• Medium-sized powers with drone-fueled arsenals have fought superpowers to a standstill.

• Ukraine’s drones have ravaged Russia’s army, killing hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Now, it is routinely bombing Moscow and disrupting Russia’s oil infrastructure.

• Iran withstood a relentless US and Israeli aerial assault for months while simultaneously damaging US bases in the region and sending Israelis into bomb shelters nightly. Now, with its drone capabilities largely intact, it has undisputed control over the Strait of Hormuz, the choke point that controls most of the Middle East’s oil.

What changed? Both Ukraine and Iran developed a new military theory that has allowed them to use the newly developed technologies of autonomy to radically amplify their ability to wage war. Let’s dig in.

Advances in Military Theory

Major advances in technology often create opportunities for decisive, disruptive innovations in military theory (something the US military doesn’t spend much time or $ $ on).

• We saw it with new technologies like gunpowder and the internal combustion engine. Now we’re seeing it with autonomous weapons.

• These technological advances only became decisive in warfare when a new military theory was developed that unlocked their potential.

• Countries that developed these new theories early saw a massive improvement in their ability to wage war (often disrupting existing power dynamics, as we’ve seen with Iran).

The technologies of military autonomy span air, sea, land, space, ballistic, and subsurface drones.

The Drone Hedgehog

Iran and Ukraine advanced military theory by using drones to create what’s best termed a drone hedgehog.

• Historically, a hedgehog is a geographically dispersed defensive formation. Typically, it’s put in a location that is nearly impossible for the attacker to bypass.

• Hedgehogs use defensive barriers to slow an attacker’s movements and mutually reinforcing strongholds that inflict constant damage (hit one, the others hit back).

• As losses mount, the attacker faces a choice: stay engaged and suffer escalating attrition while making slow progress (Putin), or withdraw (Trump) and find another path forward.

Here’s how Iran and Ukraine used a new technology (drones) to turn their countries into drone hedgehogs.

• A launch pad network. A network that can be defended against ground assaults and is resistant to air assaults. To do this, they used;

  • swarms of tactical and operational drones to slow and attrit land offensives that threaten the launch pad.

  • drones to interdict enemy supply lines (air and sea) and restrict the area

    of maneuver (i.e., the Persian Gulf).

  • geographical dispersion, decentralized command-and-control, and tunneling to blunt the effectiveness of airpower and missile attacks.

Defending the launch pad; drones have reduced Russian land offensives to only 50-90 meters a day. Iranian drones limited US shipping operations inside the Persian Gulf and dashed plans of a seaborne invasion of islands near the Strait of Hormuz.

• Drone manufacturing at scale (quantity > quality).

  • Ukraine’s production has grown to ~7 m drones per year (largely short-range/tactical). Iran’s production is between ~80,000 and 120,000 a year (largely intermediate-range aerial and ballistic drones).

  • Instead of producing expensive weapon systems using traditional methods, both countries built inexpensive, minimally viable systems and improved from there. Quantity has its own quality, particularly if those numerous systems are rapidly getting more autonomous.

  • Both countries rely on China’s drone industry as a platform (for chips, electric motors, servos, and batteries). China’s massive industrial machine (thanks to globalization) will sell to anyone (even both sides in a war).

• The capacity to inflict strategic disruption (hedgehog quills). Specifically, to;

  • Hit and disrupt strategically important targets far beyond their borders (from Gulf and Russian oil infrastructure to Moscow to Persian Gulf oil flow),

  • Dispersed, resilient nodes maintain the tempo of strategic and operational attacks using aerial and ballistic drones despite intense suppression efforts. Dispersed production of relatively low-tech weapons is sufficient to sustain these attacks indefinitely.

  • Use this costly strategic disruption, mounting daily, to put pressure on the (larger) enemy to end the war.

(More on how the US, China, and guerrilla groups will use this military innovation below).

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• Anthropic released two versions of the new model, each with significant improvements in operational autonomy.

  • Fable 5 (a general-use frontier model with guardrails) and

  • Mythos 5 (an unlocked version available only to Anthropic’s trusted partners).

• Upon review, the government concluded that the autonomous cybersecurity capabilities of both models (Fable 5 via a jailbreak) posed a national security risk. For example, it could expose and fully exploit (up to 32 steps) cybersecurity vulnerabilities at a torrential pace.

• The government immediately took action by imposing a “no foreign” (no outside-the-US use or use by foreign nationals) export restriction on the products.

  • Anthropic responded by shutting down all access to both products.

  • Since then, Mythos 5 has been released to a government-vetted list of 100 companies and organizations.

  • Fable 5 is still in negotiations with the government on ways to restrict access (all users will be required to submit IDs).

Why Now?

Three drivers made this shift, from open to restricted access, inevitable;

• Renationalization.

• Fear-mongering by the CEOs of big AI companies.

• Rapid improvements in autonomy.

Let’s examine each in turn.

Renationalization

Globalization is in widespread retreat across the West, from immigration to economic competitiveness.

• Globalized countries (hollow states, shells of laws/regul

  ations/economic activity) are starting to act like nations again to avoid economic decline and social chaos.

• Renationalization places the nation’s economic prosperity, social cohesion, and safety above the needs of corporations selling to the rest of the world.

