The Global Guerrillas Report -- Sense-making frameworks. War-Tech-Politics Book: Brave New War Patreon: patreon.com/johnrobb Substack: johnrobb.substack.com
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The Global Guerillas Report
Frameworks for understanding and anticipating events in warfare, politics, and technology.
Substack (report):
johnrobb.substack.com/
Patreon (report + discord + free form workspace):
patreon.com/johnrobb
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This would put us on a path to avoid or solve almost all of the problems we currently face with AI, from shady/spotty decision making to AI job destruction to AI fueled totalitarianism.
The fastest way to develop persistent, autonomous AIs that make consequential decisions in the real world is to pair them with human beings who can provide the orientation they lack. It's also the most beneficial path for humanity.
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Globalization converts the symbiosis between a nation and its big companies from Mutualism into Parasitism.
Germany is not merely being deindustrialized.
It is being dismantled.
Piece by piece, factory by factory, job by job.
And the people driving this destruction are not hiding in the shadows.
They sit in government offices, corporate boardrooms, and political institutions.
German journalist Patrik Baab puts his finger on what Berlin would rather keep buried: Germany’s corporate giants do not appear to fear the collapse of German industry, because many of their decision-makers no longer have their interests anchored in Germany.
Cheap energy is gone.
Factories are closing or moving abroad.
Jobs are disappearing.
The industrial backbone is being hollowed out.
And yet the DAX executives remain remarkably calm.
Why?
Because Germany, for them, is increasingly just another balance-sheet entry.
American investment funds hold enormous influence.
Production is being shifted to China, the United States, Uzbekistan and elsewhere.
Germany is being treated less like the industrial heart of Europe and more like a cost center that can be cut, downsized, or written off.
Meanwhile, billions are being poured into war.
Not into rebuilding factories.
Not into modernizing infrastructure.
Not into securing Germany’s industrial future.
Into weapons.
And while taxpayers carry the burden, arms manufacturers and investors stand to benefit.
For BlackRock and the global financial establishment, critics argue, Germany’s decline does not necessarily represent a disaster.
It can represent an opportunity.
That is the brutal logic of the system being described:
One side loses factories, energy security and jobs.
Another side collects contracts, profits and influence.
War and deindustrialization begin to look less like separate crises and more like two sides of the same destructive process.
And still, Berlin talks about “transformation”
“Solidarity”
“Adaptation”
“Modernization”
But behind the carefully chosen words, Germany’s industrial foundation is being stripped away.
The factories disappear.
The skilled jobs disappear.
The energy advantage disappears.
The economic independence disappears.
And the political establishment keeps insisting that everything is under control.
The real question is no longer whether Germany can afford this course.
It is whether Germany can survive it as the industrial power it once was.
Because a country does not remain an industrial nation after its factories, energy security, skilled workforce and productive capacity have been dismantled.
At some point, there is nothing left to "transform"
There is only something left to rebuild.
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We need a right to bear open source AI models.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent: The US needs more open-source AI models.
"We can't let these large labs have regulatory capture because that will stop innovation."
He also said that stronger US open models are a strategic weapon against China, whose models are heavily built by distilling capabilities from American models.
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(full video on 'GOPFinancialServices' YT channel, link in comment)
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Simplified; it lacks orientation.
* what separates human cognition from a machine ?
linkeddataorchestration.subs…?
"In “the Jagged Frontier,” Perez names something most people who’ve used a frontier model have already felt: islands of superhuman competence sitting next to gaps a first-year student wouldn’t fall into. A legal AI can shred a contract in seconds and then miss context a paralegal would catch on the first read.
That unevenness isn’t noise, Perez argues: it follows the shape of the training data. “Whatever curriculum was used was the low-hanging fruit available for training,” he says, and that curriculum, running from Reddit threads to books to code, is a poor substitute for a body.
Humans build intuition through decades of embodied experience."
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Circuses are zooming.
The combined monthly global trading volume on #Kalshi and #Polymarket more than doubled in the span of two months. 📈
This increase was mostly due to a large uptick in sports trading, which is now the most-traded topic on both platforms.
Have you ever traded on a #PredictionMarket? ⬇️
ALT Line chart of combined trading volume on prediction markets. Text reads: Trading volume on prediction markets doubled between May and July
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John Robb retweeted
For several years now my friend @johnrobb has been writing about The Long Night. A particularly nasty scenario where an entity uses technology to intermediate people from the reality they experience.
