Change Partners
We gotta talk about structural balance.
Social network analysis has the notion of structural balance. I first encountered this concept in relation to Imperial Alliance Networks in a Coursera class ten years ago. This isn’t formally part of The Online Operation Kill Chain material, but given the condition of the world, we MUST cover this, so you can properly orient yourselves.
Attention Conservation Notice: This is going to be similar to Looking Down From On High, we’re going to figure out where the world is headed in a pragmatic, science based way. Ideology matters, but as a thing to be observed by social scientists and factored into calculations, not as a set of guiding principles. If you’re a devout adherent of one of the Abrahamic religions this could piss you off bigly.
Networks In Conflict:
When there are two networks with dramatically different capabilities, say Europeans and the Americas circa 1500, when they meet there will be conflict, and a single “giant component” will emerge, centered on whichever clique(s) in the network were more capable. If you have a largely homogeneous network, like the European empires at the end of the 19th century, if there is to be conflict, first they will resort themselves into a balanced configuration, as seen in this graph.
So where are we today? Let's unpack the complex, barbaric attack on Israel and those to blame on Truth About Threats has a key aspect of this.
So there you can see the forces driving the grief in Gaza right now. The Rules Based International Order that was exemplified by the United Nations forming after WWII has run its course. China, Russia, and Iran are unhappy with their collective position, and have fueled the likes of Trump, Bolsanaro, Orban, Duterte, and all the rest of the internal anti-democratic threats in the world.
China is the head of the serpent, then Russia, then Iran, and North Korea is like the vestigial legs some snakes have, not serving much purpose, but present all the same. They’ve going to use the resources they have to try to monopolize extractive industries and markets for their goods in the developing world.
The U.S. could come out of sleeping giant mode, as we did in WWII, but for a variety of reasons I think it’s more likely that our condition today is akin to that of the Ottoman empire in the early 19th century. The “Sick Man of Europe” lost its way, and we’ve dealt with two hundred years of fallout from that. The behavior we see from Russian in Ukraine, Israel in Gaza, and muddle in the Caucasus mirror events in the early 20th century around the time modern Turkey emerged from the ashes of its predecessor.
Climate Catastrophe:
We’re losing the Mississippi as a shipping channel.
We’re losing the Panama Canal as a shipping channel.
We’re losing the Rhine as a shipping channel.
We’re losing the Loire as a shipping channel.
We’re losing the Po as a shipping channel.
If you need more proof than this, you probably don’t belong in this pragmatic, objective reality based discussion. Look at Ethiopia from the 1980s. Somalia from the 1990s. Syria from 2010. Yemen since 2020. Not enough water, not enough food, and problems begin that prove extraordinarily difficult to remediate. Only Ethiopia pulled out of it, The other three are periodically in dire straights. All the dry lands of the former Ottoman empire will be headed that direction. And agricultural production is already curtailed by drought affecting yields AND by low water levels affecting transportation.
Political Mayhem:
The United States is divided. About 70% of us are looking at the Republican party’s obvious and now permanent inability to select a new Speaker, which is a position akin to the Prime Minister for those of you with parliamentary governments. The GOP that once was is gone, the party has split into a Republican Rump interested in governing and the arguably insane Freedom Caucus/MAGA/Qanon nutters, who are expecting an apocalypse loosely based on a reading of the Book of Revelation.
The only thing stopping some of the Rump from crossing the aisle and handing Hakeem Jeffries in the Speaker’s gavel is their fear that they’ll be shot to death during a campaign stop at a county fair. Having put up with that sort of attention on me almost since the inception of the Tea Party back in 2009, I am forcing myself to stick to a “best for the country” position. I could start cackling with glee over them getting their own medicine, but I worry that would be sort of sort butterfly’s wing event that would quickly ripen a great deal of negative karma for all of us.
There will be blood. That’s long since passed into the realm of not quite yet but clearly inevitable. I think the historians will mark the start of our second civil war as January 6th, 2021. My hope is that if we must, the trouble is contained to the Republican disintegration, rather than becoming a rural vs. urban thing.
The Hamas attack on Israel, and Israel’s equally beastly response against all of Gaza, are precisely what we didn’t need given the religious nutter end of days stuff that’s so prevalent here.
Balancing Act:
That’s the macro issues. Sitting where I do, far enough from the front line of trenches to avoid being shot, but still close enough that I have to dodge digital mortar fire, there is an OBVIOUS change. What I’ve done in the twenty years since I parted ways with the Republican party has made me a naturalized centrist, but there are a whole lot of forces at work. The wars, the obvious dysfunction in D.C., the flipfest in Georgia, this has pushed down to the street, and it’s causing the moves people have been privately making for years to start emerging in the public eye.
I have peers, people who have been involved in online conflicts, and they span the entire political spectrum. Since the Hamas invasion people I haven’t heard from in forever have popped up, and I’m having cordial conversations with people I never imagined I’d ever have cause to contact.
Last summer I closed out positions I’ve held since I first tumbled into this curious underworld. These “investments” of my time and attention may have once made sense, but they were at best unproductive in the face of a cold civil conflict about to turn hot. The manner in which this happened was completely unlike anything I’d ever envisioned, and maybe that’s why it went on for so much longer than I ever intended.
Conclusion:
What’s happening looks for all the world like picking sides for a game of dodge ball in a school gymnasium on a snow day. Only the principal is David Lynch, the coach is Quentin Tarantino, and the ball looks like a Soviet anti-tank mine. I am sitting on my ass on this bench, waxing philosophical about my glorious (LOL) career, and pointedly ignoring the glances and tittering from my classmates who’ve already made their choice … or had a choice forced on them.
This sudden wave of “So … what are you up to these days?” will crest and then subside, no later than the holidays. Hopefully we’ll have completed our exploration of the ten phases of The Online Operation Kill Chain, and identified some new project for the first quarter of 2024.