History has in fact ended — not as a triumph of liberal democracy (as Fukuyama believed) but as the extension of technique, industrial production, and the state. How exactly this has come to pass is not to be discussed here, but I should point you to my own coverage of the topic elsewhere.

In Max Weber’s Die Protestantiche Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus he posits that the geist² of capitalism is found in the values of protestantism. This spirit is also identified by Hegel as that which develops the final historical position. While the capitalist society remains, and is even increasing in intensity, we have philosophically moved on to another stage in the development of this spirit. The final historical position has been the post-protestant “cult of reason” that was first formulated in revolutionary France.³ This idea, even though no longer a revolutionary rejection, remains the religion of the modern world, even in those places where “traditional values” and religion are ostensibly still strong. An evangelical American would have trouble destroying his beloved Ford f-150 for no rational reason whatsoever, in the manner in which Abraham was prepared to sacrifice Isaac. There is no belief held in the post-historical world than rational thought.

As I explained in Exponentials we have trouble understanding the implications of eˣ growth. When looking merely at the recent past all that came before seems irrelevant, and likewise when peering into the future the possibilities seem endless. The consequences of this is a dual rejection; of the well-travelled past as a stranger and the unknown future as a close friend. Today we instead live in the derivative of reality — of the current as defined by its trajectory between the old and the new. This is the temporal space where post-historical man lives.

But if we are then enmeshed in this trajectory through historical development, how can post-historical man be considered post-historical? Are we not then obsessed with our travel through history and in that sense more historical than ever before? The issue at the core of this is that there is no longer any authentic historical development to strife for. We are racing for ever-increasing wealth, ecological protections, state control, laissez-faire capitalism, and authentic happiness all at once, longing for the glory attained by the Caesars of old. But most of all, we are obsessed with the origin itself, of the driving force of progress.

Post-historical man is inseparable from his technical counterpart, who seeks above all to do more with less, to build grand systems, to raise the poor out of their squalor and to fix the problems of the world. This is firmly rooted in the belief of the enlightenment, and particularly those of German idealism — with the values of freedom and rationality at its heart. These are in turn two sides of the same coin; The only reason not to perform an the most rational act is if one is not free to do so. But how does the systems of technical society, and in turn the pressures of “modern life” shape the mind of the individual?

It is clear to those who bother to think about it that the technical mindset today is all-encompassing; we live in a world filled with efficiency. But in what manner is this sustainable? In many it is fully so; the dominance of technique merely pushes us to fix its inherent problems as they appear.⁴

But it is at the same time the case that humans are not meant to live in the world we have built. We have built a world for Homo Economicus, not for Homo Sapiens. The values of religion are no longer useful for social organisation, and so they have intentionally (although not by any single individual) been replaced by agnosticism and atheism.

Some people argue that the liberal attempts to spread this way of life globally failed — most clearly in the shown in the Tiananmen (天安们) massacre. But my own experiences of the prc showed a starkly different truth. While the mainland Chinese have not transformed their political system to a free liberal democracy they have nevertheless become very similar to us in their philosophical position. Their daily concerns practically identical to those in our populations, and I did not find them to be locked in an intense ideological struggle with western political, ethical, or economic systems. It is in practice impossible to build a system that is not rational and technical, for any such system will be out-competed by those who make use of such tools.

But what is it like to live in a post-historical society? The readers of this will be all too familiar with the answer, since they themselves are almost guaranteed to live such a life. We have already described the forces that have gotten us here, but it is nevertheless of interest to cover the general consequences of their implementation.

The primary goal of post-historical society is the entertainment and happiness of man.⁵ All other goals are subservient to the above — merely requirements that must be fulfilled to make sure that mankind is satisfied. The characteristic element of the post-historical world is of course that historical action no longer becomes possible. The individual person can no longer significantly shift the course of human history as is thus forced to live their life either contributing to mankind’s now divine progress or to merely watch as work continues. The chief instrument for both of these activities has become the internet.

The world online — as opposed to the one irl — does not exist. It is merely a simulacrum of the physical world’s creation. No human being has ever existed online, not even in such extreme cases as Christian Weston Chandler. Nevertheless an increasing share of humanity’s collective activities oriented toward the digital realm where the resulting product exists merely on a global interconnected network of computers.

This is the domain of media — or at least a form of it. The post-historical aim of media is to be merely consumed and not to be interacted with. Such a definition can even be extended to things email that are not traditionally considered as media. Social media is also included within this because most social media platforms are not made for reactions as a primary intent, if they are it is merely as a way to generate more content for public consumption.

We are not glued to our devices for any conspiratorial reason. There is not an evil cabal of the global elite who is trying to keep us suppressed with entertainment. How do I know this? Because they themselves are chronically online. If the president of the United States does not himself feel capable of historical action (and instead wishes to spend his time online, golfing, or bowling) how can ordinary man?

A counterargument against the contemporary post-scare reality is that there is still work that has to be done; we have not yet reached a level of fully automated luxury communism. This is not true. A very small share of the population currently labours in sectors that are inherently required such as food production, somatic healthcare, and infrastructure. All the other work is of course useful, but it could in theory be done without. The only cost would be in the happiness of mankind.

In advanced economies the predominant share of gdp is in the service industry — people performing favours for each other. The automation of service work by advances in ai promises to make much of this work redundant. The response to this has in many cases been that increases in automation instead allocates people to new jobs where they can be even more productive.⁶ But what jobs remain when both the production of goods and services have been automated? Will all that remain be performing tasks for ai? Not entirely. In a world merely meant for human entertainment, companionship becomes a commodity.

It was Alexandre Kojève’s belief that post-historical man would inevitably be reduced to his most animal forms as political action became impossible. This is in fact the trend that we are seeing. The growth of services like Onlyfans and Fansly shows how profitable intimate human connection can be.

This is despite the fact that the internet has made pornography more and more distribute-able. It is also not a question of niche kinks, since the automation of tailor-made pornography by llm image generation has seemingly not impacted these human-centred platforms. Porn has always constituted a significant share of consumer internet traffic, but the difference here is the focus on the individual’s relation to another human being. Prostitution is nothing new of course — it is after all “the world’s oldest profession” — and it is merely one form of post-historical labour.

Companionship need not be sexual, and sexual stimulation might not be continuously wished for. Things like simple company (especially for the elderly who make up an increasing share of the world), travel guides, spiritual or technical mentors, politicians,⁷ influencers, therapists, artists, and doctors all perform some form of work where the interaction with another human being is the most important part.

Above all advertising is the industry that embodies the spirit of the post-historical economy. It appears to our most base animal desires — for safety, community, approval, or mere satisfaction — and has as its aim to inform us of goods and services that we did not know that we needed in the first place. Advertising has slowly become less and less of an artform; it is instead becoming increasingly “hidden” in the world around us, silently embedded in media and in our social interactions.

The internet is what facilitates the expansion of the personal. The individual can sit at home; single, childless, friendless even, and still feel adequately entertained through their feeds of information, communicated through television, the smartphone, or literature. When earlier one had to venture out into the world to experience it, now one can instead merely have it delivered to you.

The above development is not due to llms specifically. It is due to artificial intelligence in the broadest possible sense. Intelligent machines are things as abstract as the structure of human organisations, of biological and financial systems, and of mechanical automatons such as a combustion engine. They are all intelligent in the sense of making assumptions about the world and acting within it to create something new.

Talk of shifting jobs to things like negotiation and long-term planning is idealistic — even if llm capabilities flatline the rest of society will continue on building more and more advanced systems and technologies to further eliminate dread and toil, leaving us with reading spice and water-skiing as activities to fill our ecstatic lives. There are no longer any great Jihads to be carried out, no great political work to be created. All that is left to do is the construction of industrial society’s final utopia; the city of Babel. God is in his heaven. All is right with the world. ❦

Nuclear fusion, just like nuclear fission, makes use of the strong force to harness energy. As can be inferred from its name, the strong force is incredibly powerful amongst the fundamental forces of the universe; two orders of magnitude stronger than the electromagnetic force that governs over chemical bonds. The difference between fusion and fission is that while fission (and thus contemporary nuclear power) splits unstable heavy isotopes¹ into smaller ones, fusion takes isotopes of hydrogen (the lightest element) and merges them together to create heavier helium. Both of these release energy in the process, but fusion is considerably harder to succeed in.

Sometimes, when talking about llm alignment or the internet, people will mention “instructions for how to make a nuclear bomb” as something very arcane and secret. In fact, it is technically quite easy — it simply requires a lot of resources.² Nuclear power (and weapons) harness energy by concentrating a lot of fission-material in a small space. The difficultly in doing this for weapons comes from how to quickly concentrate this before the explosion rips the bomb apart, and for nuclear power the difficultly is in controlling the chain reaction — getting a usable amount of power without letting the process spiral out of control.

For nuclear fusion, the process is reversed. Getting fusion to occur at all is quite difficult, and even when you can make it happen it is even harder to (i) create more energy³ than was used to create the reaction and to (ii) extract that energy into some useful form. The American National Ignition Facility is the only experiment that has generated a net-positive amount of energy through fusion, and it did so by firing 192 laser beams into a small pellet. How does one create electricity from such a process? An alternative approach, magnetic confinement, simply heats a homogeneous mass of hydrogen plasma to very high temperatures — insulating it from its surroundings by a very strong magnetic field that keeps it floating in a vacuum. The very high heat means that ions will strike each other randomly at very high velocities, fusing together in the process.