• With regards to AI development, the US government is using existing national security regulations in new, expansive ways to;

  • Prevent cutting-edge autonomous AIs from being used by rogue actors (states, groups, individuals) to wage cyberwarfare against the US, US companies, and US citizens.

  • Slow Chinese open-source model development (military and economic competition).

  • Maximize the benefits of frontier AI development for US citizens and companies.

Fear Mongering

The CEOs of many of the top AI companies have spent the last few years telling everyone that autonomous AIs are dangerous.

• These claims are self-serving.

• By hyping the danger of AI, these CEOs were prompting the government to take action to strictly limit and control the number of AI companies (aka pulling up the drawbridge on competition), particularly open-source models.

• Furthermore, although most CEOs publicly claim they oppose national security access controls, they all want help shutting down state-sponsored model distillation attacks (to slow the pace of Chinese open-source development). Restrictions allow the NSA to help them with this.

Autonomy

Rapid improvements in AI autonomy made this move inevitable.

• Model improvement is now laser-focused on enhancing AI autonomy (operating independently).

• Frontier AIs can accomplish a full workday of tasks (~16 hours) with dozens of steps, all without oversight. Also, upon completing the task, the human user can make adjustments to improve it (a guided learning cycle in which the human provides orientation) and then launch it for the next task (OODA loop).

• The best programmers can now comfortably oversee three to five autonomous AIs simultaneously (a shift from broader/deeper serial operations to parallel operations) and often claim an order-of-magnitude improvement (or more) in productivity (10-100x). We are going to see similar claims in every skill set/industry autonomous AI touches (from law to investing to marketing to construction to farming).

These superusers are quickly becoming national assets, not only for what they can do now, but also for what they will be able to produce in the future across everything from national security to economic competition. From a national perspective, if the gap between US superusers and the rest of the world can be locked in now, it will quickly widen as technology improves and these users vault down the learning curve.

Bait and Switch

These converging forces — the renationalization of frontier capabilities, the strategic use of safety arguments by incumbents, and the rapid improvement in operational autonomy — point to a reason for the crackdown that is far more important than export controls on frontier models.

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• Without nationalism, loyalty to the state is replaced by competitive tribal identities (loyalties to the manufactured identities of race, ethnicity, and religion, as well as loyalty to foreign states) that rapidly form on the network.

• Over time, the internal competition among networked tribal identities creates so much discord and distrust that the state’s decision-making inexorably becomes incoherent, incompetent, and corrupt.

• Eventually, the hollow state, bereft of legitimacy, resorts to tyranny to maintain control (in our case, a tyranny enabled by networks and AI).

Nationalism is a tribal decision-making layer oriented by a collective loyalty to a nation or nation-state, asserting that the nation’s culture, interests, and sovereignty should take precedence over all other identities or international allegiances. Nationalism provides a country with internal cohesion (trust through a common identity) and coherent decision-making (oriented towards mutual success).

Recent developments in the UK provide a clear example of the last stage of this process: the stage in which an illegitimate hollow state resorts to network tyranny to maintain control. Let’s dig in.

Information Suppression

Recent events in the UK have led to the emergence of a tribal network based on traditional ethnic and cultural identity (similar to the nationalism that was discarded). Here’s how it emerged;

• The number of assaults by immigrants on UK citizens (largely non-reciprocated) soared as non-assimilating immigration (19% in the UK) grew without constraint.

• Instead of using public news analysis and government data on these attacks to implement reforms to reduce future attacks, the UK’s hollow state treated this news and data as a threat to its legitimacy and suppressed it.

• As a result, coverage of these news events shifted to social networks, where they were contextualized by people seeking a return to a rough form of nationalism.

A good example of UK government and media suppression was its response to a viral video of ‘Sophie of Dundee’, the 12-year-old Scottish girl brandishing axes in defense of her sister. In response, the government arrested Sophie on weapons charges and immediately moved to suppress coverage of the incident, leading many, based on the charges, to claim the girls were right-wing fanatics attacking immigrants. A year later, with little coverage in the mainstream media, the nationalist narrative was vindicated when the Bulgarian man filming the incident and his sister were criminally convicted of assaulting the girls.

The Tribal Network Takes over Public Opinion

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• flooding the world with billions—>trillions of hardworking AI slaves,

• mostly owned and controlled by a few wealthy people,

• will result in anything other than a grim hellscape.

To fully appreciate this — particularly since most commenters are pitching AI as a novel development whose outcome we can’t predict — we need a concrete historical example to bring it to life. Fortunately, there is one. It’s the structural shift in the Roman Republic after the Second Punic War (the second of Rome’s three wars with a Phoenician colony called Carthage) that led to the Republic’s downfall.

Rome as a Model for a Republic

When the Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution;

• They used the Roman Republic as a foundational template — a Senate, a Presidency that mirrored the consuls, and nominal checks and balances like the ‘veto’ (translated as ‘I forbid’).

• However, since every literate man of the time had read Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, they drew on the thinking of Montesquieu (separation of powers), English institutions and traditions (Parliament, Magna Carta, etc.), and Locke (natural rights and consent) to build a more robust set of constraints, checks, and balances to avoid repeating Rome’s fate.

• Unfortunately, as good as these Constitutional protections have been, they are proving insufficient to prevent the real cause of the Roman Republic’s collapse: it became hollow.

