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Comment by exiguus | Hacker News Reader

I'm not entirely convinced that nations will play as significant a role in the coming decades as they have historically. Currently, we observe a trend where affluent individuals are increasingly consolidating power, a phenomenon that is becoming more apparent in the public sphere. Notably, these individuals are also at the forefront of owning and controlling advancements in artificial intelligence. Coincidentally, this trend is often referred to as 'tech fascism,' bringing us back to the dictator schema.

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States haven't always been a major feature of power. But we've never seen the interaction of personal power with modern weaponry, by which I do not mean nukes. When it was just a question of which debauched noble could afford more thugs or better assassins, sure. But 'how many Abrams has the Doge?'

>But 'how many Abrams has the Doge?'

As many as you can control with signal chat.

Besides, I'm not sure if tanks like the Abrams are as important anymore. Nowadays, things like food and water really matter. For example, exporting corn is crucial. Also, having the soils needed to make modern tech, like chips and batteries, is super important. Therefore Greenland is.

Show me the war where resources weren't important. But you fail to take my meaning, which is that of the two, bureaucracy is far more robust than aristocracy, because power held by aristocracy succeeds by lineage where that by bureaucracy does so by role - that is, in a fashion far less constrained by the available resource of satisfactory personnel.

Every billionaire in function constitutes an aristocracy of one. Meanwhile, states have armed forces. A billionaire, in relying on money for power, implicitly also depends on continued access to the global financial system which gives money meaning, in order to exercise that power. States are not obligated to allow such access, and may easily prevent it in the limiting case by ensuring such trade comes with a side of explosives delivered at speed, which broadly suffices to deter desirable counterparties.

Think what anyone may of such a thing, the fact is having an army or navy or air force means you can do it. Which billionaire has one of those?

> bureaucracy is far more robust than aristocracy, because power held by aristocracy succeeds by lineage where that by bureaucracy does so by role

You are making an awful lot of assumptions there. There are plenty of real world examples where a single party having control over a process produces significantly better results (and plenty of counterexamples where it doesn't, of course). How do you justify the assumption that preparing the next generation of leadership is one or the other of those?

> ... States are not obligated to allow such access,

Sufficient influence can be used to ensure access until it is no longer necessary. After all the government is little more than the biggest thug in the room at the end of the day.

> Which billionaire has one of those?

Which billionaire has been incentivized to pursue such a goal? It's extremely expensive.

Does the Saudi state count given that it's an absolute monarchy?

Who's making value judgments here? I'm talking about what's easier or harder to destroy, and explaining what makes aristocracy so much more fragile than bureaucracy. But the idea that governments are "the biggest thug in the room" is in itself as flagrantly ideological in origin as deliberately propagandistic in the specific formulation you chose, so the answer to my question is not really in doubt. (You might also be equating bureaucracy and government, or assuming I am doing so. Neither would be sensible.)

The Saudi monarchy I would characterize as a nation-state existentially dependent for that status upon its role as a valued¹ satrap, and regional linchpin, of US hegemony; after decades of wielding money and power with all the arrogant foolishness of any parvenu's fantasy, they have few obvious friends and many reliable enemies. Following the loss for any reason of that client status and the protective halo it confers, I would expect the remaining lifetime of the monarchy, and whichever of its members failed to flee in time, to be most conveniently measured in days.

1) Some might say, vastly overvalued given their longstanding unreliability and increasing irrelevance in a post-petroleum energy economy.

The more interesting question isn't "how many Abrams?" these days, but rather "how many drones?"

For example, Ukraine was planning to produce 1 million drones in 2024. They actually produced >2 million. For this year, they intend to produce 4.5 million (and appear to be on track for that).

What makes this especially interesting is that a single drone is cheap enough that it's possible even for individuals to own small swarms or to crowdfund larger ones. So there's no well-defined cliff of power here as there was with high-tech weaponry like tanks - you can gradually scale up to whatever resources allow. Meaning that it's much easier to be a "small feudal" type of an autocrat, for example.

You can gradually scale to what resources allow. Governments can do so far faster and further, and often already own ordnance in a range of readily deliverable sizes, from two-thousand-pound demolition bombs to missiles suitable for use against even small general-aviation aircraft.

What's the difference between a feudal lord and a government again? The point here is that previously there was a stark cliff related to things like budget (more accurately several cliffs at different locations). Moving to a smooth(er) function levels the playing field to a large degree. It's also notable that semi-autonomous UAVs are extremely well suited to asymmetric warfare tactics.

> What's the difference between a feudal lord and a government again?

