WELCOME
This is the concluding chapter of the first month of the first season of our year-long serialized book project DEEP SOCKS.
In our first season, we cover SHALLOW WINTER, the current stasis of our society, characterized by shallow politics happening in a managerial society, the successor society of corporatist society, which was the successor capitalist society. In the first chapter, we covered the invisible revolution of managerial society in three phases. In the second, we examined in brief the conflict spaces of managerial society. And in the third, we examined several different potential future states of managerial society.
TODAY
We introduce now our fourth chapter: THE MILLENIUM PRIZE PROBLEMS OF MANAGEMENT. In this chapter we will examine the most challenging and least administrated spaces of management, which form the sources of present crises and the possible undoings of managerial society.
Today we will examine warfare, in both the modalities of highly managed infowar, and less successfully managed kinetic war.
World War 3 will happen, and you might miss it
The most depressing fact of managerial society is the focus on iteration and improvement in all things, including war. World War 3 will certainly be an improvement over World War 2. It will take longer. Its benefits will accrue more evenly to all sectors of the oligarchy. And ideally, it will destroy more people over a longer period of time in less direct and organized ways.
We are now at the cusp of World War 3, or more accurately, an event that can be described with some accuracy as World War 3. It's an inevitability now that it will happen. What shape the catastrophe will take is unsure. Whether the catastrophe will be truly and easily recognizable as a world war is another question, very uncertain outcomes. It is currently clear that the world is not governed with enough wisdom to avoid catastrophe, the past 6 years have shown that there's no purposefulness or vision in the field of politics and military conflict possessed by the modern managerial state.
War is a franchise to end all franchises
The managerial state has produced a repetitive series of conflicts motivated by the same ideological justifications now for decades. It's not simply that the players haven't changed, it's that the playbook was successful once, and is being iterated upon.
Hollywood sequels aren't just the second movie in a franchise. It's one where the conflict of the previous movie is restated, and the story structure and motivations are reused. No lessons were learned from the first hero's journey, making you question the heroism of anyone involved. It's not The Godfather Part 2, it's not even Gremlins 2. It's Ghostbusters 2. The Force Awakens.
What changes between them is the happy fact of optimization. The things that tested well, work, the things that did not, get cut. Reuse the cast as much as possible to convince you it's a legitimate creative handoff to a new generation. And, if possible, find a way to lengthen the tail of the product in the market.
In the First World War, the competing interests of imperial states conflicted with each other and created a protracted conflict fought in battles of attrition worldwide, with the primary theater being Western Europe.
Market testing World War 1
Its true Hollywood sequel, the Cold War, was motivated by similar claims about global empire and fought in protracted battles of attrition across multiple continents, with its central battlefield being Western Europe.
Why did it take so much longer, kill so many more people, over such a bigger theater of conflict? Simply put, the colonial struggles tested well. Killing Europeans en masse tested poorly. No one liked that part. People remember Empire fondly. The social commitment and sustaining production capacity for a total war against another global empire also, now and then, appear to be impossible. So, war has developed a start-stop, only attack the peripheries logic. War is slower, more grinding, and more easily forgotten for those in the core of the world.
Neither attrition nor total war, war is managed to avoid the end
Imagine a total war between the United States and the combined arms of Russia and China. The reality of total war, fought and felt by both sides, could crush a populace and make the (ever-present) option of rising up against your madman slaughterhouse government and replacing them with one that sues for peace unacceptably likely. Even at a theoretical 5% chance, that's a pretty big gamble. Vietnam alone, a minor but financially catastrophic colonial struggle nearly broke the US (and perhaps it actually did). Afghanistan, a protracted conflict to slaughter a theocratic nightmare state fighting against a progressive socialist state, actually broke the Soviet Union--and they were fighting for something worthy!
The interwar period was one of rightwing ascendancy and the seeds of new conflict being laid by unrepentant creditor self-interest dominating periphery states and the losers in the conflict, and fanned the nascent embers of the previous conflict. It was marked by periodic financial crisis because the order of the world was not settled, and relations of production (flows of capital, people, material) could easily break down in a world of rampant financial speculation.
Market Testing the Interwar Period
Its Hollywood sequel, the War on Terror, was one of right wing ascendancy. There's no reason to pretend now that Obama was not a right wing hobgoblin, the same as Bush. The conflicts here were more open—but fundamentally no different than any of the colonial conflicts fought by Britain with its foreign legions in Africa. Following the colonial misadventures of the 2000s, in the 2010s, financial interests, motivated by the multiple overlapping financial crises in Europe and America, bled debtor nations (the US excepted) white and progressively created a pattern of bellicose language that culminated in the outbreak of a Civil War on the periphery of Europe. This was done as these misadventures in warfare became metastatic and started swallowing whole regions instead of whole countries, but always grinding and intractable.
