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The Art of Hiding Pebbles

The Art of Hiding Pebbles (Juggernaut XL v8)

Here’s how hope dies: first as a promise and then as a compliance report. A reformer gets elected to fix a nation’s broken system. Vox populi vox dei and all that. Change you can believe in! Once “in power,” the reformer discovers the throne is mostly theatre. The new team’s earnest efforts drown in bureaucracy – endless task groups and committees, piling plans and proposals, all eager to help, yet nothing moves. The old state machine grinds on, indifferent. An invisible windowpane somehow stops positive change from happening, as if a shadowy system existed beyond and beneath the visible levers of power. The result? Not reform, but more of the same – only heavier, slower, worse. We promised less of x and more of y; we delivered x+2=y. You know the story. Many such cases.

After a while, if you’re of the noticer persuasion, you start noticing this fascinating paradox repeating itself, and you start wondering. Is there some system you’re missing in all of this? Some complex machine hidden deep in the edifice of government. Suppose you assume this obscure, shadowy system is somewhere there, blocking reform. Where do you begin looking for it? The default route is to ask the experts. They will surely know. But, you say, the experts live in an echo chamber of faulty assumptions, longstanding biases, and manipulated data. Science denier, are you anon?

Alternatively, you could work from first principles. The deductive option is to disassemble the obscure system into its components and figure out their functionality and role in the larger whole. As much as you’d like deconstructing things, it would not do, as you don’t have access to the obscure system apart from your observation and pattern recognition skills. Induction, then. You can infer the system’s purpose and general functionality from observing its impacts. Watch the shadows it casts, the ripples in reality.

Sometimes, this would be enough. But, as we discussed in The Naked King Spell, the purpose of a system is what it does. Therefore, if a system seeks to hide, it must first hide its true actions – its purpose leaks through them. In other words, what if this system wears a mask? Determining what a system is actually doing can often be challenging, particularly if it obfuscates its operations to appear as something else entirely. The system might purposely generate synthetic shadows to convince you these are not the droids you seek. Again, many such cases.

You can overcome this problem by focusing on the other end of the equation and examining how the system feeds itself, that is, on its energy source. A system’s energy source determines its internal structure and interactions with the external environment. Obscuring actions is relatively easy – muddy the waters and the trail vanishes. Hiding the energy source is more complicated because it must, by definition, exist outside the system, leaving a trace as it interfaces with the system’s logistics.

For example, if you’re observing a system that gets its energy from livestock – say, cattle – that system will likely have organized itself for optimal control over the pastoral lifecycle. It cannot be otherwise because cattle is that system’s most precious resource. You can then safely deduce you’re dealing with a pastoral nomad society with all the cultural, economic, and political implications that follow.

Similarly, a system that gets its energy from agriculture will organize and act differently from a system feeding itself on industrial production. An agricultural society’s most precious resource is land, and it would, therefore, organize the entirety of its cultural, economic, and political protocols around control over the lifecycle of land. Not so for an industrial society, which has to organize itself around the capitalization, production, distribution and consumption of assembly line output at scale.

Alternatively, suppose the primary energy source of a system comes from government subsidies or government agency contracts. In that case, that system will structure itself to control and maximize energy input from the government acting as its energy source. Now consider a mafia network fed by racketeering and drugs. This system will optimize itself to control territorial monopolies and manipulate fear and loyalty among its operators and victims. Its routines will revolve around securing supply chains, silencing threats, and evading law enforcement – every action aligned with sustaining its energy source.

A system’s source of energy reveals its structure and goals. Cattle? You’ve got nomadic Männerbünde. Land? Farmers and feudalism. Factories? Assembly line labor, capital accumulation, and consumerism. State subsidies? Extension of parasitic bureaucracy. Racketeering and drugs? Mafia.

You don’t need to trace how the system spends all its energy; you only need to understand its energy source. A system’s energy source reveals its objectives and operational methods, what it wants to control, and what it has to affect in its environment. Therefore, identifying a system’s primary energy source allows you to determine the vector along which it aims to control its environment. This, in turn, will allow you to understand what the system actually does.

Energy defines purpose. Purpose defines control. Control defines action.

