neomedievalism and transnational nobility

state formation and national decline, competitors to sovereign authority, new cultures in the internet age

From the twelfth to the eighteenth century governmental authority grew continuously. The process was understood by all who saw it happening; it stirred them to incessant protest and to violent reaction.

In later times its growth has continued at an accelerated pace, and its extension has brought a corresponding extension of war. And now we no longer understand the process, we no longer protest, we no longer react. This quiescence of ours is a new thing, for which Power has to thank the smoke-screen in which it has wrapped itself. Formerly it could be seen, manifest in the person of the king, who did not disclaim being the master he was, and in whom human passions were discernible. Now, masked in anonymity, it claims to have no existence of its own, and to be but the impersonal and passionless instrument of the general will.

—On Power, Bertrand de Jouvenel (1945)

We define the neomedieval era as having begun around 2000; it is characterized by weakening states, fragmenting societies, imbalanced economies, pervasive threats, and the informalization of warfare. Weakening states refers to the decay in the political legitimacy of states because of their declining ability to maintain legitimacy; ensure domestic security; and provide levels of goods, services, and opportunities satisfactory to the populace. Fragmenting societies refers to the erosion of national spirit and the increasing salience of competing group identities, such as diverse sub- and transnational communities that prioritize loyalty to something other than the nation-state. We use the term imbalanced economies to refer to the disparate growth patterns of neomedieval economies, in which rapid growth is concentrated in a few sectors, while the rest experience marginal growth at best. It also includes the related problems of entrenched inequality, stagnant social mobility, and a large illicit economy. Pervasive threats refers to the proliferation of dangers from both military and nonmilitary sources, such as natural disasters, infectious disease, and violent nonstate actors, underscoring the increasing salience of domestic and transnational dangers even as the possibility of conflict with rival state militaries persists. The informalization of warfare refers to the shift away from warfare conducted exclusively by national militaries toward diverse forces consisting of professional troops; contractors or mercenaries; and sympathetic armed groups, such as militias, as well as the revival of older methods of fighting, such as intrastate conflicts, sieges, and irregular conflict.

These trends dynamically interact with and compound one another, magnifying their collective impact.

—”US-China Rivalrly in a Neomedieval World,” RAND Corporation (2023)

Political Authority and State Power

Western society was born not in the halls of Athens, but on the battlefields of Soissons, when Clovis led the barbarian Franks to extinguish the Roman rump state of Syagrius.

The Roman economy of the late republic and early empire was more complex than any in the world. The might of state power protected trade over land and sea, and cheap and safe transport allowed regions to specialize and trade seamlessly, in a similar manner to modern day freedom of navigation and global supply chains. Urban politicians and businessmen sat at the height of society, while country landlords were looked down upon as backwards and unsophisticated. Treasure flowed into the capital from vanquished peoples on the periphery, and the urban poor were kept content by the bread dole and public works.

The shock of the Crisis of the Third Century destroyed all this. People fled the cities and offered themselves up to the landlords just to be able to have food to eat. Banditry and piracy returned in force, so shipping goods long distances became prohibitively expensive, if not impossible. The vast web of commerce was shattered, replaced by isolated islands of subsistence.

Production of craft goods was internalized to atomic manor-economies, with both quality and productivity suffering for the sake of of meager, but secure, self-sufficiency. The laws of Diocletian levied poll taxes, but made them payable by landlords on behalf of the citizens on their estates, to streamline collections in the wake of lessened state capacity. To avoid paying on behalf of people who were free to go, they bound peasants to the land, a practice which would solidify over time into formal serfdom.

The Roman economy, which previously bounced back from setbacks stronger than before, never reached its prior complexity again. Thus when the Franks overthrew their masters and took direct control of Gaul, they found themselves as lords of an economy that required only a light hand to keep running.

A military elite is parasitic on its subjects in times of peace, and symbiotic with it in times of war. The Frankish freemen extracted tax from their unfree subjects, maybe sometimes preyed on them for sport, but largely left them to their own devices. The new elite spent most of their energies on going to war with each other, after every succession fragmented the realm, or with neighboring Germanic tribes when they had the necessity or opportunity to do so. In terms of political constitution, the early Franks were more like a mafia or a street gang than anything resembling a state.

The evolution of warrior-barbarism to warrior-aristocracy is slow and gradual. Whether due to vanity, expediency, ambition, or necessity, they come to see themselves less as free men exploiting their lessers, more as a privileged class protecting their charges. Rude tastes give way to refinement, folk practices become timeless traditions. Religion and culture soften them, and they begin to view their position as a duty, a right, bestowed on them the laws of nature and God.

Most importantly, their ancestors pillaged and took what they wanted by force, whereas they themselves were merely born into it. They forget the law of the jungle and search for moral and spiritual justifications for their unearned status.

In parallel to this process, the emerging Frankish nobility came into conflict with an even more nascent monarchy. Frankish kings were elected by their tribes, who expected the bravest or most eminent of their number to personally lead them in war. Although the Merovingians and Carolingians typically managed to pass down their title to one their sons, they treated their landholdings as personal property, to be divided amongst all of them. And once a line was no longer fit to rule, they were thrown out and replaced without much controversy.

When Pepin the Short usurped the royal title from the last of the do-nothing Merovingian kings, he was careful to secure the backing of the military aristocracy first; a distant ancestor of his, Grimoald the Elder, had tried the same without such support and was summarily killed. The last Carolingian to rule over a united empire, Charles the Fat, lifted a siege on Paris by paying off the attacking Vikings. Despite his lofty lineage, he was stripped of his power following this display of cowardice, and the western Franks acclaimed Odo, count of Paris, with no royal blood, as their king for his brave defense of the city prior to Charles's arrival. Hugh Capet himself was elected, and the genesis of the French monarchy began with his securing the election of his son while he himself still lived, a first step toward the eventual principle of primogeniture. But it would take some 200 years before the kings of France ruled more in practice than their local backwater.

