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Izabella Kaminska

@izakaminska

Jan 25

👉FREE WORLD VS GOSPLAN: a two-part essay on how I see the geopolitical/economic big picture. You don’t have to agree with it tho!

1/ Let’s start by assessing why anyone should really be surprised by Trump’s Greenland, Canada and Mexican “expansionism” policy.

In a nutshell - they shouldn’t. It’s no joke. It’s also far from arbitrary or illogical.

What we are facing is a renewed test of the Freeworld vs Gosplanworld systems.

This clash has come about because those spreading liberal and open systems - who believed in their superiority - overlooked how their openness also made them vulnerable to corruption by non-open authoritarian systems.

Anyone who has studied history or classics, however, can see the bigger picture and is not surprised.

But first, before scrutinising Trump, it’s important to understand that in the grand chess board of global statecraft, America is the only “power” that has been standing territorially still since the breakdown of the USSR while other systems have been aggressively expanding. [Don’t worry I will address NATO]

The EU expansionist agenda, for example, is self evident. It goes: if you are prepared to comply with our ways you get to benefit from our markets and our mutual security systems. You also get a modicum of a vote but our laws trump your local laws.

China’s “Belt and Road” expansionism is implicit but based on trade. It goes: We will build you nice airports but if you don’t comply with our terms we will take them over, and your rights won’t necessarily be guaranteed. You will become a de facto vassal.

America’s expansionism [until Trump] was also implicit but centered more so on security. [We will protect the commerce lanes of the world, and especially our NATO allies, but all we want in return is commitment to a rules based order that guarantees liberal markets and free trade.]

BUT! At some point post 2000 that rules based order which underpinned all of the West [aka Pax
Americana] began to break down and stopped being about compliance with a liberal market code.

Without any normies really noticing, the system instead began to embrace a new “multi stakeholder capitalism” approach which was highly tolerant of, if not openly supportive, of industrial policy and technocratic planning. Some have deemed this the “non system” of globalism (Napier).

What’s more, this new system insisted that the non-free zones of the world could and should engage in the global market under a pseudo consensus structure that no longer insisted on liberalisation as a condition of trade. Many Western leaders - especially in more dirigiste Europe were receptive. The logic was that the non-system would be better at generating growth and ensuring stability for all (especially of the financial kind).

To compete in that system and preserve the export of liberal systems, the security state of America naturally understood it too would have to engage in a secret industrial policy to ensure that when borderless tech systems ascended they would at least be hardwired on the foundation of a decentralised and open system. Or at least dominated by US tech platforms committed to digital freedoms.

If this ensured the global digital operating system was based on a free architecture then in theory the ends justified the secretly dirigiste means.

Except it turns out that wasn’t enough to preserve the liberal system. And over time it was liberal market structures that increasingly gave away to “capitalism with dirigiste characteristics” due to the growing popular notion that that model was better at generating growth. The security state, meanwhile, found itself unable to resist the temptation of exploiting the dominating tools it had created in increasingly illiberal ways (back doors etc).

👇PART 2

PART 2: 👇

THE BACKLASH BEGINS.

Except while the elites in urban centers pointed to the amazing success of the the non-system model, as supposedly evidenced by improvements in the Gini coefficient, it was clear the metric was failing to capture growing discontent on the ground and the true state of affairs.

Whole communities were being left behind, cultural pride was eroding, and the cost of this ‘success’ was the loss of freedom, autonomy, and the ability to govern their own futures — leaving many as mere dependents.

All this culminated in the populist shock of 2016.

2016 represented the economic zones that still had free market norms explicitly hardwired in their cultural and historical identity - America and Britain - undergoing an immune reaction. Both broke rank, paving the way for the great Western Culture Civil Wars of 2016 onwards.

Then Covid and lockdown hit.

For the planners this was a once in a lifetime opportunity to reset the system and prove the superiority of their ways. Many were persuaded to fall in line because of the challenges of addressing climate change especially.

They aggressively promoted their vision as an opportunity for a great reset that would allow the world to “build back better” - in a way that formally encoded the technocratic gosplanned system into the last holdout free market economies and dealt collectively with externalities like climate change or pandemics.

That’s why there was so much at stake in 2020. Who governed the subsequent period would either reframe America/West as a true market economy again or a gosplan system. It was MAGA or Gosplan.

The problem is lockdown also gave everyone a flavor of what a truly planned and dirigiste system might entail. The resistance to creeping technocracy grew, largely spreading online and via independent platforms.

The technocrats (being true believers) I don’t think saw the PR disaster coming. The online backlash against their slogans (Great Reset, Build back better and the Green New Deal) inevitably forced a rebrand. The Great Reset became the “inflation reduction act”, which colloquially became known as Bidenomics. In other parts it became the Draghi Plan or Securonomics etc.
More broadly the economic system itself, especially post the
2020 inflation shock, was named “Modern Supply Side economics”.

They also convinced themselves the original PR disaster was entirely linked to disinformation, which they now sought to control. Eventually the superiority of their system would prove itself.

And yet, despite delivering on growth better than any of the other technocrat systems, the associated baggage of inflation, censorship, banking crises, war and nuclear risk - not to mention the optics of having no one in control due to Biden’s lack of cognitive health - meant the system failed to persuade Americans.

When a key faction of the techno-security state also rebelled - recognising its previous error - in favor of resetting the free world, the writing was on the wall.

Now that power has been consolidated and America knows what it is, it is entirely logical it will aim to cast as big a protective net over the remaining free world system while the rest of Europe fights it out.

