Pre-21st century political history seems to have been defined by an interlocking series of oppositions – what we might call Polar Memes. Left/right was the most obvious of these but not the most durable – the prize for longest-running political meme looks like authoritarian/libertarian, which is so deeply rooted in our philosophy that its demise seems unthinkable. Sometimes it’s necessary to think the unthinkable, though; the time has definitely come to question the Polar Memes.

If you turn over that authoritarian/libertarian meme, it turns out there’s another meme hiding underneath it, possibly the Ur-meme: the tension between the individual and the collective. Although you trace this one right back to ancient Greece (just like pretty much 95% of philosophical concerns), it became really important in the post-Medieval period, reached full flower during the Enlightement, and hasn’t stopped dancing yet. DISCO INTERLUDE.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yet Polar Memes can die – they just take a loooooooong time. Left/right is no longer common sense – not (just) because of the persistent decline of American political discourse, but because of the convergent politics that Europe excels at, where left- and right-wing parties now hover around the centre of the political buffet like vultures.¹ While the concepts of left- and right-wing might still have some utility, the tension between them has slackened like dad’s belt at Christmas.

In individualist polities (which are generally post-Enlightenment), there’s a palpable fear of the collective: it’s what turned anti-communism from a statement of personal preference into a declaration of Cold War. In communalist polities, meanwhile, there’s a distinct unease about the role of the individual, creating a tension that can resolve in amusing ways (a discussion for another time). Let’s focus on what happens after this particular Polar meme dies off – because dying it is.

The truth is that these Polar memes mask a spectrum of opinions and preferences, and are only presented as dichotomies when somebody is trying to sell you something. Nobody lives a completely individual or completely communal life: people just aren’t built that way. Instead, the two are always jostling up against each other, waxing and waning, life’s rich tapestry, etc, etc. So why do I think this Polar Meme in particular is such a problem?

It’s a problem because politics as it is currently structured relies almost entirely on the individual and the collective as the primary concepts. This doesn’t just put individuals in a difficult position, it’s an accident waiting to happen on a grand scale. Political parties form around blocks of opinions, but those opinion blocks can cut individuals off from their communities, which is why party politics isn’t good for communities or individuals; the alienated individual can derail communal interests through petulance, fraudulence or something else ending in -nce.

The creative tension between individual and communal served us well for a long time, especially while our modern polities were forming, but it may be time to leave them behind as the foundation myths of those polities. Instead we should be looking at the network as a replacement for both of them, although if you asked me right now to describe what that would look like, all I’d be able to do would be to sip my tea and look uncomfortable. All I know is this: the network seems to offer the only way of reconciling the two and forging a new type of polity. See also: Carne Ross.

Click here to view the embedded video.

1. Don’t ask me what US political parties hover around, but it’s definitely not the centre, unless by “centre” you mean “abject fucking stupidity”.

This is who the corporations are telling you is cool,
This is who the corporations are telling you to listen to:
Here’s our end-of-year best-of-lists;
Here’s our coolest journalists
Taking a trip to the coolest city in the world
With people who aren’t like you or me.
Or maybe they’re just like you and me -
How would you know?

This is who the corporations are telling you is cool.
This feature article is trying to tell you something:
This spontaneous photo opportunity just happened!
You could have been there, and you weren’t.

Are the corporations telling you I’m cool yet?
Are the corporations telling you to listen to me?
You should listen to me if they tell you,
You might learn something:
You might learn how to be cool.

Poor poor corporations whispering in your ear,
Like that kid at school that nobody liked,
Because deep down the corporations want to be cool.
That’s why they’re telling you who is cool
Because, if you finally believe them,
Then you’ll think they’re cool too.

So it’s karaoke blind dates in Tokyo with -
So it’s urban gardening in Buenos Aires with -
So it’s hacker protests in Tallin with -
So it’s organic microbreweries in Portland with -
So it’s hip-hop quotables in Nairobi with -
So it’s -

Whispering in your ear: am I cool yet?
Am I cool yet? Am I cool yet?
I’m linking your article,
I’m keeping my distance,
Trying to keep my cool.

Am I cool yet?

Postscript: the weirdest thing about this article is how fucking boring that trip sounds.