The nobility directly held military and economic power, in the form of the loyalty of their knights, and dominance over productive land. Their superiors could plead, threaten, or bribe them to commit men to war or taxes to the coffers, but if they wanted to force their vassals to do anything, the vassals always had the option to fight back.

In 1214, at the Battle of Bouvines, Phillip II of France defeated the combined forces of King John of England and Otto IV, Holy Roman Emperor. This event serves as a perfect three-way point of divergence to illustrate the directions these historical forces may take.

Phillip's victory was the first high point of many to come in the subordination of the French dukes and their eventual transformation into mere courtiers under absolutist rule. Machiavelli, writing in the 16th century, contrasted France with the Ottomans, saying the former regime was quite stable, because even if you removed the king, you still had to contend with powerful, independent dukes. By contrast, the pashas and beys served at the pleasure of their sultan, so by removing the head, you could take over the entire system. The French Revolution owes the entirety of its success to the fact that, over the following two centuries, the French kings gutted their middleweight powers to achieve the same level of central control.

John returned to England to be greeted by an uprising of his own barons, who forced him to sign the Magna Carta and enshrine their rights on paper. When he ignored the terms of the deal, they rebelled again, and defeated him on the fields of battle. The irregular parliaments of the English elites, called to request taxes by a king who had no right to compel them, congealed over time into Parliament itself. Through power of the purse, these people, or this body, gradually seized control of the state. They forced concessions from monarchs in exchange for aid, and later raised their own independent army during the English Civil War: they won, although they came to regret it when their man usurped them himself. Some 40 years later they couped their king a second time, replacing him with a more pliable figure imported from abroad and securing their grip on power for all time.

Otto was immediately deposed as emperor and replaced by Frederick II, who would grant the nobility and clergy wide-ranging military, economic, and civil powers so that he could focus on his wars in Italy. The Empire would live on as a decentralized web of obligations, changing in constitution several times, but always more an association of middleweight powers than a true power unto itself. Even at the dizzying heights of Charles V, when there was a very real prospect of a united Europe and new Rome, he relied on his own vast landholdings far more than any of his nominal vassals. If he had triumphed, and left the realm intact on his death, his successors would have been quite weak, forced to cede even more authority to prevent rebellion. But if they had held onto their position, bided their time, and built up their strength, it is plausible they could have emerged after a couple centuries, just as Hugh Capet laid out a path for Phillip Augustus to trod. The true outworking of imperial weakness came in the form of Prussia and Austria, where the former centralized into a powerful state on autocratic lines, later harnessed by Bismarck, while the latter decentralized to cope with internal division.

This is the essential flow of state formation, repeated throughout history: elites with owned power gather together to coordinate and agree to terms for the sake of their own interests. They go on to lend authority and legitimacy to the body they formed, or choose a leader from their own ranks, so that some entity can operate more efficiently and coerce dissenters to obey. After some decades or centuries, enough of their power has pooled in one place that it takes on its own, independent character. It can attract men of worth to serve it directly, whether to achieve higher ideals, free themselves from the authority of their clans or lords, or satisfy their own ambitions. It develops its own genius, defends itself from attack, and eventually goes on the offense.

And as long as it has the social and communications technologies to organize, the devotion of its servants, and the foresight of its leaders, the centralized state can use its superior coordination and pooled resources to crush the decentralized collective it emerged from. Much as French absolutism had its germ in free warriors electing their captain, and the English Parliament came from a council of nobles summoned for advice and requests, the Roman Senate started as an assembly of patresfamilias, and the medieval Italian principalities emerged out of town councils and guild politics. No unitary government has ever been birthed as fully formed as the United States, and even it was preceded by a failed attempt at a looser confederation, followed by decades of legal battles and an outright civil war. And it was conceived, invented from base principles, by a potent environment of philosophers and statesmen the like of which the world had not seen since Warring States China.

The animal evolved the brain to reduce the distance signals have to travel from the sense organs to a central point where information can be amassed and acted on, with tendrils of awareness and lower cognition left snaking through the body, suborned to a higher power. This is a law of nature.

The French kings of the late medieval and early modern period sought to, and were successful in, expropriating the vast majority of owned power from the nobles of the sword, and replacing them with commoners elevated to appointed office. Instead of controlling land and men, they controlled the machinery of the state, and this power could easily be taken from them should they disobey. Many managed to make their offices hereditary and secure a measure of privilege, but they never had the force to secure their rights the way a petty lord in direct possession of warfighting potential can.

The Fronde, as the last gasp of the nobility before the absolutism of Louis XIV, is illustrative. When the princes of the blood rose up against the king, their alliance had to be turned against itself, and eventually crushed militarily in a fight whose outcome was far from certain. But when the courtiers and bureaucrats tried to coopt state power in their own disaffection, all that was needed was to send royal bailiffs to their offices to arrest them.

In the classic telling, the excesses of French absolutism led to the Revolution, taking power away from the rulers and giving it for the first time to the people as a whole. To de Jouvenel, however, this was just the next stage in the same process.

While the common people gained rights for the first time, and secured a say in the government, the new notion of popular sovereignty led directly to civic responsibility, and thus gave the state the power to extract far more from them than any king would have ever dreamed of. From punishing taxation, to mass conscription, and eventually total war and the total mobilization of society, if the people felt that affairs of state were ultimately their choice, and that they were bound together as one collective nation, then the state could demand anything and take everything.

