Notes on the Man in Black
No matter, though, how good things go, they’ve always got to wait.
—Lewis Capaldi, Old Navy Blue
This is what the KMT in Taiwan is broadly and roundly accused of doing throughout their attenuated rule on Taiwan. In the latter half of the 20th century this unjust system was challenged, shaken to the core, and ultimately dismantled in a silent revolution. But before I turn to this essential point, I need to put this necessary comparison in the context that the future requires.
Let’s turn in our minds to the ideology that motivated westward expansion of the US and the eventual discovery of the western Pacific Frontier through the Philippine acquisition, the western imperialist powers subjugation of imperial China, and the influx of both modern technology and western enlightenment knowledge into rapidly changing Asian economies and states. Even as this set the table for war with Japan, it is obvious to a sound and unbiased historian that the westward expansion, Manifest Destiny ideology concealed, and did not reckon with and trenched violence, power inequality, and the increasing complexity of managing theaters of war. On the western frontier, the situation, which had often been punctuated by a lack of legal accountability excepting for frontier courts and other sorts of ad hoc justice, revealed many significant instances where stress was applied to it beyond known facts and quantities and martial law would be threatened, even though the actuality was that martial law, except for brief periods of justifiable emergency was incompatible with the principles of government and the quiescence of the population. But we can see still such examples as in Hawaii during the Massie case where the governor, a military governor, a frontier governor, threatened to declare martial law, if the case got out of hand. It became inevitable that since all along the western frontier America was exporting martial law, but not solving how to diminish its importance or rectify and pacify the concept and its use, that new Asian democracies would be left to solve the problem. And with this cry, they let slip the dogs of war in Asia.
And then it fell to nascent Asian democracies to solve the martial law question as it had arisen in the Western Frontier of the United States. It was not originally their problem, but the problem of Western democracies. The latter half of the 20th century, the Asian half, showed them struggling with this, to some extent in Korea and Japan and the Philippines, but really, actually, the seat of contention was in Taiwan. Understanding this starts with the overthrow, collapse and fall of Imperial China shortly after the turn of the 20th century, the Othering of fascism, and the fundamental political divide emergent from that crusade that a democratic Asia would expose. Unfortunately, mostly young people are interested in information beyond this point, while older generations ruined by ignorance of happenings in Asia are still content to sleep through the life of a great man. And yet I challenge those who still identify with this mess of a solution, heeding not the resentment that is sure to arise from people who lived entire decades in perfect ignorance or mistake about the truth of matters in Asia, to read on, to give no quarter to the shame or lack of use they feel about not knowing. There is a point at which comes knowledge unrestricted by circumstance, and this is that point. The hidden past of Asia is problematic, yet it needs to be understood to avoid fatal mistakes about personhood and being and the character of the knowledge itself. So it will always be. So read on. When the last emperor of China was taken prisoner, there was a man who saw him, and conversed with him, and held him captive, so that in a flash, it became obvious to the world the illegitimacy of a god emperor. The Emperor of China had been a Pharoah, a Montezuma, infallible, unarchitectable. His divine right faded seconds into the conversation. Why? It’s best not to dwell on why and suffice it to say that the kingdom was falling down. A precarious social structure elongated to the heavens was falling down, and what the social restructuring of the Asian 20th century, the story we by rights should see as the democratization of Asia, was intellectually driven by the undoing of the divine right of kings: inevitable, movement politics driven by passion and purpose for individual rights strove for a counter-narrative to the oppression of Pharoahs and monarchs interior and exterior alike.
But where would Politics arrive, in the disposal of all this detritus of years gone by under the rule of arbitrary right? So when Peter Chang Hsueh-liang conversed with the former Emperor he had no idea yet that he would establish Politics in China. The question on the lips of the future was when politics would be established in China, and when it was would it survive the repression of ages past that at that time men could not escape the interiority of with sufficient alacrity, which oppressed their thoughts and their actions and their concepts. History will continually reckon with the fact that he was a general, and not a lawyer or politician, who started politics in China and the argument that he was in retirement a sort of statesman is the silver lining to a cloak of black. That Chang brought the beginning of Politics about through war and the philosophical politics of anarchy tickled the fancy of history but was at the time the important point about the Xi’an Incident. That was a point to overcome, just as the complex legacy of Chang Hsueh-liang from this point onwards is a point to overcome at this moment of great change and perspectival fluidity.