1. Propaganda of the deed is one of the few innovations of anarchism that entered the mainstream of political activity. In some ways this was unfortunate, because the association with violence contributed to the poor reputation that anarchism now enjoys. While violent propaganda of the deed was generally cast aside by the anarchist movement in the C20, it was enthusiastically embraced by terrorist organisations. The 9/11 bombing of America is unlikely to be beaten in the propaganda of the deed hit parade.
2. Julian Assange self-identifies as a conspiracy theorist, not in the trivial sense of black helicopters and crop circles, but on the grounds that authoritarian regimes are by definition conspiratorial. This belief is then reverse-engineered to arrive at its corollary: any regime engaging in conspirary is, by definition, authoritarian to some degree. If you don’t like authoritarian regimes, the most obvious remedy is to attack the conspiracy, and Assange laid out his strategy in two papers published in the far-off days of 2006.
3. Assange offers one innovative way of thinking about conspiracies (and therefore government) as “cognitive devices… a type of device that has inputs (information about the environment), a computational network (the conspirators and their links to each other) and outputs (actions intending to change or maintain the environment)”. This is not a constructive metaphor, since Assange believes that the only thing that a conspiracy computes is “the next action of the conspiracy”, and leads to his prescription of thinking ahead in order to deceive / blind / throttle / separate conspiratorial power groupings.
4. Regardless of who founded Wikileaks and for what purposes they founded it, Assange has made the organisation the embodiment of the philosophy loosely described in his papers. Wikileaks’ target in general is undifferentiated Authority; but the bigger the authority, the more of a target it presents, and the more valid the attack. Assange seldom makes specific claims in public about what the planned effects of Wikileaks’ work might be, suggesting that he realises their limitations when it comes to effecting real change in the institutions it seeks to undermine.
5. Given those limitations, Assange works with the material he has, and as a result propaganda of the deed is alive and well.  Most commentatorati, distracted by the surface impact of the leaks, fail to realise that Wikileaks is the nonviolent C21 equivalent of C19 anarchist bomb-throwing; and if they do realise it, fail to understand what the significance of this is. Assange is not seeking to undermine the American government himself; he wants you, me and everybody to undermine the American government, and he is merely showing us how it’s done:

“We must understand the key generative structure of bad governance. We must develop a way of thinking about this structure that is strong enough to carry us through the mire of competing political moralities and into a position of clarity. Most importantly, we must use these insights to inspire within us and others a course of ennobling and effective action.”

1. Alarm bells ring when I read that “[Katie] Salen is 43, reddish-haired, hyperorganized and a quirky dresser”. Being a quirky dresser at the age of 43 means that you’ve made a particular effort a la Colin Hunt.  IS THIS THE SORT OF PERSON WE WANT DESIGNING OUR KIDS’ EDUCATION? Etc etc, see the Daily Mail for further details. She comes across in the article as innovative, knowledgeable and determined.
2. The central question of the article is this: “What if we blurred the lines between academic subjects and reimagined the typical American classroom so that, at least in theory, it came to resemble a typical American living room or a child’s bedroom or even a child’s pocket, circa 2010 — if, in other words, the slipstream of broadband and always-on technology that fuels our world became the source and organizing principle of our children’s learning? What if, instead of seeing school the way we’ve known it, we saw it for what our children dreamed it might be: a big, delicious video game?” The short answer to that question is: it would be an unmitigated disaster for the children in exactly the same way that it has been for rest of us, but don’t let that stop you.
3. The real problem that our education system has is not identified by either the writer of the article (Sara Corbett – good article, btw) or the designers of the new approach described in that article (Quest to Learn – which actually sounds like a very interesting experiment to perform on children, if performing experiments on children is your kind of thing).

The wider function of the type of education system in industrialised countries is designed for one thing: to prepare children for the structure of life in the industrial world. From the parents’ perspective, however, education serves another unacknowledged function.

Most parents are happy with the existing model of industrial education, since that’s the shape of the life they expect for their children; parents that believe themselves more free-thinking might opt for a Montessori school; parents of a particular political-religious tendency will prefer to home-school their children. These examples point to a single conclusion: parents expect an education system to shape their children to be like them.