The wars fought in this period, especially by Russia, have shown a bizarre lack of commitment to mass slaughter and the grand push. Instead, a start-stop rhythm of artillery bombardment followed by temporary, easily violated ceasefires has been effectively prolonging wars while diplomatic negotiations take place and belabored deconfliction processes occur. Perhaps they just ran out of bombs in Syria? But wars fought by the US have shown enthusiasm for slaughter, but less staying power once the slaughter is finished. Americans lack talent for diplomacy, it is the national character to prefer slaughter to negotiation--expediency is after all quite a motivator.
The managed space of military conflict
It is strange that this tactic has not produced the expected opportunities for successful nation-building, even were one to ignore the niceties of diplomacy, surely killing your enemies and deploying endless bribes and even attempting to build infrastructure offers some out from conflict? Instead, this start-stop rhythm of destroy, let another problem mature, attempt to destroy that one, has characterized American military tempos in the War on Terror. To use the full scope of military capabilities to 'solve' the problem would likely destroy any objective being pursued otherwise. And so, conflicts are prolonged, endlessly, commitments are low, and mobilizations are not total.
This is the iteration of the interwar period, and of military strategy generally, that appears to show states very conscious that they are their own biggest enemy to survival if they pursue their interests unboundedly. It's a major process improvement, based on decades of feedback and evolution. It is also shockingly inhumane and nightmarish and capable of producing orders of magnitude more deaths in a seemingly limited conflict than should be needed.
The question now is why are military conflicts limited, but the public is in a state of imaginary bellicosity and viciousness. Why is there a diplomatic and economic war being fought against Russia with full intensity, when the military is hilariously stringing the Ukrainians along to their deaths so they can decry however many millions ‘slaughtered by Putin’s war.’ What is the nature of the disconnect between infowar and meatwar? Why should the meatwar be so poorly managed when the infowar is already won?
1936/2022
In 1936, the Spanish Civil War began. This marked the beginning of the Second World War--the conflict had become inescapable. And in 2014, its Hollywood sequel, the Ukrainian Civil War began. This marks the probable beginning of an as-yet formally undeclared Third World War. The Spanish Civil War was resolved in 3 (long) years. And the Ukrainian Civil War may take a decade or more (of even longer years) to conclude with a final partition of the state between Poland and Russia and an outpouring of grief from the hypocritical, weak, subservient, and cowardly nations of the EU.
The World Wars are simply a way of framing a series of conflicts that took place roughly in synchronous time and featuring a common set of primary actors and diverging secondary actors. It is possible to imagine some Chinese fighting the Japanese in World War 2 may have been surprised (and perhaps a bit proud) to learn that this was not simply them fighting the Japanese. They were part of a global war, for freedom, where the Japanese were the most dangerous of the bunch! Perhaps radio made this exceedingly unlikely. But many people were illiterate! Can you not imagine it? A resistance fighter with no real idea of the actual scope of the global conflict? They just fought the enemy in front of them.
World War 3 is not going to necessarily be what we think, a mass mobilization of soldiers and arms to let us go and avenge the sad deaths of injustice and slaughter. Instead, managerial domination of society has produced and popularized kind of war that is spatially delimited, fought in a grinding and endless slaughter—one nation is chosen as a scapegoat for the world’s evils and we are left with a monstrous black hole for NGOs, quangos, charities, and intelligence agencies to dump their resources and emerge with wealth and prestige as good people doing the Hard Work.
The Scapegoat
The functional delimitation of war to a country-by-country nightmare requires a specific set of belligerents. The weak scapegoat, and the outlaw villain. First, let us examine the scapegoat. Often, they are not particularly virtuous, it is suffering that makes them meek and holy. They are certainly demonized to the belligerents! And if the belligerents have an oppositional discourse, perhaps the demonization is questioned.
The scapegoat is chosen particularly because they are not competent to fight back effectively or for particularly long. The scapegoat must not be able to put the outcome in question for long, if at all. The scapegoat must be at some geopolitical juncture that is important. There has to be a good reason for the war after all. Oil, or a pipeline, or a sweet ethnic group that never hurt anyone that needs some ‘protection.’ A strategic reason has to exist and be reasonably acceptable to create a narrative about the necessity and or justice of the war.
The Outlaw Villain
If you’re American, you know this role quite well, from experience as well as it being a happy label to point at other, much larger nations with nuclear weapons. This is a nation that the world can mobilize against. The leader is also now Hitler. He sounds like Hitler. He dresses and acts like Hitler. He likes dogs like Hitler. And like Hitler, he has some really devious plans that will take a few years to implement, and he must be stopped now. Any appeasement is the Munich Conference. Any reasonableness is giving succor to fucking Hitler. Do you want to be on the side of Hitlerstory? Remember Bush? Or Putin? Or Xi? Or Duterte? Or Modi? Or Trump?