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| Peter Chang Hsueh-liang and Edith Chao |
When he suggested that the Chinese Nationalist Party join with the Communist Party to utterly destroy the Fascist Party which was invading, that simple conjunction of events, almost carelessly thrown together in history, and I think to his personal detriment not well documented, yet utterly descriptive of the formation of a Chinese democracy that exactly parallels the formation of the United States in political theory and thus space opens for discussions of political and human rights, order and harmony, subtlety and literacy, sophistication and a promise to the people, the search for truth. However, he was shut in prison for a matter of hours, secured under house arrest and stripped of his command. The trial was a sham. And then it was overturned. And he was still under surveillance and essential house arrest for a matter of years. Everything was done under the supposition that everything else that was happening had never happened before in history and under the aegis of Martial Law. Should we think of the whole thing as frontier justice? That will help you with the past that everyone is laboring under due to ignorance about Taiwan.
Wasn’t a society built? Wasn’t people’s will the ultimate determinant of national direction? Wasn’t there something to be said about the freedom that was there, was gained, spread around the world and changed it in subtle, sophisticated ways? But it was made according to place and proceeding in time. Peter Chang Hsueh-liang subtly changed sides and became more sophisticated. By the middle sixties there was a liberal-conservative split in the population of Taiwan that had Chinese characteristics. But I want to highlight this point as the one where he started thinking about colonialism and imperialism in relation to his country, where he started to see Western colonialism as being responsible for Japanese colonialism and perhaps problematizing the KMT’s behavior on Taiwan as learned helplessness to imperial domination, as well as dumb luck in evading fascism.
The important fact to know is that Peter had several friends that agreed with him on human rights and education and other liberal issues and they stayed with him all his life. He was generally the friend of the protestor. That’s how he started and that’s how he ended up. That’s how Taiwan works. Over time they softened up the repressive response to human rights protests and that’s how Taiwan got democracy.
Peter traveled all over the world after he got full freedom. He was a rich man with declining material wealth. On class issues we would find him an utterly unrelatable ally. So his writings which contain a hint of class mostly stay off the subject of personal politics except for helpless observations on affairs of the state.
I visited Peter’s grave on Oahu, Hawaii. His life was going home and then going back, going home then going back, going back then going home. I think he did attain wisdom before he died, but I never understood the flight curve of his arrow until this moment. His life was defined by grand journeys, he was a traveler, he could not in the end be contained in his endless wandering around the earth, a ghost in the shell in real life. His gravesite, engraved with the letters to the Word Emmanuel which are a suggestive question, is emblazoned also with a pictogram which is abstract; while Classical Chinese and appropriate, is better served by being visual evidence, a normal Token of regular acceptance representing agape; Greek word for love of the world. An obituary published in the New York Times said that some people still believed he was a god, however he was Christian.
There is a museum to Peter Chang Hsueh-liang in Taipei and I have been. There are displayed some words in a practiced hand from his diaries showing a brisk effective mind when he wrote these selections.
不要怕 沉愛發
知夫决石受真
啊頂天之死男勉烤
該希吃明庭欲年
Do not fear the way of oud
By the by your groom believes that stone is real
The death of the man of travail sung in the toasts is known in the highest heaven, oh good
Years passing, growing old, as the aforementioned hope devours the Ming soiree.
Bùyào pà chén ài fā
zhīfū jué shí shòu zhēn
a dǐng tiān zhī sǐ nán miǎn kǎo
gāi xī chī míng tíng yù nián
張學良自现聯
雨宇能人伴不背
等选惧我是聰明
A Chang Hsueh-liang prose couplet
In a universal rainstorm a capable person will come with me and go not back, and as for waiting, that is to choose to fear oneself, for verily I am intelligence itself.
