Force Multipliers and the Coming Anarchy

Requiem for a dystopian vision

Précis

This is a story about a proposal I wrote in June, 2019, to do a series of essays for the cryptocurrency website Cointelegraph exploring various dystopian scenarios in which all of civilization goes to shit. I called this proposed series Force Multipliers and the Coming Anarchy.

Nothing ever came of my proposal, but how I came to write it is a story in itself.

Most of today’s post is that proposal, just as I wrote it, with some comments

2024: called out like this

which I wrote today. I’ve also added a couple of pictures and links.

(Although nothing came of my conversations with Cointelegraph, a few years later the same John Biggs, introduced below, connected me with a startup crypto project that was looking for a technical writer. I wrote about that experience in 100% Bafflegab: My year as a crypto/DeFi tech writer.)

Top story on March 21, 2024

Cointelegraph and the irrepressible John Biggs

Five years ago my friend

John Biggs

was approached about taking the job as Editor in Chief (EIC) of Cointelegraph, a website devoted to covering news in the Bitcoin/Crypto/Blockchain space. John wasn’t interested in the job, but he nominated me for it because he knew I was looking for work. That came as a surprise to me.

Me: John, I’m not qualified for this position. I don’t know anything about running a news website.
Biggs: I thought you said you ran tech pubs at Sun and all those other startups? Didn't you manage a whole bunch of techwriters?
Me: Well yeah, but —
Biggs: It's the same thing.
Me: No it's not. It's not remotely the same thing. Besides, I don't know the first thing about crypto.
Biggs: Don't worry about that. It's all just bullshit. You'll figure it out.
Me: But —
Biggs: I thought you said you wanted work? This will pay good money. Do you want a job or don't you? 
Me: But —
Biggs: Listen, if you fuck it up they'll fire you and you'll get another job. That's the way it works.
Me: But —
Biggs: Start doing some homework. I already told them to call you.

You have to understand that John Biggs was very well known in the world of real-time, up-to-the minute, tech-focused websites, having already been EIC at Gizmodo and TechCrunch and a bunch of other sites like them. His recommendation carried weight. I figured what the hell, if Biggs thinks I can do it, maybe I can do it. So when I got an email from the publisher of Cointelegraph asking if I was interested, I said yes.

The interviewing process was. . . unusual. It did not go well.

To start, the publisher was based in Malta and insisted on using Telegram to communicate. I didn’t have Telegram installed on my phone, and when I did finally get it installed I couldn’t get it to work, so the first try was aborted. I felt like a clown. A few days later I connected with someone calling from Malta, who I thought was the person who was to be my boss. But he couldn’t even describe the responsibilities of the job I thought I was interviewing for. He was also distracted, talking to somebody else on another line. When that call was over I had no idea where things stood. I talked to Biggs and he said “I think there’s some political bullshit going on at that place.” I said, “Well, thanks for telling me.” The next person I talked to was, I think, the Cointelegraph section head based in NYC. She evidently thought I was interviewing for a writing position, reporting to her. I thought I was interviewing to be her boss. We were well into farce territory by now.

The next person I talked to was an editor, and neither one of us had any idea what position I was interviewing for. But we got talking about some of my dystopian hobbyhorses, and he said, “Would you like to write a series on that? We’ve been talking about doing more long-form essays. Why don’t you write up a proposal. I’m sure I can make it happen.” So I wrote up a proposal, mailed it to him, and I never heard from anybody at Cointelegraph ever again. I think I dodged a bullet.

But I did get this “multipliers” document out of it, so it wasn’t a total waste of time, I guess. It’s kind of fun to look back now on how the future looked to me five years ago and match it up with how things look in 2024. By some definition of “fun,” that is. To whatever extent contemplating the end of human civilization, with mass starvation, endless war, and all variety of groovy Mad Max mayhem can be considered fun.

I think it’s an OK piece of writing, but a bit wordy in parts. I have put a line through some phrases that I find cringey today.

Dystopia! It’s what’s for breakfast! Won’t you join me?

Force Multipliers and the Coming Anarchy

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. ”

- Archimedes

A friend of mine¹ has a podcast that he calls Technotopia, about “how technology will change the world for the better.” “Disruptive technologies” are a perennial topic on this show. My friend and his guests talk about how AIs (artificial intelligences) will improve everything — detecting cancer as soon as it appears and tailoring individualized medicines to cure it, discovering new ways to restore health to the oceans, even improving our sex lives. Technotopians share a vision of a blockchain world where every market is optimal and fraud is impossible. Synthetic biology, they say, will feed us, cure our ills, extend our lifespans by decades. In their imagined future there is a technological solution for every challenge that we now confront, from the climate crisis to food insecurity to the human predilection for war and mayhem.

