.
NATO was strengthened, with Finland joining and Sweden soon after — exactly the
opposite of Russia’s stated aims.
By the yardstick of “what was hoped for vs. what was gained,” Russia’s net loss
is obvious.
My takeaway: this sends a powerful message to other leaders who might consider
territorial aggression. The costs, in today’s world, can outweigh the
short-term gains.
3. Another narrative (Harari-inspired, expanded)
In Sapiens, Harari describes how language and gossip helped strengthen
altruism. Among chimps, altruism exists but cheating is rampant. With humans,
gossip ensured that cheaters were exposed, reducing the payoff from cheating
and encouraging cooperation.
Extending this to modern times: before mass communication, altruism worked
inside groups but violence between groups was common. Today, with global media
and social networks, “gossip” operates at a planetary scale. Leaders can’t hide
what they do.
Take Putin as an example: in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, the world
complained but largely let it slide. This time, the “global gossip network” has
made him an outcast. Other ambitious leaders are watching and calculating
whether they could afford the same kind of isolation.
4. The American context
After Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the American public has little appetite
for another large-scale foreign war. A president who tries to drag the country
into one risks enormous pushback from the electorate. This is not a guarantee
against future misadventures, but it is a strong counterweight.
5. Something else I see (the technology factor)
There’s one more thread that seems worth adding. Modern technology makes war
both harder and less rewarding in some cases:
Drones and cheap precision weapons allow even small countries to inflict
significant damage on larger powers.
Economic sanctions, while imperfect, can be deployed faster and with more
coordination than in the past.
Supply chains are global, which means that aggressors risk cutting themselves
off from the very technologies and markets they depend on.
In other words, the tools of modern globalization — finance, trade, tech —
double as tools of deterrence. You don’t need a world government to stop wars;
you just need a world that is so interconnected that aggressors quickly pay
unbearable costs.
So, to sum up:
Long-term statistics suggest wars are declining.
Ukraine shows the dangers of aggression in today’s interconnected world.
The “gossip effect” of global communication makes cheating (and invading)
harder to hide.
The American public is wary of more endless wars.
Technology and globalization add new forms of deterrence.
That’s what I see.
On Sun, 24 Aug 2025 at 14:35, Santafe <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
What things do you think you see, Pieter?
I am not following the announcements about U.S. foreign policy w.r.t. arms
closely at this point (for a variety of reasons mainly of attention bandwidth).
It has seemed to me that the largest aspect of U.S. behavior in this regime
has been erraticness, partly because that is the way trump defaults to doing
things generally, but also partly as an intentional strategy, with the premise
that giving no predictability or interpretability to anyone about anything they
do is somehow an advantage for their aims. I don’t know what I would guess the
aims to be, or why they believe that maximizing chaos is to their advantage,
but that would be my completely-amateur one-line characterization of them.
I do see what seems to be a sea change in a slightly different area, and I
wonder in how far it might be driving other changes:
In 2019, when I was first back in China after more than a decade away, I
had a sense that China had made a particular long-term decision. They had seen
that big data and big computing as a technology had introduced the potential
for a new thing that I call “information totalitarianism” of a form never
possible in human life before. I would frame this in terms of a concept of
“guard labor”, written about by Sam Bowles among others, as a characterization
of state power and social structure more generally. In even the most
authoritarian states, you can only redirect so much of the country’s entire
labor into various military/policing/surveillance/coercion activities, before
there is nobody left to do necessary work. Tiny states (back in the
before-times) with extractive economies powered by the world market (think N.
Korea, Liberia) are the only ones who can take guard labor to such a large
fraction of the society that there is no longer any degree at all of “consent
of the governed”, because the world market can support a gangster state
with no limits. But by the time one gets even as large as the Russian
Federation, the country itself is so big relative to the world market for its
extracted goods, that one needs to maintain some level of consent of the
governed for the state’s constituency at any given period to hold on to power.