Writing in the early 20th century, de Jouvenel was a quixotic partisan of an old aristocracy he was too young to have ever seen. He feared the one-way ratchet of state power above all, after witnessing millions dead and the complete destruction of European society, compared to centuries past where the scale of war was orders of magnitude smaller. His ideal society lived some time in the Middle Ages, when the elite did as they pleased with each other, and mostly kept the people out of their affairs.

Peasant levies then could rise to the tens of thousands, compared to the millions put under arms by mass conscription, and they could only be made to fight some few dozen days out of the year. There may have been reason to burn their fields to deny the enemy food, but there was little cause to shatter their wills or slaughter them wholesale because they did not have much investment in or impact on the outcome of battle. Instead of an all-powerful state that can extract all resources from its territory to throw into the fire, kings had to contend with vassals, clergy, kin networks, craft guilds, and various other middleweight powers to be able to do much on a grand scale. De Jouvenel calls these the "makeweights" of society: quasi-independent entities wielding owned power, whose very existence checks the power of the sovereign.

Our modern ideology regards rights as axiomatic, and attempts to sanctify them and enshrine them as inviolable, but we have seen countless times in the modern era where they were revoked by state fiat. They are meant to be more than mere privileges, but the only thing enforcing them is the approbation of other states, fear of popular revolt, and a vague sense that to do away with them is contrary to nature. In practice, human rights were largely defended due to the feelings of certain factions in government, and just as often disregarded by other factions which didn't have the same idealistic spirit.

For de Jouvenel, rights are privileges that can be defended by force. They are a contract between the ruler and the ruled, which the ruler may only violate at his own peril. De Jouvenel lived in fear of the idea that the agglomeration of power in a centralized state was a unidirectional process, and that the ultimate destiny of mankind would be totalitarianism and subservience. To what extent the people would retain "rights" would come down more to the aesthetic preferences of the ruling regime than anything truly material.

That direction of flow has now reversed. Nation-states are in decline, and they cannot command the absolute obedience of their subjects, like they could at their apogee in the 19th and 20th centuries. They cannot fully mobilize their societies for total war, no longer control the flows of information that enforce uniformity of thought, and will be especially unable to resist the formation of new transnational cultures that find more common cause with each other than with the populations at large of their home countries. While state power spent the modern era gradually eradicating or absorbing all competing centers of power, states now have no choice but to watch some of that power flow to other pools.

University students in the 13th century were infamous for debauched riots because they were protected from secular prosecution by canon law. Craft guilds swore oaths to kill those who murdered their own, protecting their members from wanton abuse in a world without law enforcement by the threat of retribution. Churches operated sanctuaries for fugitives and the oppressed: inside the nave of the building, one was protected from any outside entity. With limited ability to hunt down and bring criminals to justice, early rulers simply declared them outlaws, free to be taken out by anyone, just as popes stoked rebellion against rulers themselves through the similar mechanism of excommunication. These patterns will repeat in the event of declining state capacity and state legitimacy.

Private security and guarded enclaves are the norm in Manila and Rio, but these are coming to San Francisco as well. Google runs their own transit, and California hopes to cut their own trade agreements, but someday these entities may decide to issue their own visas. Sanctuary cities refuse to cooperate with federal deportation police, and while the feds could conceivably force the issue militarily, one advisor to the incoming regime has suggested they could allow governors to invade neighboring states on their behalf. Sweetheart tax deals for building factories or headquarters may evolve to include certain limited territorial or jurisdictional rights. Only a visionary leader would demand such concessions for their own sake to build up a base of owned power. But more mundane organizations may feel forced to seek such terms to cope with states' failure to provide services, and states may give these concessions to secure economic benefits for their citizens, or simply because they would rather not have to do such things themselves.

Weaker states already have to negotiate with corporations for what are in effect economic development deals. Various supranational bodies and NGOs have intervened in the affairs of "sovereign" nations and even forced some to terms. While much of this has been United States foreign policy by other means, as the USA's power recedes, these entities will face a choice to either wither, or grow more independent. Subnational rulers such as American mayors and governors find it increasingly practicable to violate orders from above, and some even conduct their own first experiments in external diplomacy. To say nothing of drug cartels, terrorist groups, private armies, and the wave of mission- or faith-driven cults which will replace the mass movement as the bedrock organizing principle of the 21st century.

As nation-states relinquish or lose more power to sub-national governments and non-state entities, we will transition toward a more heterogeneous society of divided loyalties and voluntary affiliations. It is inconceivable that the nation-state could be obsoleted or replaced in our lifetimes. States will continue to control and exercise jurisdiction over most physical territory, but membership in a powerful group may shield one from the abuses of their lawful overlords. They will continue to control vast resources and have a great deal of power to dominate and make use of the populations inside their borders. They will likely even remain paramount, but they will no longer hold exclusive, sovereign authority.

The fundamental rule of power is that power centralizes when it can, and decentralizes when it must. Through bureaucratic innovation, communications technologies, industrial surplus, and mass politics, the tendency of the modern age has been for the unitary state to extinguish all competing fonts of power and accumulate that power into itself. Unless new step-change technologies are invented that allow the ratchet to move further toward totalitarianism, we will see a return of the makeweights, who protect the rights of their members through force.

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Social Cohesion and National Identity

Popular sovereignty was one of the great inventions in the history of state power. Traditional societies have always had an elite class which compels action from its subjects through threat of violence. The people have historically been disinterested or disaffected, doing all they can to shirk responsibilities, evade punishments, and otherwise protect their own interests from a predatory, alien class. Popular sovereignty allowed the people to feel they had a stake in every action the state took. This enabled state power to not only demand sacrifices that would have been unthinkable to burghers and peasants of past ages, but to whip the masses into zealously insisting that the state take even more.