2024: In autumn, 2023, Marc Andreesen, the Silicon Valley software engineer, entrepreneur, venture capitalist billionaire wrote “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” I wrote about it in my essay Marc Andreesen was going to debug the internet or die trying.

We’re all familiar with the alternative, cyberpunk, vision. Philip K. Dick’s Blade Runner. (Or anything else by Philip K. Dick). William Gibson’s Neuromancer.  Black Mirror. Max Headroom. Robocop. Everything has broken down. Corporations little distinct from mafias run the world. Everything is privatized — from schools to prisons (is there a difference?) to law enforcement to “guest encampments” at the borders — not that borders matter much anymore. Everyone’s a cynic — or if they’re not, they’re probably either insane or an android. Currency is information; information is currency, and everything, everywhere, is bleak.  In the words of R. Crumb’s mumbling everyman, this whole goddamn fucking planet has turned to shit.

Illustration added 2024

But don’t stop there! According to some experts even the darkest of the dystopian cyberpunk visions are not nearly bleak enough because they underestimate the severity and imminence of the climate catastrophe that awaits us just over the horizon. Human civilization itself — even the most bleak, dystopian version of it — may be not long for this world.

‘Disruption.” You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

So which of these competing visions is more likely to be correct? Are we headed to a technological utopia, a world of freedom, peace and abundance, or are we careening out of control towards an unimaginable hell on earth?

The answer to this question depends in large part on just how disruptive these new “disruptive” technologies are. Will they merely disrupt existing markets, industries and traditions, and thus allow the flowering of ever more wonderful possibilities? Or will they disrupt and destroy the balances of power that have made, and continue to make, modern civilization possible?  

The utopian vision speaks for itself. Over the next few months I’ll look into the dystopian counterarguments. I’m going to take a look at each of several emerging technologies with an eye to understanding whether their disruptive power may be too great to restrain, with side effects that may make chaos and tragedy on an unimaginable scale inevitable.  

The Fulcrum and the Lever

Civilizations don’t last forever. Not the Ancient Egyptian civilization; neither the Inca nor the Aztec, not the Mayan or the Mycenaean. Those older civilizations were discrete things, geographically limited to one place on Earth. But such is the nature of our interconnected world that today we only have one: One earth, one civilization.

I suppose I should say what I mean by that word. So let me define a civilization as a system of order that allows large numbers of people to live in close proximity to each other by providing, for the preponderance of the people, sufficient food, water, shelter and protection from violence to allow the system to sustain itself over several human generations.

I’m going to take it as axiomatic that the system of order that allows upwards of seven billion people to share the earth today is internationalism, in which geographically-localized political entities called nation-states (or roughly speaking countries), harness the collective power of individuals to provide a context in which the people’s existential needs can be met. 

Since their inception, pretty much the only thing that could threaten the existence of a nation was another nation. No individual person, or small group of persons, could credibly threaten a nation-state. But what if that balance changes? What if synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, cyberwarfare, cryptocurrency, surveillance capitalism, accelerated financialization and related technologies, jointly, severally or individually undermine the foundations of the nation-state? What if — just a little thought experiment here — what if a few of these technologies hacked together were to give a clever 14 year old kid sitting in his mother’s basement both a fulcrum and a lever long enough to bring the economy of the United States of America to a standstill for a week? What if some bunch of randos on the darknet decided to use drones shut down every airport in Europe and stoke a panic using a swam of fake-new bots just for the lulz? What if Facebook’s and Amazon’s cryptocurrencies were to make the dollar and the euro their bitches? How long before we’re in a 21^st century Game of Thrones?

Such scenarios have been in the realm of science fiction for decades. But are they, like so many other things from SciFi, finally becoming real? 

With no nations, can there be internationalism? Without internationalism, can the climate crisis be addressed? If the climate crisis cannot be resolved, can civilization persist?

The Nation-State: Out of Date?

From whence cometh the power of the nation-state?  Crudely speaking, from its military power or its economic power or both. A nation’s military power is, in all but the most degenerate cases, dependent on its economic power, so where does that come from? From the nation’s human and financial capital, from natural resources found within its borders, from the nation’s institutions —from universities to corporations to courts and legislatures — all working together in some approximate harmony.  Hmmmm. . .