The reason that the hydrogen atoms need to have a very high (relative) velocity is so that they can overtake the initial resistance of the electromagnetic force. Regular hydrogen is only composed of a single proton, and since it is positively charged it will push away any other positively charged hydrogen. Simple hydrogen atoms are also incredibly hard to “hit” because of their very small size. Using larger elements — like helium — makes the repelling electromagnetic force even larger, so instead one uses an isotope of hydrogen that includes either one or two neutrons, deuterium and tritium respectively. Deuterium is naturally occurring in small amounts and can therefore be extracted from plain water in a comparatively simple process, but tritium is faintly radioactive and thus does not exist naturally on earth but is only produced in nuclear reactions. Any fusion plant thus needs to create its own tritium if it wants to be successful commercially.

One of the largest problems with contemporary nuclear power is the (largely unanswered) question of nuclear waste. Of the 31 nations of the world who posses nuclear power, only Finland has a complete solution for long-term storage of waste. This is not a problem with nuclear fusion. Fusion reactions create neutron flux that irradiates materials, but those materials do not have the same intensities of radiation as fissile (or formerly fissile) material. The direct byproducts of fusion, largely helium-3 (an isotope of helium with one neutron) is not radioactive and can be used in various industrial applications or vented into the atmosphere.

Fusion will not be built for a long time. There is an astounding and impressive amount of work being done, much of it useful, but none of it is even in the same league as a commercial power plant, not to mention ballparks. As mentioned above, only a single facility has ever reached a net-positive amount of energy production. Saying that you will soon be building power plants is like keeping a campfire lit in the rain using a flamethrower and then saying you are going to build a coal power plant using your patented 24/7-flamethrower-method.

Even then, building futuristic has-yet-to-even-be-done-in-labs reactors at commercial scale would not give us limitless energy. There are many levels of break-even in fusion; the most simple one is of course the question of raw energy, but much of that energy is in hard-to-harvest forms like radiation of various kinds.⁴ Only the amount of energy released as heat can be reasonably used to boil water and drive a steam engine to create electricity. There are enormous energy losses in this process — fission plants can only harvest a third of the (thermal) energy produced, leaving ~66% as waste heat. Beyond that a power plant needs to be able to produce as much power as was used in the production of deuterium fuels, for the extraction and transport of lithium-6,⁵ the construction and maintenance of the facility itself, and various utility process related to all of the above.

Shrinking the cost of building fusion reactors is meaningless because their operational costs are so large and their benefits non-existent for power production (as of yet). The more you run a reactor, the more energy is lost and the more money you have burned. It is like solving our flamethrower-campfire by making the charcoal cheaper; it does not solve the fundamental underlying problem with fusion power which is that it does not produce energy. From the above article:

Energy Singularity has some advantages. With their stronger magnets, design experience, and domestic supply chain, they believe their reactors will be the most cost-effective in the world. […] Having already built a first-in-class hts tokamak under budget and on time, I trust their estimate.

Lowering costs does not improve your cost-effectiveness if the costs of your reactor are theoretically infinite. This is fine of course for research and development, and is thus not useless, but I can easily build a non-energy-producing fusion reactor myself for a far smaller budget than Energy Singularity’s.

But fear not, for we actually have a working form of limitless green fusion power that can supply the world, is tried-and tested, and has already been deployed at scale: its called renewables.

The problem with energy production is not whether or not it is feasible, but at what cost energy can be produced. Another huge source of power would be if everyone constantly rode electricity-producing bikes at home, but we have all collectively agreed (through the market) that there are more beneficial uses of our time and resources. If you were paid $100 for every hour you spent on such a bike there would likely be a lot more people doing it — thankfully there are better ways of producing large amounts of power cheaply. The main cost of power plants is in their construction, maintenance, and fuelling (if relevant) but for some reason that is conveniently forgotten when talking about fusion.

All renewable power sources ultimately derive their power from the largest and most efficient fusion reactor we are familiar with, the sun. Even fission power, that can in rough terms be summarised as

We found a rock that gets really hot no matter what, and if we put the rock in water it starts to boil and gives us infinite power.

is quite hard to do commercially because it requires expensive machinery, safety equipment, and facilities on top of the cost of obtaining this rock. That building a super-expensive plasma vessel surrounded by superconducting magnets would be cheaper is absurd. By contrast wind power has been profitable for centuries — powered by the sun as wind currents are created through the uneven distribution of sunlight across the planet.

This is not to say that fusion is “doomed” or will never succeed, it is rather just that (i) it is really quite difficult to do as a way to extract energy and thus will likely not happen soon and (ii) would not magically be able to supply everyone with cheap power. Fusion has always been a few-decades away because, while fusion itself is entirely possible to do in a lab, it is difficult to use as an energy source. It did not take all that much effort to go from nuclear weapons to nuclear power (1945–1951) but we have now had fusion bombs for 75 years and have yet to produce electricity from it. That the physics allow for the possibility means that it is hard to comprehend how nobody has just “done it” yet, but so far it has escaped the clutches of the world’s most talented engineers for three quarters of a century. Lewis Strauss said in 1954 that

It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter[.]

This is the same sort of language used to describe a future of fusion power. It did not come to pass. Electricity seems to be one of the worst offenders for Jevons’ paradox — it was in fact the production of coal for energy that Jevons originally refereed to. Instead of thinking of a future technology that will swoop in and solve all of our problems with energy (cost, environmental impact, et cetera) we should focus on the solutions that are available today. The world’s energy system needs reform; it needs to be more integrated, cleaner, and in many ways larger as well. But most of all further developments need to be made in “the fifth fuel”, namely efficiency.

Even when fusion power inevitably⁶ becomes a reality, it will likely fulfil a similar niche as fission plants — used by advanced high-tech economies to provide stable base-load power and reduce dependence on energy imports. It will not solve the world’s problems overnight. Nuclear power plants famously take quite a long time to build, and a delicate high-tech machine like a fusion reactor is no different. Once commercial power becomes possible it will thus take many years, perhaps as long as a decade, to get up to speed in large-scale integration with the grid. Don’t hold your breath. ❦

Choosing to trust is a decision that is much ridiculed today. It is in many cases easy to see with the benefit of hindsight that it was foolish to trust someone, but doing so in advance is of course much harder. In general we are moving in the direction of trusting less and less; exposure to betrayal is simply too high a price to pay. The consequences of this ripply out across society with tremendous impact.

There are many ways to trust, but often what we trust is a person. In many cases that person is hidden from us, represented through the state or a firm.¹ Perhaps in an even greater number of cases (although the internet is making this less and less the case) we are actually trusting people directly when we believe we are trusting those abstract entities — in such simple things as the grocery store employee not being sick when handling our food or the clerk in delivering our paperwork.

I have recently found myself repeatedly enmeshed in discussions about identity and trust, often (but not exclusively) in technical forms. In this case obtaining trust is the method of making sure that the individual is who they say they are. This can be done in numerous ways like passwords,² access to physical items (like keys, sim cards, or an airgapped machine), and through a combination of the above (access to a cryptographic private key). But trust really operates on a deeper level. The point of authentication is to make sure the person carrying out an action is the one you trust, but it does not build that trust to begin with.

Technological development has led to a general decline in trust. Think of the telephone; it has generally meant a detachment from the immediate present, making us more inclined to “check up” on the activities of others. The portable (or cell) phone exacerbated this feeling and made it possible to reach another person practically at all times. It is a feeling that people of my generation now has had as our entire lived experience.

Today’s children do not have the same freedoms that previous generations did. Growing up I was still free to roam around the neighbourhood and visiting friends without anybody knowing our exact coördinates or activities. I got my first phone originally because my parents wanted some way for me to call them for help when i first started walking to and from school alone. This is quite a reasonable use of it, and it does not impose on my freedom if I am the only one initiating a communication.³

But the existence of a phone has more consequences, a child with a smartphone becomes digitized and able to operated on through the connective web. Them being able to call you inevitably means you being able to call them, and that makes you aware of this constant ability to “check up” on what they are doing. Apple’s Find my iphone became simply Find once it became clear that people were using it (or similar services) to track loved ones — to constantly “check up” on how they are doing instead of simply trusting their own agency.

Many people’s anxiety and loneliness stems from a fundamental lack of trust — in others, in themselves, and in other’s trust in them. Not being able to securely expect that the people surrounding you will be there when you most need it means a world where one has to manage entirety alone; a bellum omnium contra omnes. Managing to survive (and thrive!) in such an environment is naturally a challenge, and one that we humans are not made to deal with as tribal creatures.

It is then not strange that we, as non-trusting individuals, choose to reinforce this tradition by building structures that remove the need for trust. I have chosen to reject this. This is surprisingly difficult, it is not natural to trust someone who does not trust you in return. It leaves you vulnerable to betrayal, and thus is really only something that is possible to do if you are secure in your position and confident in yourself. But choosing to unilaterally trust is a requirement for building a generally trusting society.

In numerous developed countries, and at least in the Nordic ones, self-checkout machines are becoming increasingly common. I have no doubt that the reason for this is rooted in the ever-increasing extension of the division of labour (particularly through the employment of capital), but it has had tremendous ramifications for trust. It is now possible to maintain one’s existence in one of humanity’s most dense concentration — namely the city — without coming into contact with another person. You can work remotely, or as a lone delivery driver picking up enigmatic packages and delivering them to doorsteps, and then get all your basic needs delivered or machine-scanned yourself. But equally it has made the employees that are left behind increasingly paranoid and strained.

It is my understanding that there has occurred significant increase in theft following the implementation of these machines. This has led to workers confronting people who look young (to maintain haphazard age restrictions on self-service) or for people who bring bags into the store (who do so in order to carry home the food or items they buy). The age restrictions are particularly troublesome; alcohol, tobacco, and cinemas have age restrictions in order to help protect children for their own sake, but denying them the simple freedom of being able to skip a long line is a small erosion of democracy.