While the idea of popular sovereignty evolved from centuries of political philosophy, it was first truly harnessed in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the War of the First Coalition. The "deal" of monarchical-aristocratic governments had always been that the rulers would protect the people from outside harms and provide for them to what extent they could during times of drought or famine. In exchange, the people would turn over some of their economic output to their overlords and render some service when necessary, but they otherwise expected to be left alone.

When the French first rose up against Louis XVI, it was largely along these lines: they were suffering, the sovereign did nothing to help them, and they took to the streets to make manifest their displeasure. But the intellectual environment, the tool of the printing press, and the recent success of the American Revolution allowed an upstart bourgeoisie to disseminate radical new ideas about popular rule. In the end, the character of the movement shifted from that of a peasant revolt, essentially a form of petition, into an attempt to remake society entirely.

The War of the First Coalition was the first truly modern war, and the period from then until the end of the Second World War could be regarded as a long 19th century. Even in the American Revolution, most fighting-men were volunteers, with a limited draft ordered only due to lack of manpower and allowing substitution and buyouts. The American standing army was exceedingly small: most men served part-time in local militias, returning home for planting and harvesting, much like peasant armies called up during medieval conflicts.

But the zeal to defend the young French Republic, combined with the threat of annihilation by every other major European power along with the imposition of a new tyrannical monarchy, allowed French society to be mobilized to an extent unfathomable by even the most powerful medieval sovereigns. While Napoleon was truly brilliant, and his leadership from the Third Coalition onward forestalled French defeat for many years, the early wars were won by the overwhelming manpower brought to bear by levée en masse. The final wars were lost when the enemy powers copied the French model.

European society was reorganized and bound together after the fall of France by the system of Metternich, which sought to stabilize a European state-system and coordinate the national nobilities to suppress the aspirations of their peoples. This system was overthrown by the liberal revolts of 1848, and soon the zeal of the French Revolution spread to every corner of Europe. From this followed the romance of Greek nationalism, the senseless bloodshed over Crimea and Alsace-Lorraine, the unifications of Italy and Germany. The escape valve for jingoism and prestige that was the Scramble for Africa, and eventually, inevitably, the First World War. The Second proceeded on almost identical lines, to settle questions unresolved by the First, to the extent that some consider them a single conflict with an interlude, akin to another Thirty Years War.

Throughout this period, without question the bloodiest in human history, dissent and revolt tended to only come from more remote or disaffected subpopulations: rural conservatives in the Vendée, German Catholics during the Kulturkampf, pan-Slavic Balkans in Austria-Hungary, anarchists and communists in the United States. By and large, the masses brayed for blood, cheering each other into nationalistic zeal and tearing apart any who went against the public sentiment. Only after countless deaths resulting from each war did they step back and take stock of the horror, and this sobriety did not last long before they demanded another.

It is possible that World War III may never be fought. While the American public certainly fears the rise of China, and segments of the American elite attempt to provoke conflict for a variety of reasons, legitimate or otherwise, the window for mobilizing an entire society for total war appears to be closed. The pattern had already frayed by Vietnam, which was aborted unfinished due to popular discontent and led to the elimination of conscription in the United States. Despite the early zeal for retribution following 9/11, it was three short years before Iraq and Afghanistan could only continue to be prosecuted because the political class assiduously ensured these wars had relatively little impact on the day-to-day lives of the American public. It is hard to imagine, short of a direct attack on the homeland, uniting the divided American people into one body that can endure forced hardship for years, as was the case with World War II. But this is not a specifically American problem.

Despite a dictatorial regime and very clear ambitions to conquer not just Ukraine, but the rest of the former USSR, Russia can only manage a partial mobilization at best in its present war. They were forced to significantly dial back their conscription efforts in the face of mass discontent, and many better-off Russians fled abroad during the early days of uncertainty about whether they would be called up. Much like the Iraq War, Russia can only try to insulate its core population from feeling the effects of the war, outsourcing much of its economy to China and relying on criminals, ethnic minorities, and paid mercenaries to do the fighting for them. From trenches to drones, much of the present battlefield doctrine in Ukraine is dictated by severe manpower shortages on both sides. Widespread disaffection, combined with the global fertility slump, ensures this shortage of fighting-men is likely to plague any major power that attempts to wage a protracted war against a peer adversary.

It is likely that great power conflict between the United States and China, if it must occur at all, will take the form of indirect warfare. Economic sanctions and tariffs, proxy conflicts in imperial hinterlands and contested dependencies, and cyber and information warfare, particularly with the aim of stoking domestic unrest in the enemy nation to force its state to withdraw and stabilize the homefront. If jingoism and posturing spark a real shooting war, the death toll and wasted materiel of the initial phase will horrify leaders and masses alike. It is simply impossible to prosecute 19th- or 20th-century total war between great powers in the 21st. No one has the stomach for it.

At worst, a long battle between the United States and China would look more like the Hundred Years War, but with most if not all of the death and destruction taking place outside the imperial cores because invading and occupying large swaths of each others' home territories is simply not feasible. Periodic conflicts—which may coopt middleweight powers nominally loyal to the enemy, but who would love nothing more than to get out under the thumb of their overlord—followed by decades-long truces as both sides step back to rebuild public support and rearm before they can attempt another bout. More likely, war will be outsourced to paid mercenaries, autonomous weapons, and local partisans and terrorists, with some level of participation by and oversight from national standing armies.