The Hollow Roman Republic

Rome’s hard-won victory in the Second Punic War;

• left it with uncontested control of the Mediterranean,

• which provided Rome’s elites with great wealth and an endless flow of slave workers. This sudden influx led to corruption and disloyalty as the wealth and power of these elites became too great for the Republic to contain.

• These disloyal elites then used wealth and slave labor to replace the citizen farmers around the great cities that served as the backbone of the Republic with slave-worked latifundia (slave-worked estates). They even became so powerful that they could aggressively plunder public resources and stifle all efforts at reform; they killed Tiberius and the Gracchi brothers when they pushed for reforms.

To fully understand what this did to Rome, let’s refer to the historians Appian and Plutarch.

The rich absorbed public land and neighbors’ plots, then “came to cultivate vast tracts instead of single estates, using slaves as laborers and herdsmen, lest free laborers should be drawn from agriculture into the army.” He concludes with: “Thus certain powerful men became extremely rich and the race of slaves multiplied throughout the country, while the Italian people dwindled in numbers and strength, being oppressed by penury, taxes, and military service.”

Once these citizen farmers were ejected from their land, they “no longer showed themselves eager for military service, and neglected the bringing up of children, so that soon all Italy was conscious of a dearth of freemen, and was filled with gangs of foreign slaves, by whose aid the rich cultivated their estates, from which they had driven away the free citizens.” Plutarch

Let’s dive into how this impacted military service. Up until this shift,

• Rome enjoyed an advantage over all its adversaries: a seemingly endless supply of manpower it could plug into its military machine.

• The Roman army’s manpower relied on a vast number of free land-owning citizens (capable of purchasing their own equipment and loyal enough to fight well) who farmed the rural areas of central and southern Italy.

• This loyal, self-financing manpower was so great that, even if Rome lost an army, it could rapidly mobilize another (a unique capability in the ancient world).

Less than fifty years after the shift to slavery and concentrated wealth,

• Rome couldn’t conscript armies this way anymore (see Plutarch).

• As a result, Rome instituted reforms (Marius) that professionalized the military and recruited landless men into its ranks.

• This professionalism, in turn, created a military force that was more loyal to wealthy generals than to the Republic, which led to a cycle of civil wars between wealthy generals (Sulla, Caesar, etc.). Eventually, Rome barbarized its military by recruiting from lands it had conquered.

The Modern Model

Now, let’s put the Roman Republic’s structural shift into the modern context.

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Ray Kurzweil; 'we'll reach longevity escape velocity by ~2032.'

Our long-held assumptions about health and longevity are now on the chopping block. Let’s use weight control (GLP-1, Ozempic, et. al.) as an example;

• Already, an estimated ~10-15% of the US population is actively reprogramming their bodies with molecular mimicry to control their weight.

• Almost everyone has a friend or relative who has lost weight by reprogramming it with a synthetic peptide (a short chain of amino acids that acts like a hormone that regulates digestion), GLP-1 receptor agonist (it binds to and activates a receptor on a cell), called semaglutide, and branded as Ozempic or Wegovy.

• This reprogramming has worked so well, with so few downsides, that many people are actively taking the initiative to microdose more effective peptide combinations (GLP-1, GIP, and glucagon agonists, aka Retatrutride), even though they are still in phase 3 trials.

It’s amazing how quickly we’ve embraced reprogramming our bodies, and also how quickly we’ve shattered long-held assumptions about diet, exercise, and genetic destiny. However, that’s only the start.

Longevity

AI-fueled advances in bioinformatics, molecular mimicry, and epigenetics are also radically accelerating the pace of discovery of new ways to reprogram how our body functions. Most interestingly, we’re now seeing FDA trials of methods that can turn back the clock on cellular aging, returning them to their original youthful state.

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• July 13, 2024, Thomas Matthew Crooks fired shots at Trump during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

• September 15, 2024, Ryan Wesley Routh was spotted with a rifle near Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, while Trump was golfing.

• September 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk (founder of Turning Point USA, prominent conservative activist, and Trump ally) was fatally shot by a sniper while speaking at an event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.

• February 22, 2026, Austin Tucker Martin (21) breached the secure perimeter at Mar-a-Lago (Trump’s Florida resort), armed with a shotgun and a gas can.

• April 25, 2026, Cole Tomas Allen (31, from California) fired shots while attempting to storm the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner at the Washington Hilton, where Trump and administration officials were present.

This violence has a pattern that sets it apart from the random violence associated with it.

• Globalization hollowing out the nation-state (loss of societal cohesion, economic stress, rampant corruption, unbounded competition, loss of identity and trust, etc.).

• Becoming global villagers (McLuhan). Interconnectivity turned us into global villagers — narrow-minded, petty, vindictive, greedy, ready to burn outsiders (witches, heretics, etc.).

• A wholesale psychological collapse driven by new technologies. Networking (from AI to social networking) is aggressively rewiring our minds, and we are still far from finding a stable psychological and social framework that can successfully integrate this technology. Until then, depression, anxiety, and delusion will run amok like a plague.

Networked Tribalism

The pattern driving this violence is networked tribalism. Networked tribalism emerged during the 2016 Presidential campaign (see my early work on this: Weaponized Social Networks), and as it evolves, it has become central to our sociopolitical system. Here’s how and why it emerged;

• Networked tribalism is the first, early solution to the information overload created by packetized media. It does this by providing a shared, co-curated context that enables participants to rapidly process events, information, and ‘facts’ through tribal pattern matching (picking information out of the flow and snapping it into the tribe’s prefabricated pattern for rapid sensemaking).