Power

In simple systems – a warband, for instance – power is acclamation. An Achilles, Agamemnon, or Odysseus rises as chief. His power is a function of the warband’s will, performed continuously by its actions. Imagine the warband as a network of actors whose agency is necessary for generating and performing that power. Various technologies are also part of the network performing it. When the warband tames horses or invents the chariot – as an anon Sintashta warband once did – they dramatically extend the scale of its raids. The warband now extracts tribute from a vast area, and the chieftain’s wealth grows; people now say that his power has grown to extend over the vast tribute area.

In systems, power is not force. Confusing the two is a common mistake. Force is the applied effect of power, not its cause. Take the warband chief: his power isn’t in breaking skulls but in the band acting as though his word breaks skulls. Imagine the anon Sintashta band that invented chariots. Its chief’s power wasn’t in the chariots and their speed – these are just the vectors along which his power is applied as a force. His power is in the raiders, blacksmiths, horses, and chariots aligned as a network applying force against the farmers who must pay tribute. And yes, as long as the farmers pay their tribute, they also perform the network of power.

The chief’s power has always been an afterglow of the warband’s (the network’s) dynamic performance of a specific set of routines across the scale of the network’s surface. The more intricate, complex, and synchronized these routines, the more pervasive and stable the power seems. When the warband stops performing it, the chief loses his power. A new chief is elected and now sits in his place. What happened to the old chief’s power? It seemed so vast and impressive when he wielded it. How did it disappear? These are the wrong questions to ask, as the power never resided with a specific chief in the first place.

Power is a network phenomenon – an effect of the warband’s routines, maneuvers, and alignment. To understand the power, you must understand the dynamics of the network that generates it. From the network’s perspective, what we perceive as power is a function of a series of maneuvers and mundane routines enacted by the network’s actors. The phenomenon we call power is the effect of that consistent and ongoing performance, not its cause. Yet, we commonly attribute to it causal properties. When the warband network is aligned perfectly, we say its chief has power. One can even observe how that power is wielded, generating the impression of causality. The chief issues an order, and it is executed. Someone, somewhere, experiences the force of the chief’s power and has to either resist or yield to it.

The warband may grow to tens of thousands of warriors, making us marvel at the power of its chieftain. Perhaps now he is dressed in royal garments, wields a scepter, and wears a crown. Surely, the crown and scepter are where the power resides. After all, when the chieftain dies, we put the crown on the new chief; long live the chief!

But then, drop this “powerful” chief into enemy territory with his crown and scepter. What is he now? A victim in funny clothes. Like Delaroche’s painting of Napoleon at St. Helena, the ruler of Europe reduced to a sad man in an out-of-place uniform, forlorn on an ocean rock. How confusing when the mighty fall. Wasn’t he powerful?

Paul Delaroche, Napoleon at St Helena, 1855 (fragment)

The confusion is in the causative flow of agency – the chief never had power; rather, power had him. It seems counterintuitive that the seemingly causative source of power is, in fact, the effect of a long chain of relations that have to be continuously aligned, upheld, and performed. Power is the effect of that long network chain performing it, not the cause.

As an aside, this is why oppressive states love atomized individuals and fear and suppress independent networks – the latter can exercise power, while the former cannot. Contrary to appearances, individualism is a totalitarian state’s favorite ideology for the masses. Yes, anon, be all you can be, but don’t think about organizing a sovereign männerbund, church, commune, labor union, religion, or militia. Those are all bad for you. Your extended family and clan are bad for you as well – they oppress you, you see. Be yourself, be free! So much freedom is to be had when you abandon all these tools of oppression! Anyways.

The network-generated power principle scales in complex systems. The modern state operates no differently with its labyrinth of systems and routines. Here, too, power flows from the network of bureaucrats, filing protocols, intranet switches, three-letter agencies, drab brutalist buildings, and countless alignment subroutines. These actors perform state power, weaving it from mundane interactions and alignments. Networks within networks, actors upon actors, an ephemeral field guiding the visible hand. Do you understand the reformer’s confusion?

