| SNEAK PEEK |
— Do you know when you are being played? Dario delves into the new iteration of alternate reality games and explains why they are actually revolutionary political tools.
— What if the real blind spot in nuclear war is that it’s more survivable than people appreciate? Dario explores.
Dear subscribers,
Here’s the second part of our newsletter, and since there’s so much going on we will keep this greeting short.
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| ANOTHER BIG BLIND SPOT |
GO POKEMON, GO: Niantic, Pokemon’s parent company, is making geospatial AI models to help computers navigate the real world. The big reveal is that Niantic had been using its Pokemon Go game, the mobile-phone based game that made players venture out into the world to capture pokemon, to aid its efforts to build the service. When there was missing data in an area of the world, for instance, Niantic would spawn rare Pokemons and attract players to go and unknowingly capture data for their AI development from that area.
DARIO’s COMMENT: As Niantic’s offering shows, one of the mainstream’s biggest blind spots is the increasingly central role that gaming — both digital and physical — is playing in our society.
What is a game? The reason everyone is missing this is simple: the gamer personality is antithetical to mainstream concepts of adulthood. They are typically insular communities, endlessly toiling and obsessed with seemingly pointless tasks that only make sense inside an enclosed digital environment. Long-ridiculed, it was only the rise of gaming tournaments, with eye-watering sums of money and a viewership that already exceeds American baseball, as well as the incredible margins seen by certain gaming companies, that brought this sector any respect from the mainstream.
But what makes a game powerful is no digital artefact. They are instead wholly physical properties. While a book, a movie, or a TV series only treats their enjoyers as watchers or listeners, a game includes the viewer as a player and grants them agency. The second is the use of mystery — you cannot sleepwalk your way through a game like you might a book or a series. Instead, the player must think and strategize to continue advancing in a game to ‘unlock’ deeper levels of play.
Augmented reality games: The potential to use both of these properties — agency and mystery — to entice individuals to do their bidding is clearly displayed by Niantic. But few individuals have seen the potential of games to go beyond the digital format and into the real world of politics. One of these, as you can imagine, was Izabella.
In a series of prescient articles in the FT, Izzy dwelled on real-life games — ‘Live Action Roleplaying Games’ or LARPs, and how both Bitcoin and QAnon drew from this culture of gaming-brought-to-life to create a new type of Augmented Reality Game: a game environment that exists in the physical world. Another example is the complex Cicada 3301 puzzles, which encouraged players to decipher digitalised clues to join a secretive organisation.
Both Bitcoin and QAnon encouraged their adherents to do their research, one was mathematical while the other was conspiratorial. Their appeal was obvious: unlike other political movements, members of these groups could actively participate in its creation and definition.
Another person who has understood the potential for games is Elon Musk. Unlike other billionaires, Musk has acquired a genuinely engaged online following – in part by his shameless participation in and broadcasting of gamer and meme culture.
The Blind Spot — The ultimate game: We have previously referenced the role incentives and funding play in the ability of interested parties to raise color revolutionary armies. As we discussed, Kazakhstan’s Mukhtar Ablyazov is currently using such engagement ideas — a mix of financial incentives, social status rewards and social media posts — to rally followers to challenge Almaty’s power structure.
Sergei Mavrodi in Russia did so even more creatively in the 1990s, by encouraging non-violent but viral engagement in pyramid schemes and then directing the legions of investors who lost money to vote him into power to both provide him with immunity from jail and the capacity to transfer state funds back to investors. The ultimate lobbying play.
It makes sense then that the next generation of mass political movements of this variety will be structured like an ARG.
For it to work, it must initially take the form of a classic game: enticing players to participate by solving mysteries or challenging tasks.
This step is necessary for two reasons: First, to meld the game with the players’ identities and to build an emotional connection with the game’s objectives. More importantly, it helps identify intelligent individuals who might be willing to follow instructions or expending time in the interests of the game controller.
Taken to its natural conclusion, such a game — if it picks up — has the potential to raise an army of loyal individuals for the game controller who have a proven ability and willingness to exert physical time and effort to help them achieve their agenda. It is a cross between an army and a cult.
In case you haven’t noticed, this would create a modern-day prince: an individual with a sovereign power that effectively extends from the devout loyalty of each of its players.
An example of a historical precursor of such a phenomenon was the creation of the Knights Templar in Jerusalem during the Crusades. While the Knights’ ostensible mission was secretive and still the subject of much debate, the over mission was a spiritual one. But this spiritual goal mostly served as a recruitment call and a testing phase, helping their adherents identify with the title of ‘Knight of the Temple’ while demonstrating which ‘players’ were committed to take it to the kinetic level. This allowed the Grandmasters of this organization to use members for conventional power-accumulation goals: invasions, raids, and tax levies. Their military and financial power eventually became so great — with the French monarchy increasingly indebted to them – that Philip II of France saw no choice but to crush them by force.
Venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan, a supporter and friend of The Blind Spot, has dubbed such sovereign orders in the modern age (for that is what they are — landless states within geographic states), the rise of the network state.
In our neo-medieval piece, we argued that our globalized world’s late Imperial parallels with the Roman Empire were the harbinger of alternative sovereignties, just as in early medieval Europe. One of its clearest examples was the shattering of trust in the West, and the consequent collapse of meaning. All the institutions that were once our societies’ cornerstones, such as Judeo Christianity and the state, are increasingly mistrusted and their commands ignored by the vox populi. What this effectively creates is a spiritual and emotional power vacuum, with increasing numbers of the population seeking to escape through drug use or videogaming. They are ripe for conversion for those who know how.