This is equally true of the Quest to Learn approach which came out of the work of – surprise! – a bunch of new media types (working with a bunch of education types, obviously – but that was probably mainly for plausible deniability). Their website is explicit that they are looking for a certain type of student:

• “Creative
• College and Career-Focused
• Curious
• Hands-on-Learners
• Technology, Design, Art, and Media Enthusiasts
• Game Lovers
• Great Collaborators
• Interested in the way things work”

That checklist tells us that this bunch of high-achievers are looking for other potential high-achievers that they can groom. I have no opinion one way or another about this – everybody has to go through some form of education, and this may well be the best form of education for that particular personality type. Nobody should be fooled into thinking that this is reaching out to the kids’ on their own terms, however, because it’s simply repeating the old pattern of education using new tools. The parents’ profiles will probably tell you more about this project than the childrens’.

A truly revolutionary form of education would no longer take the adult perspective on what children should learn, but be wholly defined and constructed by the children themselves. Fortunately that form of education is something that nobody wants to see.

[Note: My real problem with Quest to Learn is this: "a small but increasingly influential group of education specialists... believe that going to school can and should be more like playing a game, which is to say it could be made more participatory, more immersive and also, well, fun. Nearly every aspect of life at Quest to Learn is thus designed to be gamelike, even when it doesn’t involve using a computer."

Now I loathed games of all kinds from an early age, so that sounds like it would be shit, but my personal opinion isn't a good guide to whether something is going to work or not. However one very important thing to remember is that REAL LIFE IS NOT A GAME, and turning their education into games is likely to turn their children into monsters.]

This year the central government will spend 66 per cent of its budget on defence and debt servicing, and only 2.5 per cent on education. Throw in the immense burden of corruption and there is precious little money for schools. The central education budget is only £478 million, or about £6 for each school-age child in the country. Defence, by contrast, receives £2.6 billion according to the official figure – and probably more in reality.

As Blair points out, over the border in Afghanistan primary school attendance for boys (although not for girls) is higher at 66% to Pakistan’s 23%. The situation for girls in Afghanistan is of course dire compared to boys purely because of ideology rather than finance, which is one reason why I don’t share Una Vera’s relative optimism about the position of women.

An entire generation of girls has not missed the opportunities afforded by basic education, and the current crop of female activists in Afghanistan is from the previous generation. Blair’s article is fair-handed about the role that madrassas play in offering rudimentary education to the poor, but he doesn’t look too far to the future. I can’t blame him – it’s not a pretty sight.

Lack of educational opportunities in Pakistan is the single biggest problem the country faces, a timebomb waiting to happen no matter who happens to be in power once the dust of the war on terror settles. It drives an even bigger wedge between the Pakistani elite and the people who they govern, and it closes the door to future growth for Pakistanis in every area of life.

The article does mention that DFID and other actors are investing in the educational system, but that the funding tends to go through the government, which creates problems due to corruption. So here’s an alternative suggestion: why not channel funding through the madrassas, an already existing network of educational facilities?

This gives Pakistan two opportunities. First, it won’t cost as much as starting from scratch, although obviously in areas where there are no facilities, scratch is all we got. Second, it creates more pathways for dialogue between the government and the people, undermining the monopoly that religious groups currently have.

For success, the key thing would be to work with madrassas to expand the curriculum beyond religious study, into relatively non-controversial areas such as science and languages. There’s no reason why, if it’s handled properly, at a future date madrassas could become integrated into the national education system. Not ideal, but better than what exists now.

I have no illusions that this would be ridiculously difficult to pull off, and that neither the government of Pakistan or the madrassas is likely to engage with it quickly, given their ideological antipathy. The tragedy of Pakistan is that nobody else seems to have alternative suggestions – it’s just business as usual, as if state-based education was the only meal on the menu.

At my regional airport, passport inspection comes complete with facemasks, handwash and a sheet exhorting you to report your symptoms to the nearest medical centre.¹ The pandemic has re-awakened all sorts of interesting cultural krakens, and BLDGBLG has embarked on a large scale project examining notions of quarantine and isolation from a spatial / architectural perspective. There’s a particularly interesting interview with history professor Krista Maglen, whose research focuses on the prevention of infectious disease, where she discusses how physical space determines cultural space when it comes to controlling the spread of disease.