But like anything industrial, big data allows one to burn fossil fuels (or
now nuclear fuels) to provide a force amplifier, where the same guard-functions
can be performed with far less of the manpower of the society re-apportioned to
guard labor. I had wondered whether this means that “consent of the governed”
can be eliminated as any kind of constraint for much much larger societies,
even those that make up big chunks of the whole world economy. My belief was
that China thought this would be possible, and was all-in to pursue it. That
was before the full ramifications of social media were being widely seen and
discussed by psychologists and pundits, and well before the outbreak of chat-AI
introduced entirely new ways of masking reality for people’s entire
experiential theater. The same concept would now be glaringly obvious to
anybody, and available to be developed in far more dimensions, with control
being pro-active and developmentally oriented as well as
reactive and coercive.
The Tech Oligarchs in Sili Valley saw something similar, but they didn’t
see it (back in 2019, as it seemed to me) the way a centralized state does;
they were still significantly viewing it from the company perspective of
competitors. So one saw specific changes, like the selling of electoral
public-harvesting to the republican operatives (through whatever the U.K.
consulting company was). And more recently, one of the few fully novel things
I have heard said by Scott Galloway, which seemed right to me, was that Musk’s
performance of “The advertisers can fuck themselves” was his moment of
realization — the first in the industry to do so — that the revenue model no
longer needed to be based in advertising. “Services” could be provided
entirely advert-free to users — so no advertiser revenue at all — in a limit,
because the company’s revenue stream was to use the “services” as honeypots to
harvest user data that could then be sold, at high price, as a bespoke service,
to third parties who would pay for it as the tool they needed to enforce
complete “enclosure”, as it used to be called in old British conflicts over
land use. Only now it is “enclosure” of every aspect of life.
Anyway (to try not to digress too tediously), once Musk saw it, in a way,
it became visible to The Industry as a whole. They may not all abandon
advertising as a revenue model entirely or all at once, but they now
understand, across the industry, what China understood since the 2010s, that
information-control for power will be the Big Leash that drags everything else
around. This whole cut-and-run change that I imagine I see, where the Tech
Oligarchs all line up behind trump, isn’t some kind of “Obeying in advance”, as
Tim Snyder has used the term, but rather a fully voluntary change of “business
model” on their part. And it makes the N. American technosphere much more like
a level of whole-state coordination than it was. All sides now see Information
Totalitarianism as the next major thing, and their whole attention is consumed
by the race to see who will capture it first.
Why did I go into all that, which seems tangential to the core of Pieter's
thread? At the same time as I do think these industry-guys are capable of
seeing and doing new things, and that because of their positioning in
technology and society they can be incredibly powerful, I don’t think they are
geniuses or are all that foresighted. They tend, in herds, to pursue a few
things at a time, and to simply let everything else fall away in their pursuit
of whatever the emphasis of the moment is. The “intellectuals” of the movement
(to my mind, largely ex-post just-so-story tellers) may say this is the
“rational” thing to do, since the Next Big Thing is clearly what will entrain
and drive everything else as “secondary” things, so they are fine to ignore the
secondary things for now; it will all get swept up later. But really, it is
just that they aren’t by temperament, portfolio diversifiers. They are
profit-extractors. In the “explore/exploit” language that some
Complexity-Theory types have liked for the past 30 years, these guys are
far to the “exploit” side, as contrasted, say, with academic sciences which
would like to claim they stay toward the “explore” side (and to some degree,
sometimes do).
So to Pieter's point about whether the wars are being dropped, and the influence
of military-industrial contractors a little-bit sidelined, I wonder if it is just
that they are “falling into neglect" because everybody with power and money is
chasing what they believe to be a much bigger fish.
??
Eric
> On Aug 23, 2025, at 22:08, Pieter Steenekamp <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>
> Disclaimer: This is not about Trump. He has many bad personal traits,
full stop.
>
> This post is about America’s long history of “forever wars.”
>
> I don’t have proof, so I’m not claiming that private military contractors
are the ones pushing wars to make money. What I do say is this: for the last few
decades, politicians from both parties have acted in ways that look exactly like
that. Maybe there are other reasons, but to me the result is the same — endless
wars. Bad for America, bad for the world. The only people who clearly benefit are
the shareholders of the military industry.
>
> Now, in the last six months, it feels like something might be changing.
Maybe it’s just noise and nothing will shift. But the optimist in me hopes that
America is starting to move away from fuelling wars abroad and will take a more
responsible role in world affairs.
>
> Of course, there will always be exceptions. I’m only talking about the
overall trend.