Here’s a snippet of a recent conversation (lightly edited) between “nostrademons” and “blotter_paper” that I cribbed from Hacker News. The subject was the recent spate of ransomware attacks carried out against corporations and even cities, like Baltimore in the USA, using cybertools originally developed by the U.S. National Security Agency:

nostrademons: There's this huge pandora's box about opening up state-level weaponry to the general public. Ultimately, it undermines the nation state as an organizing principle. And that's the world we live in now.

blotter_paper: The extent to which power is distributed relies on the extent to which technology is distributed, but also the extent to which the distributed technology can be utilised by a relatively small group. A small group with equally good spear designs still loses to the larger group. A small group with equally good drones, nukes, viruses, and firewalls might be able to put up something closer to an even fight. A radical open sourcing of technology might lead to a breakup of the modern nation state into smaller entities. 

The parallel structure scenario might be somewhat arguable today, but always has been; the line between organized crime and government is blurry. I don't think we've moved significantly far in that direction as a result of open source tools yet. If there ever comes a day when private defense contractors can accept Bitcoin without KYC and taxes, just rolling through the streets in a small division of tanks selling AK-47s to passing school children, I'll completely agree that the nation state has been undermined.

So how do we tell who’s more likely correct, nostrademons or blotter_paper? Political pundits and election handicappers follow betting exchanges to harvest the so-called wisdom of the market. “Follow the money,” the conventional wisdom says. 

So it must be noted that the oligarchs seem to be hedging their bets between order and anarchy, offshoring their money, gobbling up Bitcoin, quietly assembling private armies. We’re not seeing too many Trumps or Sand Hill Road venture capitalists running off to enlist in the U.S. Army, but some of them are quite cozy with Blackwater mercenaries.  It’s not even clear whether the President of the United States is more loyal to the United States or to some kind of Cosa Nostra with tentacles from Moscow to Bahrain to the NRA.

2024: This was written in 2019; Trump was president.

Garden-variety Silicon Valley billionaires and even some of their poorer-cousins the mere hundred-millionaires are doing the Doomsday Prep, some of them gleefully. Indeed, some techno-libertarians seem genuinely aroused by prospect of the coming anarchy. Who needs porn when you’ve got billion-person Hunger Games streaming live into your bunker?

But how are we to know whether everything is about to fall apart, or if, instead, the techno-utopians are right I’m just having some kind of technoparanoid fever-dream? I think a little research might be in order.

Force Multipliers

Here’s a preview of some of the particular technologies I plan to investigate. These are all force-multiplying technologies which might, in theory, be powerful enough to give a small group or even an individual the capability to threaten a political entity of great size, such as a city or a country. For each of them I’ll interview experts in the field and try to cover a wide rand of opinion. We shall then see what we shall see.

Synthetic Biology 

The era of synthetic biology began around 1975 with the first work on what was then called “recombinant” DNA, when a gene from a virus was first inserted into a bacterium.  Since then the tools and techniques for sequencing and manipulating DNA have improved at an ever-increasing rate, such that the cost of sequencing a genome has fallen by a factor of at least a thousand the days of the Human Genome Project in the late 1990’s.

But as fast as this technology was advancing, the development of the CRISPR family of genetic editing tools kicked synthetic biology into orbit.

2024: For more in-depth discussion see my essays Shifted reading frames and How I decoded the human genome.

With CRISPR comes the incredible potential for curing and preventing disease and improving the quality of life for millions. Transhumanistic enhancements and augmentations are not too hard to imagine.

But CRISPR technology is fundamentally democratic — available to anyone —and it’s not too hard either to imagine it being put to nefarious uses. In fact any synthetic biology conference one attends, from high school and college IGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machines) competitions to academic and industry gatherings is going to have biosafety and biosecurity themes, and you can bet that FBI antiterrorism folk will be there. Some experts I’ve spoken to downplay the dangers embodied in CRISPR. Some are less sanguine. And some of them have their proverbial hair on fire.

Cyberwar (against physical infrastructure)

Ever since STUXNET, the world’s first digital weapon, was reverse-engineered by an ad-hoc cohort of computer security experts from around the world and determined to be the instrument of a coordinated attack on the uranium-enhancing machinery of Iran, people have been warning that tools (or weapons) just like it could be used against all kinds of vital infrastructures, from electrical grids to urban water supplies to telecommunications networks to highways, tunnels and bridges.  Kim Zetter, in her wonderfully written and quite scary book Countdown to Zero Day, explained just how insecure and vulnerable to STUXNET-like attacks modern societies are. 

