Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
The truth is that life is cheap in this conflict.  The combatants
not gonna stop because they're not dying all that fast.   Also, the 
regional war has a larger context.   In oligarchic societies (which
is what we've got, Russia and Ukraine merely first-and foremost) ,
underclass life is always cheap, generally speaking, just as a
matter of principle.  

There's colossal lebensraum in both Ukraine and Russia, and yet the
world in 2024 seems overcrowded.  The elites immiserate the debtors.
Emigration is frowned upon; nobody wants and needs new people.  Even
middle-class life for majority-ethnics is cheap now.  

The USA is not in a land-war (at least not directly), but its death
rate is soaring and its life expectancy is way down.  The USA's
opioid massacres have reduced somewhat, but the senseless gun
massacres are quite frequent and the suicide rate is also high.  So
asking, "`How can the Russians and Ukrainians stand all this
bloodshed?" is like counter-asking "How can the Americans possibly
endure so many tragically dead Americans?"  It doesn't occur to the
Americans to ask that question.   It's not within the modern 
paradigm.  Also, the Americans are not gonna make any particular
effort to save the lives of imperilled Americans, except, maybe,
Americans in the womb, for religious reasons.  

So the land-war will be lastingly bloody, and far-away  Americans
will also be dying in large numbers in 2024.  And, rather than
effectively reacting to save themselves, they'll be more inured to
it.
  

    

One remarkable novel development in the Russia-Ukraine conflict is
the Russian recruitment of *foreign* meat-soldiers, from the
Russian-influence areas of Syria, Libya, and also some Indians, by
various reports.  

These newly-globalized guys are mercenaries, they're paid for with
Russian blood-for-oil money.  It's enough money to make it worth
their while to risk their lives.   Yes, they'll get shot dead by
Ukrainians, but mostly they'll get shot *at,* because the 
Ukrainians are coming to realize that wiping them out doesn't make
any strategic difference.

   For victory, the Ukrainians need to break the new Iron Curtain
and re-take their Russian-occupied cities.  Meat-grinding
meat-soldiers doesn't get them any closer to that goal.
  

    
"Will there be peace in Ukraine in 2024?"  It's not impossible.
There might be some black-swan miracle.  Putin sending paratroops
into Kyiv, that was almost a miracle -- really a wild, black-swan
thing to do.   Yevgeny Prighozhin staging a mutiny in Moscow --
because his meat-troops were getting shelled by his own side -- that
was almost a miracle.  Putin might die like Prigozhin died, and then
there'd be a Kremlin night of long-knives of some kind, because he
has no prepared successor and no trustworthy way to elect one or
legitimize one.  So it is an unstable situation -- but militarily,
it's pretty close to stalemate.

I don't think the Ukrainians will collapse.  Large areas of Ukraine
have already collapsed to Russian occupation. Life there is no
better.  It's worse.
  

    
I would also point out that even a signed Ukraine-Russia peace
treaty won't be "peace" as one might like that  condition to be.  
It's been quite a long time since the civil war in Yugoslavia, and
the successor states are "at peace," sort of.  They're not actively
shooting one another, but those are enemy states.  They're full of
generational, long-lasting bitterness toward one another. 
Ethnonational states don't know what "peace" is.  "Isolationism,"
they kind of like.  International amity between peoples, they don't
like that at all; it's bad for them.
  

    
There's also the conflict in Gaza and Israel following the October 7
attack by Hamas, which was the third deadliest terrorist attack
since 1970, based on the number of fatalities. The Gaza conflict
will almost certainly have an impact on the war in Ukraine in
several ways - primarily diversion of resources and attention. The
war will also have an economic impact beyond Israel and Palestine,
affecting other countries like Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. Tourism
in the region is at risk, as is economic investment in the region.
The war's also created division within the US, and increased
occurrences and accusations of anti-semitism. I mention accusations
because some who oppose Israel's actions in Gaza have been accused
of anti-semitism, but it's not unreasonable to express concern about
violent attacks on civilians pretty much anywhere in the world.
  

    
I would add that the long list of crises you list is intertwingled,
and contains others -- like the rapid loss of species diversity,
which is intimately connected with a warming planet and food
production, and others.

Does it make sense to think of the items on this list much more as
of a single "polycrisis", as some people call it? And the challenge
to address the list items as a single challenge of addressing this
multi-faceted polycrisis?
  

