The Coming American Social Credit Apocalypse

FRE 403, Antifa and Sustainable Corruption

One of the memes I have been hearing lately is that Antifa doesn’t really exist. It is a decentralized, amorphous political movement that has no hierarchical structure, leadership or agenda. Most importantly, with regard to ICE raids and protests against them, that coordinated efforts to identify and track Antifa would be a civil rights violation. I sorta disagree, but let’s get down to some devilish details.

Antifa exists. Just like open source programming exists. And just like fans of the Grateful Dead, the participants are antithetical to hierarchical structures, leaderships and agendas. Nevertheless, these avocations have their diehard fanatics who will pick a hill to trumpet the superiority of their ways and means, some of whom will die on those hills.

The Grandmother Test
A subscriber here has reminded me about something I am calling the Grandmother Test, which is not so much an appeal to nostalgia, but intergenerationality. Human beings, I assert, are not meant to be whipsawed by rapid events. We are supposed to live like villagers, and that is something I believe has been proven by evolutionary psychology. Modern life is stressful because it is fast. We all hate the rat race. We don’t mind the rat maze itself, in fact we often go out looking for puzzles, mysteries and rabbit holes. We just hate unreasonable deadlines. That mess is for robots, slaves and artificial intelligences. We don’t hate change, we love it on the margins, but we don’t want everything to change all of the time. It makes us crazy and we know it. There are certain things that should be settled. We should respect our elders because their wisdom can become common sense, having lived through decades of change, they emphasize the constant, the reliable and in that sense, the deeply human which we share with all of humanity throughout history.

So all of those things that come and go like skibidi language and frogs in blenders should amuse us but not direct us. We should not be overly concerned for the new trends. This is the point of having institutions. This is the point of having certain conventions becoming systemic. This is how society keeps its homeostasis. These are the things that should focus our efforts and attention. Guardrails. Standards.

All this is to say that everything doesn’t pass the Grandmother Test. But also to notice that all change is not for the good and sometimes the bad gets grandfathered in. Just because it has been around for generations doesn’t make it glorious, just predictable. We have a lot that is predictably bad. Sometimes we learn to live with it.

Sustainable Corruption
In the programming world, we call sustainable corruption an anti-pattern. It is a way of doing things that inevitably leads down the failing path from issue to problem to trouble to crisis if unaddressed and uncorrected. Software that dips its toe into the pool of anti-patterns can survive. We call that “cruft”. The majority of software in use today is crufty. Large, bloated, ubiquitous, but still usable. Sound familiar? Like American cars in the 70s and 80s? Like government bureaucracies? Like forests in California protected from wildfires by people who don’t understand forestry? Like rivers in Ohio abused by chemical factories? Like staged townhall meetings and horserace politics? Like overweight drunk uncles we have to invite on Thanksgiving? We all know these things are objectionable, but in the end we don’t lose sleep over them simply because they are problematic. We work around them. We use metaphorical language because we don’t want to be Debbie Downer. We don’t deny the reality and for the most part we can overcome. I mean aren’t we inevitably defined by our ability to strive and struggle? Aren’t our heroics enabled by working out with our moral muscles? We take pride in the fact that we shall overcome even if today we are overcome.

The important thing to remember in this is that we should equally beware of utopian thinking in the midst of dystopia. One of Cobb’s Rules (yeah that’s a throwback) is that perfect is the enemy of good. I didn’t make that up, it passes the Grandmother Test. The corollary to that rule is that zero-tolerance requires infinite policing. So here is a small plate of wisdom-mcnuggets that fit into a rant…

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Social Credit Scores
Let us presume that among the 160 odd data scraping identity spam mongers that I pay Incogni to block from my email, that at least 5% of them are Maltego capable. This is to say that they have open source intelligence (OSINT) capabilities and can easily purchase or generate identification regimes that are something of an Orwellian nightmare. If you think no American political activists are interested in creating and maintaining enemies lists, you have been asleep. Between Fair Issac (FICO), Acxiom, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, which one do you think is the most woke? Marinate ten seconds.

I know that hundreds of thousands of clearance holders know that the Chinese know where they used to live. Ask your favorite LLM about the OPM Hack of 2015. The wonder of intelligence services is that they hide what they know and act on that knowledge in clandestine ways. So what the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) knows about Americans, basically nobody fully knows. I’ve talked about Whole of Society strategy before, but let’s not belabor the point.

Some powerful entity somewhere is trying to figure you out.

I have been talking to Siri and Alexa since they were born. These bots are stupid, and so are most commercial recommender systems like Rotten Tomatoes and most comment sections. But you can bet your uncovered ass that there are very smart people doing an order of magnitude better. I can’t even afford to study what they already know. What has been proven by scholars like Anna Krylov is that institutionalized social engineering is real. The safest thing to do is to go grey and keep your head down. But you must also have, as they say, money, guns and lawyers. And probably a medic too. These are the networks that will grow and expand as our democratic institutions creak, crack and crumble. So be ready for the neo-feudalism of the 2030s.

In the meantime, the acquisition and fine tuning of a social credit scores are already happening in its crudest form, which is cancellation and censorship. What’s next is deniable ghosting. “Oh you must have been talking to a bot. We didn’t know..” Imagine that scenario. When the Ford bot intercepts the Chevy bot and offers you a fake deal on a Silverado, because they want to portray Chevy as untrustworthy. I and thousands of others can dream up this kind of social treachery all day. Just think of the kind of paranoid minds that drive the identity matrix today. They believe that all opposition is hate. Now imagine that every media outlet, university admissions office and corporate HR department has some version of a “no fly” list purchased from TransUnion or perhaps some cheaper version from the black market.

