Notes On Conflict
If the 20th century ran on oil and steel, the 21st century runs on compute and the minerals that feed it. This historic declaration hails a new economic security consensus ensuring aligned partners build the AI ecosystem of tomorrow—from energy and critical minerals to high-end manufacturing and models.
Pax Silica - US State Dept
GAE recently published something extraordinary that laid out the scope and nature of intrastate competition and conflict in the century to come - Pax Silica. The reason for its significance is that it should be now apparent to all observers that war and conflict are the main drivers for any conceptual framework used to promulgate political theory. Islamic Political Theory exceedingly has been stuck in conversation with mundane and increasingly outdated forms of bureaucratic secular proceduralism and the cultural vaporwars without understanding what does conflict in the 21st century look like.
Conflict in the century to come will increasingly resemble a brutal scramble for computational power which will further fragment into distinct areas. Unlike certain strands of accelerationist and cypherpunk thought this does not mean the triumph of some autonomous alien intelligence or cyberspace over meatspace. Rather it solidifies and intensifies the domination of state-megacorp panopticons in concert with nation-state intelligence agencies over cyberspace.
There is first of all the question of the Web itself, which will breakdown into regional/national splinternets as states and their patronized corporations try to consolidate spheres of influence for data harvesting and cogwar operations. A universal global commons is no longer a realistic starting point for any discussion on technopolitics because that space has all but evaporated now. The contemporary Web is a corporatized hellscape that is designed to trap users into parasitic dependency that they euphmestically term as "ecosystems". Splinternets packaged through corporate sloganeering often through the vehicle of lifestyle aspiration or vaporwave idealism (free speech platforms) is fast becoming a central pillar of life online.
Splinternets in many respects represents the triumph of meatspace over cyberspace - corporate and constitutional identities will dictate the flow and terrain of life online via digital ID and other pervasive tracking methods. It will be sold as something necessary for either national security against terrorism or foreign powers which will placate those who are supporting the Right, and for those on the Left the imaginary of a utopian biopolitical regime that eliminates risk, mitigates sickness and plague will be the choice of justification. Splinternets in this respect will find universal support across the mainstream political spectrum both on the Right and Left - the Right often are duped by politics of national security whilst the Left collapses in front of biopolitical emergency.
The Old Islamicate thus far particularly those in the GCC have all but abandoned any hope for an independent splinternet software stack by adopting wholesale the GAE platforms of vectoralist hyperfinancialism. Data is willingly given for free to the likes of Meta and Amazon who in turn freely share it and weaponise it with the help of the American Deep State and intelligence agencies. Hyperfinancialism of course is the vehicle for algorithmic capture that ends up transforming the public space of nations literally overnight.
Artificial Intelligence as an arena of conflict is far too vague, but the infrastructure build proposed to usher in the next age through data centres and the creating megacorp cloud empires with intelligence agency oversight should bring into focus what is at stake. Currently, only the Americans and Chinese have the resources, ambition and expertise to build out independent stacks of computational infrastructure. This solidifies the claim that the century to come will be fundamentally a bipolar one because of the inability of any other power to mount a rival stack independently. Middle powers can yes barter and negotiate positions of leverage by offering to host and sponsor computational buildout either through hyperfinancialism or by giving away territory for the physical infrastructure itself. Where does this leave the Old Islamicate? Top tier Old Islamicate powers at best can hope to be junior partners in a coalition like Pax Silica but can never aspire to any real form of software or hardware sovereignty. There will inevitably be some novel form of vassalage that will have to be hashed out based on emerging computational realities and how the stack itself evolves.
Related to the above is the competition over resources that will enable computational infrastructure build out. Some Old Islamicate nations may be blessed with large reserves of rare earth minerals but without the expertise to mine, process and ultimately build a robust supply chain independently of GAE or the CCP this may very well prove to be a liability and grounds for constant regime change, political sabotage and persistent civil unrest egged on by proxies of bipolar competition.
Without an understanding of what conflict will look like, without anticipating it political theory is forever trapped and becomes a museum artifact to examine at leisure - it becomes a type of entertainment.
And truly God knows best