Peter Ackerman's Accuracy

Here's another short post that is a follow-on to the post I wrote yesterday.  My encounter with the protest march in Portland yesterday got me so agitated that I actually went back to watch a YouTube video that was made by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict in 2013.  As long-time readers of my blog know, I believe the ICNC went seriously off the rails from 2017 to 2020, and that as a result they gave some advice that was seriously flawed, both morally, tactically, and strategically.  So in my posts from 2020 onward, I have scrupulously avoided referring to any materials or videos published by the ICNC.  However, I must admit that the materials they published and released up to 2016 are actually quite good.  Their Fletcher Summer Institute video series is a particular example of this.  Also, I've grown to strongly dislike YouTube for reasons which I have mentioned on this blog, yet to this day YouTube remains the best place to find videos of talks and lectures by people such as Srdja Popovic, Jamila Raqib, Marshall Ganz, Zeynep Tufekci, and other scholars of people power, community organizing, and strategic nonviolent resistance.  So to use an analogy, even though I hate the taste of cheese, because I'm hungry and there's nothing else to eat, I guess I'll have to eat this cheese sandwich...

Anyway, the video I am referring to is "FSI 2013: Why Skills Can Make Civil Resistance 'A Force More Powerful'" and it is a recording of a talk which was given by Peter Ackerman, who was one of the founders of the ICNC.  (By the way, Peter Ackerman passed away around three years ago.  I'm sorry to hear of his passing.)  In his talk he makes the point that the development of skills and wise strategy among the participants in a nonviolent liberation struggle is the key to winning the struggle.  He has some interesting things to say about the lack of effectiveness of mass protest marches when those protest marches are nothing more than an expression of collective outrage:

"Well..you know, again, we're always talking about probabilities. But a strategy to go to the street because you're angry - to let off steam - recognizing you probably have a finite amount of steam - that's probably a not good use of your steam.  [Sic] And I don't believe you should...even consider a tactic without understanding its strategic context.  Why would you just go out and do something without thinking it through?...Tactics are not a strategy. [Emphasis added.]  "What makes a tactic have a strategic context is the forethought that comes to it. [Emphasis added.] 

"And the military gets this...as some of you know, I have a son who was in the military and...as a combat officer before he went out on any activity he had to write a 40-page paper about what was the purpose, what were the risks, and on and on and on! We should submit ourselves to that same kind of discipline.  If you don't do it, you're gonna lose!"

To those who want to craft an effective resistance to the autocrats who have taken over their countries (as Trump and the Republican Party have done in the United States), I say the same thing.  Educate yourselves in the theory and practice of effective strategic nonviolent resistance.  Read some books - especially the books published by the Albert Einstein Institution.  Learn to craft an effective strategy of resistance, an effective theory of change.  If you don't do it, you're going to lose! 

Cassandra's Sore Throat

I was planning to meet some friends for coffee (or in my case, green tea) today in downtown Portland, Oregon.  Because I don't have a TV and don't watch the news on my computer, I was completely surprised by the presence of a huge anti-Trump protest rally (one of over two hundred taking place across the nation) which blocked several downtown streets, including the street I needed to take to reach the coffee shop where my friends and I were supposed to meet.  

As readers of my blog know, I am utterly opposed to the Presidency of Donald Trump.  I am also utterly opposed to the Republican Party.  Even though I am a Christian, I find that regrettably, I must now stand in complete and utter opposition to the white American evangelical/Protestant church in all of its manifestations.  So I could certainly sympathize and agree with many of the grievances of the protestors - especially because I am a black African-American.  Yet I must say that the sight of the protestors filled me with a strange mix of feelings.  This mixture of feelings was even more agitated when I gave up on trying to reach my coffee shop friends and parked my car instead in order to talk to some of the protestors.  I learned that many people had come to the protests simply because they had heard about them during this past week, and that they had not received any prior training in the theory and practice of strategic nonviolent resistance.  Moreover, the protest march seemed at times to be very little more than a nearly inchoate venting of grievances.  

So I asked a few of the protestors if they had ever heard of the study of the theory and practice of strategic nonviolent resistance.  I stressed that this three-word phrase meant far more than simple "nonviolence."  I asked them if they had ever read any of the books of Gene Sharp or if they had ever heard of Jamila Raqib or Marshall Ganz.  I asked them if they had ever heard of the difference between tactics of concentration and tactics of dispersion.  I asked them if they were willing to start reading the literature on strategic nonviolent resistance, and particularly on the methods of organizing a strike, a boycott, or a stay-at-home.  (One note about that last link: it leads to a webpage written partly by Erica Chenoweth.  While I greatly enjoyed Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, written by Chenoweth and by Maria Stephan, I must say that I did NOT enjoy a subsequent book by Chenoweth titled, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs To Know.  If you want my reasons for disliking that book, please click here.)  I told them that the use of mass protest rallies is actually one of the weakest methods of strategic nonviolent resistance, and that if they wanted to mount an effective resistance to Trump and the demographic he represents, they needed to learn the far more powerful methods of organizing economic noncooperation.  I told them that people who relied solely on mass protests as a tactic did not know what they were doing.  I warned them that people who only know how to organize mass protests can be undermined by the government if the government chooses to infiltrate the protests with violent agents provocateurs.  I ended by urging them to read some books.