• Unfortunately, the patterns developed through networked tribalization are extremely crude, chaotic, and warlike. Unlike classic tribal narratives (the story of our tribe’s emergence, what we have overcome together, and why we are better together), the narratives that form the basis of networked tribalism center on opposition to a shared enemy (an approach similar to the one used by fascism, one of the three competing approaches to organizing a nation-state).

• As a result of this negative approach, tribal patterns focus on identifying, contextualizing, and analyzing every behavior, action, and utterance of the enemy to vilify, dehumanize, and demonize them. Like classical tribalism (where we spent 99.99% of our time as homo sapiens sapiens) and some extreme forms of modern nationalism, this makes it possible to see everyone outside of the tribe as less than human (which lowers all barriers to killing people outside of the tribe).

How Tribes Wage Warfare

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• Iran’s decentralized defensive system is intact despite the decapitation of its prewar leadership and a massive month-long bombardment.

• Iran continues to inflict significant damage on US military assets and its allies despite the loss of its air force and navy.

• Iran has successfully closed the Strait of Hormuz (causing shortfalls in oil, LNG, fertilizer, refined fuels, and Helium) for a month.

Orientation Failure

Based on the results so far, it’s clear that the US was unprepared for this war. This lack of preparation was due to an orientation failure (a mental framework, from assumptions to expectations, used in sense-making and goal achievement in decision-making). Based on its actions, here are the key assumptions or expectations generated by the US military’s orientation at the start of the war;

• Iran’s leadership and its military capabilities would collapse under the intense pressure of a prolonged air bombardment.

• Drones (even if used at scale) won’t significantly change the way wars are fought. Navies and air forces are far more important.

• Iran’s drones (from ballistic to aerial to surface) would not be effective at causing anything more than minimal damage to US assets and allies before they were suppressed (and by extension, they wouldn’t be able to blockade the Straits of Hormuz).

These assumptions/expectations were repeatedly proven false;

• The war has lasted far longer than anticipated (a month). Iran’s government didn’t fall, and Iran’s ability to inflict damage remains intact. Furthermore, much of Iran’s drone stockpiles and drone production capabilities are still intact.

• The damage Iran caused in the war far exceeded expectations. Specifically, when Iran’s drones disrupted critical infrastructure networks, their effectiveness was amplified (drone attacks cause tens of billions in daily damage to the global economy).

• Logistical and planning failures. The US ability to defend against drone attacks was insufficient from the start and has continuously degraded due to a shortage of interceptors (insufficient numbers were produced prior to the war). Furthermore, after some soul searching, the US discovered that it didn’t have the capability to force open the Strait of Hormuz under continuous drone bombardment.

A good indicator of a failed orientation is an inability to agree on goals (where are our decisions taking us?). This war jumps between control of Iran’s oil assets, eliminating Iran’s drones, removing Iran’s nuclear capabilities, regime change, and unconditional surrender, depending on the day.

OODA Shear

From day two, it should have been clear to US leadership that the facts on the ground didn’t match its prewar orientation.

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• March 18, 2026. Surprising its allies, Israel bombed the processing facilities of Iran’s South Pars gas field. It was the first upstream energy strike of the war. A clear escalation of the conflict.

• March 19, 2026. Iran matched this escalation with a hit on Ras Laffan in Qatar, the world’s largest LNG export complex, and numerous gas/oil facilities in UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait (Qatar announced that the attack reduced its export capacity by 17% for the next three to five years).

• The US and the Gulf states responded by publicly threatening Iran with escalation, while aggressively pressuring Israel in private to halt all future attacks on upstream energy facilities.

This exchange established an escalation boundary for the conflict.

• Iran and the Gulf States can’t accept the destruction of their energy assets and the US can’t accept the damage to the global economy/inflation (as well as its alliances with the Gulf States) that this destruction would cause.

• In short, Iran deterred any future escalation of the conflict that damaged upstream energy assets.

• Looking at the conflict as a whole, it should be clear that if the US and the Gulf States had known that Iran would shut the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for the US decapitation attack (nobody believed it was possible with US conventional superiority and previous experience, at least at the political level), its likely the attack would have been deterred.

This is new, because Iran didn’t achieve deterrence due to a superior military (conventional air force, army, navy). Most of its conventional air and naval assets have been destroyed. It achieved it through drones and ballistic missiles.

Deterrence Theory

Classical deterrence theory (Thomas Schelling) focuses on how to use the threat of force to deter and enemy (to keep the status quo). Key concepts include;

• Credibility. The adversary must believe you have the capability to do what you threaten.

• Commitment and irreversible moves. Once deterrence fails, there’s no choice. The threatened action will occur.

• Chance. If you test the limits of deterrence, the threat may be triggered by a random factor (error, miscalculation, loss of control, etc.).

• Manipulation of risk. Both sides routinely demonstrate resolve (limited strikes, etc.) to show that the threat is real.

• Reassurance. There must be negative assurances (signals that if the enemy refrains from escalatory actions, no harm will come).

In a conventional conflict, deterrence is very difficult to achieve unless the side threatening action has overwhelming military superiority and nearly impossible if far weaker. So, how did Iran pull this off?

