(2018-02-01) Hall Situational Assessment 2018 The Calm Before The Storm

Jordan Hall: Situational Assessment 2018: the Calm Before the Storm. What follows is an update and inspection of the “four front” framework laid out in 2017, this time with a heavier touch of the central (“collective intelligence”) proposition.

Front One: Communications Infrastructure.

The first thesis is that we are witnessing a transition from one media infrastructure (broadcast and, specifically, Television media) to another media infrastructure (decentralized and interactive Digital media) and that this shift is driving a fundamental change in the very nature of how we go about forming effective “collective intelligence”.

the crux of the assertion is that media infrastructures can be compared to ecological niches. There are, by example, media “jungles” and there are media “deserts” and different forms of sensemaking and coordination are adapted to these very different environments.

the approach of the Insurgency is undermining broadcast media in general — not just “Blue” media.

There are at least three things at play here:

Attention is attention. By means of direct digital communications, the Insurgency has largely controlled the attention of legacy media (and by proxy the attention of its entire audience).

while the Blue Church’s conscious evaluation of the event might have been to deride the President as an incompetent, it is the unconscious meaning that matters: they gave him their attention en masse and almost for free. Over and over again in 2017, we saw this dynamic play out.

It is Kayfabe all the way down. The power of the Blue Church is premised on a sense of Authority and Seriousness. By pushing the entire conversation into the realm of the absurd (“really Fake News”), the Insurgency robs the Church of its simulacrum of legitimacy

Velocity, velocity, velocity. The Blue Church is like a Battleship.

The Insurgency, by contrast, is more like a swarm of Slaughterbots

the entire Blue Church approach to collective sensemaking and action requires a particular velocity of change. By moving the entire landscape into a much higher pace, the Insurgency is making it impossible for the Blue Church collective intelligence to maintain effective coherence.

The Blue Church has been pushed to the beaches and the only real question is whether or not there is a way to move what resources remain into the redoubts of Internet media structures that are controlled by and allied with Blue (most notably Twitter, Facebook and Reddit)

regardless of one’s opinion of the content of the Blue Church and the Red Insurgency, I think it is important to recognize that most future scenarios have the balance of power continually shifting away from Broadcast/Television dominant and into Interactive/Digital dominant.

right now, the Red Collective Intelligence looks and feels a lot like “applied schizophrenia” with a big dose of “indiscriminate paranoia” but the future is very much on the side of this kind of model. The sooner that more people with a wider set of values and perspectives learn how to play this new game, the better for everyone.

Front Two: The Deep State

the Deep State seems to be both divided against itself and still operating according to old doctrine.

At the same time, the Blue side of the Deep State has clearly been innovating its ability to fight the next war. Anyone watching the struggle of the last year would have to have noticed the extraordinary conflicts happening online with the combination of Blue Church extensions like ShareBlue Media and the either explicit or tacit alliance with Twitter, Reddit and Facebook elites meeting in an Iwo Jima (or perhaps Heartbreak Ridge?) like conflict with the “swarms” of the Insurgency.

While the decentralized nature of the Internet renders it more naturally in alignment with the strategic mode of the Insurgency, the “network effects” of Platforms appears to be a natural characteristic of the terrain that is fully available to the modes of the Church (islands of stability and control).

Front Three: Globalism

The Insurgency has been explicitly anti-globalist and as far as I can tell has been running the table all year.

Essentially, as long as the Insurgency holds position on Fronts One and Two it appears well positioned to establish terms on Front Three.

Power in the 20th Century was largely a balance between Energy and Innovation — this balance showed up in the form of Industrial might. Already in this Century, Innovation has begun to consume Energy and will continue to do so. Innovation will consume Energy, Military and Media — all of the foundations of 20th Century power. Even Food and Water will get swept up in the wave of accelerating change. Optimizing for Innovation is the crux of power in the 21st Century.

Front Four: The New Culture War

My sense is that the Fourth Front attracted the most attention in 2017. This was where I specifically called out the concept of the Blue Church and its cultural conflict with the emergent “Red Religion” (both terms I explicitly stole from an anonymous Redditor).

At the level of Culture War, Blue is facing two distinct disabling limitations.

The first is the locus of its operational coherence: the Blue Church itself and its dominant control of media, education and government.

the Blue Church is structurally obsolete and, therefore, increasingly inefficient. Yet, at least for the most part, Blue is still almost entirely operating through and with the institutions and modes of the Church.

a lot of Blue’s energy is being directed and controlled by a system that is a bad combination of ineffective and cynical. To put it bluntly, they have the power to stop Bernie Sanders — but not to stop Trump. And they have been repeating this losing strategy continuously throughout 2017

The second major challenge for Blue is the ideological content of the Blue Faith. This is the mix of ideas and strategies broadly contained by the frame of the New Left that merged with each other to effectively out-compete the mid-century ideologies of the 1950’s Establishment.

These ideas and strategies (including, among many other things, deconstruction and postmodernism, critical race theory, queer theory and both second and third wave feminism) proved extremely effective as critical strategies. But thus far (and perhaps precisely because they are fundamentally critical frameworks), they are proving remarkably incapable of forming a coherent structure around which to build an effective new collective intelligence.

it isn’t surprising that what we are witnessing from Blue is for the most part a mix of performative “virtue signaling” and self-destructive critique; combined with a building agitation and anomie

Where does Blue go from here?

My sense continues to be that the right model is “catastrophe theory.”

The War for Collective Intelligence

For those who want to step up to 40,000 feet and look at the landscape free from the biases and contamination of American politics, we can scan an apparently different zone of the broader war to see what I think shows up as the exact same dynamics: the blockchain.

In this domain, the forces arrayed are the Ancien Regime of Silicon Valley style Venture Capital and Startup Culture against the unwashed revolutionaries of cryptocurrencies, decentralized consensus and autonomous organizations

Have you noticed the pace of change in, for example, drone warfare? Or in self-improving AI? Crispr Cas9? This is nothing compared to the pace of innovation that will be unlocked once a functional decentralized collective intelligence emerges

Obviously, this is daunting. By definition, no one is prepared for this kind of question. So — what is one to do? Oddly, the right approach is actually rather simple and I believe my recommendations from last year continue to be completely applicable both to the local political situation in the United States and the West as well as to the bigger picture. 2017-01-29-HallSituationalAssessment2017TrumpEdition