Zhāngxuéliáng zì xiàn lián
yǔ yǔnéng rén bàn bù bèi
děng xuǎn jù wǒ shì cōngmíng
Peter was hesitant until late in life to think about the consequences of his power because he had been all his life an unknown philosopher and passed that down to us. I think he thought about it in the end. I do think he had regrets but he moved on from them, got a new perspective, thought more about solidarity and empathy. He had a hard time of it. I have no idea how it worked out for him and his family to learn, then experience loss, only at the end of his days to come home again to his life and what flowed from it. But I do think when he chose to have Emmanuel carved on his tombstone he had it done because he at least knew what he stood for when he entered the last gates. I was seven and I just remember thinking well there goes the divine right of kings—and then he was gone. I read the obituary, was puzzled by the reference to God, and life changed. He laid down more than his life at the end. Memento Mori.
The passage of time was an important theme in Peter’s work. Everything had to be accomplished, only slow work would do it, and he was idle for most of his life except for the state affairs that he was still bound up in culturally advocating for or against. A lot of things were accomplished with Peter’s presence but not many through his contributions. This hit him with some disappointment at the end of his life. Despite everything he accomplished something. This at least can be said about him in that respect, and, he was not a public speaker and was a damn good writer when he turned to it. And we should be turning to his writing more than to his life to judge him. He was asked once if his life had been successful and he said no, but when asked about his writing he said he had found some success. Unfortunately it is all in Chinese and in need of laborious translation; fortunately it was not lost to time and is in the academic library at Columbia University.
So it was Peter, who, no matter how good things went, still had to wait. There are many parallels between what Peter had to face and experience and what is going on right now to the point where you would seriously suspect Republicans of selling a scam bogus version of Peter‘s life as part of their Reaganite platform and perhaps even selling lies about who he was where he was or what he did. “Showing a lack of imagination”, he would often say, and he would without a doubt say the same thing about the Republican Party. Trump says more stuff in line with martial law era Taiwan than he has ever said about American reality. But it is the villains of a foreign past and not the heroes of a foreign past that MAGA and Trump are trying to play. And that is why people are alternately bored and furious with the state of politics: because “who cares about the past?”and “we know nothing about the past” are colliding within the same people.
Now, what happens when Taiwan wakes up? That is the future that we are facing: a Pan- Pacific future where myriad true justifieds fractalize the new picture of the world that is nascent; that is on the rise.
A butterfly breaks free and spreads its wings
And blossoms just as flowers do in the spring
And if you feel the winters brutal sting
Open your heart to wonders tomorrow will bring.
—Curtis Nowasad, Choices (A Butterfly Breaks Free)
One final miscellaneous note for now, that another implication of the Ming Dynasty soiree in the quotation above is a tower or pagoda or large hall, an example of which crumbled from the roof into dust the other day, not too long ago. Certain recent events have meant that we have virtually retired Peter’s entire world as we look to a bold exciting future. Like we did when we observed Peter, we can comprehend contradictions in the world, like to say, for instance, that we’re glad he happened and we’re also glad the world moved on.
You can’t be neutral on a moving train
Peter switched sides but I didn’t. You can’t be neutral on a moving train. Ever since the beginning that was the beginning I have had this justified true belief that as long as money and power oppress the masses one cannot be neutral, not on a moving train, not when evil forces collude to pull power from We The People. Yet history is kind because due to different circumstances we both ended up on the same team at the end of his life and the beginning of my work; pro-democracy, anti-tyranny, anti-fascism. But he had his superstitions, and they clashed with his choice to see power as money—this being nonetheless interesting to be a general and an economist, the world moved on, or should we say we did not see the world in the same perspectival way. I am pleased to report that the world is much different now than it was, most for the better but some for the weirder, and, furthermore that confusion and the intellectual fog of war has been the main limiting factor in spreading light and knowledge, truth and justice, and the main aims of humanity coeval. With that in mind I wish to aim higher, lift the fog of war, see the landscape of the intransitory moment, and recover what was lost, and to see that we need to lift the veil on Kurdistan.