Brave New War

The answer is drones (air, land, sea, undersea, space) and systems disruption. Let’s dive in. Years ago, I wrote a book (Brave New War) that posited that;

• Rapidly advancing, relatively inexpensive, and globally available technology will offer small groups (terrorists -> small states) extreme leverage in warfare (do far more with much less).

• To maximize the leverage the damage done by this new technology these groups will focus on disrupting networked systems, systems that the world has become utterly dependent upon — this focus amplifies the damage done to maximize the return on investment (ROI achieved based on the cost of the attack).

• Furthermore, if these groups radically decentralize their command and control (either purposely or through the use of open source organizational forms), which due to the nature of the technology and the targets (systems), they can radically improve their survivability.

Here’s how this theory applies to the war with Iran.

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Here are the YouTube links for the episode.

TIMELINE
00:00 – Introduction
2:45 – Guerrilla warfare as the way to understanding current events
4:45 – How us guerrilla warfare like open source software?
14:15 – How does the powerful force respond to guerrilla movements?
17:30 – What is “The Network”
27:20 – Mass SIM network found in New York City
33:10 – Other examples of dangerous military technology
41:00 – Hustling
45:40 – Fake online content: how influential?
49:00 – AI futurism
57:00 – Final thoughts

Now, I’m back to work on my next report on what the Iran war means.

Sincerely,

John Robb

• Networked systems disruption has a high ROI (return on investment). In a complex, networked world, relatively inexpensive attacks on critical nodes can collapse large networks (in this case, a state), causing massive damage.*

• It’s safe, particularly if you don’t care about the damage it does to the people in the targeted state. In fact, it is becoming safer and more effective as technology advances, such as autonomous drones and AI-fueled intelligence-gathering.

• This makes it a repeatable model. Rinse, repeat against new foes or against the same foe if they resist coercion with very little delay or expense (all while operating business as usual at home).

How Did We Get Here?

Here’s how our path to network systems disruption began;

• Between 2003 and 2005, we toppled weak, hollow states (illegitimate, corrupt, and unable to deliver prosperity) in Russia’s orbit with color revolutions (Rose in Georgia, Orange in Ukraine, Tulip in Kyrgyzstan, plus precursors like Serbia’s Bulldozer in 2000).

• These ‘organic’ ‘open source revolutions’ were designed and funded by US intelligence agencies to roll back Russia after the Cold War ended. This was an inversion of the Containment Strategy that won the Cold War, and as predicted by Kennan, inevitably turned a democratic Russia into a ruthless enemy decades later.

• However, countries rapidly learned to counter these revolutions by cracking down on NGOs, imposing internet controls, raising large loyalist militias, etc. In short, the hollow states we wanted to target built an armored core to protect themselves. As a result, subsequent similar efforts like Iran’s Green in 2009, Belarus in 2020, Venezuela in 2014→2026) failed repeatedly.

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“Companies that are entirely AI will demolish companies that are not. It won’t be a contest.” Elon Musk

“Not if I can help it.” John Robb

We’ve hit an interesting milestone with the economic and social impact of AI. The predicted pivot of the AI companies from pursuing intelligence (AGI/ASI) to autonomous social AIs is bearing fruit. In response, millions of people, many of whom you may know, are now building AI agents (an early step toward autonomy) that can superempower their ability to perform their jobs, pursue new entrepreneurial opportunities, and improve their health and wellness.

• One thing that’s clear is that these agents aren’t cookie-cutter enough to be packaged by a company and sold as a service.

• They are highly personalized and idiosyncratic, often targeting novel and narrow niches that only the builder can see.

• Furthermore, for agents designed to generate profit, whether by improving job performance or by launching a new venture, these agents are highly proprietary.

Here’s a rudimentary example.

• The smart guy who repairs my pellet stove has loaded his annotated repair manuals for all the different models he works on into his agentic AI. He’s also added the ability to scan for the prices and availability of new and used parts on eBay, Amazon, and vendor sites, as well as the ability to search repair discussion boards.

• This agent enables him to quickly diagnose any client problem, retrieve schematics and repair instructions, and provide a reasonable price for purchasing the required part and installing it.

• In short, he’s superempowered his repair business by radically improving his productivity, responsiveness, and customer experience.

The range of potential use cases for agentic AI is vast. From investing and trading agents to agents built to add services to a non-fiction book to (soon) robotic AIs that work as part of a work crew (building them for yourself and others as a service).

Autonomous Wealth

So far, it appears that people building agents are seeing significant benefit ($$) from this development effort. This makes it reasonable to assume that over time, through training, experimentation, and technological development, these early agents will become;

• Autonomous (persistent, reliable, coherent, etc.), enabling them to assume roles similar to those of employees, teammates, and coaches.

• Superempowerment that enables individuals to generate wealth far beyond what they could achieve unaided in their jobs or in new entrepreneurial ventures.

• Valuable (extremely), as a proprietary artifact, to the people who built, trained, and refined them.

The New Middle

With care, it’s likely that AIs could become the basis for a new middle “class.” A successor to the homeowner-based middle class that is currently in a steep decline.

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• It quickly went national, with large protests in nearly every city.

• Law enforcement was largely passive, absent, or supportive.

• Political support was vocal, and all opposition was muted.