2024: Still scary as hell

It took years for some of the sharpest computer programmers in the world, perhaps numbering in the hundreds at NSA and elsewhere, to invent and deploy STUXNET.  But now that the tools have been released into the proverbial wild, they’re available to anyone bold and motivated enough to use them.

It didn’t take long for the bad guys to notice. The use of so-called “ransomware” to extort millions from cities, towns, hospitals, agencies, corporations, etc., is an everyday occurrence. It’s not farfetched to call some of these attacks acts of war.  It doesn’t take too much imagination to imagine multi-front coordinated attacks, perhaps even using lightweight drones to launch physical weapons, as ISIS fighters have done in Iraq and Syria.

And yet it’s not even clear who the bad guys are. 

Cyberwar (against social/political infrastructure)

As scary as the digital attacks on physical infrastructure have been and remain, many people believe that another kind of digital warfare presents an even bigger threat: the use of a variety of techniques ranging from electronically changing election results to advanced techniques of “psy-ops” and propaganda to destabilize countries by demoralizing the population and undermining their belief in the system.

The tools of artificial intelligence, data mining and surveillance capitalism, leveraging off platforms like Facebook and Twitter, are all cited or implied in the report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.  In his public statement Mueller said, “I will close by reiterating the central allegation of our indictments: that there were multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election. And that allegation deserves the attention of every American.”

There is no reason to believe that such efforts are not ongoing. But neither is there any reason to believe that such efforts can only be carried out by nation-state agencies. 

Now, when you consider that Facebook has recently announced AI technology that can synthesize the voice of Bill Gates (and by implication anyone else), and that Samsung researches have recently demonstrated the ability to create realistic 3-D avatars of anyone from a single photograph, one can only imagine the type of engineered propaganda we’re about to be subjected to. Such propaganda and related efforts are not only attacks on their specific target, but on the notion of the state itself, and in fact on the notions of science and truth. 

2024: I think we’re well on our way down this particular rabbit hole. I don’t know how we’ll ever get back to the surface.

Blockchain/Cryptocurrency

Libertarian-leaning enthusiasts of Bitcoin and related “altcoins” and altcoin platforms like Ethereum are the future of money.  Once cryptocurrencies become more widely used and understood, they will inevitably replace national “fiat” currencies like the dollar and the euro. When that happens, they say, the issuing entities (United States, European Union, etc.) will inevitably whither, since their power is derived from the monopolistic position of their currencies in commerce.  Is there any substance to this argument? And if it’s true, is it a desirable outcome?

2024: This outcome seeming less likely these days. See my essay 100% Bafflegab.

Fintech (financial technology), or, the Capital-Concentrating Centrifuge

French economist Thomas Pinketty, in his epochal Capital in the 21^st Century convincingly documents and explains the centuries-long tendency of wealth to accrue to fewer and fewer people.  The wealthiest one percent of people on earth control such an enormous percentage of the world’s wealth that you don’t even want to know about it, and the top .01 percent has so much wealth that it’s dangerous to even think about it because your head might explode.

This is, Picketty proves, the inevitable result of our current implementation of capitalism.  Moreover, fin-tech, the use of AIs and enormous amounts of computing power to squeeze every last centime out of every last transaction is only amplifying this already-present tendency.

Now if you’ll grant me that at the extreme end of the wealth-distribution curve there is no meaningful distinction between economic power and political power (that is, to the very poor and the very rich, there is no difference between money and power), it follows that technology that is speeding up the concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people is also speeding up the concentration of power in the hands of fewer and fewer people. At some threshold — have we crossed it already? — the ultra-wealthy have so much power that they are beyond the reach of any law or government.  They can hire groups or individuals to use any of the tools, techniques or weapons I’ve already discussed against any entity they choose. They thus become virtual nations unto themselves. How many of such players does it take before the international regime collapses? How long before New York becomes Caracas?

Is It Hot in Here or Is It Just Me?

Overhanging all of these developments, of course, is climate crisis. I’m not going to look at that as a stand-alone topic in the course of the upcoming essays, but rather let it inform everything, as it’s the rising water we’re swimming in, the clock we hear ticking, the gun over the mantelpiece that we’re hoping won’t go off.  In other times the challenges posed by synthetic biology or AI-driven propaganda assaults might seem manageable. In the context of a burning-up world, any one of the scenarios I sketched above conceivably could be contained. But a cocktail of them might be enough to tip the scales to anarchy. In any event that’s my starting assumption. We’ll find out more, I trust, as we go along.

2024 Well, what do you think? Too dystopian? Not dystopian enough?

Let me know what you think!

1. That would be Biggs.