Someone said to the Unknown Soldier in the deserts of Syria at the confluence of rivers if you sit at Tell Baydar during the sunset, you will have something to say to the world regardless of facts. Having always been the sort of man who was intended to get at the Wine of life early, he went out one afternoon and sat till dusk.
About a month later some fellow around me got really worked up about it, boldly saying after a few drinks, — Turkey? Fuck the Turks. Kurdistan is the only way forward. — He was nearly drowned out by all the information coming forth about people’s love and support for Kurdistan. And before anyone criticizes me, I believe we were talking about the Young Turks on television.
It is natural to wonder whether this actually happened because while the reasons may not have been concretely literal, it was real or so my friends report, however, in the absence of facts, could that have actually happened? The dilemma is that if it really happened but it didn’t actually happen then reality cannot be the same as actuality which calls the question, which always fails.
I have a solution to this problem which is that facts are what literally occur, such, if the reasons for what literally happened are subject to some contestation and nevertheless really happened, facts that are problematic to establish can nonetheless create actualities. “This is called reasoning from similarity and not difference,” someone said to me in the muddle of youth. It applies here.
I admit for the possibility that it actually happened.
Never before has the Unknown Soldier announced his presence so clearly to the world. I will tell him now unequivocally that in spite of vehement anti-war beliefs and the stir that it caused when those who rightly opposed the occupation didn’t want to rescue the Kurds from ISIS, I did support the Global Coalition. Moreover it was precisely for the Kurds that I did and moreover I believed the choice to advance toward Mosul from the west through Greater Kurdistan was correctly chosen. AANES reserves territorial autonomy because of it—the campaign was waged through its territory alongside the Kurds, establishing a memorial to their struggle and travail as an oppressed people overcoming great odds to maintain their identity and commonwealth. However the labor strikes that followed the capture of the city of Mosul received my solidarity along with their belief that to end the war was necessary, with a Kurdish proto-state and a strong alliance between the Kurds and the United States being the only material silver lining to the war that in all actuality was deeply felt by the world as an unknown that needed to be narrativized.
There was an online exhibit at the Smithsonian when I was growing up about the mythology critic, Mr. Campbell, who, problematic though he turned out to be, wrote a remarkable book once about the structure of universal myths and when it comes to the Kurdish campaign nothing is closer to that in story than the element of myth that involves making friends with the natives in order to win the conflict. That’s what I never forget to say about this all: without the Kurds the whole thing would have been a wash.
I don’t know how long I can linger on Kurdish Intelligence without revealing my affinity for it. Without it we would have been bogged down in a mess again this time in Syria. But instead of a leader who wanted to exploit the land, follow the leader, or even one who wants to fail, we had a leader who wanted to bring people together. It’s amazing how much comes down to choices, and profoundly undemocratic ones and so it matters who we choose to make those if you care about democracy. It could have gone another way. Kurdish Intelligence knew everything during the Mosul campaign, i.e. at least it widely seemed like that, such was the faith and trust that the soldiers put in its information. Parastin and Dazgay Zanyari worked together, they say, and Al-Istikhbarat al-Askariyya had Rekkhistin— soldiers in the front report high confidence in their battlefield metrics. The way I heard their operation explained once kindled an affinity that is still hard to ignore. It goes like this: Parastin walks into a bar and asks a question. Dazgay Zanyari is already there and has the same question, turns to Al-Istikhbarat al-Askariyya and asks the question, who in turn calls up the general and puts a request in. This is a little joke because Rekkhistin is also called General Intelligence. And then it turns out that Parastin knew the answer the whole time but it was either a rhetorical question or agreement was reached. This peculiar arrangement sparked some recognition right away. Much integrative analysis has been done on the social calculus of this arrangement that is very much the narrative. I have heard that Parastin’s internal motto is Solidarity and they do a lot of work between asking the question and knowing the answer. Nevertheless the peculiar nature of the system renders it impregnable to standard critiques about uncertainty. It has never failed actuality but facts are subject to the world and circumstance. Facts do show that it works as an idea, but it might be due to the initial productive relationship. Yes, the PKK pioneered this intersectional strategy but its roots are deeply structural and cannot be discounted.