Winning a war in the present age depends utterly on ensuring the masses do not suffer its effects. The people will gladly cheer for their sports team, but they will violently resist any demand to line up for rations or ship off their sons. This is especially true of China due to the aftermath of the One-Child Policy.

Despite institutional continuity to the Founding and popular sovereignty remaining a cornerstone of government ideology, disaffection with every arm of the United States government is nearly universal. The idea that the people have very little say in what the state actually does is now mainstream. The past two decades have been defined by a pattern where half the population is checked out, a quarter consider a government ruled by the opposition basically illegitimate, and a quarter elect their favored—or, often, least disfavored—candidate in a burst of enthusiasm and then quickly become bitter and disillusioned when none of the policies they voted for come to pass. The situation is much the same in other countries, particularly in 2024, where populations have voiced their disgust with the status quo by rejecting incumbent governments no matter who the opposition is.

Prior to the early modern period, populations largely did not care what group of people ruled over them, only that they were treated well. Religious persecutions following the Reconquista, and especially the Reformation, changed this attitude, leading to a preference for coreligionists, with little concern for nationality. After the rise of nationalism, many of the wars of the long 19th century were fought over the ethnic makeup of bits of territory. Massive population transfers of Greeks, Turks, Germans, and others sought to settle the question by sorting peoples where they "belong." Huge ethnic migrations fled countries where they were persecuted and excluded from the ethnos, such as Irish under enforced famine and Jews under Nazi occupation, or the losing side of ideological wars, such as anti-Communist Russians and Vietnamese.

The situation now is rather different. While the United States has always been an attractive destination for ambitious foreigners seeking opportunity, recent waves of migrants and asylum-seekers hope to escape their countries any way they can. This is particularly stark in Eurasia, where fully 15% of all Ukrainians and 25% of all Syrians fled their countries' respective wars. The "motherland," which once commanded the obligatory loyalty of entire populations, is now a vague "homeland" to wax nostalgic about after fleeing it. Relative winners of decolonization leveraged their western-educated elites to build up their state capacity and technological capabilities, but now the fervent dream of rising elites across the globe is to move wherever they can join their transnational peers. Relocating across the world for economic and cultural reasons, once the preserve of a narrow slice of radical dreamers, is now commonplace.

The true wildcard in this question is China. It remains to be seen if discontent among urban youth of Tier-1 cities is a portent of things to come, or merely a reaction to temporary pain from policies intended to reduce inequality. China sees the largest expatriation of millionaires in the entire world, and many more who stay in-country are still keen to shift wealth overseas to guard against expropriation, with their money forming one leg of an entire black market value chain organized around evading incredibly strict capital controls. Many in the west likewise think nothing of leaving their homeland to avoid punitive wealth taxes, as have been implemented in some parts of Europe and discussed in the United States. A small class sees citizenship as something to acquire for optionality, a hedge against dysfunction at home and a tool to streamline business and travel, rather than a solemn oath involving rights and responsibilities.

However, China also provides an instructive example in what the future of the state might look like. The cornerstone of Xi Jinping's plans to solidify the legitimacy of the Chinese state is Common Prosperity and aggressive industrialization. Raising the living standards of people outside Tier-1s, maintaining high GDP growth numbers, and clamping down on corruption are by far the state's highest priorities. While propaganda and nationalism are indeed used as tools of state power, they simply do not have the cthonic force they once did for generations past.

China understands that the key to pacifying the public in the 21st century is grounded firmly in economics. This is very much in line with the rest of the world, plagued by feelings of economic malaise and still bitter over inflation, with immigrants serving as a convenient scapegoat for general disaffection and sense of decline. Indeed, it is entirely plausible that the nationalist wave of the 19th century was largely downstream of industrialization, with major changes to lifestyles and unprecedented improvements in living standards allowing the United States, Europe, and Japan to fund massive public works, immense bureaucracies, and titanic wars on the basis of this gratitude and enthusiasm.

The nation-state commanded loyalty from people on the basis of born membership in a particular group, and these groups were considered discrete entities with no overlap. The future of the state in the 21st century is unlikely to be the bastion of a nation, the sole protector of the national people, demanding absolute loyalty and immense sacrifice. Instead, the state is more likely to take the form of a service provider, competing with other states and non-state entities in the market. This prospect is frightening to nationalists, especially since they take the nation-state to be fundamentally natural and eternal, after two centuries of mythology to that effect necessary to organize and make use of people on the scale of tens of millions.

However, they are in the minority. The blame for this can largely be placed on the states themselves, who created immense suffering for their subject populations, none of whom emerged unscathed from the world wars. Even this was not enough to break the compact, and most populations who participated in the wars enjoyed rapid economic growth, compression of economic inequality, and the solidarity that comes from rebuilding. But since the 1970s, all of these trends have reversed. The situation now is that the masses feel betrayed: they did their duty, fulfilled their side of the obligation, only to see themselves neglected and taken advantage of by states that no longer provide broad-based prosperity.

As a result, from poor to rich, it is increasingly common to view the relationship with one's state as a simple cost/benefit calculation, rather than a sacred duty. This is entirely in line with the medieval attitude, and probably far more common in history than lofty ideals of civic obligation. People are far more likely to identify with loyalties that are more local, more personal, or explicitly opted into. Fundamentally this means self-identification, alignment on important questions of worldview, access to secret knowledge that outsiders are not privy to, mission, and purpose.

The state is not going away, and states are certain to remain among the most powerful institutions in the marketplace for people to choose where to throw their lot. But states will need to adjust to a world where loyalty is an exchange of value rather than a demand imposed by force.