Still, age restrictions on self-service machines does not spell the end of liberal democracy. It is however a sign of how our current state no longer trusts its own citizens. If we can not trust people to buy all the things they take off the shelf in the grocery store how can we trust them to pick the right future of our nation and state in elections?

Similarly the expansion of closed-circuit television (cctv) and other forms of mass video surveillance is also a form of a negative spiral, where a decreased level of trust leads to more cameras, that in turn leads to a further erosion. Fear over crime can only be solved in the long term by a reduction in fear (for crime can never be entirely eliminated) but this can not be attained if the level of trust in society remains low.

There are few democratic nations in the world today that have a civil and collected political environment — strict polarisation has become the norm. Political extremism and division is not the fault of any one political system. It can not be fixed merely in The United States, France, Austria, or Japan. It is a flaw with the overarching system that all of these nations share.

Party membership has seen a long decline across the world, and yet people are in many ways more intensely politically engaged⁴ than ever before. I find it hard not to interpret this as anything other than an dissatisfaction with the system of participation. It is not a mere mechanical system, but also one that is social in nature — it is a question of feelings and of relations between individuals and groups.

Solving this is thus not a technical question; it can fundamentally not be solved through the use of statistics or models. Instead we must tackle it head on, in the grit of intellectual hand-to-hand combat. It must be dealt with personally and intimately. Jesus said “Love your neighbour as yourself”,⁵ and it is thus. Love should be given out unilaterally and unconditionally, with nothing expected in return. The chief requirement for this is trust, and as long as you put your trust in others you will be continuously surprised by how much your investment will pay off.

This lays the basis for a radical new democracy. Radical in the etymological sense of the word — stemming from Latin’s radicalis meaning “root”. Democracy has always been personal, just as all politics is personal in that it is acted on through people. Our abstractions and “political systems” always have their foundation in that personal level, of a politics that is done between four eyes. A truly democratic political system always derives its power from the people, and can always be changed by the people if it does not serve their purpose.

Sweden is quite a high-trust society — it is a fact commonly quoted by politicians and academics alike. But even then this trust is not something that we can take for granted. It must be nurtured and safeguarded. Were we to give, for example, the police (an institution in which there is quite high social trust) unwarranted powers it would inevitably lead to more serious mistakes; “power corrupts”. By then that trust in that institution will be gone, and the societal benefits that come with it as well. For similar reasons it is problematic when politicians like Ebba Busch are disingenuous in debates — not because of the contents of their statements but because it erodes trust in the democratic process and creates feelings like “well, politicians always lie” when it does not have to be that way.

Trusting others does not need to be foolish — you do not need to be a doormat — but the general baseline in our society can and should be raised. In general it means giving people the benefit of the doubt, of not asking needlessly inquisitive questions and giving people the space and agency they need to accomplish tasks and/or maintain themselves.

I have (unfortunately for environmental reasons) been spending a lot of time at airports recently. The airport functions as a good example of a trusting public space. People are free to browse and pick food in little open stores without being constantly watched through cameras or corner mirrors, and in a world otherwise filled with hostile architecture are free to sleep on the ample seating available. As long as you have been “vetted” to enter the sacred space of the airport you are automatically assumed to be good, to follow the rules, and to be trustworthy. This is even more true for the Lounge, whose reputation and storytelling is based on only the most respectable having access to this inner chamber.

This does not have to remain a exclusive privilege of those fortunate enough to frequently visit the oases of trust on the outskirts of major cities. It can be a fundamental value to build our societies through. And it starts with you. ❦

Back in 2024 I was part of the first class of a new course at the Swedish Defence University titled Economic Security in Competition, Conflict and War. Throughout that course it became clearer and clearer to me that the field of economic security has a central element that makes it fundamentally difficult to implement. The subject has only become more relevant as of late, with the People’s Republic of China (prc) showing no sign of stopping its entrenchment into critical sectors of the economy and with ever-strengthening winds in the sails of protectionism everywhere from Warsaw to Washington. As such it is an issue that has continuously been brewing in the back of my mind these past years. But despite increased interest in the topic it has not become any clearer what constitutes economic security, and how it should best be attained and maintained. A crude definition might be the following:

Economic security is the ability to continue ability to maintain a healthy economy through dramatic changes in macroeconomic conditions.

Notice how this definition does not explicitly mention war or international conflict. The title of my course was aptly chosen, for economic security is not just relevant in the high-stakes environment of all-out war, but is also a deciding factor in the everyday life of international competition. Ever since the second world war great powers have been largely unable (or at least strongly unwilling) to enter into direct conflict with one another, largely due to the invention of nuclear weapons. The sphere of economic warfare has therefore become a new domain of warfare, along with the technological ones of cyber and space. Where it not for nuclear weapons Europe would assuredly be in a hot war with Russia at the moment, but instead it has been able to maintain the conflict at a lower level of the escalation ladder — purely in the realm of economic warfare.

During the cold war the west and the communists were involved in an intense economic struggle; in which the west was adamant in making use of its unique strengths to prevail against the Soviet Union. The rise of the prc has put this thinking into something of a crisis. China is a large country, it is only natural for it to make up a correspondingly large share of global production, but we should not aim to copy it in an attempt to insulate ourselves from its autocratic rulers.

Much thinking in the field boils down to improving the resilience of one’s economy, so that it can better withstand shocks from outside actors or events.¹ Resilience has become something of a buzzword in defence circles, akin to ai, Blockchain and Quantum in tech. What exactly it stands for is unclear and complex. For a visualisation, here is a graph I was shown as part of that aforementioned course showing what aspects of the Swedish model are beneficial and/or negative to resilience:

It is immediately clear that this is a somewhat muddy topic. There are quite a few different aspects to the term (as showcased above), not just in what concretely contributes to improved resilience but even to what sectors are involved in the first place. It is a solidly interdisciplinary term, one fit for a new age of political economy — albeit one that this time is principally oriented externally toward the international realm.

Economic resilience represents two qualities that are really quite different. The first aspect it stands for the ability to robustly survive the initial disturbance. In this sense it is a measure of constitution of stalwartness, and of the capacity to just keep on doing business when the situation changes. This is the primary focus of much thinking in the field of economic security. It argues for autarkic (or at least protectionist) polices that in some regards is reminiscent of the mercantilism of the 16– and 1700s. The national wealth and economic might is seen as that which is produced and processed within the state’s national borders — international trade is either seen as a necessary weakness or as a possibility for coercion. But equally important is the second meaning of resilience: adaptability and economic vigour.

The structure of the economic landscape has always been changing, and one’s economy needs to be able to keep up with those changes. To do this the economy must maintain a high level of dynamism that allows one not just to shift around production and consumption to new markets, but also the ability to utilise new technologies and to break into new sectors. Being resilient in this regard means taking a punch and then getting up to continue the struggle.² There are three primary facilitators toward this:

1. A free market economy
2. An open democratic society
3. A high level of economic development

A keen reader might realise that these aspects are the antithesis of ones that you want to strive for to create a resilient qua robust economy – save perhaps the last element.³ It is in this contradictory dichotomy that the difficulty in economic security lies.

The first aspect is quite quite obvious – it is hard to create a dynamic and rapidly changing economy that does not make use of the market – but it is hard to restrain the power of the state when speaking of questions of national security. This is the logic of Sullivan’s famous “Small yard with a high fence” analogy; one must allow the free market to adapt – to fail and to try again – but at the same time not allow a few critical industries to do so fully. Creating an artificial boundary of where to and not to intervene means that one gets the benefits of both of these.

Regarding the second point, an open society might in many cases be seen as a weakness, but it is in fact a strength. Autocracies (such as the prc) may in many cases be able to push through reform or industrial efforts more clearly, but they do so at hidden costs. Liberal democracy allows dissenting voices to vent their grievances and to easily highlight corruption and misallocation of resources. Autocracies must also use considerable resources for maintaining their rule, something that does have to be done when one has the consent of the governed.⁴

While in Běijīng I met a young man from Hángzhōu who had previously worked for many years as a security guard, and who described the job as dull and uninteresting. He did not however want these positions to be eliminated, since they had offered him a stable income when he was fresh out of school. These jobs act as a societal bribe for the maintaining of the security apparatus. The scale of this is enormous; every entrance (of which there are multiple per station) to the Běijīng metro has a security checkpoint staffed by 3-5 guards.⁵ Pinghan Liang (梁平汉), a professor at Sun Yat-sen University’s School of Government has estimated the direct cost of these security checks to be 1.8 billion usd, employing 224 thousand people.

The third point is closely related to the first, but it is still different enough to warrant its separate investigation. Having a larger economy is strictly beneficial to economic security because producing more goods and services means having a bigger influence and more power to use when interacting with the outside world. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is perhaps one of the most autarkic (and therefore economically secure) economies in the world, but even it is reliant on trade, particularly with the prc and the Russian Federation, and due to its small size it would likely not be a threat to the security of any other state (not even to the Republic of Korea, rok) had it not possessed nuclear weapons.

Following the orthodox theory of economic security to its extreme one would end up at the division of society into small, entirely self-sufficient groups of subsistence farmers who do not rely on on the producers of any other state. But such a society would at the same time be extremely insecure, at risk of being conquered by industrialised nations like those of Europe during the Great Divergence.

While this form of resilience is incredibly strong against disruptions in trade, it is equally weak against disruptions in production. We no longer see the kinds of famines like those of the Hungry Forties⁶ or of the Year Without a Summer thanks to systems of food production, storage, and transport that have been made possible thanks to the modern globalised industrial economy. There have been no major famines in the Indian subcontinent for over half a century, and they largely ended as a structural problem over 100 years ago. This is not due to techniques of protectionism, but due to the adaptability of a free market, and of the increase in technology that such a increase allows for.⁷ The productivity of industrial society is a tremendous power to wield, and one should care for it as much as they can.

