Cold War to Cold Peace

The threat of non-violence and bitcoin

§0.1 The Cold War was historical because it happened under the threat of violence, even if/against the fact that, this threat was ultimately a simulation.

§0.2 The threat of violence is symmetrical: the reality of a potential outside violent threat mirrors itself in the reality of a potential internal threat. If either disappears, so does the other one.

§0.3 If a state is not threatened by internal revolt, that is, it cannot fall into contradiction with its own identity in a way that produces any violent friciton, then it can become the vehicle of any identity of which’s imposition (which arrives necessarily from the outside) will not require violent force.

§0.4 Similarly, if a state is not threatened by outside violence, the enforcement of the coherence of the state (identity) dissipates, as the aggregate energy spent to reproduce coherence becomes inflated the more stakes are removed.

§0.5 These stakes are layered: the management of violence is dependent on the management of the state, the quality of management is dependent on the process of reproduction, the process of reproduction is dependent on the health of the culture, etc., etc. These layers are the living and present dimensions of history.

§0.6 The removal or inflation of either one of these layers has a ripple effect. If the management of violence (inside/outside) is inflated, so is the dependency of a functional state apparatus. More “relaxed” conditions produce more experimentation, but these experiments all begin from an inflated position that cannot reinstate the stakes within the order, only inflate them further (with more simulation —or spectacle → speculation).

§0.7 Threats, however, are relative: the recognition of a threat, while it may seem immediate, is retroactively dependent on interpretation. Meaning: the domain of where the threat is apparent is up to interpretation. A recent example of this today is how the domain of threat has entered culture, hence the “Culture War”.

§0.8 This produces a paradox between two opposing yet simultaneous “threat assessments”. On the one hand, ‘historical’ threats of violence, which are still referred to as self-evident and present realities, on the other hand, the interpretive domain of threats: “psychological operations”, trade wars —where private and public domains both enter into and exit out of domains of war, etc. But these alternative domains are still approached from the assumption of historical threats: If I disrupt the domain of culture, I disrupt the cyclical reproduction of the state, which will ultimately make it vastly more ineffective when it comes to ‘historical’ confrontation. Only, the confrontation never happens, because paradoxically, its site has been strategically moved over to these other domains.

§0.9 This reveals the threat of threats, which puts the reality of threats, the reality of violence, into the dimension of interpretation. Historical power entered this dimension (or meta-domain) with games of deterrence.

§1.0 Nuclear deterrence shifts war from being historical into a war of the interpretation of what/where war is, as nuclear powers calculated that historical confrontation would result in mutual destruction. This first moved confrontation into proxies, then purely into intelligence (the simulation of every domain), then finally into the accumulation of intelligence (the capacity of the simulation of every domain).

§1.1 Deterrence is dependent on granting simulation the position of immediate reality. Once again, this is a paradox: immediate reality now contains the extent of its own possibilities, which have not been realized yet but are still taken into account. This scenario is perfectly illustrated by Philip K. Dick’s Pre-crime unit from Minority Report, where precognitive mutants can see murders before they happen, these visions are then used to capture the murderer before he commits his crime.

§1.2 The threat of the prescience posed by simulation is the threat of non-violence. This domain of simulation is the domain of the interpretation and re-interpretation of the domain of threat. This extends deterrence to all possible domains. No wonder, why Marshall McLuhan could only describe this state of affairs as “a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation”.

§1.3 The historical state that adapted simulation (which is nothing but a game of deterrence) as a strategy also paradoxically erased the domains of its own identity (as threats are symmetric) by considering them as well a domain of threat and thus a place of deterrence. This becomes clear when all referents of history in any state are gutted from their historical reality, so as to deter these referents from ever pulling the state back to history. The best example is Europe: historically and symbolically important places are flooded with tourists (a deadly symptom), and are not integrated as an active, living part in the identity of that particular place. When the natives notice this, however, their means of action are limited to the domain of economics or protests, but they cannot restore the places’ historical existence, because its loss is already the reason why the tourists appear in the first place. They no longer can act from historical identity.

§1.4 Meaning itself is deterred by simulation. To use the example of Minority Report again, imagine that instead of the precogs showing visions of a murder, they show visions of someone going to church, who then, by being confronted by these visions, states that he must be a believer in God.