We might be thinking pictorially again about something that is actually a system for producing what we see occurring pictorially, seeing the effect and not the cause, which is human. The cause is human allegory which produces symbol pictorially. When Leibniz was describing mass integrals, it showed cause and effect as a triad— human, environment, and society being one such triad— interacting with a binary or ternary system of perceptions— sight, hearing and touch, and sometimes people say sight and touch are the same—which leads to a modal calculus. About this I will try not to confuse other than to say if a result is produced it is satisfiable and if it produces a result for all variables it is valid. About the topic at hand I would say the narrative is satisfiable but with some knowledge about the variables that go into it it should be quickly determined to be valid referencing the above.
I’ve referenced that there might be a sort of modal logic of social engineering at play in the PKK’s operations. But could there also be a moral calculus? Many have asked me and I have to say yes there could very well be; likely it is in the passing moments that we spend with each other, when we want to know how to structure our associations, and again returning to it when we want to create a meaning to it all, that the same sort of questions arise along with the same longing to know each answer. It has been proved in the crucible of war to have served liberty’s interests but it should shine all the brighter in the forum of peace, and be it incumbent on we who say the word narrative with confidence in its meaning to show once more its capacity as a modal calculus to be a moral calculus, I should say it would exhibit our truthfulness to a principle integral to the dignity of the human. That principle: the love of truth and due honor to justice.
The PKK, far from being just Ocalan, has responded to a truth in the human condition by actualizing it. We could do far worse than to find the same truth and actualize it ourselves. I do not fear advertising this fact because its competitive advantage is that it works for liberals and therefore it works for the Kurds, because they are surrounded by authoritarian countries yet they know something their neighbors do not. I’ve heard two people say what I will say next. The first person said “Be like the Kurds. Travail but do not suffer, travail and see.” The second person said “The Kurds are the interiority of our world.”
This all reminds me of a passage from a London magazine lamenting the passage of time into the 21st century and the unresolved nature of the past. The author, she wrote: “We need a new political subject, no longer in flight from interiority, who inhabits the cracks and crevices of this world, knows how to be nobody, and when to rush to the other side to meet her double.” It might as well be Kurdish intelligence that we need. As to whether we ultimately support the Kurds: you can’t be neutral on a moving train.
The Fractal Frontier
Well, you know, we are over with seeing the frontier as a tangle of nameless wilderness in a neo-proprietarian way and are transforming the physical space of the frontier that occupied our minds in past decades of ideology into intellectual and commercial emerging paradigms unabridged by material fetters on intellectual production, or the advantages of property.
The frontier, though, whether spatial or fractalized into the interstitial spaces of modern life, or in the process of abandonment and rediscovery, as in the so-called crabgrass frontier, has always been an escape route from the ravages of capital—now of course it becomes apparent that we do not have a simple answer for what the frontier, the escape from capitalistic excess and decadent wealth as cultural fact, represented in the past, that does not exist now, and so it becomes even more worthy to ponder what new frontiers really exist anymore, and pose the question: how should we start to understand frontiers now that the great American West has been tamed and the further west of the Pacific and East Asia has touched our reality?
There are three major ways that the end of the literal frontier, and the inception of a fractalized frontier embedded into lived reality, shows itself in attitudes and opinions, and by some coincidence, they all surfaced in the press on June 20, 2025, the day of this writing, from major national news sources. This happens more often than you think, and it’s part of the play of the news cycle, but there is always a proximate reason for it happening, and in this case, three articles show three dimensions of the question on everyone’s mind about what is the frontier.
Of course, we have to set up this discussion with some premises. The first is that the frontier was a desirable escape route for free thinkers or apostates from the position of social policy. The second is that what happened on the frontier was not always subject to law and therefore justice, and the third is that a social policy of expansion undergirded scientific advancement.