In a warband, the power-generating network is pretty clear – warriors, raids, tribute, feasts, long live the chief. Simple. But scale it up, and clarity dissolves. In large systems, scale adds efficiency and complexity up to a point, after which the system has to choose whether to retain adaptability or keep scaling up with efficiency. State bureaucracies rely on a government’s budget – seemingly bottomless until it isn’t – and always opt for the least efficient mode of complexity, which diffuses and abstracts the power-generating network. A warband’s chain of actions is short – kill, take, divide, repeat. The modern state’s chain is labyrinthine, stretched across countless systems, actors, and subroutines. Each piece performs a fragment of the whole, and no single actor sees the entire picture.

From the reformer’s perspective, sitting at the “command center” of the system, its subroutine chains are so abstracted and obfuscated as to appear self-perpetuating. The reformer seems to rule, appoint people at all key departments, sign things, and issue executive orders but is, in fact, a function of the very machine they are supposed to reform. The reformer’s power is a function of the network they aim to dismantle – a contradiction from the start. In turn, the network has no interest in its undoing and resists the reformer at every step. It absorbs, redirects, and stalls, ensuring that reform dies before it begins. Sounds familiar?

The Art of Hiding Pebbles

People imagine the deep state as an omniscient shadow bureaucracy – unelected, unsupervised, corrupt, all-seeing, and surgically competent. The esoteric alphabet agency from a Jason Bourne film. This shadowy, all-powerful enemy is a beloved trope of all serious conspiracy theories. We’re resisting a 5000-year-old death cult anon, the final red pill! This is such a comforting story – it helps order the chaos and noise of reality into a neat victim narrative with heroic individualist overtones. There’s nothing you can do, but now you’re one of the few who know about these things.

However, there is nothing deep about a bureaucrat. Have you not seen one? Bureaucracies are neither deep nor competent; they are inertia-bound self-reproducing machines focused on their own expansion while growing less and less efficient over time. Like a tapeworm. Left unchecked, a bureaucracy invariably drags down the system it is supposed to serve into a Red Queen Trap.

When communism fell in Eastern Europe, the formal state structures of the entire oppressive apparatus remained. The following day, department names were changed, seals were swapped, and red stars were painted over. The bureaucrats were still there, yet their power was gone. Why? Again, because power doesn’t live in people, titles, desks, or badges. It lives in network alignment – the chains of routines, actors, and energy flows that generate it. Once that alignment fractures, yesterday’s power structure becomes a row of imposing brutalist buildings housing sex shops, with its top operatives peddling hair loss treatments in late-night infomercials.

There is no deep state; there is deep power.

Chesterton once noted that a wise man hides his pebbles on the beach, among countless others. Deep power follows the same principle. There is no deep state; there are networks performing their routines while concealing their actions and, to the extent that they can, their energy sources. Where would you hide a network of profound influence? In plain sight, among a thousand mundane ones. Within the complex edifice of the modern state, these networks are like a pebble hidden on a pebble beach.

Take the tax office – everyone’s favorite bureaucracy. On the surface, it shuffles papers and collects revenue. Beneath that, its routines generate energy to feed a broader network – the state. Now imagine another vastly smaller network, hidden across tax offices, forestry departments, alphabet agencies, universities, corporations, and opposition parties while skimming off their revenue energy feed. Its survival depends on appearing as unremarkable as a beach pebble. It thrives because it blends in.

Obfuscation is not just a simple tactic; it is the network’s primary survival mechanism. Networks that generate deep power obfuscate their actions and hide their energy sources in complexity, bureaucracy, or layers of plausible deniability. Depending on their environment, they can be expected to dedicate resources to generating the synthetic shadows I mentioned earlier. These shadows are designed not just to mislead but to exhaust your ability to discern reality.

How did Nabokov put it?

“A shadow of a waxwing slain / by the false azure in the windowpane.”

Another benefit of synthetic shadow-casting is that when deep networks apply force, the source of that force is always obscure: an unknown perpetrator, a synthetic terror group, or a lone gunman. Sad! If you understand this, you see why the reformer’s attacks against the visible structure of the state rarely achieve meaningful results. The visible structure is camouflage for the networks generating deep power. Deep power networks are the reformer’s primary target. However, striking the networks is only possible after identifying their energy source and disrupting the flows that sustain it. Even then, the reformer must focus on disrupting the networks’ routines and alignment.