Quarantine differs very much depending on where a country is in relation to a disease source or perceived disease source… Quarantine became a very big deal [in Australia]. First of all, there’s a perceived proximity to Asia, which in the West has traditionally been seen as this great source of disease – the “Yellow Peril.” Quarantine is also a way to draw a line around White Australia, racially, just as much as it is to draw a line around the notion of a virgin territory that doesn’t have the diseases of the rest of the world.

Britain has a different relationship to quarantine because its borders are much more fluid. It can’t have borders as rigid as somewhere like Australia, for lots of different reasons: because of its empire; because it relies on maintaining open borders to let trade flow; and because Britain is itself quite undefined, in a way. It’s a composite of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. The borders of Britain are much more fluid, so quarantine takes a different form there and has a very different history.

Quarantine is closely tied to immigration in the United States: Ellis Island was a quarantine processing site, as well as an immigration processing site. Until the 1920s, immigrants arriving into the United States came into facilities that were also quarantine stations, and also places where you could isolate people for disease control reasons. Part of the processing of who can and can’t get into the United States is always about quarantine—what bodies are seen to be diseased and undesirable.

This sheds much light for me on the way in which immigration discourse in the USA is shaped – on both sides, but particularly on the right – in terms of disease control. Uncontrolled immigration is an infection in the body politic – the right demands that the intruder cells be expelled, a classic CD4+ T cell response, while (broadly) leftist plans for controlled assimilation are the political equivalent of quarantine measures.

The US attempts to deal with immigration issues as if it was an island nation (in addition to shouldering its own legacy of racial tensions), as if it was a body with clearly identifiable borders rather than a free-floating concept with only a thin match to its actual spatial coordinates, which is of course a recipe for an epic fail. How should we deal with the brute fact that the history of civilisation is a history of population movements?

Much of what Marines now face in Fourth Generation wars is simply war as it was fought before the rise of the state and the Peace of Westphalia. Once again, clans, tribes, ethnic groups, cultures, religions and gangs are fighting wars, in more and more parts of the world.

I’m no military historian, but this viewpoint always seemed to me to be a) obvious and b) wrong. Perhaps I came of age in that post-Cold War period when Fourth Generation warfare (4GW) was simply the face of war – and certainly the big ticket wars of that time, the Great Lakes and Yugoslav wars, fit the description – but it seemed clear that the sort of war that is now described as Second and Third Generation warfare was long gone. By 1991, in fact, that sort of warfare already seemed archaic, something that you would read about in history books rather than actually attempt to wage.

So yeah, Lind seems kind of obvious here, in the same way as Hobsbawm seems when he talks about the 20th Century lasting from 1914-1991 – not obvious in a “well, duh” way, but obvious in a “thank god somebody else noticed, and isn’t that a useful way of looking at things” way.

I missed out on military history, but I did study contemporary history, and in particular a whole heap of African history. So while Lind’s statement seems obvious, it also seems wrong, because a brief glimpse through the annals of post-WWII African history reveals a glaring absence of Second and Third Generation warfare. It’s all 4GW all the time, baby. Other parts of the world tell a similar story, since most of the proxy wars between the USA and USSR were easiest to sustain at the 4GW level, with some heavy artillery thrown in and the occasional weak-ass air force. Maneuver warfare in eastern Congo? Unlikely.

If this is true, it raises a difficult question for the “standard” history of warfare from First to Second to Third to Fourth Generation. You don’t have to be John Gray to be suspicious of such a smooth narrative, particularly when it emnates largely from the Kings of Narrative, our American friends. American political history perhaps more than any other country is one in which the narrative is paramount for the sense of national identity – where most national histories are primarily the result of historical contingency, of pragmatic adaptation to external and internal shocks, American history was spun equally out of whole philosophical cloth.

Suspicions multiply when Lind talks (with caution, admittedly) about importing 4GW techniques – via the physical presence of the military – to fight gang crime on the streets of American, on the basis that gang tactics are essentially identical to insurgency tactics.

Objectively, what the Washington Post has reported is a milestone, to be neither praised nor regretted but merely noted. It denotes another step toward 4GW here at home. It is a step we cannot avoid. As both imported and domestically-generated Fourth Generation entities ramp up their warfare on American soil, the U.S. military will be drawn in. As is the case in 4GW overseas, it will probably fail. Old Uncle Karl was right: the state will wither away. But what follows will not be communism. It will be chaos.

