The Chain Mail Gaze

Hey everybody, great to be here, thank you for the introduction Liggy, it's amazing to be back at Procter & Gallagher, good to see good things continue. Okay, so the title of the talk today is called The Chainmail Gaze, for reasons that will hopefully become clear over time, but what I'm actually going to deliver to you is kind of a composite of a few different stages and phases of this work, which in its totality is attempting to provide a decolonial critique of network states. Okay, so those are some long words, we'll start with a poetic refrain, fractals don't care about your feelings, systems disregard their externalities, and formalisms cannot reason about the real. So the most recent kind of direction this work has gone in has been under this title, Oucer of Nations, techno-capital utopias and their reactionary shadows. Previously, and also in parallel, I've been working on a project which is themed and framed as the Chainmail Gaze, the thousand year stare of techno-colonialism.

And more recently, like more further back, this work got its start under the title, Profit Motives, P-R-O-P-H-E-T, I'm going to read you a little text which is a bit more in sync with where I was two years ago when protocol work rolled around. For as long as there's been financial capital, risk and speculation have orbited, manipulated and harnessed it. At narrative feedback machines, simultaneously reading and rewriting realities, markets exist as a distributed conversation amongst speculators driven by profit motives and an appetite for divination and property. Today, new strains of techno-colonialism are emerging, which are the latest of a series of echoes throughout Western history. An ascendant cabal of elites are attempting to reshape the world in their favour, whilst hiding in plain sight behind the technologies that have enriched them.

Theirs is a Promethean zealotry without faith, affecting an aura of divine sanction for the purposes of elevating the ego, enriching the chosen ones and creating empires of varying stripes. But the question I would ask here is, was it not always so? So here's a proposal that we must arbitrage against the machine. I'm going to read you a short fictional vignette that I wrote a couple of years ago for some governance fictions. It's called Seething Like a State.

Decentralization has a cost, the price of anarchy. The price is always due, but the rewards weren't cheap to reap. So solid CCRU. What most did not expect was that payment would become due at the grandest scales of The West's failure state, forged under the fires of Pierre Prussia, was ambushed by upstart modes of power, opening new vistas of communication, commodification and communion. The orientations that network states had used to enshrine their power only made it easier to undermine them.

The bigger they were, the harder they fell. Brextopia, the European Union, NATO's cave, the United State machine, all returned to dust. The decline of the nation-state in the Roaring Twenties became a canon of canonicity for an entire generation of sole traders. It wasn't even just the big leaders. In those days, there were many networks, many messiahs, many ideologics, all with their own profit motives.

The imaginary countries were myriad. Most barely lasted a year, typically weeks, always due to the toxic masculinity of their power vacuum suckers. The experts that greased their ways up the slimy poles of the agora were born again as sociopaths, just like the politicians that came before them. Though these initiatives were in themselves ineffective and dysfunctional, they sufficiently destabilised the inflexible structures that preceded them. An earthquake of organisational forms, seeding a tsunami of human chaos.

There's a right kind of liquidity and a wrong kind of liquidity, the internet of drownership. Okay, so let's start at the start. And I root a lot of this work as coming out of what I would think of as ideologies of scarcity. And, well, let's start with the coin where it all began. This is a picture I took in Shenzhen in December 2018, at the very bottom of a previous kind of cycle of sentiment in Bitcoin, where the mining machines, the ASICs were piled up like paperweights around all over shopping districts in Shenzhen.

And this is one of the ways that we sell, like miners, manufacturing of the mining equipment, sell these things to people. I think there's something, well, we'll come back to it in a moment, this interesting kind of connotation to the way it's being sold. Okay, more poetry. I promise you there's some theory in here. I just thought I'd start with some poetry.

The church and the network, zeal and time, death and money, all sides of the same coin. Of course, I'm talking about Bitcoin. I like to think of Bitcoin as an indifference engine. And we all know that Ethereum stops using proof of work. Bitcoin continues.

And the way that the community is set up and the way that the updating of the software that runs the client nodes is also very slow and very conservative. Chances of Bitcoin reforming itself in this way seem very small. So as a consequence of keeping proof of work stochastic clock constant, this difficulty adjustment algorithm, which changes the probabilities of mining successful hashes every couple of weeks, Bitcoin is insatiable. There is no upper limit to the amount of energy it desires. Further, it is insensate.

