Henry Farrell

@himself.bsky.social

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Professor of democracy and international affairs. http://www.henryfarrell.net and newsletter at http://www.programmablemutter.com. Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (Holt, Penguin). https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250840554.

The labyrinth is made so that whoever enters it gets lost, so they wander. But at the same time it implies a call to the visitor to reproduce the plan according to which it is built, and thus solve the confusion. If they succeed, they will have destroyed the labyrinth: for whoever has unraveled it, there is no longer a labyrinth.
Most importantly, he believes that knowing one’s men, as individuals and as a group, is crucial to proper command. Some people who read O’Brian reasonably complain about the detailed description of ship’s rigging and equipment. Far fewer note the nearly equally omnipresent philosophical discussions and asides, which frequently counterpose both Aubrey and Maturin’s lively attention to the individual to Whiggish abstractions. The abominable banker Mr. Ellis is naturally a friend of Jeremy Bentham, whom he lauds as “the gentleman that wrote the Defense of Usury (it deserved to be printed in gold) [and] had invented a whipping machine.” Bentham’s whipping machine would certainly be more efficient than the cat’o’ninetails but efficiency is not the summum bonum. When Jack has his men punished in an earlier scene, he reproves a midshipman for not being properly dressed for the occasion: “these wretched men were going to be flogged and it was their right to have it done with due ceremony - all hands gravely present, the officers with their gold-laced hats and swords, the drummer there to beat a roll.”
The Intercept has been a notoriously fractious organization, with people leaving in angry huffs, being forced to leave, newsroom leaks and the like. I can understand why they don’t want more drama. But that doesn’t make it right. It’s an article whose fundamental flaws have caused specific hurt and had wide repercussions for American media and politics. Fixing fuck-ups like this is Journalism Ethics 101. And there’s a deeper story here about something that has gone badly wrong with one part of the American left, which I used to be reasonably friendly with, and have found increasingly weird and alienating over the last few years (some things I used to think, I don’t think any more; some people I respected, I’ve given up on). One of the key consequences of the Intercept article has been to undermine efforts to understand, let alone push back against, democratic disinformation. I suspect that is an intended consequence. The article’s authors make it clear that they don’t think that government should have any role in making the information environment better. That’s an argument that I strongly disagree with, but it is not an inherently stupid argument. What is stupid – and worse than stupid – is the conspiratorial logic they use to defend it, patching together out-of-context quotes, breathless rhetoric, and disconnected factoids to suggest by sheer force of volume that There Is Something Wicked Going On. A healthy distrust of the state has mutated into a creepy wake-up-sheeple paranoia. The Intercept is still publishing good journalism (e.g.). But this is a style of writing that it needs to cut off at the roots.
“If we’re going to die,” said Ben Woden, operations manager at Pivotal Research, a fellowship program for aspiring AI researchers, “I would really, really prefer to die fighting.” He then clarified that by “fighting” he meant continuing to work at his job as an operations manager for an AI safety nonprofit, not bombing a data center.
At one point, there were so many organizations fundraising off the threat of the Billionaire Tax Act that two donors — Ritankar Das of Titan Holdings and Genevieve Jurvetson — tried to organize a Zoom call to get them all in one place. The idea, according to someone with knowledge of the plans, was for donors to appear with their screens blacked out to maintain privacy while representatives for each organization took turns pitching their visions — like an episode of “Shark Tank” in the dark. The idea was eventually scrapped over fear that details would leak to the press, the source said.