This is what American expansion is about. And when it comes to NATO, from the Trump perspective, it’s not just about paying your way, it’s that you’re not entitled to a US military subsidy to protect your economic systems if you continue to resist market liberalism. As far as the new America is concerned it is not prepared to subsidise Europe’s economic self sabotage.

Meanwhile, it's also worth considering - for those who think Trump's expansionism is somehow unprecedented or irregular - the Ukraine conflict wasn't just about NATO. It was also about coming out of the Russian trading block and into the EU one.

EU expansionism justifies itself on the basis that it is opt-in and non-coercive. But with Ukraine this was not the case, with a significant part of the population resisting EU protectionism in favor of Russian protectionism.

Greenlanders are now faced with a choice. Which protectionist system is likely to serve them better? The one that wraps them into a dirigiste planned economy where their economic specialisms are dictated by Brussels and everyone is micro-managed? Or, into the free market system that Trump is offering, where the state's prime responsibility is providing security for the system and enforcing a level playing field, but allowing citizens to take their own risks?

In other words, will they prefer to be part of the creative free-thinking and individualist side of the new collective consciousness we are forging, which embraces personal risk — or the part that excels in implementation and execution but draws greater comfort from being subjugated to the will of the collective, and wants all risks to be shared equally.

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Izabella Kaminska

@izakaminska

Jan 14

🧵1/ Why glasnost matters. In November 2016 I wrote, in a piece called "The price of unfounded news hints at the true cost of the web" in the FT that:

2/ what this piece was all about was how the "free" and de facto subsidized internet [i.e. the "if you're free you're the product" model] was misdirecting the economy because of lies and false assumptions (especially about productivity). I believed that when the economic failings became obvious it would force a Gorbachev-style turn to perestroika and glasnost. Except I also predicted lots of people would not be able to handle the "openess" or having to fend in a less subsidized system, and would be happy to accept authoritarianism in return for the old "certainties" of the past. This would include accepting the return of a censored internet if needs be, but this time explicitly so.

3/ Earlier in October, @PeterMcCormack and I discussed the incoming "infoapocalypse" both AI and a less controlled internet was inducing.

Read 6 tweets

Izabella Kaminska

@izakaminska

Nov 29, 2024

🧵Here's a special Black Friday FATF Thread to complement @pmarca 's explainer on the Joe Rogan show about how the USG's "control mechanism" was applied to Big Tech by emulating the way it already controlled the banking system.

2/ FATF stands for the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). It originated in 1989 as a one-year fact-finding mission, championed by the United States during the “war on drugs,” but has since evolved into one of the most influential, yet opaque, financial regulators in the world.

3/ Its power stems not from formal authority but from the coercive force of economic exclusion. Nations that ignore its mandates risk blacklisting that shuts them out of global markets.

Read 26 tweets

Izabella Kaminska

@izakaminska

Nov 22, 2024

Reading Alexei Yurchak's "Everything was forever, until it was no more" and have just realised that viral memes — or what they called anekdoty — were a critical feature of late-stage socialism, and arguably a key dissent mechanism.

Anekdoty were basically the oral equivalent of today's digital meme. Among the structural similarilties is that they always centered on one prevailing scenario. In Poland 'Idzie Baba do lekarza" etc. — which was then adapted accordingly to depict current news events/developments.

This manifested in reams of Stalin and Brzehnev jokes which were enthusiastically adapted for current cultural or political context. It was, indeed, an art form. And I myself remember the enthusiasm and joy with which such yarns were retold and shared by everyone.

Read 11 tweets

Izabella Kaminska

@izakaminska

Aug 26, 2024

The Blind Spot returns from summer holidays with a deep dive into the two-sided markets that have infiltrated the value system and how they are now systemically repressing productivity.

Why is it that we still can’t spot them despite all our regulatory efforts?

- We start with how such models applied to Autonomy’s business; who they really benefited and why they encouraged so much aggressive accounting.

- We then consider how they apply to more traditional business models like hospitality, and why the years of turning a blind eye to the questionable nature of such incomes might be drawing to an end - especially if recent litigation facing the Marriott group in Poland is anything to go by.

The latter is particularly pertinent in light of the crackdown on Telegram’s Pavel Durov and digital social media spaces more widely.

If these virtual spaces can no longer assume immunity for the potentially illicit content created on their systems by third-party users, why should the same not apply to the world of bricks and mortar agents such as well respected hospitality franchises? For now, they’ve mostly been immune.

And finally, we consider the implications for global growth if the economics of many well established businesses just don’t work without extensive use of “corporate beard” accounting.

Bottom line: honest actors have no chance in an economy where loss-leading strategies dominate cashflows (unless they too get a lift of their own from becoming informants to the state).

Either way, it’s not just a market for lemons problem. It may be a systemic Spencian crisis.

the-blindspot.com/in-the-blind-s…

Separately, as the global grift becomes obvious to the average normie it will become ever harder to differentiate the “bad guys” from the “good guys” by actions alone. That’s because once trust is vanquished everyone thinks they have a moral justification as to why the law applies to everyone else but not to them.

It’s a big problem for our society because it creates a system where those charged with protecting us from lawbreakers and the tyranny of evil men, risk becoming indistinguishable from those they are protecting us from.

Read 8 tweets

Izabella Kaminska

@izakaminska

Jul 12, 2024

These diagrams from “How they make money” are absolutely brilliant at pointing out the zero sum nature of some of the world’s most disruptive companies. (And by disruptive I mean unsustainable - just try getting a cab in central London these days? ) As costs bite and investors start to demand some sort of return beyond mere zero sum growth, these things will topple, because they just burn cash.

The absolute opposite of this is Nvidia:

Except you have to consider how much of Nvidia is exposed to the former toppling over?

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