The last four sentences are all narrative reinforcement, by the way,  but I thought they were worth keeping in. Lind is wrong about the essential point here (and I would argue wrong in his conclusions as well). While their tactics may look similar (in the sense that there’s a limited range of possible criminal activity in any society, so it inevitably looks familiar), gang culture in the United States is primarily the result of the failure to sustain the narrative of the US – another, different symptom of this failure can also be seen in the political schisms in the US that have grown up since the turn of the millenium – and we can argue about why that narrative is failing another time.

By contrast insurgency culture in other countries is not just a response to the failure of the state’s narrative – for example, in Afghanistan. That reduces the narrative to a response to a dominant state narrative, which might seem natural to those of us who come from countries where a dominant state narrative, but is not true in many places; and to reduce it so also reduces the agency of insurgents to mere reaction. That is sometimes the case, but we need to recognise that insurgency culture presents a successful narrative in its own right in a way that street gang culture does not. So the two are not identical, they are flip sides of the same narrative coin, which means they need to be addressed differently – although in both cases the importance of establishing alternative narratives is paramount.

Back to my original point – the difficult question for the “standard” history of warfare is whether that narrative fits the facts. My answer is no. The standard history presented by Lind and others is a) Eurocentric and b) militarocentric,¹ primarily an attempt to define a coherent narrative which justifies both the military and the ends to which the military is directed. Any group that didn’t buy into the post-Westphalian consensus on how war would be conducted – and that includes pretty much everybody who wasn’t a European state and who didn’t take their cues from the European states, which is to say pretty much everybody in the world – was rolling like they used to roll, all 4GW all the time, baby.

Does this make much difference to the work of Lind and others to help the military to adjust to 4GW? Not especially – although their historical interpretation might be a bedtime story to reassure the military that they weren’t wasting their time, the direction in which they’re going is absolutely the right one.² The real question is whether a state-based military can really be “successful” in 4GW terms in a situation where the very idea of the state has lost its currency – and that seems to me very doubtful.

p.s. H/T to John Robb for hosting William Lind‘s work on his website. I count that as a public service.

1. That’s a terrible word – anybody got anything better?
2. Until things shift again and renders the entire concept of a state-based military entirely not merely redundant, but comical.

At the time, the fall of the Berlin Wall didn’t require anybody’s help to generate a real sense of occasion – it was a real event with a real impact of an order of magnitude that is hard to understand in today’s over-mediated world. Only 20 years later, events no longer have this sense of occasion for us since they act mainly as grist for the media mill. So how to communicate the right gravitas?

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is where U2 come in, not as musicians but as event planners whose outputs can be repurposed on demand (weddings, barmitzvahs, the collapse of Communism). Yes, U2′s album Achtung Baby was recorded in Berlin and featured a Trabant on the front cover, but it was recorded after the fall of the wall – they were piggybacking on the event for a combination of self-reassurance and self-promotion even then. This concert is just the logical next step, and everybody is complicit in making it happen – the band, the government, the media, even the people holding those free tickets.

Why am I being such a curmudgeon if everybody involved got what they wanted? It’s because a) I believe actual events have real meaning which is obscured by media events, and b) I resent companies making money from our personal experiences. Will Davies believes that we’re accelerating towards the Economy of Presence, where co-location (say, at U2′s Berlin Wall gig) will be of the highest value because it’s so scarce, but I’m not sure that I agree. The ubiquitous nature of telecoms means that the distinction between being there and not being there becomes blurred, with the encouragement of the telecoms companies – who arrange things so that they make money from our experiences both ways. Presumably that’s why the organisers of the U2 gig prevented those without tickets from seeing the concert, even though it was free – to cordon off the experience so that it could be leveraged.

It’s no use saying “I was there!” if everybody else in the world replies “So was I”, after all. Yet the very technology we’re provided with nibbles at the edges of events and causes them to bleed all over the internet. I’m not complaining about that bleeding and blurring of the lines between being there and not being there in the same way that William is (I think). I’m just suspicious of groups such as U2 who magically claim to have some sort of connection to events they clearly had nothing to do with, and who are at the same time are complicit in degrading the real meaning of those events in the popular consciousness. If we’re not careful, we’ll end up in a world where the Live Aid concert as a cultural phenomenon has more resonance in the popular consciousness than the Ethiopian famine it was meant to relieve.

Whoops. Too late.