Tech Feudalism: Another Sign of End Times

Last week Naked Capitalism posted a terrific piece, "Notes From an Emergency: Tech Feudalism," by Maciej Cegłowski. Ceglowski defines "the feudal internet" as follows:

The status quo in May 2017 looks like this:

There are five Internet companies—Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. Together they have a market capitalization just under 3 trillion dollars.

Bruce Schneier has called this arrangement the feudal Internet. Part of this concentration is due to network effects, but a lot of it is driven by the problem of security. If you want to work online with any measure of convenience and safety, you must choose a feudal lord who is big enough to protect you.

These five companies compete and coexist in complex ways.

Apple and Google have a duopoly in smartphone operating systems. Android has 82% of the handset market, iOS has 18%.

Google and Facebook are on their way to a duopoly in online advertising. Over half of the revenue in that lucrative ($70B+) industry goes to them, and the two companies between them are capturing all of the growth (16% a year).

Apple and Microsoft have a duopoly in desktop operating systems. The balance is something like nine to one in favor of Windows, not counting the three or four people who use Linux on the desktop, all of whom are probably at this conference.

Three companies, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, dominate cloud computing. AWS has 57% adoption, Azure has 34%. Google has 15%.

Outside of China and Russia, Facebook and LinkedIn are the only social networks at scale. LinkedIn has been able to survive by selling itself to Microsoft.

And outside of Russia and China, Google is the world’s search engine.

That is the state of the feudal Internet, leaving aside the court jester, Twitter, who plays an important but ancillary role as a kind of worldwide chat room.

 As China is donning the mantle of global leadership with its One Belt, One Road Initiative and Made in China 2025, the U.S. is looking to expand perpetual war to more parts of the planet. On the one hand you have China which is looking to build, on the other hand you have the United States which is looking to destroy. Most would dismiss this as an oversimplification, but what other conclusion can we draw?

The only thing the United States has in the way of an industrial policy is to be found in Silicon Valley where a mad dash is underway to corner the market with the first commercially successful self-driving vehicle. The masters of the tech universe, as Ceglowski explains, are also enraptured with space travel and immortality:

Given this scary state of the world, with ecological collapse just over the horizon, and a population sharpening its pitchforks, an important question is how this globalized, unaccountable tech industry sees its goals. What does it want? What will all the profits be invested in?

What is the plan?

The honest answer is: rocket ships and immortality.

I wish I was kidding.

The best minds in Silicon Valley are preoccupied with a science fiction future they consider it their manifest destiny to build. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are racing each other to Mars. Musk gets most of the press, but Bezos now sells $1B in Amazon stock a year to fund Blue Origin. Investors have put over $8 billion into space companies over the past five years, as part of a push to export our problems here on Earth into the rest of the Solar System.

As happy as I am to see Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos fired into space, this does not seem to be worth the collapse of representative government.

Our cohort of tech founders is feeling the chill breath of mortality as they drift into middle age. And so part of what is driving this push into space is a more general preoccupation with ‘existential risk’.

Musk is persuaded that we’re living in a simulation, and he or a fellow true believer has hired programmers to try to hack it.

Peter Thiel, our most unfortunate German import, has built a survival retreat for himself in New Zealand.

Sam Altman hoards gold in Big Sur.

OpenAI, a religious cult thinly disguised as a research institution, has received $1B in funding to forestall the robot rebellion.

The biggest existential risk, of course, is death, so a lot of money is going to make sure that our big idea men don’t expire before the world has been received the full measure of their genius.

Google Ventures founded the very secretive life extension startup Calico, with $1.5B dollars in funding. Google loses $4B a year on its various “moon shots”, which include life extension. They employ Ray Kurzweil, who believes we’re still on track for immortality by 2045. Larry Ellison has put $370M to anti-aging research, as anybody would want to live in a world with an immortal Larry Ellison. Our plutocrats are eager to make death an opt-out experience.

Now, I’m no fan of death. I don’t like the time commitment, or the permanence. A number of people I love are dead and it has strained our relationship.

But at the same time, I’m not convinced that a civilization that is struggling to cure male-pattern baldness is ready to take on the Grim Reaper. If we’re going to worry about existential risk, I would rather we start by addressing the two existential risks that are indisputably real—nuclear war and global climate change—and working our way up from there.

But real problems are messy. Tech culture prefers to solve harder, more abstract problems that haven’t been sullied by contact with reality. So they worry about how to give Mars an earth-like climate, rather than how to give Earth an earth-like climate. They debate how to make a morally benevolent God-like AI, rather than figuring out how to put ethical guard rails around the more pedestrian AI they are introducing into every area of people’s lives.

The tech industry enjoys tearing down flawed institutions, but refuses to put work into mending them. Their runaway apparatus of surveillance and manipulation earns them a fortune while damaging everything it touches. And all they can think about is the cool toys they’ll get to spend the profits on.

The message that’s not getting through to Silicon Valley is one that your mother taught you when you were two: you don’t get to play with the new toys until you clean up the mess you made.

The circumstances that have given the tech industry all this power will not last long. There is a limited time in which our small caste of tech nerds will have the power to make decisions that shape the world. By wasting the talents and the energies of our brightest people on fantasy role play, we are ceding the future to a more practical group of successors, some truly scary people who will take our tools and use them to advance a very different agenda.

To recap: the Internet has centralized into a very few hands. We have an extremely lucrative apparatus of social control, and it’s being run by chuckleheads.

The American government is also being run by chuckleheads.

The question everybody worries about is, what happens when these two groups of chuckleheads join forces?