The end of a spatial frontier significant enough to, all by itself, advance the condition of society through innovation and change means that creation moves into the second phase, the unmaking and remaking in different contexts of fundamental allegories. I would add that for the benefit of those who are tracking the narrative. Because what is happening at this narrative juncture is that three different fractalized narratives of the frontier have been presented as there is a point of contention in narrative interpretation. Each of these is in some distinct measure both in discord and harmony with the narrative at various points. I think examining them after reflection is the only way to show how they illustrate the pitfalls and gains in moving the narrative forward.
The Wall Street Journal opinion page is particularly demented as it suggested today that the Supreme Leader of Iran should be killed, quite abruptly I might add, because it stated it right at the end of an otherwise banal statement about his religious rank. The title was "Iran's Mediocre Supreme Leader," and I don’t have to tell you that I thought the article itself was rather mediocre.
It strangely presents a reason that Khamenei should be killed because his religion is heresy and apostasy, and far and away proves this absurdity by never offering another reason for its very strange pivot to suggesting the death of another Muslim Middle Eastern leader. It somehow wants us to believe that the faith and hierarchy of priests in a foreign land should at all determine war or even assassination against that leader. Never will something like that provide me with sufficient reason to believe we should kill said leader. As an American with principles, that would go against mine. Let’s allow for diplomacy to work here because this is just a government-to-government clash. The people of Iran don’t want war, the people of Israel are against war including this one in Gaza; the governments need only listen to the people, and they would cease this nonsense, and the background will come to the fore: we will realize that all current violence in the Middle East derives from the anxious desire to be part of the Abraham Accords, which several countries and factions now fighting are not part of and perhaps should be.
This is a sort of transparent desire to reinstate a frontier: it is transparent, obvious, and strains credulity. Neocolonialism and imperialism are examples, as is Guantanamo and CECOT, of the hopeless tangle of frontier logic where a certain conquest has hit the borders of sense and dissolved into meaninglessness.
The frontier logic usually makes a digression into the sciences, regardless of whether there are simple options of conquest. However, it is now perfectly ordinary for science to be considered a frontier, and a place where this frontier logic, I suppose you could call it—the sort of Wild West mentality—does tend to trickle through. However, I think we have seen a lot of opportunistic science and a lot of fringe science as a consequence of treating science as an escape route, something like the western frontier once was.
And really, a good example of this is quantum mechanics and the lack of creative rigor in quantum mechanics. Before I go on, I will linger on this point as it is sure to cause skepticism. I will point to the simple reality that quantum mechanics has led to the creation of a quantum computer as really its main purpose because said computer can perform computational tasks necessary to allow us to get beyond quantum mechanics.
Well, anyway, this morning there was an article from Scientific American interviewing a physicist who had a lot of similar ideas and criticisms of a lot of things that physicists are doing, and the way research is being conducted and the way people are thinking about problems, fundamentally. It was called "Quantum Mechanics Is Nonsense," and I think it really exposes this next tendency for the frontier, the Wild West mentality or frontier logic, to implode on itself into a sort of geopolitics.
He’s saying, basically, with respect to quantum computers anyway, that there are many discrete energy states in quantum mechanics, and they could just as well be used in combination with classical computing to do another form of quantum computing that might be more powerful than the simpler explanation of quantum states currently being used in basic quantum computing, which is the Schrödinger’s cat-type superposition principle. However, there’s nothing, apparently, holding the theory of quantum computing to a three-bit system, other than the popularity of superposition principles as a way of doing quantum computing with more than two bits.
All this is sort of to say that people suggest that quantum computing could be done with any number of bits as long as there are discrete energy states that could be describable and usable for such a machine. For example, if there are five discrete energy states, there could be five-bit quantum computing; if there are 5, 6, 7—however many—there could be computers with bit systems based on however many states we want to be quantized from nature into the computer system.
However, I do believe the biggest takeaway from this article is to keep in mind that advances in quantum computing are going to limit the pure speculative physics of quantum mechanics because, in order to build the quantum computer, everybody who is thinking and working on quantum problems is essentially thinking the same way about things because the main project at the moment in quantum research has become quantum computing.