The long term objective for any state is then to augment its power by increasing the productive powers under its command or, in other words, to increase gross domestic product (gdp), and any coherent economic security objective should incorporate such a goal and the methods to accomplish it (such as investments in r&d, a sensible tax policy, and the construction of basic infrastructure). That this is the long term objective is significant, for it may be easily clouded by short term thinking.

The Argentine Republic was once one of the the most prosperous and wealthy countries on earth, for a short time in the 1890s even surpassing the United States of America and the United Kingdom in gdp per capita. The reasons for its downfall are of course numerous, but of interest to us are the goals set by Peronism of economic independence. The technique of import substitution we now know have failed many times, and creates an insular industry unable to compete internationally. In the short term however, such techniques protects jobs and the wealth of investors who have already “bought in”. Following a system of “whack-a-mole” it allows one to (comparatively) easily eliminate dependencies on other nations. But doing this completely is impossible, as the impacts of the 1930s depression on Argentina shows. Instead what must be done is to focus on the fundamental capabilities of the economy.

The enormously successfully policies of the east-Asian tigers takes this advice. Instead of acting in a reactive sense — where one merely responds to what happens around the world — these countries (The rok, The Republic of China (roc), Singapore, and Hong Kong) adopted Export-oriented industrialisation (eoi) in niche sectors where they possessed a comparative advantage. This does not meaningfully reduce dependency on the outside world, but instead puts the ball in your own court by creating dependencies on your own country. The construction of a Texas Instrument plant in 1968–’69 on Formosa was one way to explicitly link the roc with the rest of the world (and with the us in particular) long before Taipei achieved its legendary dominance over the ic industry that is so admired today.

But the roc is incredibly dependent on the rest of the world — it is a small island almost entirely reliant on sea-bound imports for energy and food, as well as to the broader lifeline of general goods and commodities needed to sustain its economy. None of the tigers tried to obtain leverage through de-risking, they all made themselves indispensable through investments in forward-thinking industries such as financial services (in the case of Hong Kong and Singapore), electronics (all four in some regards), and automotive (Korea).

A modern example of what not to do might be found in Merz’s Germany. The reversal of the decision to in the near-future forbid the sale of combustion engine cars is, irrespective of any environmental concerns, a decision to lock oneself into the economy of the past. Germany did not obtain a car industry by focusing on its large coal and steel steel industry, it did so by seeing a chance to further specialise and make use of its highly skilled and educated population. The construction of combustion engine cars is a dying industry, if it is not dead already — at least in its future prospects. The decision was taken to protect modern industrial workers, but ideally this group could be let free from their duties as the band of the titanic, and instead use their knowledge and expertise to work in the forward-looking industries of tomorrow such as drone manufacturing, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, chip manufacturing, renewable and low-carbon energy, and electric vehicles. Doing this would give Germany the initiative tomorrow at the cost of pain today, instead of erroneously hoping that combustion engine cars will ever be the backbone of the economy that they once were.

America, as the only major power who did not materially suffer from the war, in many regards got a head start on the later half of the 20th century — in some way the reverse of a “lost decade”. But that it has continued its economic dominance for so long, only to be rivalled by the prc after the great financial crisis (and perhaps only equalled in a few sectors after the covid-pandemic) has not been a mere gift from Fortūna. The United States (us) has made a considerable number of enormous bets, many of which have paid off over time. An examination of all of the factors that have led the us to success is of course not something that can be covered in as short a text as here, and therefore I will not endeavour to do so. But beyond all other aspects it is surely the all-mighty dollar that has cemented us supremacy over the world. It allows the us to obtain goods and services for practically free, simply in exchange for pieces of paper that the rest of the worlds needs to trade amongst themselves. Protecting this asset should be of utmost importance for any American administration that cares about the prospects for us hegemony.⁸

What American (and European in regards to China) strategy is much more focused on today seems to be solving the Chinese communist monopoly over rare earth minerals. This is a mistake on multiple levels. First of all, building rare earth mines will not stop the dependency itself. The prc has a three-level that includes raw materials extraction, refining, and manufacturing itself. It is of no use to go to the great effort of prospecting for mines and investing the large amounts of resources needed to create a competitive industry if one merely needs small amounts and will likely export the ore to the People’s Republic regardless. Focusing on the refining of minerals is much more efficient, particularly as the west still possesses large chemical and refining companies along with their expertise. Any action on the side of the Chinese would then carry a proportional economic pain; The export of rare earth metals is a negligible part of China’s total exports and so implementing export controls comparatively cheap. If the west possessed significant refining capacity a stop in ore exports would lead to disruptions in the prc’s manufacturing base, leading to internal pressure to back down.

But worse than an imperfect strategy is the focus itself. Ed Luttwak pointed out quite concretely in an interview with Chinatalk that when the United Kingdom first successfully bombed Hamburg

… the Royal Air Force tells Churchill, “We can win this war. We’ll just stand down the useless army and navy. We’ll bomb Hamburg.” Churchill was smart enough to say, “No, because your very success of last night condemns you to failure.”

War, and all strategy, is a form of dialectic whereby one acts and the other reacts. As in a game of Go you might have thought out a perfect plan to defeat your opponent in a given area of the board, only for them to place a piece on an entirely different region. You do not get to place all of your pieces at once and then bask in the sunshine of victory — the enemy will counteract you at every step of the way and drag you into the mud of the dialectical process. It is a common mistake to merely think about your own actions; as Harris put it “The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them”. The same idea is present in economic warfare in that an improvement in military technology or methodology carries within itself its own counter-reaction — one therefore needs to continuously invent new such techniques.

The weapon of rare earths became worthless once it was universally unleashed, just as the oil weapon became after 1973. It may still be useful for some time going forward, but new deposits and technologies will in the long run win out. Stockpiles will increase and (in the worst case) smuggling routes will grow.⁹ One must take this opportunity to look forward toward the dependencies and industries of tomorrow instead of continuing to focus on the moves that have previously been played — for the deciding pieces are already being put in motion.

As for how to measure this dependency it is worth mentioning that the simple Herfindahl–Hirschman index¹⁰, mostly used to determine market concentration for antitrust purposes, actually has its origins in the primordial times of economic warfare. It originates in Hirschman’s work National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade originally published in 1945.¹¹ As is clear from careful examination of the equation (and as gracefully pointed out by The Economist) the score rapidly changes at high concentrations. This poses both risk and opportunity — decoupling does not require full substitution, it only needs to slightly reduce the major supplier’s influence; and drastically increasing market power can be done from relatively small gains.

It is a of course a shame that the field of economic warfare and security is seeing a renaissance not seen since the days of the Trade Clearing House during the first world war. This makes the matter all the more important; how we act now may in many ways decide the course of the rest of the century and of the global balance of power.

While orthodox theory on economic security stresses the focus on neomercantilist methods it is being increasingly clear that merely doing so is an overcorrection. Instead one must balance the tightrope that harnesses the benefits of global interconnectedness while avoiding serious dependencies on adversaries in critical industries.

This balance means that economic growth should be strategic and structured in a relative-gains manner, where one tries to choke out rival powers by constructing networks of free trade and rapid development that exclude bad actors. Growth remains important because it gives you more tools to use. We must accept that it is not possible to correctly predict the future — “But about that day or hour no one knows” — and so we must thus prepare for every eventuality. The only way to do this is the increase in the total number and value of the goods and services produced. ❦

The subject of artificial intelligence (ai)¹ is one that has become hotly debated in recent years. That the growth of ai’s capabilities has been partly driven by what is becoming increasingly clear financial engineering. These problematic elements has created a stark division of opinions that can generally be subdivided into the following categories:

1. The masses. A large, indifferent group who use llms in different capacities — stretching from the most common not-at-all to daily. Their unifying character is that, while discussion surrounding the ethical and day-to-day implications of ai are common, they primarily do not think about the philosophical, technological, political, macroeconomic, or in some other sense structural impacts of quick ai growth. Generally negative toward ai (and of how it seems to be loosely integrated into more and more consumer products) but not so much as the next group:
2. The Luddites. A highly critical and hostile group that consists of an over-represented share of (digital) artists, environmental activists, reactionaries and software engineers who prefer “hand-crafted” code. They are much more plugged in to the conversation than the every-man, but are at the same time reactionary in the Newtonian sense, explicitly denouncing any ai advances and proclaiming that ai will not be relevant after the inevitable popping of the bubble.
3. The Doomers. Strong believers in strong growth in the capabilities of ai models, but also worried that humanity’s collective ability to control them will grow slower than the aforementioned capabilities. Makes up the majority of the ai-safety community.
4. The Optimists. This group believes that not only will ai growth be fast, it will also grant mankind gifts that surpass all that humanity has achieved before, and we will hopefully live in som form of Fully Automated Luxury Communism.

I am not firmly enmeshed in any of these camps. I am too well-informed to be a part of the uninterested masses, and in some ways am more positive about the use-cases of ai than many others (although I do also do not reject the label of luddite either). On the division between “optimists” and “doomers” I find that both are often heavily separated from reality, and in many cases not well-read outside the fields of science-fiction (and perhaps computer programming). This is an attempt to inform these latter groups.

One of the favourite subjects of ai discussions are those of exponential growth. This is usually framed in some way that sets a “before” and and “after”, during which ai gains the ability to recursively self-improve and effectivise the manufacture of goods and services as well as the large-scale automation of r&d. I am a strong believer in the long-term ability for different ai models to improve all of these fields, but believing in exponential growth means that one has to face the reality of the costs of such development.