And so, the reformer swings at shadows. If they’re smart, they quickly realize it’s easier – and safer – that way. The deep power network hides dispersed behind innocent office doors, audit reports, and coffee-stained memos, with closely aligned force just an arm away. Lean too close, and you’ll feel the false azure’s breath on your neck. So many such cases.

So, how do you fight a deep power network? Usually, you don’t because you’re not part of a network generating enough power. But, if you have the network to back you up, there are two primary ways of dealing with it. The Stalin way: clear almost every pebble from the beach and seed it with new pebbles. That way, no matter how well camouflaged and distributed the deep power network is, enough of its nodes get misaligned to disrupt it. Alternatively, the FDR way: build another, much larger pebble beach and route all energy flows to it. That way, the deep power network’s energy sources, routines, and alignment are disrupted at once by the alignment of a much more extensive network.

Both options are very costly. The first leads to direct network confrontation, weakening the system or tearing it apart. The second buries the system under new burdens, leaving it no options but to seek new energy in expansion. Rome tried both. Sulla put in place the first, buying the system a generation of peace followed by two more civil wars. Octavian put in place the second, condemning the system to expand in search of new energy until it could not – and collapsed irreversibly. In the end, no matter the method, a new pebble joins the beach, and the game begins anew.

On the third mode of power

Lucas van Leyden, The Game of Chess, 1508 [fragment]

I recently spent some time in a rather isolated mountain village, where I was able to observe an interesting lesson about the modes of power in turbulent times.

The village head was a man born and raised there, elected repeatedly for the same position for decades. He was connected to a powerful political party, and doubled as the head of the regional hunting club. Clearly popular with the locals, on first names with the regional authorities, clearly bearing all the attributes of power. The person you go to visit when you just move in and want the local power to know you exist.

However, when the locals needed help organizing a festival they turned to an otherwise unassuming woman, a decade old addition to the village, who was quite frail after a recent chemotherapy. Why? Supposedly she could organize things. When an unexpectedly large number of people turned up for the festival and a number of foreigners found themselves without lodging, people gave them her number. She will help you, they said. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one night the throng of visitors ended up exhausting the village water supply. The village woke up to a looming disaster, or so I thought. The locals were not moved though.

As it turned out, the unassuming woman had called the head of the water company from the nearest large town first thing in the morning, asking him to activate a mountain water pipe bypass and supply the village until the visitors leave. Apparently, it was expected that she would know about things such as mountain water pipe bypasses and will somehow fix this problem. True story.

What to make of this scenario? It is easy to say the village head is an incompetent vestige of the patriarchy with visible but largely ceremonial power, while the empowered yet unassuming woman holds the less visible but real power. That is how this scenario would appear in a Netflix fantasy series. Let’s presume you have no use for cartoon stencils though.

The familiar duality

There is such a thing as visible power, and it does not need to be exercised often in order to be effective. It is visible because its attributes have to be easily recognizable in the leaders of this or that hierarchical organization. Warlords, CEOs, kings, bowling club presidents, generals, popes, village heads. The larger and more vertically centralized the hierarchy, the more visible the power of its head.

All power is a function of architecture and aesthetics, of topology and appearance.

The architecture of visible power is hierarchical, its topology – tending towards centralization. Its aesthetics and appearance involve visible attributes which can be observed from outside the structure. Visible power is not omnipotent, like all modes of power its architecture and aesthetics simply allow it to be effective in a given context, while severely limiting it in others.

However, not all power is visible. There is a type of power that is very effective but does not carry any of the aesthetic attributes of visible power. Let’s call it flow power. It doesn’t compete with visible power, it stays mostly latent, but when something breaks everyone turns to it because of its ability to get things done. I call it flow power because it allows the network to operate and resolves or routes around blockages. Again, it doesn’t lead in the context of the larger system, as visible power does, it just gets things done. Like the unassuming woman.

