A Trustless Society
Doomsaying for 2026
The saddest thing is actually getting used to Orwellian perversions in society. I think perhaps that now I am at level four of seven, which means at level five I will have become a significant victim. I have to ask myself if it is reasonable for me to compare myself to Solzhenitsyn, which now by the way I can spell correctly without the aid of Google. Definitely level four.
We are in a J6 / Altadena Fire / ICE shooting moment which lines up in the queue of outrages familiar to the American public.
As an engineer who has been climbing through jungles of logic to prove my mind against the best computer chips known to mankind, I have a sort of discipline that seems more and more rare in humans around me. I know I play some role in determining which humans I pay attention to, and I know there are dislocations of truth and logic in the Attention Economy. I feel the pain of this lack nonetheless, because my instinct and profession is to bring fact to suspicion and light to darkness, if only metaphorically.
Asymmetric Information Warfare
The first thing my sensei taught me:
Don’t go to stupid places where stupid people are doing stupid things.
So why in tarnation would anyone, especially people who think ICE is full of morons with guns, go to where they are operating? They do so ‘armed’ with nothing more than a smartphone in hopes their video will go viral. That’s a hell of a bet. But it is one that makes sense for someone who wishes to participate in asymmetrical information warfare. There are markets for these videos which we are handily demonstrating this week.
The acceleration of agitprop and viral attention has worked a particular kind of miracle on the American public and for politicians and government officials who want that dynamic to work for them. By now the paradigm of “the court of public opinion” has become firmly established in the mind of the American electorate and its attendant punditocracy.
I’ve called this idiot populism but maybe I’m wrong. There are two major reasons why.
It works very well for both parties, but specifically for non-mainstream wings of both parties, in exactly the way anti-Zionism worked for pro-HAMAS agitators around the globe. This is the asymmetric information war.
There is something of a dramatic paradigm shift in the way American interest groups define winning now. They’re not trying to win the center. They are monetized without a middle.
Because of these two factors it makes the most sense to go to stupid places where stupid people are doing stupid things. Moreover it convinces people who have nothing approaching situational awareness to go to dangerous places where dangerous people are doing dangerous things. Here is the paradigmatic example for those of us who can remember June of 2025.
How does asymmetric information war work? Simply stated, it uses distance and ignorance of specifics to convince large numbers of people that your enemy is mercilessly destroying innocents for no excusable reason. You weaponize your victimhood.
I wish to god I had that viral, staged picture of the Hezbollah ‘aid worker’ who posed with a dead or injured child somewhere around the Blue Line in Lebanon in August of 2006. Here is an article I quoted back then, when Gilad Shalit was the Rodney King of Israel.
I’m surely not the only person who has raised this concept of fighting wars with media instead of kinetic weapons. It works. But the next thing that I said back in ‘06 was that this reality gave me doubts about the currency of nationalism and the concept of the Westphalian state. Great segue. Now let’s talk about speed and John Boyd.
The Speed of Paradigm Warfare
This is going to take some explaining, but let’s go BLUF (bottom line up front).
Victory comes from shattering the enemy’s mental model of reality faster than they can adapt. — John Boyd
He argued that:
Humans do not reason from facts, they reason from mental models.
Evidence is filtered through the model, not the other way around.
When a model is threatened, people defend the model, not the truth.
So when I talk about my value as a writer for computers and people, I build systems that go from the facts → model. And my experience shows me that in a significant number of cases, business executives make decisions based on their models because facts are too expensive to come by. And on the rare occasions when they have needed facts, they paid me the big bucks to make them evident. The problem with that is it’s expensive to do and most large businesses don’t iterate their business model in light of new facts. Generally speaking, the larger the business the slower their iteration cycle.
That’s really the primary difference between highly regulated and captured industries and companies like Apple and Google. So I go stoic facts first, mental models built on top of that. That’s why Stoic Observations have few conclusions except those going back to, stoicism, yay. Boring.
Nevertheless, you all know that there are new concepts here that are interesting, because you rarely hear anything else like this. Congratulations on being sharp enough to be in a faster loop. Don’t forget I was here at Substack and Persuasion very close to day one. Enough meta. Let’s get to the meat.
Moving Goalposts
The trick is to get people to kick the football sideways so that their football kicking skills are not lost as you ease them into a new game. Some observations.
Proud Boys, Tea Party, Groypers, J6ers, Kirkists & Never Trumpers are not the Republican Party, but yet they are.
Antifa, Wokies, SJWs, Warmists, Deep Staters, Queers & Socialists are not the Democrat Party, but yet they are.
Each of these ideological partisans believe they should be the soul of their parties, but they each have different priorities, different goals, different primary enemies, different leadership (if any claim) and most importantly different views of the world. Indeed they have different ways of achieving their goals and they are working independently without centralized leadership or funding. Each are moving goalposts to a place that doesn’t cater to E Pluribus Unum. It might be cynicism, it might be despair, but it is self-evident.
So what are we to make of this? That they may be the same people just trying new tactics and strategies in their pursuit of power and influence. They cater to their own networks and exploit everything they can to draw attention to their cause.