I think the answer is that end times are upon us.

It is Hard to Imagine What Peace with the Taliban would Look Like

Afghanistan is getting a new defense minister. Gen. John Campbell is being replaced by Lt. Gen. John "Mick" Nicholson, who will likely preside over whatever ignominious demise is in store for the Ghani-Abdullah government. Here is the blurb that appears in this morning's Foreign Policy "Situation Report":

Fourteen years of war, and a new General steps up. One place in particular where American special operators have been making headlines is Afghanistan. And the 9,800 U.S. troops there are about to get a new boss. If confirmed by the Senate, Army Lt. Gen. John “Mick” Nicholson will pin on a fourth star and head to Kabul in coming months to replace Gen. John Campbell, who is expected to retire. Nicholson, a veteran of multiple deployments to Afghanistan, is currently commander of NATO’s Allied Land Command in Izmir, Turkey. He’ll also appear before the Senate Armed Services Committee Thursday morning at 9:30 a.m. for a hearing on his nomination. Watch it live here.

Campbell took over the war in the summer of 2014, and was expected to be the general to close up shop on the U.S. and NATO presence in Afghanistan. But after shuttering hundreds of combat outposts across the country and ending the NATO combat mission on Jan. 1, 2015, Afghan security forces have faltered in the face of a consistent Taliban offensive. Despite Washington’s $60 billion investment in the Afghan army and police, Campbell has argued that they need several more years of training and support before they’re ready to stand alone. And now the next general steps up to take over the fight.

To get a sense of the contours of the Taliban offensive, there is David Jolly's "Taliban Sabotage Cuts Major Power Source for Afghanistan Capital." The Taliban blew up a transmission tower in Baghlan, the province next to Kunduz. The Taliban took control of Kunduz City for two weeks in October. Now they are engaged in an offensive in Baghlan.

One of the passages in Jolly's piece that really jumps out at the reader is his description of the Afghan power grid:

Afghanistan suffers from a chronic power shortage, with less than 40 percent of the population even connected to the grid, according to World Bank data. Three-quarters of the country’s electricity is imported from the neighboring countries of Uzbekistan, Iran, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. The long transmission lines leave Kabul vulnerable to outages from sabotage. As a result, backup generators are de rigueur among those who can afford them.

After 14 years of U.S. occupation and hundreds of billions of dollars spent, two-thirds of the country is not connected to the power grid, and 75 percent of its electricity is imported. This tells you more about the failure of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan than the chronically dysfunctional Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police.

Jolly goes on to mention the Taliban offensive in Helmand Province in the country's south. Remember, it is winter, the season when fighting is supposed to wind down:

The unrest in the north is arguably not the worst of the government’s problems at the moment. Helmand Province, in the south, has been under siege for months, and officials say that only the timely dispatch of Afghan and American special forces kept it from completely falling under Taliban control toward the end of 2015.

On Wednesday morning, insurgents attacked a demining team in Nawabad village in the Greshk district of Helmand Province, killing at least three people, said Mohammad Ismail, the district police chief. He said the police quickly scattered the insurgents after a 30-minute gun battle. Had the police not arrived, he said, the insurgents would very likely have killed or kidnapped all of the deminers, employees of the Demining Agency for Afghanistan.

The Chinese are reportedly getting antsy ("China Urging Afghanistan to Restart Peace Talks With Taliban" by Ed Wong; "China Considers Larger Role in Afghanistan Peace Process" by Ed Wong and David Jolly), worried that a collapsed Afghanistan ruled by various Salafist groups would serve as a transmission belt for jihadi Uighurs to destabilize western China's Xinjiang region. Also, as long as Afghanistan remains an oozing ulcer, Xi Jinping's "One Belt, One Road" development plan for Central Asia will be unable to achieve its full potential. One Belt, One Road is vital to China because it is the Dragon's counter to Obama's militarized Asia pivot. Hence, the Chinese are putting pressure on Pakistan to reboot peace talks between the Taliban and the Ghani government.

But what would peace with the Taliban look like? Is such a thing even possible? Would the Taliban agree to serve within a U.S.-created Afghan government? Is partition of the country on the table? It all seems like nonsense, a sentiment basically echoed by U.S. Army Officer Lemar Farhad in "Why Peace with the Taliban Is a Bad Idea: What Needs to Happen Instead":

Pakistan’s view of peace with the Taliban entails the placement of actual, dyed-in-the-wool Taliban ideologues in the ranks of the Afghan civilian and military establishments. This would result in infiltration of Afghan military and civilian cadres, by pro-Wahhabi partisans from Hekmatyar’s Hezbi-Islami and the Haqqani network.

Unfortunately Farhad's solution is pure fantasy:

Establishing sustainable peace in Afghanistan, and the region at large, requires the total and unequivocal neutralization of the Taliban as a viable fighting force. This is because the Taliban and peace are antithetical to each other. Defeat of the Taliban requires a broad based international effort to dissuade the Pakistani government from supporting Taliban action in Afghanistan. The U.S. policy in particular should be geared at rendering Islamabad either incapable of aiding the Taliban or unwilling to do so. Declaring the Taliban as a foreign terrorist organization is the first step. After all, an insurgent force without protected safe-havens, financial institutions, resources, materiel, logistics capabilities, and a host-state will be unable to survive for long.

For this to happen, the United States would have to confront Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Absent a revolution in the homeland, that is not going to happen.

Maybe the best that can be hoped for is a "frozen conflict" a la countries of the former Soviet Union. A set of ceasefires with international monitors.