    
Here's an interview with historian Adam Tooze about the concept of
polycrisis:
<https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/03/polycrisis-adam-tooze-historian-explain
s/>

"You cannot live through the experience of 2020 and not be
profoundly shaken in your assumptions about what you can take for
granted, especially as a young person. It's all very well for
somebody of my age to look at the world and say, 'Well, I can take a
hiatus for 18 months.' But I know from watching my daughter's
experience, that it's much more panic-inducing if you don't actually
know what the rest of your life is going to be like. There's no
normality from which you're taking a break. You're 20 or 21 and
you're trying to figure out what you do next.

"This is a huge shock that is going to reverberate through global
society, especially in middle-income countries, notably in Latin
America, there are literally tens and then globally hundreds of
millions of young people who've been deprived of years of education,
socialization and everything that goes with that. So it's very
dramatic. Unless we reckon with this polycrisis experience at all
these levels, we are not doing it justice."
  

    
Thanks Bruce, for inviting me to this conversation. I don't know if
I can fully fit the bill for "some sources of off-the-wall
futuristical razzmatazz", but I definitely can highlight the change
of the hard futures coming at us despite the seeming continuity of
the problem space.

It is a particular honor to have been asked to drop in, given that I
have been reading Sr. Sterling for about as long as he has been
doing this particular bit of ritual futurism. Our first conversation
back in the 90s riffed on arms control using his occult metaphor for
offensive cyber capabilities (in which he was very kind to a rather
overly enthusiastic young man). I did not know at the time, but his
foresight across so many areas quite literally shaped the world in
which I would later operate.

Somewhere along the way, I fell into grappling with cyber for a
living as the field transitioned from a thing that might be to a
daily threat across the spectrum of competition, crisis, and
conflict (a HostileSpectrum, if one prefers). I currently serve as a
professor at National Defense University and a research scholar at
the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia
University. I came to academia having formerly served as an
intelligence professional in both government and industry for more
than 25 years, doing the hard things that I now try to write better
theory and doctrine to understand. As always, the views and opinions
expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the official policy or position of any agency of the US
government or other organization.

In intelligence service, I have for a number of years been involved
in the futures thing - including supporting hard estimates and even
harder warning problems. So like Bruce I share a set of paleofuture
ideas that provide lenses for what we thought we might be grappling
with in the 2020's. I can't claim anything so insightful as the
ideas that have come to pass involving death by armed drone, or
geriatric politicians propped up only by their AI augmentation.

However, while he gave us a first vision of ubiquitous corporate
video teleconferencing as primary mechanisms of business
interaction, I was involved in futures scenario effort 20 years ago
that foresaw this changing communications and decision making
environment emerging after serial pandemic that swept the world, as
part of the hard intelligence problems in the 2020s. Whilst it is
entirely fatigue inducing to talk about the lost years in the real
world version of that remix, the ripples of those changes are still
not something most folks have fully come to terms with.

Beyond these drivers, we are haunted by multiple concurrent wars and
rumors of wars to come. Much of what has mattered in these fights
within the cyber domain have not fully come to light - even if they
are as a result of the revolution in intelligence affairs things
that can be known from open source information and industry insight.
But even the folks that follow the fights day to day are
increasingly overwhelmed by unevenly distributed futures, and their
very sharp edges colliding with the things we thought we understood
about how to make war, and handle national security crises in order
to avoid war and find peace.

I cannot shake the sense that we are rapidly outrunning our
headlights, into unknown futures that will emerge outside of the
cone of probability we thought bounded our world as deep change
drivers upend comfortable assumptions of our earlier epoch. One of
the reasons I am always excited about the State of the World
conversations is that it is a remarkably enduring mechanism for
sensemaking about those unknowns. I'll have a few things to say that
I hope will contribute to this sensemaking process, and even more
interested in what may come out of this.
  

    
Welcome, J.D. By "revolution in intelligence affairs," are you
referring to the idea that artificial intelligence (AI) and
autonomous systems will transform the practice of espionage? Or
something else?
  