What does the actual ‘center’ look like? It looks like people trying to play the old game and demonstrating frustration that the old ways don’t work any longer. It may very well be that you can’t win with moderation. Or at the very least until those unaffiliated minorities or majorities in their jurisdictions start organizing in decentralized networks of networks, they will be continually marginalized. (OK Boomer?) The only way a ‘centrist’ backlash can work is with swift enforcement of those slow laws that the fast movers cannot change. OR perhaps a fallback to an un-exceptional America.
This goalpost shifting game is something that I believe Trump understands for the most part. He invented the MAGA movement from zero. He’s ducking and dodging faster than his opponents can identify where he’s going next to cut him off at the pass. It’s not Presidential. Of course not. We already know how to defend the Ancien Regime. Why can’t he be like Ike? We already know who the ring of power goes to next for the mainstream Democrats, sorta. Well, we did in the Bush - Clinton era. Now those days are gone, and people are clinging to old hopes for a new breakthrough from the old guard. Not gonna happen.
Boyd was explicit about this:
People cannot see a new paradigm from inside the old one.
Why? Because:
The old paradigm defines what is even allowed to be real. Anything outside it is labeled “illegal,” “impossible,” “unthinkable,” or “crazy”. So when someone acts outside the playbook, observers don’t see a new game — they see:
“lawlessness”
“chaos”
“norm breaking”
“authoritarianism”
“recklessness”
Those are defensive labels, not analysis. They are the immune response of a dying paradigm.
But Stare Decisis
Yes, exactly. But how many people have been convinced, people who are moving the goalposts, that the current law and law enforcement and economic system, that stare decisis itself is worth defending? How many American voters believe there is institutions and groups of citizens whose ‘manifest corruption’ requires cancelation? Who in America talks about systemic good?
See what I’m getting at?
Ultimately what I think is going to happen is that we are going to lose faith in each other and we’re going to punt some of that faith to AIs and the most resilient old school (retail consumer) institutions. I think CocaCola will survive. I think Proctor & Gamble will survive. I think the Catholic Church will survive. Basically I hope when Americans start to recognize the hard limits of their wishful thinking, they’re going to snap back to common sense, but reaching those limits is going to cost an inordinate amount of FAFO.
At what scale you ask? That has become a bit easier to answer this week. The President is going to stare down the governor of Minnesota. So you think Kent State was a big deal? You think the 1968 Democratic Convention was a dumpster fire? I think this President is going to DOGE a set of enemies. I predict this with a 25% chance. Last point. We have that chance of being frightened back into timidity. Basically, don’t believe that Alex Karp hasn’t considered his domestic enemies trigger point. If we’re lucky it will just be a recession.
Tottering FRE 403
Just a couple weeks ago I was considering the culpability of protest organizers - particularly when people were haunting a federal office in the Pacific Northwest. Probably Portland (irony) but it might have been Seattle.
At any rate, I was looking at the federal rules of evidence which do not allow membership in particular types of groups to be an aggravating factor.
It’s FRE 403. I found the document.
So I believe we have particular groups with particular funding sources able to assemble and disassemble faster than any government agency with intelligence services can monitor and track. This is a new paradigm of organization for direct action groups and micro-party partisans are going to accelerate its operation.
What can it do? It can do as much as CRT did. It’s identifiable but not with the kinds of questions most people know how to or are willing to ask. That’s because Americans are accustomed to falling back on a Trusted Society, which is basically being gamed. The shortest way to describe it is that activist politics is now a cell-based gig economy.
What have Somalis been doing in Minnesota? The same thing the Tongan Crips have been doing in Utah. Exploiting the forbearance of a permissive multiculturalist society that accepts the double standard of first-class and second-class citizenship. Second class gets a pass. More and more Americans are feeling second-class and justifying their rule-breaking and self-segregation
Bluesky didn’t exist three years ago. I don’t spend any time on Bluesky. How could I know XYZ? Doesn’t matter - I’m not supposed to know, I don’t subscribe to Progressive watering holes. Remember Firedog Lake? Remember Little Green Footballs? Same deal. American ghettoes. Distrustful. Spiteful. Old world. Still trying to be nationalist and capture the nation. Of course MAGA is regressive. It’s playing an old game. Of course the Blue Wave is regressive. It’s playing an old game.
People who are thinking Civil War 2.0 are in the wrong paradigm. Our ideological watering holes are going to be surveilled. Somebody is going to be screaming their lungs out demanding to know WTF happened to our competent 4th Amendment attorneys. Yeah. What have you been paying them since 2001? Besides, do you even really trust people not like you?
References
>What does the actual ‘center’ look like? It looks like people trying to play the old game and demonstrating frustration that the old ways don’t work any longer. It may very well be that you can’t win with moderation. Or at the very least until those unaffiliated minorities or majorities in their jurisdictions start organizing in decentralized networks of networks, they will be continually marginalized. (OK Boomer?) The only way a ‘centrist’ backlash can work is with swift enforcement of those slow laws that the fast movers cannot change. OR perhaps a fallback to an un-exceptional America.
Or, centrists see your comments about Coca-Cola and the Catholic Church, and nod in agreement.
Economies and religions are rather resilient against political failings. Sound global companies and solid world religions will carry on, as we centrists well know.
The political bickering in the US look like kids wrestling in the mud, but that mud pit isn't the only thing that matters. Only seeing the kids in the mud is myopic.
Important message that’s easy to read and understand.