The fundamental currency of civilization is trust, but the fundamental currency of tribalism is loyalty.

We are headed towards Game of Thrones and you think you are Theon Greyjoy, but your enemy calls you Reek. You think that you are inheriting freedom, liberty and justice as an American citizen. The skeptical me says watch out for the President who cracks down on FICO. Will he be called a Nazi? Who is watching the watchers? It is once again, a question for our times.

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Hiding In Plain Sight
The current law is our bastion against being prosecuted on the basis of association. Need I remind you that “All Cops Are Bastards”? Here is the rabbit hole I went down to find out if and why Antifa ‘members’ can be tracked down and/or prosecuted. The results are comforting, mostly.

Here are the details. Antifa Convictions in Portland

Before I summarize, let me say that as a Neocon after 9/11, I supported the efforts of AG Alberto Gonzales to defy some Geneva Conventions and come up with a term appropriate to non-state actors as ‘enemy combatants’. And I also supported the proposal by Judge Richard Posner to create an American Counter Terror Circuit Court such that attorneys and judges could hear cases against enemy combatants and their criminal facilitators that would not be open to the public. Essentially I wanted an American MI5 separate from the FBI and a new court system, with the priority on the court system. In 2006 I wrote:

I have argued that I expect that the more terrorist trials we hold in this country the better we will get at it. If the GWOT is to be refocused as an international police action we are going to have to do a  better job of investigating. Posner opines that the FISA Court is really too narrowly focused on SIGINT to be broadly effective. I agree.

It is also becoming clearer to me that between what we have at Gitmo, old treaties, the Hamdan decision, it’s a patchwork. I think there is a strong case for a new type of circuit court with new powers of investigation to handle the kinds of cases we are likely to encounter with Jihadists and non-state actors going forward. I think those who have, even under the influence of [Bush Derangement Syndrome], suggested that there is too much Executive power arrogated by GWBush are backing into the truth. I say that the Congress clearly isn’t doing a decent enough job, and that anybody with gripes about Gitmo should be behind a new sort of judiciary power.

While CIA whistleblower John Kariakou makes it clear in retrospect that CIAs actions at GTMO were reprehensible, I’m already reticent anyway as a non-political actor to grant any powers that contradict my civil libertarian spidey senses. However I think hindsight makes it clear now that such judicial oversight could have stifled the CIA’s reckless torture, and proved so in a better way than grandstanding reps.

All that said, I would not consider even black bloc Antifa to be that dangerous as enemy combatants although equally insidious. I could see some equivalence to the KKK with regard to their extralegal spontaneously coordinated violent activities, to the extent that they are ideologically coherent. Right now, in our populist era, all that judgement is crowdsourced, which is horrible and mob-like.

So what you should know beyond common sense is Federal Rule of Evidence 403

Courts apply Rule 403 of the Federal Rules of Evidence (and its state equivalents).

• The key test: Does the probative value of identifying the group outweigh the risk of unfair prejudice?

• If the affiliation isn’t directly tied to motive, intent, or conspiracy, judges usually exclude it.

  • Example: In Dawson v. Delaware (1992), the Supreme Court overturned a death sentence where prosecutors introduced evidence the defendant was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood — irrelevant to the murder’s facts.

Thus, prosecutors must show that membership proves intent, motive, identity, or organization, not just character.

I think this makes a reasonably tall barrier for what people believe ICE is doing, or may actually be doing if they are doing essentially undercover surveillance on those suspected of being illegal immigrants. The determination as to whether or not they are foreign nationals up to no good is a problem if they are indeed cartel members. So this is the crucial distinction that it is clear that the Trump Administration is going to exploit by overloading the rhetoric of ‘terrorism’. And so long as pro-immigration and pro-sanctuary Americans are going to be mule-headed about any presumptions other than there are only innocents and exiles then it’s going to be a contest of wills that the Executive Branch will win.

Again. The intel is already out there. I have mentioned this long ago. Credit bureaus know how people spend money. KYC rules are good, but people with AIs can go a lot further. And if you think all of those brains are captured by the Intelligence services of the US and restrained by FRE 403, then you’ve been microdosing on copium.

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Antifa is not a gang by federal definition. Kamala Harris is not presidential by common sense. Donald Trump is not a traditional Republican by any definition. All these rule breakers need to be restrained. Some more than others. Please don’t think that these are the exhaustive list and the extent of my concern.

We need a better way to police our intelligence capabilities. To me, this means a new circuit court, and/or a new kind of judicial competence. I don’t want to muck around with the rules of evidence, and I don’t think we need a complete lack of corruption in our institutions. Let the bad ones fail. Let the marginal ones survive. Pointy haired bosses are not the devil.

We can live with a certain amount of corruption and stupidity. Dilbert’s very existence proves it. It may not rise to something our justice system pursues and that’s a good thing - even in a populist culture war shitstorm. But when the situations of incompetence and slop provide cover for hostile actors, we need the ability to crack down and interdict. The ability to know is not the problem. The professionalism to prosecute judiciously is the problem. We are missing the latter.

Sooner or later, Americans are going to have social credit scores. We’re too judgmental and insecure to do otherwise. By ‘we’ I don’t mean GenX. GenX understands and respects being abandoned to ourselves. But those suckled by short attention span theatre and Love Island love to be short-sighted, petty and viral. You should be very afraid of their rotten tomatoes.