It took humanity roughly as long to go from using bronze swords to iron swords (3300-1200bc, roughly 2100 years) as it took to go from iron swords to gunpowder (1200bc-904ad, 2100 years) and from then it was only one millennium until we had the ability to destroy ourselves utterly with the invention of the atomic explosive (1945, 1041 years after the military use of black powder). The growth in technological capacity is already an exponential one.

The growth in computational potential is famously also exponential, and in many ways it is the driving force behind the capabilities of large language models. But increases in energy efficiency and computational speed are harder and harder to come by (Dennard scaling has been gone for 20 years now). This does not mean that growth in computation is likely to stall, but instead it means that more and more resources and inventions need to be produced in order to maintain the same rate of exponential growth (since the integral grows faster than the absolute value above it). Lithography machines are a famous example of this; likely the most advanced machines that humanity has yet to create, they consist of individual parts that are incomprehensibly precise.²

I feel compelled to quote Alexis de Tocqueville; There are two camps consisting of those who believe ai will dramatically accelerate technological development and those who believe it be a mere fad. “It is to be presumed that both are equally deceived”. I believe that ai will be a necessity for continued technological growth as the barriers are continuously rising, but that a very quick (less than half a decade) transformation is very unlikely. Many analyses of an ai-powered economic boom predict yearly growth rates in the mid-10¹% (~50%), but often also mention the theoretical doubling rates of insects or bacteria.³ But these latter examples only double very quickly under very unique situations with very large amounts of resources. To me this seems like a classic misunderstanding on the structure of human development.

That invention is the driving force behind development has been a dominant thought since the enlightenment. But one should not underestimate the importance of a more organic and more diffuse form of development. The economy of the prc, or of the four Asian tigers, doubled incredibly quickly, but when it did so it required enormous amounts of resources. The industrialisation of China needed huge quantities of steel, concrete, and energy to construct railways, highways and urban dwellings. The physical mass of this puts an upper bound on the speed for growth that a superintelligent ai can not fix.

Doubling the number of factories requires a large increase in construction-related steel production, and that requires an increase not only in logistics, but also in the exploitation of resources. A delivery of iron ore takes a month to travel by sea (one of the most efficient forms of transportation) from Australia to Shànghăi (上海).⁴ Delivery of construction equipment also takes an insignificant amount of time. The Abundance-argument regarding red tape is of course valid, and there areas in which improvements can be made in western economies, but one still needs to keep in mind an analysis connected to the situation on the ground.

Richard Danzing’s recent paper on cybersecurity and ai stresses an important fact when it comes to national security, that ai is here now and needs to be continuously integrated into the (American) national security apparatus in order to avoid a “Maginot moment”. This rings true for economic development as well — because the nature of war has become more and more industrial as the state and the economy has grown.⁵ Waiting for a potential “agi” to be invented before applying it to the economy is akin to (to take inspiration from Danzig) waiting to discover the mythic city of El Dorado before taking advantages of the discovery of America.

A particularly obscene phrase (although it seems to have been fallen slightly out of favour) is the statement that ai will in some sense kickstart a “fourth industrial revolution”. In fact, there has only been one industrial revolution — and we are all still in its midst. To showcase this, here is a graph of the world’s (human) population:⁶

Here it is again, but this time with a logarithmic y-axis:

It is clear that, while the population has generally been increasing steadily, there was a sharp inflection point (that can be clearly made out even in the second graph) some time in the 17th century, i.e. the industrial revolution. This development has not wavered, an despite demographic decline in Europe and east-Asia will likely continue until the end of the century. At that point, even if the population decreases faster, we will still be so unfathomably greater in number than we have been for practically all of human history. The power of industrialisation is awesome qua the sublime.

The division of industrial revolutions typically do so by focusing on the specific “driving” technologies. But those technologies do not come out of nowhere. They are needed, invented, applied, and (through their application) they drive new needs. A superintelligence would not have solved this because intelligence itself has not been the bottleneck for a long time. Technological growth is driven by application driving new needs — innovation is not a scientist sitting in a laboratory (that is science) but instead the practical needs developed out of application. The steam engine was developed long before it was employed because the steam engine qua invention could only exist in a proto-industrial society that needed mechanical energy for pumping and transport and that had ample supplies of wood and coal.

That is not to say that gai would not be useful for future scientific and technological development, but I merely want to point out that “a country of geniuses in a datacenter” does not a scientific revolution make. The shape of technological growth (since the industrial revolution that is) appears in some ways similarly to the following function:

\[ g_t(x) = c + \sin{x}, \hspace{1em} c > 1 \]

There is always some underlying r&d (in the literal sense) going on, and it in turn prompts new developments to begin. Because the above is the growth of technology, and because the value of sin never goes below -1, there is never any regression in technology (as I am aware of there has never been, apart from the Bronze age collapse). The integral of this then becomes

\[ G_t(x) = cx - \cos{x} \]

where \(cx\) continuously keeps going up, and mirrors in this sense the continuous advance of technology. There has been rapid change for a long time now — almost 300 years. Each generation that has lived through this development has had to grapple with its consequences. The field of political economy grew out of not just an attempt to control and steer this growth, but also an attempt to try and attempt how it happened in the first place.

Smith did so using the analogy of the pin factory to show how increasing markets made possible by international shipping, steam engines, and empire led to an increased division of labour and therefore an increase in productivity. Marx in turn tried to describe this by framing it as a consequence of primitive accumulation (through the expropriation of land) and capital’s ever-increasing needs for growth. In fact, there has not been a decade since the late 1700’s that has not been revolutionary in some way.

To say that the next decade will be transformative is an easy bet to take. We humans like to think that the world will stay the same forever, but our increasing industrialisation means that that will likely never be the case again. It seems strange then to write a post arguing against rapid change. But that is precisely the problem we are posed with — because we see the world as static we do not notice how much it is changing.

When we are presented with a technology as all-encompassing as ai it is entirely rational to see it as upending the world as we know it. But the world has seen — and is currently seeing — transformations of equal (if not greater) impact. The conversation around ai is stuck with its blinders on, just as those who (mistakenly) saw crypto as revolutionary did not focus on the broader technological change of the planet. We must therefore enlargen our view to encompass all these aspects in order to adequately think about how technology will impact our lives. ❦

The spirit of the age that we currently finds ourselves in is one of rapid change (and often times decline) in the economic, political, and technological order of the world. Compared to the nineteenth century (and in many regards even the twentieth), when living standards where many times more squalid than today, there was then a sense of progressiveness, of growth and change that — as long as channelled in the correct direction — would be transformed into a new and wonderful world. That spirit does not exist today. Instead we have the idea that we are “sliding” back into the darkest depths of mankind’s history and that we will — posed with some certainty if not clarity — see the return of fascism and of the oppression of the state.

There are many people today comparing our contemporary times to those of the 1930s. Even if there are apt comparisons to be made I have trouble seeing the similarities clearly. Much more relevant to me seems to be the many crises leading up to the first world war; the long period of change created more and more cracks in the established systems of managing relations that at last proved too great to overcome. Once the stresses had reached a certain level it all came falling down once someone started shooting in the streets of Sarajevo. It still feels relevant to quote the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci¹ however:

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

As those who have by chance been born into this interregnum it is our duty to understand the developments that have lead us to these events so that we can do our best to shape the future trajectory of the world, and to make sure that the new that we create is better than that which came before.

We must differentiate between three words that are often seen as synonymous, that being the dictatorial, authoritarian, and totalitarian states. The authoritarian state is a state that demands that it possess ultimate authority of that which it claims, and that expects that authority to be unquestionably followed. All states are authoritarian in some degree, to the point that the use and employment of authority must be included in the definition of the state. This is what Weber famously did in his formulation of the state as the possessor of the monopoly of violence. An authoritarian state does not have to be a particularly powerful state, and in fact the reverse is oftentimes the case. A powerful state can instead offer some degree of leeway when it comes to organizing its possessions since it does not have to risk the diminishing of its power.

The dictatorial state is closely related to the authoritarian one, since the application of authority requires dictating one’s wishes. The dictatorship, as an institution, has its origins in the office of the dictator in the republic along the Tiber, and any study of the dictator specifically should incorporate its formulation. In its roman form the the dictator was role temporarily appointed to solve a specific problem, but in the late republic it became a much more over political tool — used most prominently by Sulla and then subsequently by Caesar.

The narrow focus of the dictator showcases an important element; the dictatorship can only exist in a state that is in an earlier form of historical development. The dictator, as an individual, must be involved in the decisions of the state — who become incalculable in number as historical development continues. We will soon examine the nature of this trajectory, but permit me to remain on the subject of the dictator.

The centralisation of decision-making is a core aspect of the evolution of Ellulian technique, and because of that is has been instrumental in the development of the state. A weak state, as all early ones were, necessarily requires a strong authority to impose its will and maintain its existence (as we have already described). The early state is forced to centralize, if not its limited resources then at least its political power, to get anything done. It did so initially through the institution of kingship (as Lewis Mumford examines in the first volume of his book The Myth of the Machine). This initial collectivisation enabled the construction of vast irrigation systems — that in turn contributed to an increased degree of the division of labour and therefore the development of things like mathematics and astronomy — as well as of vast monuments such as the pyramids of Giza.

The dictator (in the form of the monarch) remains at all times a touch-point figure, like how the pharoses of Egypt were intimately involved in agriculture through their role in the periodic flooding of the Nile. The invention of writing served an important role in the extension of the dictator’s power, they could now project their presence across both space and time, and thus organize labour on a much grander scale. But this development also created something else that is of interest to our study — a permanent, literate, bureaucracy whose role would become not just the communications of the dictator’s wishes, but the carrying out of the actions of state, whose existence first now can be outlined.