§1.5 One could see the deterioration of the dimensions of history (§0.5) mirror the process both inside and outside: the first proxy wars are fought by US troops (mobilization of population is required by the identity), then they are funded by the US (mobilization of economy as opposed to populations, not unlike European tourist spots..), then it came to be that all wars became proxy wars, as there was no more a difference between involvement and distance.

§1.6 All wars become proxy wars, as they are all immediately subsumed by simulation, where simultaneously everyone and no one becomes a participant, especially not the forces that are engaged in the fighting —i.e., who most closely resemble historical action. Nor do they represent a ‘historical side’, as all ‘sides’ represent the strategic domain of simulation. This is where one can find a profound irony: they are the violent proxies of the process that wants to enforce non-violence.

§1.7 That violent force is confronted with the fact that its application of violence does not give it agency over its own historical determination; quite the opposite, it throws them into a state of indetermination, their fate decided by the processes of simulation outside themselves.

§1.8 The threat of non-violence, and more broadly the threat of peace, is the fact that no possible action, whether outside or inside an identity, will have historical meaning and thus historical determination. It’s as if we are globally stuck in Groundhog Day, repeating the same day over and over again, though remembering, but never being able to move into tomorrow.

§1.9 The ascendence of simulation is directly proportional to the ascendence of cybernetics, that is to say, the ascendence of networks of intelligence and the application of said intelligence to games.

§2.0 The efficiency of simulation is dependent on lateral relations: intelligence, data, trade, and ultimately, a transparency between all domains, including private and public, and sacred and profane. This lateral expansion is realized by the historical identity as a strategy, a vertical aspect. In this sense, the reliance on simulation both exalts and completely destroys the identity of the historical agent. The friction of this contradiction results in the “liberation” of all domains by simulation —deterrence and the threat of peace— as a strategy.

§2.1 This also implies that the historical agent, as it is being erased and exalted at the same time, exists in a perpetual state of exception. This state of exception, as I’ve said earlier, is what determines the vectors of deterrence and simulation. To put it simply, paradoxically, this state of exception determines all simulations, giving them a qualitative, vertical aspect in which the liberation of domains from history is good. If this state of exception were to change, the relationship would be inverted: there would be a hierarchy of simulations determined by proof of history —i.e., by a historical agent. Deterrence of deterrence itself.

§2.2 This is where Bitcoin comes into play, not as a monetary technology, but as a technology that reintroduces historical stakes without divorcing from the reliance on simulation. It does this by applying the proof of work to the domain of cyberspace, this ultimate domain that encompasses all lateral relations. The traffic of data, and by extension, the means of simulation would be assigned physical constraints and with it, these abstract visions, the domains of deterrence, are liberated by once again, an act of deterrence as the historical state views its simulations, its capacity to deter, too a domain of threat.

§2.3 Bitcoin as a monetary technology is a Trojan horse. The adoption of Bitcoin means the adoption of the proof of work as an agreement. It must be understood that the proof of work is somewhat arbitrary and its necessity is always enforced outside of the technology —in our case, the agreement to the proof of work produces economic benefit. The work is still a pretension, but a profitable one —and ‘to pretend’ is also a type of simulation.

§2.4 The proof of work (and the proof of history) applied to simulation will flip the relationship between immediate reality and simulation. What is being simulated is unitary, and what happens “outside” of the simulation, in “outside” reality, has to be determined to be “canonized” into the prime simulation of history —to be more precise, a “simulated body of history” —a “corpus”.

§2.5 Where there was an erasure of history on account of a historical agent in a constant state of exception, we are going to have the reality of history with a completely simulated and enforced system of stakes. The reality of history with simulated agents.

§2.6 The likelihood of events will parallel the proof of work assigned to them. Instead of how today, each event’s simulation simultaneously exists across all domains, defanging the event’s historical determination, we’ll have a lineup of events with different ranges of proof of work.

§2.7 The violent force can, in fact, determine its own history by authenticating its use of violence as historical via the proof of work. It can get its “side” canonized as opposed to other “sides” in the collective interpretation —simulation— of history.

§2.8 The best depiction of this state of affairs is the Combine from Half-Life. The Combine simulate human relations, language, and even constitutions —all in accordance with historical “continuity” and at the same time being completely alien to a continuous development of history.

§2.9 An event that is within history but is still alien to its continuity is the event of a natural catastrophe. The state of affairs that the proof of work will bring will seem similar, only it cannot be accounted for by nature, as it will look human, as it will be systematic and artificial, and yet come from equally outside of history.