If you’ve spent an extended amount of time in a hierarchical organization – large corporations, the army, academia – you’ve learned to intuitively recognize flow power. If you need something done, or a problem fixed, you look for flow power. Often, say if you are new to an organization, you need to go to visible power first so that it can point you to flow power directly. Flow power is usually found somewhere in the middle of large hierarchical organizations, where it is close to the action, is not crippled by the requirements of visible power and has enough room to maneuver and get things done. That is the level of company mid-management, or the army ranks from lieutenant to major – close enough to the action and to the decision center.

Paradoxically, the architecture of flow power is also hierarchical – it is a binary of visible power and needs it to function effectively. Of course, up to a certain level of complexity the two can be combined, the unassuming woman could also become the village head, and would perhaps be far more effective than the old village head as a wielder of both visible and flow power at that level. However, the more complex and hierarchical the organization, the harder it is to hold both powers in the same center. This is because to remain effective, flow power has to be close to the action, while visible power has to be at the top of the pyramid.

Startups usually begin with both types of power in the same hands, and this persists until the organization stratifies to a level that makes it impossible to effectively keep both types of power in the same node in the network. The more complex the topology of the network, the more the aesthetics of flow power differentiate it from both visible power and everyone else in the network.

Every hierarchy relies on visible power to represent it externally, and flow power to keep things together internally.

You can see this clearly with the evolution of power modes in the military. In a warband, both visible and flow power are in the hands of the war chief. He visibly leads from the front and keeps the simple structure together. We see this evolving with the organized armies of antiquity. Alexander the Great kept the visible power and led from the front, but his army was complex enough that it could function without him, because of the flow power of his generals. Once Alexander and his companion cavalry would charge into the fray the army held together and adapted only because each of his generals wielded delegated flow power.

By the time of Caesar and the far more complex organization of the Roman legionary army, the architecture of power had evolved further. Caesar wielded the visible power, but did not need to lead from the front. Flow power was even more decentralized, and now in the hands of the centurions at the head of each cohort. The military and personal genius of Caesar was in the fact that at times of ultimate stress, when his heavily outnumbered army faced catastrophic collapse, as at the battle of Alesia, he was able to fluidly assume flow power locally as needed, and then immediately relinquish it when he was not necessary in that sector.

This evolution can be pursued to the present, and it is fairly easy to spot a common trend. Both visible and flow power are emergent, and will appear organically in a group of people even without formal organization imposed from outside. With the rise of complexity in an organization the two powers diverge. Visible power remains at the top, while flow power is distributed to an ever expanding number of nodes.

Now, if you look at an organization from the outside, as an attacker, and if outright takeover of visible power is impossible or undesirable, obviously you would try to target flow power. Doing so can cripple an organization while its visible power attributes remain intact. The more complex and centralized an organization, the easier it is to locate its flow power nodes. This brings me to an important point.

There is a third mode of power.

It is not visible, and not as easily found as the mid-level flow power which makes things run. It is best explained by thinking about organizations as networks. Centralized networks – think pyramids – are hierarchical and vertically integrated. They are very resilient, scale well up to a point, and provide a visible power structure. The pyramid is good at mobilizing resources, and has strong inertia which allows it to deal with most static resistance.

This is why historically the dominant form of social organization has been a flavor of monarchy – from warbands to corporations. Both warbands and corporations exhibit the most stable form of visible power – the elected monarch. In warbands that role is played by the war chief, in corporations – by the CEO. As the pyramid’s organization evolves, flow power separates from visible power and travels midway between visible power and the periphery where the organization encounters reality.

By comparison, decentralized networks – think bazaars – are far less hierarchical, if at all, and integrate horizontally rather than vertically. They are even more resilient than pyramids, and under certain conditions – think insurgencies – can grow stronger when put under pressure. Unlike pyramids, bazaars are usually ruled by oligarchies which are not necessarily visible from the outside. The optimal bazaar does not have any visible power, and you might spend a long time engaging with it without ever finding its power centers. Why is that?

Because, since power is a function of architecture and aesthetics, bazaars exhibit a third mode of power, different from visible and flow power. The bazaar topology is either decentralized, or completely distributed, without a visible central command node and its supporting structure. Bazaar aesthetics is therefore not related at all to visible power, but rather to the amorphous and fluid architecture of the bazaar. It is chaotic and transgressive.