    
The revolution in intelligence affairs is an argument that Greg
Treverton (formerly chair of the National Intelligence Council, and
later with RAND) really brought into prominence. It is the shift
from stealing secrets as a function of narrow and opaque government
activity, towards dealing with the broader ways of knowing that
emerge from lightweight publishing, prosumer media, ubiquitous
sensor deployments, and automated processing and exploitation of
large datasets - all done increasingly in the private sector rather
than in state practice. The latter is now usefully enabled by neural
network based tools and emerging AI capabilities, but this is just
one piece of radical change. In effect, this is the subversion of a
government monopoly on intelligence.

Of course, we see this most prominently in the Ukraine conflict at
present - where near real time satellite imagery (including
synthetic aperture radar) and constant UAV full motion video imagery
has informed much of what we know publicly about the kinetic fight.
But it is playing out in the Red Sea, and in the Pacific, in ways
that are very much equally radical changes to how policymakers and
the public deal with crisis events.
  

    
I would add that polycrisis is very much the new expression of what
former DCIA Panetta would describe as "Blizzard War", where issues
came at policymakers at volume, variety, and velocity that
challenged industrial era governance structures and policymaking
processes. 

The tyranny of the present crisis has always threatened the ability
to think meaningfully about the future. The problem becomes
magnified when the scope of these present blizzards degrade our
ability to even think about the now.
  

    
The idea that the (im)plausibly deniable, and now too often denied,
human wreckage of failed GRU paramilitary actions at the front would
have their own feelings on how the war was conducted, and be able to
make those feelings known, was one of the most serious surprises of
the unknown futures spawned by polycrisis. Prigozhin's mutiny likely
did not start out as a mutiny. It was a sit down, in the old sense
of the term used within Russian organs of state power, at the
Southern Military District headquarters. It became a march on Moscow
when the sit down failed, as an appeal to the Tsar. However, the
state could not help but see this an an echo of the Time of
Troubles, which led to a coup in the summer of 1605. The Smuta
Boogaloo of summer 2023 came to the precipice - and had things
played out slightly differently, was precisely the war termination
scenario many in the West had hoped to see. That is, internal change
leading to removal of Putin with the hopes that successor elites
disenfranchised by losses - especially losses due to sanctions, and
increasing numbers of previously unthinkable direct strikes against
Moscow - would sue for peace. But instability within the Russian
state is a nuclear crisis. We were very lucky the march north
bypassed nuclear warhead storage facilities, because it is entirely
unclear that 12th Main Directorate could have held out against
hardened mercenary forces intent on acquiring weapons. Or if the
permissive action link and other nuclear surety mechanisms would
have been sufficient to avoid nuclear blackmail with live weapons,
rather than weapons in an unknown state.

Certainly, not a scenario folks convinced that the end of history
would bring us. And this entire chain of events was kicked off by
what was likely cyber espionage against what were seen as
increasingly restless mercenary forces directly challenging Ministry
of Defense leadership through public statements disputing priority
of logistics support and overall war aims, leading to the moves
against Wagner that triggered an inevitable response in part out of
paranoia, and in part because to not act would be to cede to a
different kind of death.

Sometime in 2023 Prigozhin shifted from infamously using an old
Psion handheld computer, to a more modern apparent Android device.
Which of course gave new options to target the device itself. In
part, this moment of surprise was as much about exploiting that new
mobile, and whatever encrypted comms that Prigozhin felt comfortable
using despite known FSB intrusion capabilities and widespread
publicly released intercepts of other GRU comms broken during
earlier months of the SVO.

Ubiquitous insecurity, and offensive cyber advantage, thus shapes so
many features of the polycrisis even with one particular mercenary
warlord dead.
  

    
Via email from Webb Traverse:

So, what do the veterans and imagineers who have the most
acquaintance with the shifting, evolving polycrisis (and past forms
of crisis) say to the plebeians, particularly those so far feeling
insulated from it, about what to do?

Trust the powers that be?

Engage in politics along a certain agenda to advocate for different
outcomes?

Really do make sure they have a Go bag wit a first aid kid and a
lifestraw and maybe buy a generator? A gun? Land? A bunker?

How much of the preparedness rhetoric is placebo salve, how much is
common sense, but where to stop---how insane ... or sane ... are the
QAnon red-pilled preppers?
  

    
Via email from Webb Traverse:

Something to highlight in the all-encompassing polycrisis:

Tim Bray, no dummy himself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Bray)
posted a personal little new year write-up. He's more optimistic
sounding than many. Hey, I hope.