• Any violence (and there was a considerable amount of it) was either explained away (“mostly peaceful protest”) or ignored by the major media.

• Corporations provided generous donations $$ and rapid acquiescence to demands.

• Finally, and not insignificantly, it galvanized political opposition to Trump in an election year.

Ever since the re-election of Trump, the blue tribe has been searching for another event it could use to repeat its success with BLM. They thought they had finally found it with ICE (its enforcement actions produce numerous excesses it could exploit). Let’s dig in.

Vanguard Action

In guerrilla warfare theory, the best way to ignite everything from protests to revolutions is by using a vanguard.

• A vanguard (or foco in Che Guevara’s theory) is a dedicated group of activists, revolutionaries, or paramilitary fighters.

• They set the stage for the protests and revolutions to follow by undertaking bold actions to demonstrate viability and compel the government (the usual adversary) to overreact, thereby initiating violence that discredits it (moral defeat).

• They then hone, package (propaganda), and propagate a narrative depicting the government as cruel, illegitimate, and morally bankrupt, in an attempt to mobilize others to join them.

The Minneapolis Vanguard

The Minneapolis Vanguard (ICE watch) followed the playbook, updated for network connectivity. Here are some examples of the preparations involved;

• They built discussion groups to manage the vanguard. Due to their prior success with BLM, these Vanguard discussion groups included senior government officials.

• They developed and distributed a detailed training manual for confronting ICE and conducted training sessions for Vanguard members, teaching them to build the confidence needed to engage ICE agents aggressively.

• They also built surveillance networks that enabled community members to report ICE activity via their smartphones (photos, license plates, geotags, etc.). This data was put into a database that automatically alerted Vanguard members in the area to mobilize and deploy.

This led to increasingly aggressive confrontations between the Vanguard and ICE.

• Rapidly deployed crowds of protesters descended on ICE raid sites to harass and intimidate agents conducting raids.

• Paramilitaries staged attacks on ICE facilities, including a hotel housing ICE agents, and random individuals were enraged enough to ram or kettle ICE vehicles with their own cars.

• These aggressive confrontations demoralized ICE agents, making them fear for their safety, setting the stage for a violent counter-response that protesters and onlookers would capture via their smartphones.

Finally, after weeks of effort, they hit paydirt.

• The first event was the shooting of Renee Good while trying to flee/depart a protest site in her vehicle.

• The second event was the shooting of Alex Pretti after a struggle with ICE agents.

• Both events were documented via smartphone and led to an immediate surge in vocal support for the anti-ICE protest (all the way up to two former Presidents).

Despite this preparation and apparent success in generating widespread outrage, the BLM-scale national protest didn’t ignite. Let’s dig into why.

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If you dive into the numbers, a picture forms;

1. The economic impact of the top 10% (25-30 m people) is far greater than that of the much more numerous middle class.

2. Its impact is increasing — the trend line since the financial crisis is solid.

3. Diving deeper, it’s also pulling away from the rest of the income brackets — relative to the median income, the threshold for inclusion in the top 10% is 50% higher today than in 1990, adjusted for inflation. Note: the current household-level threshold is $251,000.

Given how important the middle class has been to the US — economically, politically, and socially — since its founding (if we treat America’s exceptionally high number of landed farmers as a pre- and early-industrial middle class), its replacement by a small new ‘class’ is a monumental shift in the socioeconomic structure of America. To figure out what this means, let’s dig in.

“Over the last thirty years, rampant globalization and poor governance has replaced a thriving middle class (60% of the population) with a thriving cosmopolitan elite (10% of the population).”

The Role of the Middle Class

To understand what the loss of the middle class means, let’s frame what it provided. The middle class, and previously the landowning farmer, was always at the center of America (its only decline, in the early 1900s, led to a low point demarcated by the Great Depression).

• Land ownership enabled the vast majority (80% of families at the time of founding) of Americans to both produce and accumulate wealth as farmers (90% of the population were farmers).

• However, as farming declined due to productivity improvements, so did land ownership (down to 44% during the Great Depression) and with it the ability of the majority to accumulate wealth.

• This was rectified after WW2 through the development of the modern middle class, driven by an expansion of home ownership (and to a lesser extent, corporate pensions). Ownership peaked at 69% in 2004 and has since declined to 65%.

What most people don’t appreciate is what happens when the majority of the population has access to a vehicle for producing and accumulating wealth.

• The Capitalist mindset. As the historian Max Weber pointed out, land ownership led to a critical shift in mindset from serfs (in the rest of the world) who worked just enough to get by (needs + tithe to the lord who owned the land) to landowning farmers who worked extra hours and constantly innovated to improve their position. Features: Entrepreneurship. Risk-taking. Self-improvement. Saving and investing. Value hard work.

• The first Mass Market. Until the founding of the US, only aristocrats and wealthy businessmen had discretionary income. That shifted when the US enabled millions of families to accumulate wealth. The scale of mass market spending power drove industrialization.

• Rapid technological innovation. The mass market also changed the direction of technology. Technological development shifted from producing a small number of luxury items and weapons of war (what aristocrats wanted) to a wide variety of tools (for greater productivity) and labor-saving devices (aristocrats didn’t need these; people were cheap). Also, due to the shift in mindset (continuous self-improvement), the mass market was ready and willing to try new innovations, providing a feedback loop for entrepreneurial innovation (early adopters).

