Last Stand of the Nation State
Well, this was one of the scarier discussions I’ve had in recent memory, and you do not want to miss it. In this episode John Robb and I discuss the ongoing total war between Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and the open-source networked insurgency that has emerged to do battle with him.
John Robb is a former Air Force special operations pilot, an astronautical engineer, a tech founder who helped invent RSS, as well as a defense & global affairs analyst & consultant. His book Brave New War was well ahead of its time when he released it in the mid-2000s, and has guided much of my thinking about fourth- and fifth-generation warfare and the networked insurgencies that now seem to dominate physical and ideological battlefields. John is the creator of the Global Guerillas Report, in which he provides deep analysis of the strong underlying trends and forces that are driving the events we see on the news. Over the years, his framework has helped me to avoid being blindsided by emergent events, and I’m very excited to have him on the show.
This one’s going to cost you $5 and a couple of hours of your time. And in all likelihood, some sleep.
Update: here’s a different interview you can view for free as an introduction to Robb. But take in the above anyway.
Another update: there’s a free subscription option I hadn’t noticed, thanks to Francisco.
Sounds intriguing. Especially after reading the subtitle of his book at the Amazon link: “the end of globalization.”
But I’m not going to fork over $5 that might end up being a rehash of things I’ve already heard. Kate, you might want to leave him the following tip: let readers of your blog tune in for free just one time to this podcast. He might be pleasantly shocked at how many new subscribers he will pick up as a result. That’s if he is in fact as insightful as you say.
That’s your decision, but I think this is the first time I’ve recommended paying for a podcast. He has observations that others have missed, and they’re both starkly obvious and sobering.
I was able to access it with the free subscription option.
If you don’t have the patience or the time for the podcast, John Robb’s Twitter is worth reading.
His basic thesis is that social media, Twitter, especially, led to the escalation of the Ukraine conflict to the brink of World War Three.
And it’s not even the first time a new communication platform has caused something like this to happen. He believes the printing press was a key accelerant of the wars of the early modern period.
Ignorant people getting information that is either a lie or too complex for their critical thinking skills, or lack thereof, have been known to make deadly mistakes. We have some of the dumbest people on the planet supposedly in control at the present time. Good luck folks, we will need it.
George Carlin was right in that aspect, stupid people litter the landscape.
Used humor to tell truth.
I have run out of humor.
“Ignorant people getting information that is either a lie or too complex for their critical thinking skills, or lack thereof, have been known to make deadly mistakes.”
This is true. But governments appointing themselves gatekeepers of what their citizens should be allowed to know on that basis rarely works out well either.
The experts may make far fewer mistakes than the ignorant, but the mistakes they do make generally tend to be much worse in effect and much harder to correct before irrevocable damage is done. The past two years should be evidence enough of that.
I’m about a half hour in. Excellent podcast. Well worth the listen.
It gets better. Or worse, depending on how you define such things.
How much worse, Biblical worse ?
I tried the free subscription option but it still did not allow me access to this podcast. How did you do it?
One of the few benefits of globalism was that everyone was in everyone else’s pockets.
China can’t attack the USA without destroying their largest market, etc.
Isolating Russia takes that out of the equation.
There’s another podcast hosted by a Jack Murphy on Spotify that appears to be along the same lines?
https://open.spotify.com/episode/23DMpQwlzeIg9vcz0Kk030
Jack Murphy
lol
I’m not familiar with him. I just turned it up with a search engine.
Just finished listening (the hours long task of fabric cutting for quilt making gives my ears
plenty of opportunity to listen)
I listened to the “updated” podcast (for free, he even mentions he opened this up for general listening).
I learned a lot, moving through history and understanding the European relationships, Europe/West relationships from WW1 onward, including the affects of the wars on national psyches and the grounds from which national intentions grow.
We are all so dumb to think we have a clue as to what is happening in the Ukraine (myself included). The story of how we got here is long, fascinating and, at the same time, horrifying. People in-the-know have seen it coming and warned generations of politicians of the ominous steps they were taking.
I am left to wonder, considering our current juxtaposition in regards to the WEF, if the in-the-know players were preserving a button to press at the approved time, and it just got pressed.
So, what you get for free is a very good historical account of what led up to the Ukraine/Russia conflict.
What you have to pay for is to listen to the link Kate originally recommended. Which though related is a different topic.
Gotcha. I have no regrets taking the time to listen to the historical background though.
What Robb is talking about in this podcast ties in with the work Mathias Desmut has done on mass formation psychosis.
Darryl Cooper is excellent. Last year he released a MartyrMade series called The Antihumans about what happened to Eastern Europe after WWII between the Nazis and mainly the Red Army, and I haven’t been the same. It took me weeks to listen to because I had to take days-long breaks to process. So when the Ukrainians are willing to go all out to fight the Russians there are clear historical reasons.
I still have no idea what’s going on over there now and I assume most of what I think I know is a lie.
Watched the YouTube one in segments today, I’m thinking he is very close as to scenarios of where this takes us all. Thank you Kate !
What he describes in the paywalled portion: the same swarm mentality that was used against Trump to remove him from social media platforms, and then to neutralize start up competitors (like Parler) is now engaged against Putin on the geopolitical scale. But this isn’t Trump being purged from Twitter and Facebook. This is a nuclear armed nation with a very different threshold and point of view regarding the deployment of those weapons. Governments in the west are playing an extremely dangerous game (in their escalation of sanctions in particular), and they may not even be in control of it — thus the “swarm” analogy.
It is really worth the time to listen to it. Pour a stiff drink.