They politely listened to my near-diatribe and graciously answered my words, yet I must wonder how it must have felt for them to be button-holed by a total stranger and lectured for several minutes.  If any of them are reading these words now, my deepest apologies for any heartburn I caused in you.  Nonetheless, I have over the last several years felt like the Cassandra of Greek mythology who was condemned to scream out warnings which were not heeded by her hearers.  Then again, maybe things are not as bad as I sometimes fear.  After all, tactics of economic noncooperation effectively drove Elon Musk out of his role as one of Trump's henchmen.  These tactics have almost bankrupted the Tesla corporation and are starting to hurt Starlink, which is another of Musk's businesses.  And things like these boycotts should be proof enough to my fevered brain that I'm not the only one who can come up with a good idea.  Still, like Cassandra, it's hard sometimes to resist the urge to scream my head off...

Repost: A Clarifying of Stance

Although I don't have time to post extensively right now, I do check my stats from time to time.  I have noticed how some readers have focused on posts which I wrote several years ago from an overtly pro-Russian point of view.  However, in 2016 Russia revealed itself to be a wolf in sheep's clothing, a toxic and narcissistic wanna-be empire run by a thieving little man in a bunker.  To understand how I view Russia now, please read the posts linked on the sidebar of this blog, particularly, "A Clarifying of Stance."  As for the pro-Russian posts, as they come to my attention, I am either editing them or making them entirely invisible.

Legible To Machines?

Here's another short post.  I have a Chinese friend who is a software engineer.  I think her husband may also be a software engineer.  Anyway, we have been having a friendly semi-disagreement about the capabilities and impact of AI on the future of industrial society.  (It's always a good thing to have friends who are willing to disagree with you!  This helps to keep your thoughts and conclusions healthy!  She also knows more about computers than I do...)  She sees AI as somewhat inevitable due to its rapidly increasing capabilities, although she recognizes some of the potential harms that may result from the increasingly widespread use of artificial intelligence (including large language models or LLM's) in society.

As one can tell from reading some of my most recent posts on precarity, I am a bit more skeptical about the ability of AI to take over a majority of human cognitive tasks.  And in re-reading (or in my case, re-hearing the audiobook version of) Seeing Like A State by James C. Scott, I've been wondering how much of the power of present-day AI is the result of our society having been remade in order to become more legible to AI.  Scott points out the many ways in which the ruling elites of past and present societies have remade their societies in order to make them legible to the command and control organs of the State, thus facilitating easier command and control of their subjects.  Yet these schemes of legibility have often had painfully unforeseen consequences.  How have major corporate interests made our society more legible?  How have their methods also facilitated making our society more legible to large AI deployments such as chatGPT and Gemini?  What are some of the consequences we are likely to see from this re-making and its resulting increased legibility?  I wish I could ask James C. Scott such questions, but unfortunately he passed away last year.  Looks like we'll have to figure things out ourselves...

Repost: Gantry Collapse

I must apologize for not writing a new post in a while.  Unfortunately, we in the U.S. are reaping the consequences of the curse that reads, "May you live in interesting times." This curse is commonly cited as originating in ancient China, but it was actually uttered for the first time by a British politician in the early 20th century.  (However, the Chinese do have the following deliciously appropriate phrase: 宁为太平犬，勿为乱人, which can be rendered, "Better to be a dog in peace than a man in chaos!")  

Anyway, the effort of dealing with national chaos (and its trickling down to the local level) has me quite busy, so I won't be writing a lengthy post in the near future.  However, I have been thinking about the current chaos as well as the architects of that chaos, namely Mr. Donald Trump and the Republican Party.  I am also thinking of one of the chief enablers of Trump, of the Far Right, and of Republicanism - namely, the white American evangelical/Protestant church and its subculture.  This is a church which claims to know Jesus, yet whose members hate their fellow human beings if those human beings are not American or white or rich or English-speaking, and whose leaders practice and tolerate the most egregious predatory sexual behavior - including felony-level sexual assault, pedophilia, and rape.  Reading the latest news about evangelical sex scandals and the culture which enables perpetrators to continue in the ministry made me think of a blog post I wrote over two years ago.  Therefore I am presenting to you the link to Gantry Collapse, for those who want a blast from the recent past.  Please note how that post documents the process by which religion used as a tool of domination eventually loses its power to dominate.

Non-Starlink Alternatives to T-Mobile?