It remains important to build a quantum computer for reasons of pure physics, actually. Problems of and relating to Einstein’s final works are difficult to prove or even examine fully, especially general relativity and string theory, without more sophisticated and more powerful computers. Clearly, from the perspective of history, we are seeing the proliferation of quantum mechanics into science, eventually leading to a reconsolidation of its power in a computing device in order to solve the fundamental problems that exploring quantum mechanics was simply a detour from. At first, quantum mechanics might have seemed like a new idea, but history will show that the detour into quantum mechanics was intended in the grand scheme of history to shore up technological capability to solve the problems that quantum mechanics was, in essence, fleeing from in the first place: it was a sort of retreat and regrouping, in the process gaining enough technological might to solve the original problem.
The frontier here is not what you would expect, and it is also pretty much nothing because it is the process of making things obsolete. Quantum computing will make possible math that makes its source, quantum mechanics, obsolete. But more broadly, science as a frontier logic is technology, and technology is geopolitics, and it always ends up in the same race over who has the most sophisticated hardware and software. So again, this isn’t much of a frontier and really does illustrate, more than anything, the struggle to find some sort of frontier to replace the societal release mechanism that the frontier once was.
The third example from the news is not much more than a headline, which blares that "Our Future is Feudalism." What is concerning is I do not think it does so with any hint of irony. I had no desire to delve into it after it showed itself to be a Roman Empire fanfiction doomscroll. But I mentioned it and barely referenced it to show that this is another confusion in the narrative at minimum and possibly an intentional misdirection.
It will be apparent to those on the left, who are paying attention to the newest ideas and political economy, that a certain Greek scholar has written a book describing the structure of platform businesses as essentially rent-seeking feudal operations, but feudal in the context of Internet or IP property rather than feudal in the context of land. Now, of course, I do not believe there was any honest confusion on the part of this author; he had either not heard of this new theory, or he had heard of it and then deliberately tried to distract attention from it. Why? I couldn’t say.
In case there is any confusion on the narrative, I will definitively say that only techno-feudalism, which is the theory above described, fits within the narrative, and there is nothing feudal about the narrative. Only techno-feudalism is valid as an interpretive scheme for the modern day, while feudalism is a counterexample that is satisfiable, that is to say.
However, here is where I think there is a breakthrough moment that relies on prior cognition. This article is so significantly off base that it allows us to think outside the box while dismissing it. By refusing to be confused, by refusing to be led off base, by making a lateral move into consciousness, we see a natural idea that opens up the space to propel the narrative forward.
This opens up two angles to see this at. One is political economy, and the other is political reform. That is to say, after you say it is techno-feudalism, not feudalism, you still have to say whether you mean that in terms of political economy or political reform.
In terms of political economy, you can look to good economists and combine their ideas. For instance, Piketty’s thoughts about the rentier class combine nicely with Varoufakis himself on the point that lack of choice, genuine choice, and lack of safeguards have created an exploitative class of tech oligarchs, exacerbating inequality, and fueling division. I don’t think people think about this enough. Everyone talks about how the Internet brought us together, and the Internet will ultimately lead to this, that, and the other thing, in terms of better communication and a safer world. But at the same time, the very platforms that we are using are exploiting division, and doing so for profit, but also for the benefit of any power and authority that seeks to crush the will of common people for outdated and Neolithic reasons. And perhaps to critique this, we have to reimagine the primordial state mechanism.
Which leads us to political reform. And it is here I think we can ultimately see curious examples of the peculiar workings of the narrative. Here’s just a brief example to close with to get you thinking. Anticipating that eventually we will get to public funding of elections, grassroots political movements and campaigns are raising money to the point at which, once they have enough to spend for literature, advertising, and what have you, from that point on they are not accepting further donations and focusing on winning media battles and the narrative.
Frontier logic relies on an acquisitive logical scheme, but this social calculus is far from being a frontier logic. It is an emergent property of systems, and it is the narrative because it asks, "What is the narrative?"
