perfidy

Well, it's part ten, for starters.

You can read it here.

For those in the know, you may begin to detect some themes here. The beginnings of some HBD. Monarchy, christianity. I'm not prepared to go all Moldbug yet, though.

Over at Veil War, there is now in existence at this very moment the fourth installment of the Really Big Idea series. Allison Dickson explains the ideas behind her novel, Scarlet Letters: The Tale of the Vampire Mailman. Worth a read, as are all three earlier installments by George O'Har, Steve Umstead and once and future perfidious minister Ian Healy.

Joe-Bob says check it out. Two thumbs up.

Chapter Nine is up over at The Veil War. Read and enjoy.

“Captain Lewis,” the Prince said through the interpreters, “Yes. Tend to your wounded. Send a dozen men with beasts of burden down to the valley, that we may share the spoils of battle. You and your officers may join us at sundown. Then, we will eat; and we will plan. Our presence here in this world can not have gone undetected, and we will have to move quickly.”

Chapter Nine is the first installment of what, in my head, is part two of Captain Lewis' story. The tone is a bit different; and there are new characters and new challenges for our Marines.

Don't forget to sign up to be an email subscriber at veilwar.com, or friend the Veil War Facebook page. There's still time before the Bonus story ships today.

I don't know how significant this is, but in my recent travels through Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Ohi0 - and then back - over the Christmas holiday I saw "Ron Paul 2012" etched, inked or carved next to five urinals in mens' restrooms. Given the number of stops I made thanks to the infinitesimal bladders of my children, that was a Ron Paul Pisser ratio of about one out of two.

I saw no exhortations for Mitt Romney, Obama, Gingrich or any other announced candidate.

As the title says...

It's Veil War Thursday. And that means another chapter of edge-of-your-seat action.

Your teaser:

“What are they doing firing a half mile out?”

Lewis dropped the glasses. He watched the gray cloud of arrows climb skyward. It looks like they’ve got the distance…. And there goes another volley.

Evans was incredulous. “How the hell could anyone draw a bow that could shoot an arrow that goddamn far?”

Five flights of arrows were in the air when the first round hit. Those five hundred arrows hit the goblins like the wrath of god. “Holy mother of fuck!” Evans shouted.

“I don’t believe it. Every single one of those arrows hit.” Pethoukis said softly, stunned.

Read it here.

Just in time for Christmas, Drunk History presents:

Drunk Christmas

I'd have embedded the video, but as a special added present, Funny or Die doesn't make that easy.

Part Seven of the Veil War is up over at the cleverly named Veil War site.

Read, tell your friends, and tell your friends to tell their friends.

It came to my attention that the original explanation of why this blog is named the Ministry of Minor Perfidy, or 'perfidy' for short, is not easily available. While the most dedicated and assiduous readers could likely track it down, it is our goal here at perfidy to make things easy.

Back in July of aught 3, we had this to say:

In his most recent bleat, Lileks tosses this out:

When I hear a speech like Blair’s, I have to check the calendar. And the calendar is usually wrong. It may say 2/23, or 7/16, or 4/30. But I know what the date is, and the date is 9/12. It’s going to be 9/12 for a long time to come.

While I’m on the subject of Lileks, I should mention that we shamelessly stole the name of our blog from one of his bleats.

In a bleat shortly after the beginning of the war, but before American troops reached Baghdad, Lileks had this to say:

These pictures are fascinating - it's a capital in wartime, and it looks like it's had a few bad gas main leaks, nothing more. The giant black plumes of fire come from oil trenches set alight by the Iraqis, and looking at them from above you realize they make excellent visual markers for incoming bombers. (If they needed such a thing, which they don't.) The first picture shows a Presidential Palace - two words that ought not cohabitate, really - and it's had the crap blown out of it. Across the street is a gigantic assembly building of some kind, perhaps the National House of Enthusiastic Rubber Stamping. It's untouched. I'd wager a five-spot that they left it for whatever legislative body comes next. There's no sign of bombing anywhere else, except for a small building down at the bottom of the picture; perhaps that was the Ministry of Minor Perfidy, or the State Bureau for Interrogative Dentistry. Something naughty happened there, in any case. I'd thought that the first phase of the air war would see the atomization of all the palaces, but perhaps that's not so; good. Turn them into bed & breakfasts. Give every iraqi citizen a coupon good for one free night in a room in the palace. Thin Mints on the pillow, courtesy the US Military.