The state is usually dated firmly to the peace of Westphalia, when the principle of a sovereign right emerged,² but as we have established its structural roots go all the way back to the origins of kings. This of course continued, and the stretches of land that monarchs laid claim to increased as their powers did – to almost the level of caricature like in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. In France, one of clearest examples of early centralisation, Louis xiv famously proclaimed that the he and the state were one and the same³, but the growth of the bureaucracy required for absolutism meant that on his deathbed in 1715 he is said to have uttered “Je m’en vais, mais l’État demeurera toujours”.⁴ These are not contradictory statements as they might appear on first appearance. Absolutism meant that the monarch, in every capacity in which [he] was able to intervene, was the embodiment of the state. But to maintain this capability demanded the maintenance of a massive political machine that would necessarily have to survive the monarch.

Absolutism is the end of the form of the dictator. While it survives, and in some places even reëmerges in the world today, it can no longer be the source of historical progress. Instead it must leave the reins to the burgeoning bureaucracy that it helped create.

I must ask the reader to try to vanquish any pretences over the idea of totalitarianism that one may already have. The goal here is not to study a specific group of states that have existed in the past, present, and are postulated to exist in the future, but instead to inspect qualities that exist in all states of a sufficiently developed historical nature. The detailed implementation of this totalitarianism has been extensively debated for almost 250 years. During this debate there have been many proposals that have been discarded, but they are nevertheless of interest to us in the study of their shared qualities.

The totalitarian state is, like all other states, by necessity authoritarian. Its primary characteristic is that it attempts to envelop all of society; there is no element of social, political, technical, or private life that it does not interest itself in. It can be dictatorial — in the sense that we have just examined — but bit does not have to be, and in fact may often be limited by a dictatorial nature. This is because while the dictatorial form allows for the forcing through of action it does not foster a total commitment to the cause of the state.

The totalitarian state does not have to actually succeed at this goal of being the fulcrum of social life – in fact no state has yet done so completely – but it must strive towards that ideal. Some of the different methods of doing so that have historically been attempted we will generally discuss here, but a complete record would require the examination of almost every society existing today – as well as a great multitude of historical states. We now however live in a time in which this ultimate goal seems to be within reach, and agents of the state (such as autocrats, politicians, and civil servants) are becoming ever more frustrated when met with aspects of the world outside of their control, when they before would have been unthinkable for the state to influence. This frustration will only serve as an accelerant for further increases in state capacity.

Machiavelli, even in advocating for the benefits of a reputation of cruelty, makes clear that one must in all cases avoid being hated — even under the conditions of dictatorship.⁵ That this is easier said than done is clear to anyone, but is is particularly so in a dictatorship, where the originator of decisions does not immediately feel their consequences. While fear must be employed to maintain rule in a dictatorial system in some degree (as Machiavelli elegantly explains) the point of totalitarianism qua force is not merely to enforce rule — although that is of course in the interest of individual actors within the system.

The first forms of the totalitarian goals of the state emerged out of the French revolution. The imposition of the political will of Paris during the various counter-revolutions across the country (most notably the Guerre de Vendée) was a method for further centralisation and imposition of political will. But most of all it was the Terror that — in the same way as would later occur in the Chinese mainland between 1966 and 1976 — imposed a political purpose onto the whole of society. Political life became intensely relevant, and things like the Levée en masse violently joined the individual’s fate to that of the state.

The numerous modernisations made during the revolution brought state control into an equally numerous number of areas of life. This continued under the reign of Napoleon — whose civil code unified the French judicial system into one coherent whole. It was this dichotomy and bringing together of the individual and the sublime structure of the state that Hegel pointed out at Jena, and that represented the end of History.

The ideology of fascism is at its heart the ideology of the state as a supreme, all-encompassing entity — and as the final form of the post-1789 developments in state capacity. Combined with the ideas of nationalism, in the strict sense,⁶ this creates the connection that not only is the state developing and an agent throughout history, but that the nation state is the representation of a the nation’s actions, and the state is therefore responsible to the people in the same way as the people are responsible to the state.

It is a strictly illiberal (in the sense of liberal qua freedom of the individual) idea. If compared to the liberal (European) nationalism of the nineteenth century — where the state’s purpose is merely to act as the collective sphere to enforce the rights and dignities of the nation — it becomes clear how the fascist state is demanding of another degree. The state is not content to merely exist as the arbiter of the status quo, but must act in a new sense upon its environment.

Gentile writes in the Doctrine of Fascism:

Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accept the individual on in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal will of man as a historic entity.

[…]

It is not the nation which generates the State; that is an antiquated naturalistic concept which afforded a basis for 19th century publicity in favour of national governments. Rather it is the State which creates the nation, conferring volition and therefore real life on a people made aware of their moral unity.

This is no longer an idea unique to those who publicly consider themselves as fascists, but is widely held across the political spectrum. The state, on the international level, and government, on the domestic one, are seen as the principal agents through which political life should be lived.

That fascism has been the ideology of the reactionary is perhaps primarily because it has served as a progressive⁷ force against that of communism (that we will soon discuss). It thus quite naturally attracted the interest of capital; the nsdap was neither socialist nor a worker’s party. The struggle against this expansion of capitalism into fascism has been the central mission of left-wing activism since the end of the second world war. But fascism failed at extracting the power of the state, precisely because it was forced to coöperate with the interests of monarchists and capitalists — just as in the east “the paradox of Russian bolshevism is that it was in reality conservative” led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. One can not maintain the old institutions of feudalism or religion while subsuming everything into the totalitarian state.

Socrates, in Plato’s Republic, paints the picture of his idealised city; the Kallipolis. A common quality to all the techniques that Socrates proposes is the centrality of the state as totally demanding and of highest importance. The rulers and guardians of the Kallipolis would not be allowed to touch gold and would live in simple communal housing so that they would not put their own interests over those of the state.

The platonic ideal of the city is strictly limited, and Plato (as well as his follower Aristotle) believed that the city must maintain a firm boundary and not give in to imperialism. This is in some sense a prenationalist idea; the state exists only to serve those belonging to the nation, and should not be extended to all the ends of the earth.

Socrates describes on page 423⁸ how a (non-ideal) city is really composed of two cities — that of the rich and that of the poor — who are both at war with one another. Defeating such a city simply means turning one of these inner cities against the other — the rich against the poor, for example — and letting it succumb into infighting. The Kallipolis would be immune from such infighting due to its structured coöperation between classes; a form of primitive corporatism. This is such a central tenet of Socrates’ idea that he defines justice itself as that of different groups or elements performing their assigned tasks, just like how corporatism emphasises the duty of social groups to fulfil their role for the good of the state as a whole. The ideal city must be one city, composed of citizens not advocating for some domestic change.

Communism is the state of affairs consisting of a classless, stateless, and moneyless form of society in which all members are able to form free social and economic relations with one another. How to achieve this has historically been a matter of some debate among leftist groups however. Those who have been most successful, not in achieving communism but in achieving absolute power, have almost entirely tried to do so through the path of socialism — state control over the means of production and most commonly the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat. We have of course already explained the institution of the dictatorship, and this is the same institution here.

Marxism once again identifies the struggle between what Socrates called “two cities”: the proletariat (who can only sustain themselves by selling their labour) and the bourgeoisie (who live on the extracted surplus labour of the proletariat). “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles”; The goal of the socialist revolution is to abolish this class struggle. To do this it aims not at the reconciliation of the classes (like corporatism) but instead to subsume the bourgeoisie — to seise the means of production — into one class whose only relations are to those of the state. That no nation has successfully performed the transition from socialism to communism is due to the power and allure of the state.

Furthermore is the idea that the family, as a fundamental axiomatic unit, should be replaced by the community of the state. This is not unique to Socialism (not even to Marxism as a whole), but it is an especially prevalent idea because of the Marxist focus on how women are exploited as unpaid domestic labour under capitalism. To mention Socrates once again; he proposes that children should not be told who their parents are, and likewise parents should not have any specific ties to their offspring. Instead children should be turned over the state and raised collectively, so that their education is attuned to the best interests of the collective whole. This too is a technique for the state’s increasing control over its population — the elimination of all social relations that are not under the auspices of the state.

The state, as the representative of the common good of the people, should inherently strive to better the conditions of the working class. But at the same time the state requires more and more power and resources, necessitating the increased exploitation of the proletariat — even as they are ostensibly in charge.

The democratic system is in many ways the most totalitarian of all. The dictatorial system requires that political power be monopolised by the dictator, but in a democracy the reverse is true. When the people rule it becomes a requirement for each and every citizen to become informed and opinionated regarding the political issues of their time. This is, more so than the technical developments, the primary advancement of the French revolution in regards to totalitarianism.

Because democracy is intended to be shaped by the individuals interests it invites them to try and solve their problems using the power of the state. Thus when the feminist activist Carol Hanisch writes that “the personal is political” she describes how the personal aspects of one’s own life have been extended outward into the public sphere. When all problems are solvable using the state (and more and more problems are correspondingly caused by the state) it becomes more and more important for one’s specific group to take control over the apparatus. This is one of the reasons for the increasing political polarisations of our time — those who covet the command over the state will stop at nothing to obtain it, even if it comes at the price of social unity, because they deem the possible rewards enormously great.

Feminism is indeed one representation of the totalitarian state. While women have been historically suppressed and made subservient at all levels of society it has been the goal of feminist movements to make use the state to right this wrong. Some feminist scholars have rightly critiqued this, citing the inherently patriarchal structure of the state, but it seemingly has not had much impact on mainstream feminist thought.