I don't know. Do you? My prior interlocutor cited a state in example of this putative lordlet's theoretically plausible capabilities. I see you claim there is no difference in kind and none significant in degree. But you do actually need to make an argument about that. Just saying it won't do.

It's interesting you mention asymmetrical warfare, the fundamental axiom of which as a concept is that the nonstate or nonpeer force has no chance whatsoever through conventional tactics, which are far more reliable and thus invariably used for practical reasons when practicable. (Americans always get this wrong because of Vietnam. The NVA and the VC were not the same force, dammit!)

To cast the conflict in such terms, with the billionaire in place of the "asymmetrical" belligerent, thus makes my point for me in neater, more concise, and no less accurate terms than I myself expected to ever get away with on this website. You have my genuine thanks for that valuable assistance in clarifying my thinking.

I'm suggesting that there is no difference in the dictionary sense. I believe the burden is on you to clearly articulate the distinction that you are attempting to draw between the two. To put it differently, I suspect that when you say "government" your intent is to refer to something else. Hence my question.

> the nonstate or nonpeer force has no chance whatsoever through conventional tactics, which are far more reliable and thus invariably used for practical reasons when practicable.

I'd have to disagree. It refers broadly to tactics that don't favor size (ie expendable manpower, cash, physical resources, etc) to the same degree as conventional ones. Questions of reliability, cost, speed, user safety, and all sorts of other considerations apply in equal measure to any tactic that any party of any size might consider employing and tend to vary wildly depending on the context.

> Americans always get this wrong because of Vietnam. The NVA and the VC were not the same force, dammit!

... NVA? Was the US pushed out by a non-peer adversary or not? Were any favorable alternatives available? Isn't that all that matters at the end of the day?

> thus makes my point for me

Unfortunately I remain in the dark.

I meant "state," and was sloppy in my terms ironically in hope of aiding understanding since no one here even seems to know what distinguishes a state from a nation. The distinction here between state and feudal (ie vassal) lord is in sovereignty and should be trivial to all but a Randite, which is what you argue like whether you claim the allegiance or not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44231857 I've always found it a bewildering irony that soi-disant "objectivists" should so constantly display such pervasive inclarity of thought, and the "rationalists" lately likewise. What you really want to talk about and don't know it is a warlord. But we do at least agree that Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or any of that ilk, and any given Somali "general," deserve to be taken about as seriously as one another.

I cited a state as an example of the kind of scale that even a relatively poor state can pull off. But the point is that you don't need a million drones to have sufficient capacity for organized violence to be a state.

FWIW I don't think drones count as "asymmetrical warfare". They might have been that ten years ago, but a lot has changed since then. Today, they are very much part of conventional warfare, and the state with more drones still wins, all else being equal.

"Asymmetrical warfare" is a strategic and operational concept, not a threshold on some notional tech tree. It's a mental tool that people reared in the paradigm of high-tech, high-intensity combined-arms mobile warfare - in other words, Americans - can try to use to think about warfare as pursued by people who don't have the logistical support or unassailable strategic reserve that makes it possible for us to win wars the way we do.

This would certainly be the case for a billionaire, who simply cannot swing the resources to sustain the logistics to support the kind of formalistic, resource-intensive combat you envision. In a realistic scenario the strategic and economic balance is going to look like the American Civil War only much more so, inasmuch as where the Confederacy at least at the outset of the conflict had an economy it could dedicate to supporting the war, a billionaire, as I've already touched on nearby, not only lacks such power but indeed requires unfettered economic access to continue to exist, a vulnerability he constitutionally cannot answer since it inheres in the source of his power...again just like the Confederacy, which relied on trade in raw agricultural outputs to supply itself with the tools and materials of industrial warfare, and so saw its back broken after the Union suppressed that trade by blockading southern ports.

But at least the Confederacy had an economy, however incompetent. What, I ask again, does a billionaire have that an army can't take away?

Focusing on "nations" specifically is a waste of effort. "Power structures" generically are enough. It doesn't matter whether it's technofascist fiefs, nation-states, the Illuminati, or an up-jumped HOA.

Governments remain the owners of significant weaponry and willingness to kill on a large scale. The tech world has empowered authoritarians, usually to the cheers of the ideologically aligned, but modern tech systems are as incredibly fragile as they are powerful.

Across history, often the “state” is/was really just a kind of collective umbrella organization to help manage the interests of the powerful.

I agree. Initially, this power was embodied by monarchs who claimed divine right, such as god-given kings. Over time, the influence shifted towards corporations that wielded significant economic and political control. Today, it is often the super-rich individuals who hold substantial sway over both economic and political landscapes.

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