Many people feel as much, if not more, investment in the politics and affairs of countries other than their own, on the basis of ideological solidarity and ingroup feeling with those of similar affections. This is not entirely new, as demonstrated by colonial officials going native, and foreign fighters in liberation wars, but they were oddities in the past, with real skin in the game, whereas now it is a fairly commonplace affectation. "Solidarity" of the Communist-Internationalist variety is now a feature of virtually every political bloc, and people scattered across the world of a common political bent often have a deeper sense of shared values with each other than with their countrymen in the opposition.

Aside from politics, one of the leading bastions of shared transnational values, which will be a model for many imitators to come, is tech. There are, to be sure, many people who want to emigrate to America for economic opportunity, and many who feel aligned with its history and political culture, and would likely be more nationalistic than most native-born. However there is a notable segment whose chief identification is with the American tech industry specifically. The United States as a political entity is fractious, confused, burning treasure and legitimacy. The idea that it is in decline, once fringe, is now taken for granted, and the chief question of politics on both sides is how to arrest or reverse that.

Tech culture—for lack of a better word for a set of beliefs and shared touchstones that transcend the professions and locations that spawned it—has a strong sense of shared mission and purpose. It is aspirational, optimistic, pluralistic, and transnational. While the typical western government won't let you open an ice cream stand without a license, tech culture will give you a couple million dollars for a good pitch deck, just in case you can succeed. Successful burghers and industrialists sought to join their nations' ruling classes, whereas successful techies seek to coopt or replace them. Increasingly the milieu finds itself more willing to fund life sciences, quasi-religions, humanities work, community-building, and the arts, broadening its circle beyond the core professional class that it came from, and becoming more of a gathering point for all people of specific sympathies.

In short, tech culture has a positive vision of what the future ought to be like, is an attractive destination for the young and ambitious, and despite internal division over questions of national politics, remains more intact and aligned than national populations at large. This is the kind of ethos that can command loyalty in the future, of a form that more closely resembles medieval favor-trading than modern blood and soil. There is much to criticize about tech culture itself, but the point is not that "tech" per se is the future. Merely, "tech" is the first successful model of a decentralized, transnational culture in the present era that is capable of truly superseding national loyalties and fostering collective feeling among members who acculturate to it by choice. This model is what will wax, and many more instances of it, with radically different values and practices, will emerge in the coming decades.

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Mass Media and Consensus Reality

In the era of the manuscript, "text" was something consumed and interpreted by an elite class who disseminated essential meaning to the masses. The invention of the printing press was an epochal change on par with the gun or the airplane, shifting the meaning of "text" to something produced by an elite, and directly consumed by the masses.

The print era, which includes other broadcast, or one-to-many, technologies such as radio and television, proceeded in two phases. In the first phase, production of texts was relatively cheap and accessible, and the ruling class saw its control over information seized by the middle classes, who also became its primary consumers. This enabled enormous political upheavels, starting with a century of religious war and mass slaughter sparked by Martin Luther and other Protestant dissenters. In the wake of this horror, the bourgeois intelligentsia shifted away from religious particularism, and toward a more universalist notion of natural rights, civic duties, personal liberties, and consent of the governed. The philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries laid the groundwork for the French and American revolutionaries to come, followed by the liberal revolters in the mid-19th. The the ultimate font of meaning shifted from organized religion to civic pride, and the idea of the laity gave way to that of the public.

With the Second Industrial Revolution, this situation changed drastically. In much the same way as spinning and weaving, papermaking and printing evolved from artisan craftworks to industrial processes. Texts could be churned out orders of magnitude more cheaply, and literacy finally reached the masses at large, but the capital requirements for printing ballooned and text shifted from a tool for fomenting revolution to another weapon in the arsenal of state power. Wire services disseminated news around the globe, perspectives were sanitized to make content more saleable in various markets, and eventually the major news aggregators in Britain, France, and Germany became embedded in their respective states' governments and entered into a cartel to control most of the world's information. This served to establish a uniformity of worldview that served as the shared foundation for object-level ideological battles that we now call consensus reality.

The transition from orality to manuscript followed a similar pattern, with book-based Christianity and Islam eradicating the speech-based paganisms that undergirded the political systems they coopted or replaced. A much more peaceful transition took place internal to Judaism as the oral traditions were recorded and the more plebeian Pharisees won out over the patrician Sadducees, forming the basis of what would become the rabbinic tradition. It seems absolutely reasonable to presume the same process will again take place in the print to electronic transition: a period of violent destruction of the old order driven by usurpation of its control over information, followed by a period of consolidation as a new elite develops the skills and technologies required to steer the masses once again.

Print culture was grounded in broadcast, but electronic culture is fundamentally peer-to-peer. Print, including radio and television, allows one entity to disseminate text directly to the many, disrupting the control over meaning that priestly interpretation of manuscripts granted the clergy, but allowing the new priests to craft texts amenable to particular readings and put them in the hands of all. Journalism, propaganda, advertising, and public relations are all sciences of persuasion that rely on this deft control over meaning, and when they fail, it is because the people choose to read the texts differently.

Electronic culture allows anyone to create and spread texts to anyone, crafted with any intent and provoking any meaning they choose. This has led to chaos in the information space, and most descriptions of P2P text transmission analogize it to the spread of a virus. Arbitrary actors can disseminate memetically potent information independently. Texts can be reinterpreted, recontextualized, or edited at will. Individuals must develop strong immune systems to resist information warfare, or see themselves hollowed out and turned into hosts for especially deadly ideas.