But he also noted this, and he's hardly the first (_How to blow up a
pipeline_, anybody?):
<https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/01/01/New-Years-Day>

> Did I mention the climate catastrophe? I hope our political
leaders come
> to their senses, get out from under the Carbon Hegemony, and do
the
> necessary things that will necessarily bankrupt much of the
Petroleum
> sector. If they don't, I think it near-inevitable that some of
those
> defending the planet's future will discard their commitment to
non-
> violence. There is nothing people won't do to protect their
children.

Do we have to fear that too? Or join in at some point?
  

    
Re: Webb Traverse

The problem with any interwringled set of problems / "wicked
problems" / the polycrisis is that our usual approach to solving
problems -- analyzing scope and shape of the problem, dividing,
working down the list one item at a time -- doesn't really work. The
list is too long, too intertwingled, we don't understand enough how
one thing impacts all the others, and by the time we might if we
spent the time, the situation has changed too much to make the
analysis still useful.

Personally, while I don't believe there is a "root problem" -- they
are impact each other -- in my view the most fundamental of all the
related problems is information dissemination and curation,
including fake news and informational manipulation. I cannot see how
we can make any progress on anything if our information exchange
channels are unreliable. And they are, today, and more so all the
time:

* Fake news is everywhere, and you have seen nuthin' yet in a year
or two when "everybody" has turned on their AI "writers" and
"photographers" at scale ...

* The "objective" news media keeps losing ground in favor of ... I
don't even know what to call that.

* Today's prevalent social media could be a great communication
channel, but it is thoroughly manipulated to optimize for profitable
outcomes of the respective social media platform, and not to convey
the truth. If you follow me and I post something, there is no
guarantee you will ever see it, but you will see what a commercial
or governmental actor pays money for to be shown to you. Not a basis
on which you can solve any problem.

The list goes on.

But it's why I work on the Fediverse these days, the decentralized
social communications network not controlled by any entity, and not
beholden to making a profit. I believe, among many other things,
that it has the potential to claw back communications from being
manipulated-by-default to being not-manipulated-by-default. And if
we manage to re-establish a reliable communication channel with each
other, at least for a large enough subset of people, we can also
start agreeing on what the facts are again.

There may be a golden age of information curation and fact-based
learning in front of us! (Don't laugh! If you don't believe that
possibility, think of what future you believe in instead. I choose
to be an optimist if a non-zero chance exists.)

Of course, there is still a gigantic gap from the rudimentary
Fediverse of today to such an age of facts, and another gigantic gap
from the facts to actually finding ways of addressing the
polycrisis, but I cannot see how else we could make progress.
  

    
I am hesitant to respond to the question of "what to do" about
polycrisis. I do not engage in domestic political analysis, and
generally avoid prescriptive policy recommendations. 

I will note that in any of the serious crisis contingencies that I
have been involved in overseas, where everything is coming apart at
once, those that made it through all shared common characteristic.
Whether in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, or Eastern Europe. It was
those folks who could rely on their communities, and the networks of
relationships they had built and nurtured over time, that endured.
Even in the worst times.
  

    
There are encouraging solutions emerging for defanging
disinformation, but perhaps unfortunately for any of us over 45 or
so, they often involve adding media literacy and critical thinking
to educational curricula from primary grades onwards.
  

    
Welcome back! Bard was unable to help me with SotWDT, State of the
World Deprivation Therapy. Accept no substitutes.

If I may, I'd add to the List two concerns.

Expanding upon <30> ( for newcomers, that's how we refer to previous
posts ), players being drawn in include but go beyond Egypt, Jordan,
and Lebanon ~ to include Saudi Arabia (tilting away from Israel and
the Abraham Accords), Syria, Yemen (the Houthi's blocking the Red
Sea), Turkey (with its huge army), and of course Iran.  Given Russia
- Ukraine and now Israel - Gaza, am I off-base to add World War
Three to this year's list?  Or would it take China retaking Taiwan? 
I wonder if one reason world war is not widely discussed is our
sense of "the world" as being circumscribed by a limited sense of
the world, limned by, say, H G Welles' Outline of History (1919).  
Or is the concept World War past its sell date?  The other side of
the ledger is the possibility of recognizing and understanding who
profits from war, and who suffers ~ and finding a better way to
co-exist. 