It cannot care about what happens outside of its perimeter. And I've spilled much ink on that elsewhere. But for now, I'll just put up this slide from IBM presentation 1978, which says a computer can never be held accountable. Therefore, a computer must never make a management decision. But in the bottom left, 2025 seems like a computer can't be management.

And I think Joey Tribbiani is right to be concerned. Okay, here's one of the externalities of Bitcoin that is very legible to all of us. The hash rate, an indirect proxy of the amount of energy going into the mining, the decentralized consensus of proof of work. And you see like fires, floods, empty server farms, and even ASICs running off the fracked gas of from the flared gas from fracking wells. So the externalities of Bitcoin are all around.

It's now thought that the impact, climate impact of Bitcoin is now greater than gold mining. You know, when we dig holes in the ground and pump it full of chemicals, it's worse than that. It's getting up towards oil and beef. But some people don't care. Bitcoiners don't really seem to care.

They, I mean, some people in Bitcoin seem to think that actually we should accelerate the warming of the planet, put more CO2 in the atmosphere, and that's how we get more forests. So that's, you know, the greening effect of coal, according to the Bitcoin climate department. And this all carries echoes of a concept from a concept from Cara Daggett from a few years ago called Petro-masculinity. I think it's very useful, especially for Bitcoin, but also quite useful more broadly in the technology spaces that we are in. I'm going to read you an edited quote from Cara Daggett.

As the planet warms, new authoritarian movements in the West are embracing a toxic combination of climate denial, racism, and misogyny. Petro-masculinity appreciates the historic roles of fossil fuel systems in buttressing patriarchal rule as anxieties aroused by the Anthropocene augment desires for authoritarianism. Petro-masculinity suggests that fossil fuels mean more than profit. They contribute to making identities. To a psycho-political reading of authoritarianism, fossil fuel use can function as violent reactionary practice.

And I would imagine that this is ringing some bells in many people's heads about people they've met and stuff like that. Here's a very famous guy, maybe better known in the Bitcoin sphere than outside, but I would wager that a lot of you have heard of James Howells. This is the person that supposedly mined with Satoshi and then put his hard drive in the last, I think, seven, eight, ten years, trying to bribe a municipality in the UK, a very poor part of the UK, to excavate this dump in the hope that he'll find his hard drive in the hope that he'll get his coins back. So this guy doesn't seem to care about the environment. He just seems to care about himself.

So we could argue that he's a petro-masculinist, maybe even a necro-primitivist, another kind of cute name I've given the Bitcoiners over the years. Speaking of Bitcoin, isn't it interesting how we've got this kind of like decentralized network that is totally autonomous and the founder has disappeared in an immaculate conception, if you listen to the Bitcoiners, and yet loads of other people just seem to have turned up and put crowns on, or wreaths, or suits, and kind of declared themselves the head of Bitcoin foundations, or the CEO of Bitcoin, or whatever, that they speak for this decentralized network. Very interesting. Here's a slide from a conference that the Bitcoiners did, a developer conference in Malta, I think in 2018. And the Bitcoin developers have dressed themselves up as the Knights Templar, which is something related to the Crusades, which we're going to get to in a minute.

And it's probably just as well that when this conference was around that I applied to speak at it and I was declined. Otherwise I would be on this slide and this talk would be another rung more hypocritical than it already is. Okay, did you think I was going to leave Web3 out? So we've also had, well I mean, before Web3 we had this guy who was going around calling himself Bitcoin Jesus, and then he kind of assumed the figure of Judas, I would say. On the left you've got a classic meme from the ICO era, which some of you I'm sure are old enough to remember, of Vitalik dressed as Jesus, holding the Lambo, beckoning you to the promised land.

So, now it comes to the less pleasant part of the talk, about like where these kinds of murky ideas are bringing us into the future. And it's called the dark enlightenment. There's a concept called the dark enlightenment, which we're going to reference. So here's me in Brussels a few weeks ago. Brussels and the European Parliament, they love to espouse the virtues of democracy, whilst perhaps not enacting them as well as they could.

So anyway, their theme, their logo for Brussels is democracy in action. But they kind of didn't leave a very big space between the in and the action. And now it looks like democracy in action. And, you know, that's most people's impression of Brussels, I would imagine. Okay.