Everyone has stories about the friends and family members whose personalities have been excised and replaced by the unquenchable need to spread a particular idea they have been colonized by. This is not new at all: it is identical to religious zeal and nationalistic fervor. The crucial difference is that, in past eras, only a dominant or aspiring elite class had the means to craft these payloads. Now, it can be done by anyone on the planet.

The ability to produce and share texts can never be taken from the masses as long as we still have electronic devices and computer networks. The eventual lever a new elite will use to assert itself will be control over the flows of how texts reach people: the algorithms and platforms that curate what they see. In 2017, I wrote that while platforms debated between backing the old order of consensus reality or shifting curation responsibility to users themselves, platforms can in fact encode any values their authors desire, and can be employed to arbitrary ends. Since then, a billionaire bought Twitter and used it to swing an election against the regime. But we are still in the disruption phase. For quite some time yet, users who create and spread texts will run circles around the coders who try to control them.

20th century propaganda is no longer effective against anyone but the most unsavvy: when people parrot obvious party lines, it is because they choose to believe, knowing what it is. 21st century propaganda functions in alternate ways, and we have only scratched the surface when it comes to techniques at our disposal.

Sockpuppets to create the illusion of agreement, bait to induce reactions from enemies that discredit them, innocuous-seeming information meant to shift underlying assumptions about reality, scissor statements and callouts to induce schism or provoke discourse that amplifies awareness of a fringe opinion and force it into the mainstream. Cancellation organizes groups of partisans to create the illusion of public backlash against an enemy target. Real-life pogroms are stoked in private groupchats and on public feeds.

Disinfo is perhaps the most insidious, meant to deliberately provoke the immune response that we all need now to survive online, thereby muddying waters, hardening opinion against both sides of an argument, and cultivating cynicism against the author's enemies. AI will make all of this unimaginably worse, a printing press for printing presses, and it is likely that people will retreat further into closed communities to escape the deluge of garbage that will swamp the public internet.

The nation-state is a creature of the unitary public, broadcast media, and consensus reality. The chaos of the internet makes it fundamentally impossible to organize on that same scale, and this situation is likely to persist for decades.

Western politics and ideology were grounded for centuries in a shared understanding of popular will, state sovereignty, and the public good. That shared basis is gone now. We have ceased to debate, in the broader sphere, how to accomplish the ends we all take for granted as true. We have regressed, necessarily, to arguing about what those ends even ought to be.

In this hostile information landscape, older people are, frankly, helpless. People who grow up online learn to become hardened to it, but even then, the survival rate is not stellar. Many jump from one set of ideas to the next, trying to find something real to hold onto, especially if they remain susceptible to mass politics. Even individuals presumed safe may eventually stumble onto the idea that blows past their defenses and consumes them, or experience a personal crisis that weakens them long enough to succumb to infection.

There are three classes of people who will be able to navigate the electronic age. Some will become hardened to everything, impassive rocks in a raging ocean. They will check out and focus on other things like work, family, hobbies, or pet interests where they can thoroughly vet everything they consume. Others will be captured by ideas that are relatively benign, establishing a mutualistic relationship where these memeplexes rely on them to spread but protect them from more insidious ones. And finally, some people, with a deep sense of their core values, along with mission and purpose, will seek each other out and organize on the basis of their shared vision of reality to accomplish great things.

This is very much similar to the medieval situation, with an added layer of self-awareness. While the peasantry was checked out because they had no stake in their society, the information-immune will check out as a defensive measure, and be unable to meaningfully participate in it, except possibly as members of craft guilds who keep to themselves except when selling to market. This is not necessarily a bad thing, considering the history of mass politics. As long as they can be provided for, and in exchange made economically useful, this is an acceptable arrangement for both sides.

The benignly infected will be fervent monks, and some enlightened laity. And if we assume going insane has a negative effect on your ability to live a good and healthy life, eventually the benign beliefs will outcompete the destructive ones, in the same way that a virus which quickly kills its host cannot spread. These people will develop heuristics for staying grounded and content in a hostile world, and after some generations arrive at a process to cultivate those beliefs and transmit them to their children. This will form the basis of future world religions, whether they evolve from present ones or are invented de novo. Practitioners in our lifetimes will look like wild mystics, but the core principles they discover will later have their esoteric practices sanded off to be made safe for public consumption. It will only be possible to distinguish the benign from the malignant in hindsight.

Those who gather and organize to inscribe their visions on the world will form the bedrock of new societies. They will be united by shared worldviews in much the same way as nation-states once were, but they will come from across the globe and choose their affiliations for themselves. This mechanism is fully robust against the breakdown of consensus reality, because for them, is no consensus to enforce. It is entered into willingly, with full knowledge of alternatives, and as a result will enable even smoother coordination than the era of mass politics, albeit on a much smaller scale.

Much like the monks, their associations will be cults, but less like esoteric religions and more like secret societies or fraternal organizations. The best of them will cut across professions, forming microcosmic societies that interface with the broader world in a radically different way from how they deal with each other internally. With superior networks, shared purpose, and implicit trust, they will be able to amass class resources; though their membership may come from any economic stratum, they will be able to raise up their poorer members and cultivate shared prosperity.

Eventually it will be members of these groups that build the platforms that filter and guide information, merely to automate their own preferences and offload work to the machines. Someday those platforms will be pointed at the masses, first to guide and protect them, but eventually to yoke them, and entrench a superior class in power that it no longer deserves to wield.

And so the cycle repeats. But for a time it will be good.