The economic bottom line of of wars is that they're expensive.  And
economic warfare is nevertheless war, by other means.  I continue to
monitor the stories including the trend towards dedollarization, the
UAE being the most recent opposing the petrodollar.  Meanwhile, U.S.
debt continues to climb into the clouds like Jack in the beanstalk. 
On the positive sides of that ledger, I'm watching neighborhood
economics, and regenerative agriculture.   

That's my two cents. 
  

    
According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the world is 90
conceptual seconds from global catastrophe. So at least one set of
experts sure doesn’t think so the concept of world war has gone
stale. 
  

    
*Man, the good old WELL State of the World is hopping when people
show up and flatter me and I don't have to do very much.
  

    
*In seeing Emily's list up there, in post #12, of things that are
"positive developments," well, I read that with attention, and I've
read a lot of those.  And I could compile one of my own, too, but I
never do.  I find that they never actually cheer me up.

They've very human expressions, they're not phony, but they're like
expressing gratitude  after the tornado hits your house (which
people commonly do).  "Well, we lost a lot of material things, but
the great thing is, we're all still alive, and Mom only broke one
hand, and now Dad can buy a new toupee, and that will look lots
better!"
  

    

They don't want their hearts to break, and they do feel a kind of
reverse-traumatic elation, but that lacks allure for me.  I don't
want to participate in that.  I've come to realize that, as things
do grow darker here in the 21st century, I've developed a different
personal and cultural sensibility that's a lot more Eastern
European. And, nowadays, I find comfort in that.  It seems suitable,
and appropriate to existent conditions.

I'd even say that I have more of a *Belgrade* sensibility now.   At
the beginning of this century, I used to venture there, and I would
say to myself, "Wow, this strange, exotic city has so many elements
of a real-life cyberpunk dystopia, it's really raw, tough and
tragicomic here, and steeped in transgression, narcotics and guns!" 
And that was all true as far as it went, but it was more of my
tourist impression.  I hadn't internalized how they got that way,
and also, how they persisted, despite being that way.
  

    
I have never been on the Ukraine/Russia battlefronts, but I have
been in Belgrade rather a lot recently, and if that vast land-war
stormcloud is gonna have some kinda silver lining for 2024, it's in
Belgrade.  I don't claim that this is a general reason to "cheer up"
-- the people of Belgrade aren't perky and happy.  They just aren't.
There's some perkiness-and-happiness in Belgrade, but it tends to be
rather covert, it's not adult behavior.

However, almost instantly, when the grisly mass-shooting started in
Ukraine, things turned around in Belgrade in a major fashion. 
Belgrade in 2024 is a flat-out boom town.  They've got more
"new-and-improved" going on than pretty much anybody else that I
know.
  

    
Where is that coming from?  Well, it's not *all* war-profiteering. 
Some of it is Arab Gulf-State offshored oil money, and other shady
characters looking to own real-estate where they can't be
extradited, but it's mostly Russian and Ukrainian money.  And many
Russian and Ukrainian people -- peaceniks, draft dodgers, and some
business people.  They scrammed toward a town that would accomodate
and accept them.  Because they didn't want to get bombed, or
bullied, or it was just harshing their mood to wake up to sirens and
listen to bullshit patriotic-medleys on TV.

So there's lots of them around in Belgrade. They're not "happy,"
either.   These refugees, or refuseniks, they have a distinct look
on their faces like:  "Well, the human condition is inherently
tragic, but I showed some agency and I did something unorthodox that
made sense."

Also, the Russian emigres in Belgrade and the Ukrainian emigres in
Belgrade, they do not shoot one another.  They're not showing a lot
of inter-ethnic ferocity.  They could do that, but they don't have
much stomach for it.  They could go home and do that.
  

    
There's a kind of survivor's practicality about this, and also,
things are moving in Belgrade.  They're  not "progressing," but the
town is physically transforming in major ways.  There's an influx of
wealth, money-changes-everything.   

Probably the most obvious thing at one glance -- everybody's got a
new car.  They're discovering what traffic-jams are.  What suburban
commutes are like.  They never knew that before.  They couldn't
afford that.  It's not "advancement," because everybody in
California knows that the upshot is awful, but they're actually
experiencing the direct fulfillment of some of their material
ambitions.  They're better clothed.  Better furniture in the stores.
Lots of pricey sports athleisure gear.  They look different.