"But Marx had drawn a nightmare picture of what happened to human life under capitalism, when everything was produced only in order to be exchanged; when true qualities and uses dropped away, and the human power of making and doing itself became only an object to be traded. Then the makers and the things made turned alike into commodities, and the motion of society turned into a kind of zombie dance, a grim cavorting whirl in which objects and people blurred together till the objects were half-alive and the people were half-dead. Stock-market prices acted back upon the world as if they were independent powers, requiring factories to be opened or closed, real human beings to work or rest, hurry or dawdle; and they, having given the transfusion that made the stock prices come alive, felt their flesh go cold and impersonal on them, mere mechanisms for chunking out the man-hours. Living money and dying humans, metal as tender as skin and skin as hard as metal, taking hands, and dancing round, and round, and round, with no way ever of stopping: the quickened and the deadened, whirling on. That was Marx's description, anyway. And what would be the alternative? A dance of another nature, Emil presumed. A dance to the music of use, where every step fulfilled some real need, did some tangible good, and no matter how fast the dancers spun, they moved easily, because they moved to a human measure, intelligible to all, chosen by all. Emil gave a hop and shuffle in the dust." -- Francis Spufford, Red Plenty, Graywolf Press, 2010: 66-67.
Underground Empire UK edition
They highlight the importance of enduring, but not immutable network structures. States are locked into existing network structures only up to that point where the costs of remaining in them are lower than the benefits: should this change, one may see transitions to new arrangements.
The New York SantaCon website describes the event as a “nonsensical Santa Claus convention” to “spread absurdist joy” and urges participants not to vomit, litter, fight, urinate on the street, climb on cars or deface property.
Economists tend to be more mathematically and econometrically sophisticated than political scientists, but what political scientists tend to be better at than economists (albeit not all economists; there are some who are very good at this) is understanding that some problems are irreducibly political. This is not a world in which we are always going to be able to get to first-best solutions or even second-best solutions. This is a world in which people are often going to disagree, radically, on what the first-best solutions and what the second-best solutions ought to be. Whether we like it or not, we all find ourselves stuck with other people who not only have different material goals, but also very different value systems. Here we might think about how these different value systems, these different perspectives, can offer valuable information about how to solve broader problems. And so political science, in an ideal sense, could start thinking about systems that can harness these quite fundamental and irreducible disagreements among human beings and apply them to social and political problems that might otherwise be pretty intractable. Not in a way that points towards some kind of optimum, not in a way that will ever point toward some kind of a utopia, but instead in a way that messily—but nonetheless usefully—conducts political behavior in ways that are both conducive towards social peace and political peace. This would be more like engineering design than most political scientists are comfortable with, albeit less like it than the work of economists. We would end up somewhere in Simon’s science of design, with varying degrees of quantitative sophistication across different political scientists (I myself am not at all sophisticated).
The world has entered into a new stage of network politics, in which other states have begun to respond to such efforts. When interdependence is used by privileged states for strategic ends, other states are likely to start considering economic networks in strategic terms too. Targeted states—or states that fear they will be targeted—may attempt to isolate themselves from networks, look to turn network effects back on their more powerful adversaries, and even, under some circumstances, reshape networks so as to minimize their vulnerabilities or increase the vulnerabilities of others.114 Hence, the more that privileged states look to take advantage of their privilege, the more that other states and nonstate actors will take action that might potentially weaken or even undermine the interdependent features of the preexisting system
Without anyone really talking about it, there has been a massive shift in the fights around big tech and intellectual property. Up until about a decade ago, there was a loose but obvious alliance between technology focused lefties who wanted free access to cultural resources and tech companies like Google, as they faced off against common enemies like Disney. Activists like my sorely missed friend Aaron Swartz would get excited about “Free the Mouse” bumper stickers, which protested Disney’s role in getting copyright protections extended. Today, Disney is still a problem (it doesn’t like to pay authors if it can get away with it), but the Mouse is Free. Lefties today are more likely to distrust platform companies, and to side with culture producers and those who want authors to be compensated. As they see it, Google has gone from Don’t Be Evil to Doctor Evil. There is an entire coalition devoted to disentangling research on technology from the funding priorities of big platform and search companies.
Mervyn Peake's "Uncle George" illustration and accompanying doggerel poem.
Lionel Hutz business card: "No, money down!"