It is heartening to see how much of the rest of the world is responding to the actions of Donald Trump and Elon Musk.  Several boycotts of goods made in the United States have sprung up, and these are growing.  Unfortunately, some of us may find that we are still beholden to the Trump administration and to Elon Musk, due to hidden dependencies in existing products and services.

Musk owns SpaceX which operates a fleet of Starlink communication satellites.  I just found out today that T-Mobile has teamed with Starlink to increase its phone coverage.  This is distasteful to me as I am a T-Mobile customer.  Does anyone know of a cellular or Internet service provider who has not partnered with Starlink?  If so, please let us all know.  In any case, I may wind up canceling one of my Internet access plans with T-Mobile in the very near future.  One thing to note: T-Mobile was acquired by Deutsche Telekom in 2001, so perhaps economic boycott pressure can be applied to other holdings of Deutsche Telekom as well.

Oh, and here's a message to Mr. Trump: you don't get to tell people that it's illegal for them to refuse to spend money on a particular product.  I can't see you sending your jackbooted cop thugs into people's houses to force them to buy a Tesla - especially when those people live in other countries.  You should be more careful when you run your mouth.

Effective Cures Versus Social Placebos

Today's post will be short.  我很忙，所以我没有很多时间！Anyway, here goes.

Over these last few weeks, I've heard of at least one protest that took place to oppose the new policies of the Trump administration, and there is a call for at least one more protest to take place sometime in the next few weeks.  I can definitely understand the anger and distress many people are feeling because of the revived Presidency of Donald Trump.  (Ah, Trump! To what may I compare him? Perhaps to a vampire that wasn't effectively dispatched - maybe the people who drove a stake into his last Presidency did not use a stake made of the right kind of wood.  He certainly seems to be a zombie revenant from a horror movie...)  However, hearing of the revival of mass protest in response to the revival of Trump, I feel the need to repeat myself.

So once again, let me say this: the use of mass protest in these days as a tactic or strategy of resistance is a very bad idea.  I say this for the same reasons I mentioned in previous posts on strategic nonviolent resistance.  First, mass protest is actually one of the weakest of the methods of strategic nonviolent resistance.  Protest merely registers an opinion - it does not have the power to coerce power-holders into taking the protestors' opinion seriously.  Second, autocrats and tyrants have by now figured out very effective ways of destroying the effectiveness of mass protest rallies and marches.  All these tyrants have to do is hire thugs and goons as agents provocateurs to infiltrate the protest marches in order to commit violence.  Then the tyrants have a ready-made justification to violently crack down on the protests and to move closer to martial law.  Third, it seems that too many people who have organized protests in the United States over the last several years have treated mass protests as their sole go-to tactic of strategic nonviolent resistance.  Thus the tyrants whom these protesters oppose are easily able to skirt around this one tactic.  Remember from my previous posts on this subject the lesson of the British strategic failure in World War 1 in the 20th Century - a failure that consisted of Sir Douglas Haig's insistence on daily frontal assaults for months on end in a war of attrition that Britain would have lost had it not been for the entry of the United States into the war in 1918.  Or, to quote Theodore Sturgeon, "...and when you see them do that twice in a row you know you got a one-trick fighter, which makes it easy for anyone who knows two, and I know half a hundred."  (Gene Sharp knew at least 198 tricks!)

The most effective methods of strategic nonviolent resistance remain those which have the following characteristics:

• They reject all forms of violence.  This includes sabotage and property destruction!
• They employ an entire suite of tactical tools, and don't rely on just one or two tactics.
• They are able to motivate large numbers of the oppressed to withdraw as much as possible from providing any economic or political support to an oppressive regime.
• They are thus able to impose serious, sustained, long-term economic and political costs on the oppressive regime.

The most damaging costs that the oppressed can impose on the tyrant and his pillars of support consist of economic costs.  To impose these costs, the oppressed must create  alternative ways of getting their needs met, both individually and collectively.  They also need to understand what constitutes true "needs."  We need food, clothing, and shelter.  We do not need to watch the Superbowl or drink beer or go to Disneyland or buy a Tesla or become addicted to consumerism or attend churches that preach American patriotic fascism.  Individual and collective self-reliance and frugality remain potent weapons.  These weapons must be deployed as a lifestyle of resistance by which the oppressed withdraw from a corrupt prevailing order so that they can build a righteous alternative order.  This withdrawal is what weakens the corrupt prevailing order to the point that it collapses.  This can work even against a chump like Trump.  Imagine, for instance, the impact of a sustained, long-term stay-at-home strike or a sustained, long-term mass boycott of certain consumer goods sold by businesses that support Trump or that benefit from his policies!

So if you are a reader of my blog, and you want to join a righteous resistance, and you think I may have something good to say, please read my previous posts on strategic nonviolent resistance.  You can find links to them in the sidebar.  Thank you!