The Outlaw Villain has very clear objectives and exists to fight and seize its interests in a vague and protracted war. The Outlaw Villain behaves suspiciously like a regular state, but rest assured, they are committing atrocities. Should the infamy of the Outlaw Villain reach a certain pitch, they will be sanctioned by the dominant powers of the world. The war will become a manhunt for one nation, a large series of policing measures short of actual intervention against the country, identified inextricably with its leader.
Is this actually the war?
No. It’s the infowar. It’s the war referred through the space of managerial ethics and managerial society. The moralizing of managerialism, with its emphases on warm professionalism, proper conduct, and being ‘good’ are core to its nature. It would be difficult to accept a person bossing you around if they were not at least superficially a good enough person to believe in.
The infowar is the important one for managerial society, because it represents the war that they can manage. War is a famously difficult task for the organization of humans, it is a place where heroism and valor have a real purpose. Modern warfare, less so, as anyone who fought in a war in the last hundred years can attest—it is genuinely superhuman (and as uncommon as superhuman feats) to be a hero in a war of armor, massive armies, precision guided munitions, and drones. It is still possible, as humans do rise above themselves quite frequently.
Infowar is the space of management
Managerial society is a metasystem that guides and steers economic output. Economic output is very directly related to informational and personnel control as well as resource control. It is very concerned with many of the same matters as warfare. Modern militaries are highly managerial, by necessity, as managerialism represents the leading edge of organization of human capabilities, and militaries must make use of the best technology available.
The armies of the world have fought many wars in limited form to preserve the overall health and safety of the planet, performed often under a managerial ethos. The ‘eggheads’ of Vietnam like McNamara, the bureaucratic grise of Colin Powell, the constant talk of a new army. We talk about the US here because not only are they the epicenter of managerial society, they are also a uniquely warlike people in the modern era.
One fun fact though: they have, operating under the ethos of a modern, highly technological corporation guided by the best minds with the best technology and rigid hierarchies failed to produce results that are in line with the necessities of a global empire. They have seemingly been kept afloat by financial institutions keeping the dollar’s chokehold on the global economy more than any particular ability to achieve a strategic goal.
Managerial society has successfully dominated infowar spaces. Media, diplomacy, government, and major corporations are all enthusiastic collaborators in infowar because of the fact that this is a manager’s kind of war. As the past few months have attested, it was almost trivial to defeat Russia in an infowar. Defeating China, equally trivial. A purported leak of documents and a few interviews with some Central Asian woman who can’t keep her story straight is all it takes. The imprimatur of media from ‘free societies’ is an expertly managed branding effort that has successfully let people believe the BBC isn’t state run media, or that the NYT isn’t de facto a state propaganda outlet.
The First Millennium Prize Problem of Management
The First Millenium Prize Problem of Management is: How to manage meatwar without escalating into catastrophe?
Perhaps World War 3 will ‘go according to plan.’ Whatever the plan is. Perhaps it will be a series of phased conflicts occurring on the fault lines of the managerial world. China and Taiwan, Armenia/Azerbaijan, Iran and Saudi Arabia and Israel, Russia and NATO, China and the Western Pacific, India and Pakistan, and numerous other simmering pots. There will hopefully be some successful infowar about an aggressor, a pitiful and violently attacked nation or entity. And hopefully, the conflict will drag on for a decade or two without a real resolution, because no one is stupid enough to actually wage total war with modern weapons and capabilities.
Infowar is a solved problem. War war, kinetic war, meatwar, is not a solved problem. The current strategy of spatial delimitation of conflict through the creation of ‘scapegoat’ and ‘goatfucker’ roles for nation-states to play has proven to be a mistake. The wars metastasize. Iraq turned into a general war in the Levant that remains unresolved to this day. Do you think Bush knew that his insane pet project would turn into the most successful attack against a US military base since Pearl Harbor—and it would go unanswered?
Planning for your enemy
Across the world, meatwars spiral out of control. The limitations imposed by the infowar are meaningless to the actual war. Saudi Arabia’s insane bloodquest in Yemen has turned into a conflict pitting OPEC against the US for the first time in decades. And surely the war in Ukraine will not end well for any involved—and it may spread to Transnistria or easily into the rest of Europe, as NATO is currently playing a strange game of chicken with a country that has plenty of artillery shells and guided missiles and control over the biggest energy resource in the region.
But no plan ever survives contact with the enemy. The old chestnut remains true. Managerial society thrives on plans that can execute in the face only of passive opposition. Economic competition is (generally) a pacific process where neither interferes too directly in the other. War is a process of competition where both sides have no rules and absolute incentives to interfere and attack relentlessly, and are checked only by the fact that the outcome of uncontrolled escalation is mass death.
Managerial society will need a new form of organization that is viable and conflict-limiting, one where a competing hostile group has a say in the outcome. This is the challenge that will define whether World War 3 is some invisible, half-war that passes without being known as such for decades, or a brief and apocalyptic nightmare.