1. How is the Pentagon planning to implement the “supply chain risk” designation? Is their intention actually to ban DoW contractors from working with Anthropic across their whole business, and is this actually going to be “effective immediately” as Hegseth seems to be implying? https://x.com/SecWar/status/2027507717469049070 2. If so, what’s the chance this holds up in court? https://x.com/CharlieBul58993/status/2027605917257109694 3. What should we expect Anthropic’s critical business partners who contract with DoW (like AWS and Google Cloud) to do, once it’s clearer what the Pentagon actually intends? If they make more money from Anthropic than from government contracts, they might consider exiting those contracts. But then they may think they are risking being designated supply chain risks themselves or being DPA’d. 4. If Hegseth’s plan is indeed the maximalist one, how are tech founders and CEOs across Silicon Valley currently thinking about future risks of the Pentagon taking similar retaliatory actions in response to a failed contract negotiation? See, for example, this open letter that’s been circulating today https://dowletter.org 5. In what ways do the terms that Anthropic wanted differ from the terms that OpenAI has agreed to? For example, are there particular lawful examples of either “domestic mass surveillance” or “fully autonomous weapons” that Anthropic wanted to exclude, but which OpenAI is agreeing to? What are the other important factors that are different? https://x.com/UnderSecretaryF/status/2027594072811098230 6. Seems like a lot of OpenAI employees really care about what these terms actually are (e.g. see https://notdivided.org), and clearly OpenAI cares about addressing those concerns (https://x.com/sama/status/2027578652477821175). How much do employees actually know about the contract that was struck, and do the contents of the contract satisfy the employees who signed the open letter?
The principle by which a leader possesses absolute power, with no restraints. An absolute government would be considered an autocracy (derived from the Greek word autokrates, which means ruling by one's self). An absolute or autocratic state is said to be the opposite of a democratic one. Popular opinion has minimal influence, while criticism of leadership is stifled. Once an autocratic leader reaches power, opposition groups are usually outlawed. Strict adherence to the leader's views is expected among citizens, pervading most areas of a citizen's life. King James I, the first Stuart King of England, who took the throne in 1603, used the medieval European doctrine of the divine right of kings to support his absolutism, claiming that the legitimacy of his office was directly ordained by God. He further declared that his subjects must obey the king as they would God. The king was also answerable only to God not to parliament or anyone else.
Something like this explains the main consequences of social media for politics. The collective perspectives that emerge from social media - our understanding of what the public is and wants - are similarly shaped by algorithms that select on some aspects of the public, while sidelining others. And we tend to orient ourselves towards that understanding, through a mixture of reflective beliefs, conformity with shibboleths, and revised understandings of coalitional politics. This isn’t brainwashing - people don’t have to internalize this or that aspect of what social media presents to them, radically changing their beliefs and their sense of who they are. That sometimes happens, but likely far more rarely than we think. The more important change is to our beliefs about what other people think, which we perpetually update based on social observation. When what we observe is filtered through social media, our understandings of the coalitions we belong to, and the coalitions we oppose, what we have in common, and what we disagree on, shift too.
A copy of Underground Empire
I want to agree with John H. over Tolkien and the war. My criticism of him as falling prey to a boys-own-adventurism was misplaced. I still hold that Tolkien’s battles are ‘morally disordered’, but as John H. says, ‘the disorder is of a different order’. Instead, the overwhelming tone reads as a kind of melancholic glorying, faintly elegiac, Tragic-with-a-capital-T, with swords a-flashing and valiant steeds a-galloping, not Just William but Light Brigade. Rather than the product of never having seen modern war, this in fact seems to me an attempt to forget. Tolkien’s modernophobia manifests in the attempted invocation of a nobility he knows doesn’t exist. It’s interesting to compare him to that other great outsider artist of the fantastic, Lovecraft. Though Lovecraft never saw war, he did see, quite clearly, the social chaos that the First World War ushered in. The ‘Great War’ was the most shattering event in Modernity’s conception of itself as a rational, humane system: the paradox is that Tolkien, who experienced that carnage first-hand, attempted to turn his back on the truth of post-traumatic Modernity, whereas Lovecraft was thousands of miles away from the heart of horror, but was a neurotically acute barometer of society’s psychic disorders. These different approaches manifest in their fantasies. To put it with unfair crudeness, Tolkien’s is the fantasy of a man murmuring to himself ‘it’s alright, it’s alright’, but not believing it; Lovecraft’s of a man shrieking ‘none of it is alright, nor will it ever be’. Unconvinced forgetting versus psychotic fixation: both are the results of trauma.