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Transnational Culture

Europe from the fall of Napoleon to the fall of Metternich was not, as partisans of state power like to assert, a self-balancing system of sovereign states interacting freely on an anarchic playing field. It was held together, very deliberately, by a transnational elite of reactionary statesmen and nobles hoping to contain the spark of revolution and prevent the tinder from reigniting. Several congresses were held, after the first in Vienna, which authorized military interventions in member nations by other states to crush liberal revolts and protect or restore monarchs. Press censorship was enforced throughout the German Confederation, and secret police of various states pooled intelligence to monitor and arrest dissidents who crossed national borders.

Similarly, but from a progressive angle, the United Nations was not originally intended to be a gathering place for inviolable states to hash out disputes, but an initial attempt to bring them to heel after the horrors of World War II. Its architects presumed they lived in a Westphalian world, whether or not that was actually true, but they regarded this as an unmitigated disaster. Far better, they thought, to shift power up the stack, to a supranational entity that could, in time, come to pacify its members and transform them into subjects.

From this perspective, the Concert of Europe and the International Liberal Order were fundamentally identical in aim, only differing in political valence and technology level. It was the period of nationalism that was the true aberration, when staggering economic growth, rapid social change, memetically vulnerable national populations, and the sinister logic of social Darwinism combined to birth ruling classes utterly convinced of the practicality, and existential necessity, of regional or even world conquest.

If the sole means of organizing people and resources to accomplish great ends and spread one's culture and values is the nation-state, then the logic of bellicose nationalism is sound. With the industrial, social, and communications technologies necessary to coordinate on the scale of tens or hundreds of millions, and strict firewalls between populations based on immutable inborn traits, one has no choice but to fight and die for their motherland. That is no longer the world we live in.

The common people lack the stomach for total war and total mobilization, especially as their economic prospects dim, inequality widens, and the nation-state ceases to represent their interests or provide for their weal. Their loyalties will become more local, to the mayors, churches, employers, or personal relationships that tangibly affect their lives and respond to their words or actions.

Regional or global upper classes have long been highly mobile and more connected with each other than with their subject populations. They communicated easily in shared auxiliary languages such as Latin, French, Classical Arabic, Classical Chinese; until the era of nationalism led to language reform and forced assimilation, commoners often couldn't speak to people from nearby regions of their own countries. The elites shared a common cultural vocabulary grounded in their classical canons, works with which their peoples were entirely unfamiliar, and they intermarried routinely, in fact often more routinely than they really should have. Most importantly, they were often fully aligned on the basis of shared class interests. While the titanic struggles of the long 19th were existential in nature, many of the great wars of the medieval period were either jockeying for power within a coherent system, or essentially family disputes.

The only other classes that ever approached this level of mobility and cohesion were merchants and, less commonly, priests. Merchant classes had their own versions of the elite patterns, on much smaller and more pragmatic scales, replacing classical speech with broken pidgin and a shared literary history for common business norms. Priests often found themselves tied to lands or lords, used as temporal rulers and makeshift bureaucrats by various societies due to their education and literacy. The early Catholic Church very quickly recognized their wandering gyrovagues as troublesome and dangerous, and forced the monks into monasteries. Later, university schools served as rotating posts where professors could circulate freely, and they created their own diplomatic and emissary corps out of their holy orders. Occasionally misfit classes of craftsmen, entertainers, and colonists could find the freedom and resources to roam.

The free association, freedom of movement, shared language, and shared culture usually restricted to true elites are now also trivially available to the professional classes. Routine air travel, growing wealth inequality, globalized monoculture, assortive mating, and the internet allow upper middle classes from across the world, including middle-income and outright poor countries, to find each other, discourse, and even frequently meet.

The degree of connection is fully determined by onlineness: most expatriates live in bubbles of home-culture peers, or integrate into host-culture society, making them either long-term tourists or partially assimilated locals. The very online may be much the same if they move overseas, settling in with either or both of these norms depending on their efforts and tastes. But they also belong to a globalized class that can be found in any regional tech hub or major world city across the Americas and Eurasia. And many, if not most, of the people in those cities belonging to this transnational culture will be native to the countries they're located in.

Covid greatly accelerated this human circulation by enabling a wave of people to travel abroad, and many found their ties to their birth countries were not as strong as they thought. Some took a couple years to wander before finding places they wouldn't mind to settle in, at least for awhile. Others still bounce from city to city virtually every month, meeting at conferences, camps, and popup villages, lines crossing and recrossing. It looks rather piddling now, but it did not exist at all 10 years ago. What will it look like after another 20?

Again, this is not the only future. This is an early model of the kind of shape that many futures, shared by many distinct peoples, will take. Humans crave meaning, vision, community, and purpose. Nation-states can no longer fill those needs, so they will find it elsewhere, build it for themselves.

That the nation-state itself might take up this role was once horrifying to people who feared the consequences of nation-feeling plugging the yawning void that had been left by the departure of world religion. Considering the consequences, they were right to fear it. Perhaps one day our descendants will regret the choices we made, seeing clearly in hindsight where it all went wrong. More likely, I think, we are heading into a world that will be in some ways worse, but other ways better.

State power may well no longer be able to regiment and command the masses as one body, but as often as this ability was harnessed for greatness, it was also employed to effect unspeakable calamity. States may not have on-demand access to the sum total of wealth and productive capacity of their societies, and their fiscal health may continue to backslide, but wealth will accumulate in and be deployed from alternate reserves. Communications technologies may destroy the shared reality that enabled vast populations to find common cause, but new realities will be created, and entered into by choice. Elite manpower which was once the jealous possession of national governments, mere human capital to seize and exploit, may circulate throughout the entire world.

And perhaps one day, in retrospect, we will call these messy patchworks and informal alliances, made of upstart individuals looking to have their own place in the sun, "society."