So here's the project that I'm talking about, the techno-colonial project about network states, in a kind of succinct formulation. And then from there I'm going to give you a more speculative taste of what's coming in the book that I'm writing. The emergence of techno-capitalist and neo-reactionary currents of thought, exemplified by the dark enlightenment writings of Nickland and Curtis Yarvin, presaged the ongoing anti-democratic turn in contemporary politics. These reactionary ideologies, framing monarchical governance, zones of exception, patchwork neo-feudalism, hyper-financialization, and ecological extractivism as desirable and or inevitable outcomes of capitalist evolution, threaten to normalize anti-egalitarian logics under the guise of technological process. These ideas are presently being put into practice by an emboldened cadre of technology elites, most strikingly by the organizational concept of network states.

I'm sure many people in the room are familiar with network states. Network states are envisaged as archipelagos of sovereign territorial enclaves, acting as de jure and de jure, as in de-jurisdictionalized, exits from the oversight of traditional power structures such as tax and regulation. By tracing the roots of technology colonialism to medieval crusader institutions and early modern India company colonial enterprises, the project explores the supremacist violence underlying and underwriting technolibertarianism. So here's some questions for you to mull over. How do right-wing secessionary movements co-opt emancipatory and utopian rhetorics, such as those of decentralization, freedom, sovereignty, that we hear these words in the discourse around these technologies, right, to legitimize and ultimately enact their patriarchal, colonial, and necropolitical desires?

What alternative governance practices or ethical frameworks might mitigate or counter these maneuvers to reorder the global polis? Okay, that was a lot of words. Now let's look at some pictures. So this is kind of like the first wave of, let's say, we can call it techno-colonialism, the first wave. Seasteading, and then also people kind of trying to occupy offshore platforms.

So we've got the Seasteading Project, Sealand in the top right corner, Liberland in the top left corner, which is a bit of a swamp between Serbia and Croatia, which neither country can occupy due to the specifics of a peace treaty. And so some enterprising bitcoiners, cypherpunks, cryptanarchists showed up and said, we're the king of this now. And they can't actually be there or live there, but they put a flag in it. And this kind of, you know, let's say, imaginary conquest might pave the way for something realer. Here is the Zaha Hadid, Patrick Schumacher-designed metaverse headquarters of said Liberland, looking very hyperbolic, I guess, in geometric terms as well as in their phraseology.

And like, there's been so many of these kinds of zones of secession, crypto-island, crypto-ship projects. I should just pick out a few that lean a bit more towards bitcoin. Now, obviously, we have things like Zuzalu and all the rest of that edge and battalion stuff. The bitcoin president is still trying to build a volcano-powered bitcoin city in El Salvador while he's expanding his high-tech jail. So yay freedom.

And, you know, coming back to the present, I mentioned Curtis Yarvin. Curtis Yarvin was the founder of the Urbit Computational Network. And his ideas have been kind of brought and given a new lease of life, especially around the practical exemplifications of the project working towards making network space real. Things like practice and things like the city of Prospera in Honduras. That's pictures of both of those.

Practice, in particular, is getting a lot of column inches at the moment. I think the image on the left is from the New York Times. They also post about chain mail stuff, which I think may be a direct role of my project, interestingly. And, like, very recently, it's actually kicked up a gear in terms of the visibility. So this is Mother Jones, the left-wing publication, American publication, and even Vanity Fair.

Imagine, they're writing about practice in Vanity Fair, totally uncritically. So think about who's reading this stuff and what ideas are going to get pollinated in the minds of others. So let's have a little refresher on a network state. Velagie, very helpfully in his book, gave different definitions of varying lengths. So I'm going to give you a very small one, verbatim.

A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition. And I've bolded the key things in there, in my opinion. Recognized founder, physical territories, diplomatic recognition. So in this vision, network states are imagined as competitors or superseders of the nation-state paradigm. That's when we come to the chain mail case.

Okay, sorry, it's a lot of words, but this is a book that I'm writing, and I'm trying to give you like an extremely condensed precis of this thousand-year timeline through Western imperialism that seems to end, or at least have its latest and most grotesque continuation in the Bellagian conception of network states. What if the medieval crusades never truly ended? Instead, what if the brutal campaign of conquest by Latin Christian zealots became the template on which modern finance and the capitalist economy was modeled? A blueprint that reveals its true horror in our current age of technology fanaticism. The abysmal forces within medieval Christendom, which fueled militarized pilgrimages to the promised land in the late 11th century onwards, persist today, haunting contemporary politics and technology.