Often their chants sounded so clearly that I could make out the words, though they were in no language I had ever heard. Once one actually stood on his saddle like a performer in a riding exhibition, lifting a hand to the sun and extending the other toward the Ascians. Each rider seemed to have a personal spell; and it was easy to see, as I watched their numbers shrink under the bombardment, how such primitive minds come to believe in their charms, for the survivors could not but feel their thau-maturgy had saved them, and the rest could not complain of the failure of theirs. Though we were advancing, for the most part, at the trot, we were not the first to engage the enemy. On the lower ground, the cherkajis had streaked across the valley, crashing against a square of foot soldiers like a wave of fire.
The real bread was in the Colossus of Yorba Linda Foundation, which had been successfully raising money for several years to erect a heroic monument, in solid gold and ten feet taller than the statue of Liberty, honoring the martyred former president Richard Milhous Nixon. This monument, paid for entirely by the twenty million Americans who still loved and revered Nixon despite the damnable lies of the Congress, the Justice Department, the press, the TV, the law courts, et al., would stand outside Yorba Linda, Tricky Dicky’s boyhood home
"I do think that a lot of the power of the powerless comes from the creation of a consensus — and, bluntly speaking, a moral consensus. A moral consensus that what is happening is wicked, what is happening is wrong, what is happening is, in a fundamental sense, evil. To the extent that what the Trump administration is doing gets on the wrong side of that, either internationally or domestically, it does create a way for people to start pushing back."
Buried Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes
Three senior American cardinals have authored an open letter urging President Donald Trump to adopt a “moral foundation” in exercising US foreign policy, including towards Greenland. Blase Cupich of Chicago, Robert McElroy of Washington and Joseph Tobin of Newark wrote that the US was undergoing a “profound and searing debate” about its approach to the world that had become embroiled in “polarisation, partisanship and narrow economic and social interests”. “The events in Venezuela, Ukraine and Greenland have raised basic questions about the use of military force and the meaning of peace,” the letter, published in the Catholic Standard, read. “Military action must be seen only as a last resort in extreme situations, not a normal instrument of national policy.”
Since then, Ms. Sinema has been involved in the psychedelic science industry, and has discussed undergoing ibogaine treatment with the aim of preventing dementia. She also joined a law firm, Hogan Lovells, where she works on issues like cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence.
Indeed, everyone—businesses, allied governments, and adversaries—will be trying to figure out what is happening within a chaotic administration, and, if possible, to shape it. Allies will strive to protect themselves from an unpredictable great power that is no longer as capable of exercising control as it believes. Foreign and domestic businesses and crypto capitalists will rewire the infrastructure of the world economy to make more money, just as their forebears did in the early days of the U.S. empire, when the state was underdeveloped. Some may capture parts of the Trump administration, turning U.S. power to their own advantage. Adversaries will look to capitalize on America’s weaknesses, leading to even greater disorganization. Once, and not too long ago, it was possible for U.S. elites to believe that technocrats could order the world in their interests, making it secure and predictable for them. They held out hope that Trump’s first term was a temporary aberration. Now, it is clear that it was no such thing.
Google’s Deep Mind Lab is going to build a materials science lab in the UK, manned by robots and humans: To help turbocharge scientific discovery, we will establish Google DeepMind’s first automated laboratory in the UK in 2026, specifically focused on materials science research. A multidisciplinary team of researchers will oversee research in the lab, which will be built from the ground up to be fully integrated with Gemini. By directing world-class robotics to synthesize and characterize hundreds of materials per day, the team intends to significantly shorten the timeline for identifying transformative new materials. This is a very big deal. Gemini won’t just read papers. It will design the experiments, run the experiments, learn from the successes and failures and then recursively improve. It’s an attempt to learn the game of material science in the same way AlphaGo learned the game of Go.