The phrase just caught us, and we ran with it. If you’re going to steal, steal from the best.

It is a commonplace that the advance of technology killed the Feudal age. The cost of training, equipping and supporting the Medieval knight was large, relative to the economic output of the era. And this cost was necessary because in many respects it was the best bang for the buck given the technological and economic realities. So the military necessity, the social structure and the available technology mutually created and supported each other in an environment where there had been significant collapse of large-scale institutions and in which there were powerful threats to local populations.

As technology fitfully advanced, new military paradigms arose. The rise, first of archers and pikemen and then the firearm, created a tactical environment unfriendly to the armored knight, which then made the cost of training, equipping and supporting the expensive and arrogant knight sufficiently unpleasant that he faded from the scene.

Technology didn't stop with killing the knight. Masses of musket-equipped soldiers were eventually joined with mass-produced muskets, mass-produced canned goods, and eventually mass-produced mass production. Soon, even the emaciated descendants of the knight - the aristocracy - was on its knees.

Democracy triumphant! Workers of the world unite, and eat the rich! Buy large quantities of Chinese trinkets!

However, the rise of capitalism and democracy were not without their downsides. While the initial wave led to decentralization of economic and political decision-making, the system did not provide much in the way of safeguards against the eventual re-centralization of power using the techniques and technologies that the age of mass production and eventually the information age provided.

Crony capitalism, regulatory capture, the unfettered rise of the financial industry - we are seeing that allowing these things to happen, and especially to happen with the seal and approval of a democratic mandate, equivalent to the mandate of heaven - is probably not a good idea. In fact it likely will lead to the collapse of modern society - and if you read zero hedge, you'll know that this will happen sometime before next Tuesday.

There are new technologies on the horizon. The maker movement, 3D printing, home fabricators, automated CNC routers, the nascent technological cornucopia will soon force upon us vast changes, fully equivalent in scale to the changes brought by the industrial revolution, and before it the late medieval technology boom in metallurgy and clockwork and the harnessing of wind and water power.

These technologies, if you listen to the hype of their creators and promoters, will lead to a golden age of libertarian skittle-shitting unicorn rainbow happiness. And hey, they might be right. It might be stage one of the rapture of the nerds, and all humanity will just leap forward into the promised land where everyone is safe from obnoxious jocks with big muscles and little understanding of the wonders and nuances of star trek minutia and WoW guild politics.

But will it?

Just to be contrarian here for a moment, what if the new technology does not result in further democratization and libertarian society fertilization? Okay, sure, the cost of many things will go down, and that would be an argument in favor of the established perception of the economic and social potential of this complex of technologies. Global design and local production will surely have a vast effect, one corner of which will be lower cost of some goods.

But will the cost of absolutely everything go down? I think, yes and no.

The rifle is a simple piece of technology. Mass produced in quantity and distributed, it is and has been the center of large national armies for half a millennium. To be sure, we have accreted a lot of things around the hoary and grey-bearded rifle-equipped infantryman. Artillery, air forces, etc, ad nauseam. And those can generally only be produced by nation states because you need to own the factories to make these expensive items that allow the democratic citizen soldier to prosper on the battlefield.

The concentration of power enabled by mass production and democratization has been focused on the nation-state, and increasingly on the parasitic large corporation/finance behemoths that interpenetrate and influence the nation-state. As Aretae recently pointed out, the interference of the nation state in even simple things like transportation networks hugely distorted the 'natural' growth of economies. And this leads to interesting thoughts.