The specter of these forces manifests in theaters of perpetual enmity that techno-capital orchestrates, manipulating the occidental institutions of crown, church, state, and school to wage its battles. From Pope Urban II in 1095 to Christopher Columbus in the 1490s, from Eisenhower in the 1940s to George W. Bush in the 2000s, the concept of the crusade as a righteous, civilization-defining war has left an indelible mark on world history. What lessons can we learn from the past, in particular, the Athenian democracy and the mare liberum of piratical modes of governance, to counter the chainmail gaze of today's captains of industry and their masculine demi-urges? That's the questions I try to answer in the book.

The book is currently provisionally titled The Crusades Never Ended from Holy War to Techno-Fascism, which I think is fairly self-explanatory. And we'll carry on a bit more. So we spoke about the Oscars just now. Has anyone seen Kingdom of Heaven by Ridley Scott? Historical movie.

I just can't see if anyone's nodding. Some people. Okay. So it's one of the worst movies about the crusades, but it's one of the best about network states. And it didn't win any Oscars, but it got nominated for a few.

So here's a few screenshots from a later part of the movie. And by the way, the two characters, Jerry Iron and Orlando Bloom, they made these characters up. They had to change their characters because there were no good guys for the movie. So I've given Jerusalem my whole life. First, I thought we were fighting for God.

Then I realized we were fighting for wealth and land. I was ashamed. So when you hear the network state kings and prophets of tomorrow, proselytizing, asking you to take leaps of faith for some higher purpose, remember what the crusades were really about. And after the conquest of the first crusade, the victory of the crusaders and the forming of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and three other Latin Christian states on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, there was a hundred years of war between, let's say, Christendom and the inhabitants of those lands of various faiths, which ended 200, roughly 200 years after the initial conquest of Jerusalem with the fall of Acre 1191, I believe. So what I'm trying to say, like in this book, it's very hard to do it justice in this short talk, but I'm basically trying to draw a continuous line from the first colonial project, which I believe was the crusades, through to now.

And okay, so here's a bit about the PayPal Mafia, or the Papal Mafia, even. The balance of power across Eurasia a thousand years ago was not so different than that of today. Imperial hangover from righteous European patriarchs believing themselves to hold honourable intentions, noble birthrights, and virtuous ideals lives on within the present cultural imaginary under late capitalism. The logic of the crusade, i.e.

destroying the human, intellectual, and material riches of foreign lands under an array of pretexts has always been the default mode of occidental barbarity. You might think, why are we talking about network states in this context? Well, they want to territorialize these things. They want to make new territories, new empires. That would involve expropriation and exploitation of the peoples that are already there.

So the logic of the crusade continues, like from the 11th century. It wasn't even called the crusade back then, actually. The first time we heard it called the crusade was in the 13th century. But now, it is a concept that is very much embedded in our technical, social, and political worldviews. By the way, the current US Secretary of Defense, Hexeth, wrote a book called American Crusade, and he has the kingdom of Jerusalem's flag tattooed on his breastplate above his heart.

Make of that what you will. Here's a meme I'm working on. Maybe I'll be finished by the time the book is ready. I'm trying to disentangle the crusades as well, not as some homogenous and unidimensional movement, but rather as a complicated, multilayered, and evolving set of theaters of conflict, which, as I said, I don't believe have ended. Okay, and then I'll give you two pictures.

This is the story in two pictures. One is on the left. Taylor Swift is using this, like, irredentist and revanchist. I'm going to get this territory back. I'm going to get back what's mine.

And it keeps coming up in her lyrics. And so somebody speculates that Taylor Swift will be a network state by 2030. And on the right, we didn't get to the fourth crusade because we don't have time today, but, like, you know, I would encourage you to look at the lessons learned from the fourth crusade when the crusaders destroyed the largest city in Christendom, Constantinople, and I would argue that the cure to male loneliness is not to retake Constantinople. Thank you for your time. You have one question if your book will have pictures, because you make so nice ones.

That's a great question. The publisher is discouraging me from putting too many pictures in because of the way it will be printed. But there's a lot of rich visual history, as I'm, you know, I just gave you a taste of it. Today, and so maybe some schematics, but hopefully, probably not some pictures. And but maybe we can make it into a movie.

And then, like, we'll finally get the Oscar for the crusades that Ridley Scott couldn't manage. A big round of applause again.