Improvements in technology and in the techniques of propaganda⁹ have strengthened the ability for dictators to project their will. This development is not new — it was pointed out quite clearly by Speer¹⁰ — but it has not stopped; If anything it has accelerated. And yet no technical apparatus can yet match the strength of democracy in this regard. In democratic society all members are part of an intense political discussion, where each individual is at all times a recipient, activist, and censor. The democratic state does therefore not require the same level of authoritarian control as that of the dictatorship as we ourselves maintain the continuity of the state.

We thus, as citizens in democratic states (and not actors in a people-ruled anarchic world), further this extension of totalitarianism. Feminist scholarship has long discussed how societal norms and structures are maintained through our actions, but also our ideas and theoretical abstractions. In just the same way democracy shapes our lives by defining it in our political relations to the state.

Following the end of the second world war, having witnessed the horrors caused by Nazism, the authors of the Herrenchiemsee draft of the German constitution put as its very first article the following:

Der Staat ist um des Menschen willen da, nicht der Mensch um des Staates willen.

(The state exists for the sake of man, not man for the sake of the state.)

The Swedish constitution has a similar-sounding opening; that “all public power descends from the people”. But the difference between these two is considerable. The Swedish opening is a legitimizing force arguing that since the rulers of the Swedish state are elected by the people the actions of that (strong) state are always democratic and legitimate. The Herrenchiemsee draft by comparison realises that for the individual it does not matter how the state derives its legitimacy — it is by nature always authoritarian. The German Grundgesetz that eventually came to be did not end up using the above phrasing, replacing it with the famous

“Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar. Sie zu achten und zu schützen ist Verpflichtung aller staatlichen Gewalt”.

(Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.)

This too puts human dignity in the hands of the state, attempting to restrain its authoritarian might instead of giving the individual the power to fight against it. The reason for this is of course because the state can not let itself be challenged; doing so would undermine not just the operational practice of statecraft, but also the fundamental reasoning for the state itself.

That the state’s power is sublime and dangerous is an idea that has long existed in theological scholarship, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The church itself is an institution that has always existed in parallel to the state, and therefore by definition undermines its power. That the protestant kingdoms colligated the church with the state was one of the causes for why they were first to apply technics on such a broad scale.

The Jewish Pirkei Avot warns against the state, and against its corrupting practices:

הֱווּ זְהִירִין בָּרָשׁוּת, שֶׁאֵין מְקָרְבִין לוֹ לָאָדָם אֶלָּא לְצֹרֶךְ עַצְמָ

Be wary of the government, as they draw close to a person only when they need him for some purpose.

נִרְאִין כְּאוֹהֲבִין בִּשְׁעַת הֲנָאָתָן, וְאֵין עוֹמְדִין לוֹ לָאָדָם בִּשְׁעַת דָּחְקוֹ

They seem like good friends in good times, but they do not stand for a person in his time of trouble. (Pirkei Avot 2:3)

It is clear that what this warns against is the same as that which Gentile wrote, that the state “accept the individual on in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State”, but does not altruistically help the individual “in his time of trouble”. The Jews unfortunately have perhaps more experience of the state’s power when used against oneself than any other group – not just in the horrors of the holocaust but also in the division between Prussia, Austria, and Russia; in Iberia; the destruction of the second temple; and as far back as the Babylonian captivity.

This is similarly warned against in the old testament, specifically in the widely misinterpreted story of Babel in Genesis 11:

וַיֹּאמְר֞וּ הָ֣בָה ׀ נִבְנֶה־לָּ֣נוּ עִ֗יר וּמִגְדָּל֙ וְרֹאשׁ֣וֹ בַשָּׁמַ֔יִם וְנַֽעֲשֶׂה־לָּ֖נוּ שֵׁ֑ם פֶּן־נָפ֖וּץ עַל־פְּנֵ֥י כׇל־הָאָֽרֶץ׃

And they said, “Come, let us build us a city, and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; else we shall be scattered all over the world.”

וַיֵּ֣רֶד יְהֹוָ֔ה לִרְאֹ֥ת אֶת־הָעִ֖יר וְאֶת־הַמִּגְדָּ֑ל אֲשֶׁ֥ר בָּנ֖וּ בְּנֵ֥י הָאָדָֽם׃

god came down to look at the city and tower that the mortals had built,

וַיֹּ֣אמֶר יְהֹוָ֗ה הֵ֣ן עַ֤ם אֶחָד֙ וְשָׂפָ֤ה אַחַת֙ לְכֻלָּ֔ם וְזֶ֖ה הַחִלָּ֣ם לַעֲשׂ֑וֹת וְעַתָּה֙ לֹֽא־יִבָּצֵ֣ר מֵהֶ֔ם כֹּ֛ל אֲשֶׁ֥ר יָזְמ֖וּ לַֽעֲשֽׂוֹת׃

and god said, “If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach. […]” (Genesis 11:4–6)

The focus on what humanity built here is not a tower to reach up into the heavens in a literal sense, but instead it is the city itself that is the focus of God’s anger. A city that can support such a massive tower must be a grand one – and it is itself a rejection of God’s natural order and world, and of our duty as guardians and shepherds (Genesis 1:26). The city, as Plato has illuminated for us, is the origin and birthplace of the state. That the Pirkei Avot warns against this more advanced and developed form is therefore not surprising – it is a core aspect of Judeo-Christian theology. That “nothing will be out of [our] reach” refers to how the construction of Mumford’s megamachine will be made possible by the city and its kings, and that such employment of technique will make anything possible for mankind – for it is the goal of technique to encompass all. In the same vein Jesus Christ, in Matthew 4:8–9 (during the temptation), is offered all the kingdoms of the world by the devil – who can only offer them because they are not part of God’s creation.

This intellectual thought still remains with us today, even in the agnostic and atheist parts of our perspective on the world. The work of Kant, the great German philosopher, is largely one of secularising and shaping the ideas of the Judeo-Christian ethics into one befitting the enlightenment. His view on democracy (to be differentiated from republicanism) are in line with this thinking on the state; the tyranny of the masses as employed through the state means that the life of the individual person is necessarily ignored – or deliberately destroyed – when “his interests [do not] coincide with those of the State”. The freedom of classical liberalism therefore has its roots in religious opposition against the state.

The totalitarian state is here, ever present, and only interested in its continued survival and growth. It comes in numerous forms – aristocratic, autocratic, dictatorial, democratic and many more. It will almost assuredly come in an ever greater variety in the future, even as the techniques for maintaining state control become more and more common across the world.

Countering this future seems almost impossible, and yet it must be done to ensure the freedom of the individual. It is in this very struggle between these forces that our time will come to be defined; in how we use the state to reduce co₂ emissions, maintain the western “way of life”, and finally hold together an increasingly fractured world. The state is necessarily an oppressive construction that can not be used as a tool for freedom. Its power is however so great that the material rewards it has allotted for its citizens is enormous. ❦

What first comes to mind when talking about Europe and tech is likely the strong forms of regulation that the European Union (eu) has legislated in recent times. Most prominent of this is of course the General Data Protection Regulation (gdpr) that governs the handling of data on European users and has had global impacts through the Brussels effect. Thinking of American or Chinese tech on the other hand likely awakes images of more empirical accomplishments — of companies, products and services that actually make up an industry.

This invites the conclusion that because Europe has strong regulation it has killed off its nascent tech industry. I do not hold the opinion that this is the case. gdpr in particular mostly harms larger, non-tech firms that collect large amounts of data on individuals and therefore have to build large elaborate systems to try and manage this data collection.

Garicano and Holmström, in their newly released piece The Constitution of Innovation, quote a study saying that European venture capital funding decreased following the enactment and implementation of gdpr. This observation may be true, but I have trouble seeing how gdpr empirically hurts startups. Reading up on the requirements it seems that startups and services merely need to follow best-practices and not collect already unethical amounts of data. That “[gdpr] favors us tech giants which can shoulder the burden of massive compliance costs” seems laughable, since those us tech giants have instead opted to ignore gpdr² on many fronts, a problem of enforcement rather than regulation. Small startups are instead incentivized to use data collection systems that anonymize data to begin with. Anecdotally I asked the founder of a European ai startup how much of an obstacle the gdpr was to their firm, and they responded that it did not significantly impact them³. I also spoke to the Swedish minister for eu Affairs (Jessica Rosencrantz) who told me that Google had talked to her at the world economic forum about how troublesome gdpr was for them, and how they would prefer it to be slimmed down. Why would (one of) the most privacy-invasive tech monopoly want to get rid of the gdpr if it is what keeps the competition down? The answer is that it only harms those companies whose business model focuses on harming its customers, and it is in the interest of Europeans to keep these companies out.

“But if European startups can’t collect as much data they won’t make us much money right?” There is an element of truth to this, but the large American tech companies have shown that it is still profitable to run social media platforms in a post-gdpr Europe — otherwise they would have left the European market.

The arguments made by Constitution that the European regulatory machine might be out of control (specifically the European one, not that of the national governments) should however not be dismissed out of hand — but that it is harming European tech and innovation specifically seems less clear to me. There is clearly something here that needs to be fixed in general, and a renewed spirit of prosperity and economic growth may have knock-on effects in innovation by freeing up stale capital and misallocated labour.