The growth of new methods of production might lower the cost of some things enough that the cost of other things, especially networks of things will go up, relatively speaking. (If useful things become cheap enough, you can get lots of them. If they are intelligent things, having lots of them will grant capabilities beyond a linear extrapolation of having just one would lead you to expect.) Will the cost of these networks of things rise to the level at which you need the concentrated essence of economic power - the nation-state - to effectively field fighting forces with them? The likeliest case, given the wider range, is that the cost would fall between the normal individual's means and national-debt-inducing.

If there is a collapse, or pseudo-collapse, in national and international economies and society as a result of the recent and ongoing unpleasantness - what will happen? Local-producing makers and fabricators will create regional trade networks. Trading designs globally, but producing locally, we can imagine whole new industrial ecosystems growing up around descendents of today's maker spaces. The modern smithy will be a fab lab where the local artisan can produce circuits, finished parts in plastic and metal or wood - customized and perfectly suited to the task at hand. No more mass-produced assembly line toys from China - if you want something, you go to the smithy and he makes it, just like of old.

But the thing is, a fully realized maker fab will be able to create enormously sophisticated devices and indeed entire infrastructures on a custom and ongoing basis. This goes far beyond printing interesting dildos in pink ABS plastic. Drones, drone controllers - and therefore systems of surveillance, mini-missiles, over the horizon attack capabilities, metalstorm pods, munitions, AAD systems, all networked and controlled by systems of software modeled on modern game software.

Producing rifles - even super-cool, electrically activated, rapid-fire, armor-piercing, self-homing bullet firing metalstorm rifles - with this nearly automated manufacturing technology would be the smallest thing. Equivalent to the medieval smith making a knife - a trivial exercise.

In a world that is suddenly regionalized (at best) or hyper-localized (at worst), where large-scale institutions are enfeebled both by the growing power of new technologies and the economic systems that evolve around them as documented by people like John Robb; and of course by their own inherent flaws as ably documented by Moldbug and Foseti - you have something that starts to look a lot like the pre-feudal age where the common folk are at risk from the still powerful remnants of the old order, and from out of context threats like vikings and other mobile bandits.

And what defends local communities from threats? A defense infrastructure that is complicated to produce, and difficult to utilize. While the local maker can produce any simple tool almost at cost from scrap metal and plans pulled out of the cloud (just as the medieval smith could produce simple tools from pig iron and the sweat of his brow) creating a complex of drones, missiles and automated defense systems that might be very like that imagined by Daniel Suarez in his books Daemon and Freedom(tm) is more on the order of a highly skilled armor smith producing a complicated and effective suit of armor, and the sword smith creating a usable and durable sword out of high-grade steel. And the horse breeder providing destriers, and the community providing for the feeding and training of the knight who used them...

What if the new proto-medieval knight (the old one was the thug who was skilled at arms, and seized the opportunity to create an economic situation that would support him and provide defense for the people sufficient enough that they accepted the rest) is the techno-geek gamer who understands the means of designing and utilizing the new high-tech to provide for the defense of the commons. And whose training to be effective takes years, and requires the output of a significant community, and works best when the skills are transmitted in a master/apprentice mode.

Because one guy with a rifle won't be an effective combatant in a world with networked drones, micro-missiles, sensor networks, and who knows what else that could be created with a mature fabbing technology. And as easy as a rifle is to learn to use, learning to use complex networks of weapons won't be.

Technology forces cultural changes. But not usually in ways that we expect. Our current system is between two and four centuries old, depending on how you count it. Technology is undermining it, along with its own inherent and multiplying flaws. That's about as long as things generally last. In times of great change, things don't normally continue on a linear extrapolation of current events, or even the events of the last century. We are perhaps foolish to imagine that the result of the changes taking place will be merely the elimination of only the bad parts of the current system.