As individuals search for meaning outside its traditional carriers of the state, religion, and society, it’s only a matter of time before an enterprising individual re-channels these escapists into the real world, harnessing the power of digitally-organised mystery and agency.
The question to bear in mind, therefore, is: Are you being played?
IZZY ADDENDUM: A curious related sub-phenomenon is the growing awareness by anti-disinformation bodies that challenging conspiracies by loudly and repetitively asserting counter narratives from an authoritative standpoint is no longer good enough. While that strategy was effective with the majority of the population whose minds are wired for conformity for decades, it seems to be losing resonance resulting in an explosion of “conspiratorial” thinking. Or what might also be labeled peddlers of alternative or dissident facts and narratives.
Conspiracy theorists (aka dissidents) at the margin, however, are not a problem to those who set the agenda. Their alternative narratives — even if true — can usually be controlled with smearing and ridicule, a manipulative strategy that most human brains are uniquely predisposed to respond to in a Pavlovian way because of their overarching desire to fit in with the majority. This usually sees them shun or rally against the dissidents without really questioning why they are taking authoritative claims at face value without even bothering to entertain the counter perspective. Being known to do so in official circles would be stigmatizing.
The phenomenon is as old as time but no matter how much we identify it or study it post facto we never seem to build an immunity to it happening again. The results of the Milgram experiment and the Asch conformity experiment are a case in point. These experiments proved that law abiding rational people who considered themselves honest actors found themselves capable of doing terrible things and telling egregious lies either because authoritative people had steered them to do those things or because telling the truth meant going against a large majority.
But there’s a problem for all authorities whose power is drawn from maintaining control through influence over the majority consensus — even when narratives look increasingly false, contradictory or illogical. Eventually conspiracy theorists’ appeal to reason draws enough recruits to tip the scale to start become a fashionable new consensus view in and of itself.
When that happens, simply using the Goebbels technique — repeating the lie many times and doubling down on it — is no longer effective. At that point the powers must adapt or die.
Hence, the latest turn of counter disinformationists embracing conspiratorial processes themselves to get their message out. Think BlueAnon and other viral conspiratorial narratives such as those about Trump’s near assassination. And hence, too, the rise of so-called limited hangouts and “false” conspiracy theorists bearing compelling information but in controlled quadrants to consciously muddy the waters. They are there to mop up the new converts who are now also insatiably seeking alternative facts but don’t quite yet see the big picture. Better to have the masses believe in nothing, or become deeply confused about who they should really have a grievance with, than fall in line with a counter narrative that actually makes powerful sense and could destabilize those who have really been misleading them.
| GEOPOLITICAL HOT SPOT |
NUCLEAR GAMES: In the latest round of escalation between Russia and Ukraine, both countries have engaged in a worrying bout of missile strikes deep inside each other’s territories. This instance is notable for two reasons: The Ukrainian use of British Storm Shadow missiles to strike targets inside Russia, and the Russian use of nuclear-capable ICBM strikes on Ukrainian targets — the first time in history an ICBM strike has been carried out on real targets.
DARIO’s COMMENT: Clausewitz’s famous quote, that war is but an extension of politics, has never been more true than in the latest Russian-Ukrainian escalation. The reasons for the escalation are obvious.
With the end of the conflict, at least in its current form, on the table due to Donald Trump’s election victory, the counter-intuitive result of such an outcome is a rapid intensification of warfare as each side battles to gain an edge in upcoming negotiations.
Why the escalation? From the American perspective, this is a win-win. The military under a Biden administration enjoys a free hand to escalate the conflict dramatically in order to provide the next administration with the best possible hand in negotiations. Furthermore, any responsibility for escalatory moves will be washed away by the transition of power from Biden to Trump. Contrariwise, the rumour mill also indicates that controlling the escalation provides the Biden-controlled military, likely comprised of individuals on the Trump chopping block, leverage over the incoming Trump administration.
Russia’s incentives are quite the opposite – to deal credible threats that would clarify to the United States that any escalatory move by its current administration may have irrevocable knock-on consequences for the next administration. That’s why it’s taunting Ukraine with non-nuclear, but nuclear-capable, ICBM missiles — “one wrong move, and it’s all over” is the message. These moves intend to paralyse Western decision-makers into inaction, buying critical time for its forces to continue making gains until Trump’s new administration.
Where’s the blind spot? But there is one extremely dangerous blind spot at play here. Nukes might be more survivable than appreciated.
This changes the game theory surrounding the credibility of Putin’s nuclear threats. There is currently an instinctive albeit irrational human response a la ‘the boy who cried wolf’: Russia has been threatening the use of their nuclear deterrent since the conflict’s inception. And yet, three years later, and despite a Ukrainian invasion of Russian territory, and the use of Western missiles to strike deep inside Russia, no nuclear weapons have been yet used. The problem with Russia’s increasing lack of nuclear strike credibility is there’s only one way for Russia to prove it: by deploying a tactical nuclear strike.
Most agree the third deployment of a nuclear weapon in history would be terrible. But the problem with such a tactical nuclear strike won’t be its devastation. Instead, the types of nuclear weapons that would likely be deployed will be low-yield tactical nukes. Thus, the real risk is that Putin would use such a weapon and that not much would change; only a small section of the Ukrainian countryside and/or city would get destroyed, there would be minimal radiation, and life would continue as normal.
The problem with today’s nukes is, thus, their lack of massive destructive capacity. Because once people and leaders realize there is much less fallout from a nuclear strike than is popularly imagined, we will have truly entered the age of nuclear war.