A recent column in The Economist argues that Europe’s lagging innovation is because of our stricter labour laws. This would make it riskier for companies to make large bets on ideas that may not pan out since they wouldn’t be able to fire teams working on bad ideas. This might make sense on the margins, but glossing over the names of silicon valley it seems that most groundbreaking innovation comes from either small, visionary companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Openai, Intel, et cetera) or companies that are willing to power through what seems like obviously failed or wasteful ideas because they believe in what it could achieve (Nvidia, SpaceX, et cetera). That American innovation is now driven more by large, dominant companies seems more like a natural consequence of consolidation in the industry rather than large companies being good at making innovative bets.

There are also those who say that the reason why Europe does not have much ai, or a strong tech industry more broadly, is because there are those who perceive such sectors as “authoritarian”, “promethean madness” or “techno-fascist”. To me this seems absurd. Even if these people have any actual influence on policy they are still not the people who would have otherwise built a tech industry. The question should be focused on the people on the margins — why do people who sit in their bedrooms and code all day not found successful software companies?

Building a social media platform is comparatively easy⁴. By far the biggest issues for any new player entering the field is network effects, that everyone you know is already on the preëxisting platform. The second hardest thing is keeping people continuously hooked on your platform (to use a colloquial term). This is important since the more users have their attention directed at your service, the more advertisements you can show them — the lifeblood of most social media platforms.

The provider of the digital platform does not do most of the work, that is done by content creators⁵. Hosts are incentivized to make it hard to move your creations to other platforms to keep the aforementioned network effects in place. To successfully break out into this space they need to provide a sufficiently different experience to create their own network effects before their inventions are copied by the dominant players.

But why do we need to have this focus on social media to begin with? Would it not be a better idea for Europe to “skip the line” and start building European Artificial Intelligence (ai) straight away? This sounds reasonable, but it still remains to be seen what the business model for ai will be. So far it has been bankrolled almost entirely from the spending on more traditional “Web 2.0” social media and advertisement companies. Meta and Google combined have an almost complete monopoly on digital advertisement, and are using this income from the “real economy” to finance these large bets on ai. Social media is the tech industry at this point. There is also the fact that one of the biggest assets in building a competitive ai company is access to large amounts of consumer data.

China has managed to build its own tech industry through the application of this logic. The famous Great Firewall of China does not just keep information out of the country (like about the Tiananmen Square massacre) but just as importantly it has kept foreign tech companies out. Chinese tech companies have then filled this void and built competitive platforms. Mainland émigrés do not delete their Wechat accounts when moving abroad, abandoning them for superior American alternatives, they keep them due to their network effects.

It is possible to replicate this approach in Europe. A total block would likely be infeasible, owing to fact that European nations generally want friendly relations with the usa, but some sort of system that gives American companies a handicap for their monopolistic nature would not be unwarranted. This would likely be some sort of digital services tax (dst) that taxes larger platforms more. This would allow European companies to compete with entrenched rivals from the other side of the Atlantic.

The downside of such an approach is obvious, especially with the recent American administration. The tech industry has considerable influence in American decision-making, and so any move to supplant them will likely receive backlash. The Americans themselves consider Google to be a monopoly, so reducing their influence here would likely improve the state of the digital advertisement market.

I do not know if this is the path forward. To me it is easy to see the status quo as a wealth transfer from Europe (and the rest of the world) to Silicon Valley, data as a form of digital oil gathered cheaply in the orient before being sold to the domestic market. The problem may genuinely just be one of competition — of a few number of companies (that just happen to be American) gaining a disproportionate share of the economy due to their monopolistic practices. In that case the course of action would just be stricter anti-trust enforcement.

What is the benefit genuinely gained from Europe not possessing their own tech companies? Cheaper electricity prices (than would otherwise be the case) may be one, but data centres still need to be present in Europe to efficiently provide Europeans with services (and content). To me it seems that smaller European companies are more than capable to providing the same services as the American tech giants, the only exception being the sheer scale (and that is itself perhaps problematic).

This has been discussed ad nauseam, but it bears repeating. The European Union needs a systematic banking and capital markets reform. This would allow startups to raise capital in Europe without moving to Silicon Valley.

Here in Sweden we are quite proud of what we see as an innovative and digital culture and economy, spawning things like Spotify, Minecraft, and Skype. But all of these have moved to the usa in some capacity⁶. That the American financial system is so dominant is of course a given, and we should therefore expect European companies to make use of this to raise additional capital — but Europe also needs to more effectively make use of the resources in its possession.

A deeper union for banking (perhaps paired with some form of combined European debt) would allow for better coördinated form of spending. This appears to be to be the biggest initial problem for European startups, a problem that right now is only solved by moving to the United States of America.

Data centres do not matter. That is an exaggeration of course, but investing more in data centres will not create a tech industry. They employ very few people following their construction, and can be used remotely from anywhere on the planet. A tech startup will not decide where to relocate to depending on whether or not they get slightly lower ping⁷. They will be located where they can get skilled staff, attract investment, and carry out their work effectively. There is no reason that this can not be in the European Union.

Data centres are still necessary, but constructing them does not drive innovation (except seemingly in ai). The state should be more focused on funding research and enabling innovative companies to actually enter the market rather than building infrastructure that will be used by American tech companies instead.

The entire point of the internet is to be able to separate computing from where it is needed and used. Data centres allow devices at the edge (laptops, smartphones, et cetera) to perform feats of computation that would otherwise be too slow — like running llms⁸. Having domestic data centre capacity is not critical for building a tech industry, you can just rent capacity in northern Virginia if you really need it. Building local data centres is then only a good idea if demand holds steady, and even if that is the case they still need to be refitted with newer, faster computers every so often.

This calculation looks different for China however. They are actively hostile to the us and therefore need to attain their own data centre capacity in case they come into armed conflict over Formosa. While America has shown its inability to be trusted in recent times, I still believe that the American tech lobby is strong enough to maintain European market access for the foreseeable future. The European market is simply too alluring for those companies to avoid.

Recently there has been increasing talks of tech stacks and the of the costs and advantages of building our own compared to using a preëxisting one. Tech stacks are sets of software (and/or hardware) that can be deployed in combination with each other. Most famous of these is perhaps the lamp stack (Linux, Apache, Mysql/Mongodb, Perl/php/Python) using free (as in freedom) software to serve websites or applications. A newer example might be the use of Nvidia ai chips running pytorch written in cuda. We all stands on the shoulders of giants, and it is needless to reinvent the wheel for all of your infrastructure.

A recent report from the Centre for European Policy Studies has broadened this perspective to the entire supply chain for digital services, all the way from the end-user application to the physical materials used in the manufacturing of the integrated circuits themselves. The proposal is that all of this (or at least a significant portion) should be supplied by eu institutions is not only protectionist to an absurd degree, it is unrealistic. Attaining digital sovereignty should not mean abandoning non-eu digital solutions entirely, and any attempt at doing so will likely fail.

Instead Europe should do what has been proven to work, to rid itself of proprietary solutions that exert control over their users (regardless of if they are the American government or a Lithuanian small business). Europe is already strong in this regard; The Linux kernel was first developed in Helsinki and is today developed globally. The World Wide Web (www) was developed at the pan-European cern.

Free software is not just a part of building European technology, it is the only path forward. Supporting initiatives such as risc-v is a good idea, but it is still problematic if European companies build proprietary systems on top of those free solutions, like Nvidia has done with its cuda.

Building ai has not made much money so far, but I do not believe it will in the future either — just as being an internet-service provider is not hugely profitable (but not loss-making either). Open models have shown how llms are almost fungible in practice; Switching models can be done quickly and quite easily. ai labs have no “moat”. Instead the money is likely to be made by those who can effectively apply llms to new industries and applications. While Openai has generally performed best out of all the major model providers competitors are usually not far behind. Why use one company’s model when you can get 90% of the performance for a far lower price?⁹

The debate surrounding Chinese electric vehicles and the risks that they may pose due to their highly interconnected nature¹⁰ touches on similar topics. The debate centres on if a dependence on Chinese carmakers’ software will allow them to “take control” of transport in a crisis — especially with the developments in self-driving. But this misses the point entirely. That we can not trust our methods of transportation is not a problem with the author of the software, it is with the modes of control themselves. Cars (and the software running other critical services) needs to be open to introspection, control, and modification in order to create a resilient society. This is the case for Chinese, American, and even European auto manufacturers. Talking about if we can trust China is like talking about if we can trust the person holding a gun to our heads not to shoot — when the real problem is how to get rid of the gun (and not who to replace the person holding it).

At the Swedish Defence University — perhaps one of the places you would most likely expect technological independence to play a major role — we are still (and increasingly) reliant on Microsoft software. Switching to free and open alternatives (that are likely significantly more secure) should be easy, there is just a lack of urgency surrounding switching to alternatives that would improve European sovereignty.

Adopting free software is also a good approach in that it does not antagonise the us, and in allows us to make use of their talent and infrastructure, and in return improves their position. Building a libre stack is inherently not a protectionist choice, it is a democratic one that improves the well being of all peoples.

Benjamin Bratton says that while Europe needs to build its own stack to achieve sovereignty, it can not rely on free software because it is “anti-sovereign”. But this is exactly what Europe needs. To crush the hearts of European federalists everywhere: Europe is not a state. It can not rely on solutions that allow other states to pressure each other. This is the reason that eu countries are limited in their ability to orchestrate industrial policy. The solution is not merely to move this decision-making to the eu-level. Instead Europe needs anti-sovereign solutions, because they work in the same spirit of European coöperation and integration as the eu itself.

Much like Europe itself free software is subject to intense debate on what it actually is, comes from a wide breadth of different places and people, sometimes has issues with coming up with unified plan, and yet is responsible for some of the most important improvements in recent history. What could be more fitting than for a European tech stack to reject a centralised form of industrial policy and instead adopt a form of technology that prioritises freedom, efficiency, and diversity? In varietate concordia. ❦