I am calling this third mode hermetic power, after Hermes, the Greek messenger god. Hermes is the messenger between the realms of the gods, humans, and the dead. His winged sandals carry him between domains, he is a connector and carrier of information. In antiquity his holy places were situated at the crossroads, symbolizing the amorphous and transgressive nature of the information domain.

Hermetic power is also emergent, but unlike the other two modes it is most effective when invisible from the outside. The less visible the information, the more valuable it is. Where the pyramid generates the visible pharaoh and his priests who run the structure, the bazaar generates anonymous people in the know. Where visible power relies on loyalty, and flow power on competence, hermetic power relies on trust. In a pyramid, you gain power either by moving to the top, or by keeping the bottom and middle together. In a bazaar you gain power by generating information the others in the bazaar can trust and act on. That’s the essence of hermetic power.

Hermes’ power was the ability to carry information between realms. Similarly, hermetic power is distinct from the other two modes, because, unlike them, it can move in and out of non-bazaar structures with ease. Visible power is limited to its own architecture, and so is flow power. You get to be middle management only in one organization at a time. You get to be pope, emperor, or village head only of this one pyramid. If you want to also be the head of another pyramid, you have to visibly take it over.

By contrast, hermetic power can connect to a number of pyramids simultaneously and extract information from them while remaining invisible. More, it can also inject and manipulate information within them, and still remain invisible. From the perspective of topology, this is because a distributed network operates at faster cycles than a centralized one, and can easily transect it, particularly if it also tries to keep its nodes invisible. From the perspective of aesthetics, the bazaar cannot be fully grasped by a pyramid because it always extends beyond it.

There is a lot more to say about hermetic power, but this post is getting too long, so I will leave you to consider the following scenario:

What would change if an adversarial hermetic power takes over the flow power of a state? What if it is a number of states? How would you recognize this is happening?

Network architecture encounters

These are some loosely organized observations about the nature of network topologies in the wild.

In terms of both agency and information, all entities, be they singular [person], plural [clan/tribe/small company], or meta-plural [nation/empire/global corporation] are essentially stacks of various network topologies. To understand how the entities operate in space these topologies can be simplified to a set of basic characteristics. When networks are mapped and discussed, it is usually at this 2-dimensional level. However, in addition to operating in space, all entities have to perform themselves in time.

This performative aspect of networks is harder to grasp, as it involves a continuously looping process of encountering other networks and adapting to them. In the process of performative adaptation all networks experience dynamic changes to their topologies, which in turn challenge their internal coherence. This process is fractal, in that at any one moment there is a vast multiplicity of networks interacting with each other across the entire surface of their periphery [important qualification here – fully distributed networks are all periphery]. There are several important aspects to this process, which for simplicity’s sake can be reduced to an interaction of two networks and classified as follows:

1] the topology of the network we are observing [A];

2] the topology of network B, that A is in the process of encountering;

3] the nature of the encounter: positive [dynamic collaboration], negative [dynamic war], zero sum [dynamic equilibrium].

All encounters are dynamic, and can collapse into each other at any moment. All encounters are also expressed in terms of entropy – they increase or decrease it within the network. Centralized networks cannot manage entropy very well and are extremely fragile to it.

Positive encounters are self explanatory, in that they allow networks to operate in a quasi-symbiotic relationship strengthening each network. These encounters are dynamically negentropic for both networks, in that they enable both networks to increase coherence and reduce entropy.

Negative encounters can be offensive or defensive, whereby one or both [or multiple] networks attempt to undermine and/or disrupt the internal coherency of the other network/s. These encounters are by definition entropic for at least one of the networks involved [often for all], in that they dramatically increase entropy in at least one of the combatants. They can however be negentropic for some of the participants. For example, WW2 was arguably negentropic for the US and highly entropic for European states.

Zero sum encounters are interesting, in that they represent a dynamic cancelling out of networks. There is neither cooperation nor war, but a state of co-presence without an exchange of entropy in a dynamic time-space range. I believe this is a rare type of encounters, because the absence of entropy exchange can appear only if 1] there is no exchange of information or agency, or 2] the amount of agency/information exchanged is identical from both sides. Needless to say, this process cannot be easily stabilized over a long time period and either morphs into one of the other two states or the networks stop encountering each other.