From disinfo to drones

From bullshit to builders.

The West needs to nurture dozens of tech startups like Anduril, Palantir and SpaceX. And it needs to do it ASAP.

The FAA effectively destroyed drone manufacturing in the US, while letting Chinese manufacturers, like DJI, dominate the market in the US. Marc Andreesen recently noted that 90% of drones operated by the US army and police forces are made in China. The same story of government overreach that backfired can be seen across industries.

We need to reverse the recent mission drift of the (security state) Blob that went “from tanks to tweets”. NATO’s Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, said in 2019 that “NATO must remain prepared for both conventional and hybrid threats: from tanks to tweets”. But incentives matter and trade-offs exist.

It is easier and safer to police speech online and work from home with a warm coffee in your hand than to fight actual crime on the streets. We have seen it in the UK, and in the EU, and indirectly in the US through various cut-outs and cushy jobs at Big Tech companies - the censorship industrial complex creates comfortable jobs for the laptop class.

The drive to please and reward the laptop class is at the core of the Western slide into anarcho-tyranny. But we need to empower the fab lab class at the expense of the laptop class. More builders and less bullshiters.

History is running in reverse with the opposite outcomes, says Balaji Srinivasan. In the past, extremism in the West was spread by poor young men. This time it is rich old women who are key blue tribe constituency doing the de(con)struction of the West.

Blue tribe’s way of keeping power and doing corruption is quite sophisticated. They do it by growing the ambit of institutions and their mission scope and hiring activists and bureaucrats for various bullshit jobs, to use David Graeber’s term. A company is driven by profit. A government agency or an NGO is driven by expanding its ambit and the number of employees.

Balaji Srinivasan thinks that if Mark Zuckerberg had bought NYT at the same time Jeff Bezos bought WaPo we would be on Mars already.

Media is upstream of moral and tech progress. The power flows from a paper into a party and into a polity. Imagine if all the attention that was given to supposed disinformation online and all the woke nonsense went to raise awareness of technologies like the ones Anduril and Palantir are building to defend the West.

Imagine if all the myriads of content produced to smear founders like Elon Musk would be replaced with techno-optimistic messaging. Most people are normies, or NPCs, and they engage in preference falsification, to use Timur Kuran’s term.

Imagine if there were more movies like Dallas Buyers Club, depicting institutions like FDA as hindering progress and killing people by acts of omission - by not approving medicines faster.

Sigmund Freud has one useful concept of projection that explains a lot of what woke progressives and the blue tribe are doing when they accuse people of disinformation and authoritarian behavior - they are projecting their vices onto their opponents. It’s like a thief shouting “catch a thief”.

The Founding Fathers in the US were writing under pseudonyms, a point stressed by Marc Andreesen and Balaji Srinivansan. American politicians like Jefferson and Adams engaged in rumors (disinformation) to smear their opponents in their own newspapers they owned. Ben Franklin created 15 pseudonyms that argued between themselves in his newspaper.

The AI and Social (media) tech democratized the access to information and content creation, but we are merely going back to a previous more decentralized era and will not return to an unusual era of peak centralization in the 1950s.

A 200 year old newspaper, New York Post, was censored and blocked from Twitter for a week before the 2020 election for publishing an investigative story about Hunter Biden laptops that was later proven to be true in court. This was an example of a direct meddling by the US (former) security state (officials) in elections while running a sophisticated censorship and propaganda operation on mass media to cover a corruption scandal.

After the 2024 election the meme of American Dynamism is closer to becoming real. It’s time to build, and free speech on post-Elon twitter is a crucial driver of techno-optimism. Next we need to make progress in debureaucratization, deregulation and decentralization, put abstractly.

And this means progress in drones, dark factories and deurbanization in concrete terms, to use the Thielian “definite and optimistic vision of the future”. I call this vision a dark dynamism.