@vgr

Underground Empire by Farrell and Newman was published in September 2023, just before the current climactic chapter of the book’s core theme got underway. To its credit, the book is consistent with, if not predictive of, current events. Good book to read right now if you want to process and orient above the noisy play-by-play level of abstraction. One exhibit: The book devotes a few pages to the “strategic autonomy” meme in EU policy circles a few years back, which apparently meaningfully shaped the discourse and stances. I spotted the phrase in Carney’s much-circulated Davos speech yesterday. Carney’s speech could almost serve as an extra chapter to the book, along with Alexander Stubb essay he cited, which was published in FP last month. Book-level discourse doesn’t get any fresher than this. https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/speeches/2026/01/20/principled-and-pragmatic-canadas-path-prime-minister-carney-addresses https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/wests-last-chance Book passes the Gell-Mann amnesia test for me on the two topics I know well enough to evaluate — semiconductors and crypto, both of which are slow-boil crises in the making (future Greenlands). One point the book is driving home for me is that this global machinery is designed/emerged for subtlety, and at least a low chance of creative win-win outcomes, even if it’s mostly operating as a negative-sum Torment Nexus now. So when an unsubtle and myopic actor gains sudo control, it can only be used to bludgeon, producing small localized gains in time/space for one actor and larger unpredictable fallout for everybody elsewhere/elsewhen. To the point that even when it is apparently deployed in your favor (eg US being against Nordstream 2 for EU Greens), it is a liability. The Trump regime’s “support” for anything (for eg crypto) is a monkey’s paw of a blessing. There is a cousin to Cipolla stupidity here (“actions that hurt others and do not benefit you”). It’s not stupidity exactly, but a blinding level of malice that is indistinguishable from it. Hanlon’s razor doesn’t cut anything now. Through unsubtle overuse, the global machinery is having its remaining useful lifespan prematurely foreshortened, and reputationally reduced to pure torment nexus (TN). Nobody outside the MAGA core of the US can trust anymore that it can do them anything but harm. And within MAGA core it’s not doing any good either. And increasingly, harm too (measles, insurance costs). Meditation-geek friend of mine once defined evil as “selfish myopic desperation” which seems like an apt description. Another once defined “feeling rushed” as an attempt to compress time itself, which also seems in evidence. Trump+MAGA are rushing to compress the time for which they have sudo control of the TN, and get everything done before either the machine tears itself apart or someone else gains control. In this, the desperation resembles Putin’s eagerness to move on his delusions before gas-pipeline leverage expires. Or looking back further, Gorbachev. Within the TN sudoside, agendas are in conflict over what exactly to use the crashing residual agency for, before the clock runs out. Trump himself seems to be driven by genuine mortality fear to maximize the amount pissing on history he can do before he sundowns. His cabal (the Essentials in Dictator’s Handbook terms) is clearly already competing to maximize personal fiefdoms after he’s off the board (@Nils Gilman notes we’re about to move from Idiocracy to Death of Stalin). Republicans in Congress and the extended Trump GOP universe (the Influentials, including literal influencers still fighting for scraps of marginal influence on Twitter) seem fully disoriented and sliding into irrelevance. And MAGA voters (the Interchangeables) are acting like equal parts death cult and desperate eschaton immanitizers. Buckley would cry. The UE/TN is too big for any one actor to fully control, especially in this late modern unreliable condition, but to the extent we can impute a “goal” to it under Trumpist sudo control, it appears to be attempting a decisive kamikaze attack on what’s left of the rules-based order globally, and what’s left of liberalism and progressivism at home.

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