Imagine an evil ai living in your phone completely managing your ability to understand the world and your ability to act in it.
A kind of totalitarian Orwellian nightmare only imaginable with recent tech advances. Technologies like CBDCs which turn off your ability to buy whatever you want based on a politicians whim, or a car that refuses to drive more than 10minutes from your home are downstream technologies in the Long Night Scenario..
At the same time Peter Thiel has been lecturing us about the coming AntiChrist. I’m less inclined to describe that as he does a better job, my definition isn’t relevant, and the point is there is such a thing. A technology that turns Man away from God is the antichrist.
There’s a scene in Star Wars where Natalie Portman’s character laments, “so this is how democracy dies…to the sound of thunderous applause.”
Brave New World and 1984 were scary visions of the future. But they never came to pass. And they won’t. Why? Because they failed to foresee User Generated Content. That surveillance authoritarianism would be brought on voluntarily, by the people themselves, rather than mandated by the State. And that change, that direction of flow, is the entire difference between our timeline and theirs.
Unfortunately, I’m writing this because the AntiChrist, the Long Night AI, is here.
It wasn’t externally imposed by Govenment and it didn’t escape from a frontier lab chasing AGI.
It came…from Facebook.
Muse AI is the AntiChrist, or the first one, of many.
And people are adopting it faster than any technology in history.
It is insidious. It promises to manage your subscriptions, cut down your email, and help you book a tennis court. It works. It’s useful. It’s a genuinely useful technology.
But it also takes all that knowledge of who you are, the best statistics of a generation, and it interprets and summarizes reality for you.
Don’t have time to read the FT, WSJ, and The Economist, don’t worry, Muse will summarize them for you. It will pick out the most interesting stories, the most obscure yet important facts. And it will tell you how it goes together, and why.
This is how it separates you from everyone else. It gives you the most amazing What, while slowly eroding your ability to How through selective inclusion. Discernment comes not from what facts you read but which you don’t. That distinction makes the difference in the modern OODA loop/information environment. That is, you’ve ceded your Orientation to a machine.
And it’s in this intermediation. This externally defined information environment management. This self-imposed hall of mirrors. That it lays the foundation for The Long Night and achieves AntiChrist status.
Well done @finkd , you did it again.
Thunderous applause.
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For more on what is driving this: The Great Powers Respond (to Drone Hedgehogs)
johnrobb.substack.com/p/the-…
patreon.com/johnrobb/posts/g…
🇪🇺🇷🇺 European spy chiefs just raised the alarm: Russia may test NATO WITHIN MONTHS...
Intelligence officials say Moscow is preparing more decisive action, including limited attacks, false-flag incidents, or drone and missile strikes designed to probe whether Article 5 is real or theoretical.
At the same time, Russian sabotage campaigns across Europe are expected to intensify, shifting from random disruption toward defence industry and Ukraine-support infrastructure.
Baltic officials are urging calm, warning that panic itself plays into the Kremlin’s hands, but the overall assessment is clear: the threat level is rising.
Source: The Guardian / Writer: Samuel
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AI ends the "mass" frame (the idea that if a large number of people do, like, or think something has an inexorable weight) by making it possible to manufacture mass.
johnrobb.substack.com/p/the-…
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My new report, "The Three Systems" is up.
Network AI and the Struggle to Solve Networked Modernity.
The struggle between Communism, Fascism, and Democratic Capitalism that defined the Twentieth Century was, at root, a war between competing systems. Systems that claimed to "solve" the problem of industrialized modernity. The Twenty First Century will see a similar struggle between three new contenders. This report digs into this idea and flesh out the participants.
Substack and Patreon (links in bio).
Made with AI
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johnrobb.substack.com/p/thre…
patreon.com/johnrobb/posts/t…
This is a take on what happens after the "mass" frame ends.
Historical analogue; We're currently in a disruption phase similar to the collapse of reformed feudalism during WW1, which set the stage for the rise of mass-based authoritarian systems (communism/fascism) and the maturation of democratic capitalism.
As the mass frame fails, top down AI enabled domination proliferates (the slaved system) to solve the crisis (although it is actually a big part of why it is happening).
It's challenged by the two breakout systems detailed in the report. The shape of these systems are as invisible as Communism and Fascism were in 1913.
(for more on the end of the "mass" frame johnrobb.substack.com/p/the-… )
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