Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace.
What did he mean by this? And is he correct? Does this accurately describe a real process in history? That’s what I’m going to answer today.
There are really two claims here. The first claim is that deregulation and the state can be understood as competing in an arms-race. The second claim is that this arms-race pushes both parties onto the digital plane. What does Nick Land mean?
When Land refers to deregulation, he’s probably not referring to any particular political lobbies pushing for the deregulation of particular industries. He’s talking about everyone, in any time and place, who is looking for greater freedom. Everyone whose interest and intention is to lengthen whatever political or social leash they’re on. That’s the general camp of deregulation. Similarly, the state is better understood in its most general sense, which of course includes governments, but also all of the individuals and entities who are interested in improving state control over human liberty.
So is it true that deregulation and the state arms-race each other?
An arms-race is not just any conflict but a fairly specific game-theoretical situation.
An arms-race takes place when the best strategy for one party is to increase their arms because they know that the other party’s best strategy is to increase their arms. Both parties would prefer that neither increase their arms, but because each party must predict that the other party will increase their arms, each party must increase their own arms. In short, the arms-race phenomenon in International Relations is an instance of the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma in the game theory literature.
If you look at the history of political economy, I think we find more than enough evidence to justify Land’s characterization. I will give you just one specific example, but you can probably think of more. If you think of others, leave a reply to this video.
Before the 1760s, textiles in Britain were woven by hand, by individual weavers working at home. You might remember from your high-school history class, this was called the “putting out system.” Interestingly enough, on a totally unrelated note, young men used to use that term to describe girls giving sexual favors, “putting out.” Do young guys still say that? I don’t know, I’m guessing no. Anyway…
Well, starting around the 1760s, new textile machinery emerged. The new machines wove textiles more efficiently than individual weavers working by hand, at least in theory. But in practice, at the beginning, the new machines were barely viable. That’s because they required a lot of social coordination to make them profitable. You needed to arrange a bunch of the new machines in a large space (aka a factory), and you need a bunch of docile individuals willing to man the machines and abide by the machine’s rhythms. This was a totally new kind of labor and it wasn’t regulated at all. So entrepreneurs are trying to recruit and train workers, just creatively using whatever liberty they had, and the result was horrifying to the dominant sense of social order. You had people losing fingers and hands all over the place, you had little kids managing massive machines, the factories infamously roared with diabolical sounds, and so on.
So the state leaps into action. Not just the government, but again, the larger mass of people who generally want to control others. Public outcry and indignation by state agents (aka citizens) forced the state to crackdown on the entrepreneurs. Labor laws were introduced to prohibit the worst excesses, and of course trade unions eventually emerged. Unions were easier to organize in factories because factories concentrated the workers in one place.
This historical dynamic is well known, but it’s a new twist to see it as an arms race.
I think it’s a fair description.
The entrepreneurs who built factories beyond what status quo norms and regulations condoned, these entrepreneurs represent the deregulation vector in history. Building a factory and worker dormitories and training humans to do something extremely weird and new, for profit, is like building a bunch of missiles and pointing them at the government’s doorstep. The moralistic citizens and the government, in turn, started accumulating their own weapons, in the form of public protest and legislation. At all times, both sides are always looking to increase their power relative to the other, because they are game-theoretically required to do so. They both have to constantly push their limits, or else they’ll be destroyed by the other.
One can cite many other more recent examples by the way. And this idea is even widely recognized on the mainstream Left, as well, they just reverse the normative charge. The late 1960s and early 1970s, for instance, saw a massive stockpiling of weaponry by the state. From Civil Rights, to labor law, to radical community organizing, the forces of the regulatory state surged forward. Then in the mid 1970s, the forces of deregulation surged in retaliation. Leftists like to talk about the 1973 Trilateral Commission as a turning point, when capital got together and said enough is enough with all this regulatory stuff. And then of course the deregulatory wave that came in the 1980s with Reagan.
The most interesting part of this sentence in Meltdown, however, is the second part. Land says the arms-race between deregulation and the state ultimately pushes both parties onto the digital plane. Does history agree?
Again I think this idea is well supported. Consider the taxi unions. Before Uber, taxies were highly regulated in most big cities. If you tried to launch projects deregulating the taxi systems, you’d get caught way before you could scale. As you slowly grew your business, someone would report you and you wouldn’t have enough money or power to win in the legal system. But with digital networks and mobile-phone commerce, you could scale fast enough, and accumulate enough economic weaponry, that you would outgun the taxi unions before they even realized what was happening. And if you look, that’s exactly what happened with Uber. They accumulated weapons on the outside of institutional legibility, and they accumulated so much weaponry, so fast, that from then on—they just replaced the previous taxi authorities.
But if Land is correct, then we should expect the state to ratchet up their own investments in cyberspace arms accumulation. And that’s exactly what they’ve done, mostly by strong-arming the big tech companies. The Snowden leaks were one of the first major revelations regarding how ambitiously (and secretly) the state had been accumulating digital weaponry. And now, of course, the government requires big tech companies to help them monitor and arrest individuals of interest.
If Land is correct, then this idea should also have some predictive leverage.
Land would say that we should expect both sides to escalate over time, if it is really an arms race. This is a non-trivial idea. I’m not sure many people think like this, or even believe this.
But from where I’m sitting, I see a near future that conforms to Land’s mental model here.
Look at the emergence of zero-proof technology, look at Urbit, on the one hand—cyberspace technologies that provide free spirits ever increasing degrees of digital autonomy—and the introduction of “central bank digital currencies” or CBDCs (basically state-sponsored surveillance blockchains.)
Deregulation and the state really are arms-racing each other into cyberspace.