Hollow State End Game
The United Kingdom, rife with incoherent decision making and internal discord, is doing the only thing a hollow state can do: become a networked tyranny.
Most of the countries in the world aren’t nation-states anymore; they are hollow states (China is an exception). Functional nation-states become hollow states when they discard the unifying tribal decision-making layer of nationalism.
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.