The Decline of the Middle Class

The decline of the middle class began with the end of the Cold War. During the Cold War, a thriving middle class was seen as essential to US survival, leading to policies designed to grow and strengthen it.

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• Empty day care facilities, nutritional service providers, and medical facilities (Medicaid) that routinely charged the government for services never rendered. Many prosecutions are already underway.

• The scale of the fraud in only one state is massive. The US attorney's office has already identified over $1 billion in fraud (with speculation that there is $8 billion more).

• Despite ongoing arrests and prosecutions, the mainstream media and many in the government have disputed that the fraud occurred and the central role of the Somali community in much of it.

The Sacking of America

This recent case of large-scale looting isn’t a new or unique development; it’s just a small part of a growing wave of systemic looting. For example;

• Cybercriminals who target US citizens and companies loot $16 billion a year (reported) and an estimated $450 billion to $1 trillion a year when unreported incidents and associated disruptions are included.

• Medicare and Medicaid fraud is estimated to be $100 billion to $146 billion a year. Total fraud (from GAO insiders) estimates the cost to the USG at $550 billion to $750 billion per year (and growing fast).

• There is also ongoing indirect looting (at the expense of American citizens) worth trillions through a collusion between special interests (usually corporate) and select government agencies.

  • The financial crash of 2007/08, when the entire financial industry and its government overseers conspired to defraud investors of countless billions. Nobody went to jail.

  • The US government’s efforts to offshore American manufacturing to China (WTO, etc.) and Mexico (NAFTA), a move that sacrificed millions of stable US jobs and ended US economic independence.

  • The ongoing effort by US technology companies to aggressively replace millions of Americans in high-paying STEM jobs with lower-cost foreign workers. Also, the efforts by industries and small businesses reliant on illegal immigration to push for open borders and relaxed penalties for unlawful entry.

Looting is everywhere now, and if that isn’t bad enough, there’s every indication that it will continue to accelerate. Here are the factors making this outcome inevitable;

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The Long Night is a sameness of thought and approach enforced by a pervasive AI-fueled surveillance network. A network championed by a politically dominant establishment of socially internetworked believers that crushes dissent and enforces a strict alignment to its beliefs. An invasive, pervasive surveillance network that ruthlessly narrows public thought down to a single, barren, network-ordained orthodoxy unmoored by history, culture and experience. An orthodoxy that locks us into inevitable failure and eventual collapse as it runs afoul of reality and human nature.

In 2020, with the arrival of COVID and the disconnection of Trump, a steady slide into The Long Night looked inexorable. Musk, the wildcard, foiled that future with his acquisition of Twitter (X), but his actions didn’t vanquish it. The threat it poses remains, looming in the background.

• The Long Night is still advancing in the EU, as a way to eliminate political opposition to policies that have driven demographic collapse and economic stagnation (the EU went from ~30% of the global economy in 2000 to ~16% in 2025, while the US went from ~30% to ~26%).

• However, the EU’s version is crudely bureaucratic and legalistic, lacking much of the technological sophistication, dynamism, and leverage we saw in the US version. For example, in the UK, 30 people are arrested every day using laws against ‘offensive speech’ (an overly broad and easily abused term). In contrast, the earlier US version systemically disconnected, shadowbanned, blacklisted, and trolled its targets.

• The EU’s low-tech approach hasn’t stopped it from attempting to dominate global social networks and drive AI alignment, using access to its markets as leverage. In its most recent effort, the EU fined X $140m (and threatened Musk’s other companies) under its Digital Services Act to pressure the platform to open its data for analysis (which would allow it to statistically prove that X violated the EU’s Long Night bans and provisions, opening it up for more fines).

Based on recent political developments, it appears that The Long Night will be back on the menu in the US soon as well.

• The Republican Party’s fragmentation (Red Network forking) has set the stage for a harsh midterm election that will drive even more division.

• Another brutal loss in 2028 will follow since the Red Network won’t have Trump as its focal point (the network’s plausible promise).

• If, as is likely, the losses are substantial enough to give the Blue Network a political ‘mandate’, the effort to continue the march towards The Long Night will resume, but with a crucial difference. This time, it will include AI.

Public Enemy #1

Once back in power, the Blue Network’s top priority will be to regain control of the information system.

• The big stumbling block to reigniting The Long Night is Musk’s ownership of X. X has been the Red Network's center of gravity since 2015 (as Twitter). I.e., Trump’s ability to bypass the media in 2016 was entirely due to Twitter (his 2024 reelection was made possible by his supporters on X). It stands to reason that if Musk sells X or relinquishes control (steps away), the Blue Network will bring any future owner or operator quickly into alignment.

• To accomplish this, out of the starting gates in 2029, there will be an intense effort to coerce Musk through regulatory pressure on X, Tesla, and a newly public SpaceX. These targeted regulatory controls/delays/barriers — encompassing everything from social networks (X) to humanoid robotics (Tesla) to autonomous vehicles (Tesla) to AI alignment (X) to Orbital datacenters (SpaceX) — will diminish the future potential of these companies to deflate the stratospheric valuations Musk relies upon to fund his growth plans.

• Beset on all sides (including the EU and pro-Israel networks pushing for tighter surveillance and censorship) and without any potential for relief, Musk is likely, at a minimum, to step away from the company. This arrangement would allow the Blue Network to bring X back into alignment with its plans for a surveillance state, while allowing Musk to continue building Grok (the most valuable part of running the network) using X's data.