Chiralities: A Two-Way Street
Respect is a two-way street. About all the rest that can be said of the matter is in how you regard someone else. I think we have gotten away from this in the same way and for the same reasons as I have already mentioned, for the sake of trying new options for how to see things from the diversity of societal systems out there, and that was relevant to the time, but I don’t wanna talk about Chang. It is a two-way street. It’s not that I don’t want to talk about Taiwan. It’s that I wanna talk about Taiwan in a new context, unburdened by the past and set upon claiming for the future what is rightfully theirs. And this is a future that includes Taiwan and the United States and, to a lesser extent, other international allies, and coming to grips with the reality of the future we are already living in will require understanding the undebatable primacy of ideas relevant to Taiwan and the United States. Unavoidable political-social realities have led to this understanding. The relationship between Taiwan and the United States is a two-way street. Where else is this the case? Show me the counterexample. I can assure you there is none.
Even taking into account one other country in the entire world is going to take a little bit more than the standard analysis from everybody, policymakers to citizens alike. It’s already going to have a huge effect on the diversity of explanations for ordinary phenomena. The bond that exists between our two nations has already been tested and evolved and taken on a stable foundation. Human rights discourse, pro-democracy movement politics, counter-surveillance, and privacy politics have all evolved out of this pre-existing relationship that can be built on and harmonized for a better future. So on the one hand, not all is lost; on the other hand, the bond definitely seems to be in need of bolstering. It doesn’t seem to be quite enough to know exactly what is going on over there, which we will increasingly need to do to some extent through autonomous actors or for our own necessity, probably both. The same goes for us of them. It’s not that we had not both held up mirrors to the world around us, but it’s that they were different mirrors. Translation between the two is not in urgent need of repair. There are better places to move the narrative. And one that I think is most important is what universals could be reached and what would they look like?
Well, I can’t completely answer the question of what universals could be reached, however, I believe chiral objects exist. That is to say, just as I believe that people can have face-to-face conversations and see each other, there is a chirality or handedness in the orientation of the human and certain products of the human, which could be universals. Chirality in communication looks like it’s in the mirror when it’s not in the mirror.
The ultimate chiral object, of course, is the conch shell, that is to say, a certain kind of three-dimensional spiral. The reason for that hearkens back to the shape of galaxies. The shape of galaxies shows two spirals at points of maximum constructive wave interference. However, the conch shell is geometrically constructed such that it mathematically fits another spiral to its curve that is implied in its symmetry that goes in the opposite direction of the apparent geometry, that is, it spirals in the direction counter to the material spiral, and this can be seen in its mathematical geometry by analyzing its curve and plotting it to computer graphics, and knowing to look for a countervalent spiral. Of course, in galaxies, if you apply the same logic, you get two countervalent spirals on two perpendicular planes. There are other examples, such as you can sometimes see geese flying in a formation where the two prongs of the V shape are facing into the vector that the geese are flying in. Usually, you see this in three flying together going in an opposite grouping to the patterns you usually see and in a way that could be a chiral object. I have seen such things. Ultimately, I think chirality is a class of objects or groupings such as tools that have mirrorlike properties and show them without the need of a mirror. Now, with that grounding in fact, we are entering a new era where the chirality of the car, office operations, the bow and arrow, and the square are becoming apparent. And what about chiral planes? There is an asymmetrical airplane that is chiral in that it has asymmetrical wings, and it is effectively when you see it flying through the sky a chiral effect. But overall, it’s a metaphor. It’s a metaphor. I think we’re seeing the chirality of things that have become familiar by virtue of their significance.
OK, that’s already familiar to you by now, but there is a sort of ultimate reality that explains the balance of this moment where, as I see it, we are bridging between the past and the future with the present in between, where we sit. The interests of the population and the interests of justice are mutually chiral and mirrors of each other. And I mean simply to show you that it is a two-way street. The interest of the population can be explained to the interests of justice and to the interests of the population. The interests of justice can be explained to the interests of the population and to the interests of justice. The tautology of this truth only emphasizes its ethical weight.
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