A Surveillance-State-as-a-Service

The difference between now and when The Long Night emerged as a tangible threat in 2020 (at the start of COVID) is that AI is now sophisticated enough (or will soon be) to enable a surveillance-state-as-a-service.

• At the start, this service will focus on censorship across all platforms and networks. AI will enable analysis of every conversation (text or voice) and every visual image (still or video) captured. Soon after that, AI services will be able to perform this analysis in real time on a population-wide scale.

• Next, an effort to align AIs will emerge. This alignment will focus on training AIs to adhere to orthodox thinking and viewpoints, such that attempts to engage in unauthorized conversations with AIs will be discouraged, disparaged, or blocked. This strict alignment will have an immediate impact on the ~ billion people currently using AIs as friends, coworkers, therapists, advisors, tutors, etc. For example, if an AI serves as a tutor for children, it will guide their character development towards an orthodox alignment.

• As this system matures, the desire to profile, grade, and target people, on and offline, will emerge. To do that, AI ‘minders’ will be built to monitor every individual, creating detailed profiles that can predict behavior, assign scores (from threat level to deviation from authorized norms), and punish infractions. Punishments span unsuitability for employment to law enforcement action to limiting access to public services.

A Historical Comparison

The development of the surveillance-state-as-a-service is a significant historical development. To demonstrate this, let’s explore how AI automation would simplify a surveillance state by comparing it to one of the most successful historical examples: East Germany.

In 1989, the East German Stasi (secret police) had;

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They killed the Dream by reviving the vile practice of indentured servitude through the following:

• Work visas

• Sanctuary-based illegal immigration

• Virtual offshore outsourcing

To really understand how indentured servitude worked and how it corrupted the American Dream by globalizing employment, let’s go back in history a bit.

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• Until a decade and a half ago, a new frontier in space was an impossible dream receding into the distance. The space program was dead, killed by defense contractors soaking the government for every budget penny.

• Elon’s SpaceX blew apart this corruption with Falcon (and now Starship). SpaceX drove down the costs of space launch to a small fraction of what they were in 2010 (1/100th projected soon) while radically increasing the frequency of launches and pioneering advanced technologies (reuse, vertical landings, etc).

• Now, with launch costs set to break through the $100 a kilo level with Starship, we’re finally capable of opening up a new frontier in space. The only question that remains is how?

The Bubble Buildout

In 2023, I wrote an essay (drawing on some Boydian insights) that explored how to accelerate space development as quickly as the Internet's accelerated buildout in the late 1990s. The answer was that we needed a financial bubble to make it happen. In 2024, it became clear (at least to me) that the AI bubble was the way to build out space. Here’s why;

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Fortunately, the potential for a Technological Singularity (where AI becomes smart enough to improve itself at ever-increasing rates) isn’t likely to occur in the short to medium term.

• The rate of improvement seen in AI models (advancing towards AGI) is slowing (diminishing returns) despite massive investment. NOTE: AIs currently ‘write’ 20% of the code used to design the next generation of models.

• This rate of decline in improvement has forced the leading companies to focus on mass market adoption (consumer AI companions and agents, aka Social AIs).

• Efforts to build persistent and coherent Social AIs (running on top of commercial LLM platforms) that don’t suffer from hallucinations and entropic decay have hit a wall as well (usability limited to hours of use rather than days, months, and years).

However, while the potential of a near-term Technological Singularity is diminishing, it’s still possible that we’ll see catastrophic singularity events in discrete areas, such as economics. A good example of this is a recent paper from a group of economists from MIT and Harvard (“The Coasean Singularity”). It argued that;

• Firms form to minimize transaction costs (Coase).

• AI agents will significantly reduce transaction costs across the entire economy.

• If transaction costs decline markedly, the need to create firms would evaporate, necessitating a complete reevaluation of economics and market design as existing corporations dissolve and new markets emerge.

While a Coasean Singularity would be disruptive, it would be a minor event compared to a true Economic Singularity, which completely reallocates the production and allocation of wealth faster than we could respond. To fully explore this, allowing us to identify something similar in the future and react to it, let’s map a pathway to a sudden and catastrophic Economic Singularity.

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• Israeli hostages were released. Israel razed Gaza and weakened Hamas, eliminating it as a meaningful threat in the near to medium term.

• Israel assassinated the senior leadership of both Hezbollah and Hamas, diminishing the capacity of both groups. Attacks by the US and Israel have set back Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

• Israel’s oversized influence over the US political system (AIPAC) and the mainstream media achieved its objectives during the war. It also successfully suppressed US opposition efforts, both online and offline (i.e., University protests), using censorship and political pressure.

In battle after battle, Israel has won victory after victory, outmaneuvering foes and allies alike. However, from the perspective of Grand Strategy, Israel wasn’t victorious; the war was a Pyrrhic victory, a victory so costly that it threatens Israel’s future survival.

Pyrrhic Victories

“If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.”

The term Pyrrhic victory derives from a series of battles between the Roman Republic and the Greek monarchy of Epirus in the third century BC. Epirus, ruled by King Pyrrhus, was a Macedonian successor state (it’s the land opposite Corfu in Greece and Albania), one of the states that broke away when Alexander the Great died.

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