Progess on the Möbius Strip
A Mobius strip is this surprising topological object that looks like a ribbon but has only one side. It has strange properties like to be a non-orientable surface. It means that when moving along the strip you are not able to determine whether you are moving clockwise or counter clockwise. Moving without having any way to know you are advancing or going backwards may ring a bell isn’t it? What is interesting is how you build a Mobius Strip. It is relatively easy: a piece of paper and adhesive tape are enough. You just have to twist the strip of paper and attach it to itself to form a Möbius strip. The allegory of our media environment couldn't be more on point.
Towards a dualistic monism
When looking at a ribbon you can see that there are two faces. A Möbius strip also looks like that. But if you progress without interruption on the surface of a Möbius strip you will explore every inch of the strip without having to switch face. There is no need to jump from one face to the other one. It is done smoothly, almost imperceptibly.
Every resemblance with recent election cycles is not by accident. The infinite cycle looks like this: People are not happy with how things works. As a result a modern demagogue runs the election and pretends he will break everything down. Try Obama: the young afro-american star that was going to shut down Guantanamo. He never did and droned to death more than any previous presidents combined. Trump is the same: he promised to end up with the swamp only to get stuck in the mud of Russia Gate and not reelected. In short the swamp has ended him. Biden promised unity. Divisions in the political area have never been this marked. Similar stories could be told about Italian's prime minister Meloni. We will soon see what happens with Milei in Argentina. Every time that you promise to change everything, then things continue to evolve seemingly on their own. The descritpion given by Putin, so you can take it with the appropriate grain of salt, does not appear crazy off the bat:
I have already talked with one US President, and with another, and with the third - Presidents come and go, but the policy does not change. Do you know why? Because the power of the bureaucracy is very strong. The person gets elected, he comes with some ideas, and then people come to him with briefcases, well dressed and in dark suits, like mine, but not with a red tie, but with black or dark blue, and they begin to explain what he should do - and everything changes at once. This happens from one administration to the next.
The internet social media environment is strange because there are not really "behind the scene" anymore. Everything appears as being visible, just like there is only one side of the Möbius Strip. There is no other side of the story anymore: news stories are fact checked to death. Yet it looks like there are invisible forces at play. I wrote about that subject in a preceding post:
The discrepancies between what is said and reality seem to get larger by the day. How did we end up in an universe where anything doesn’t make any sense anymore?
Let's twist again
Just a little twist is required to build a Möbius strip. From there netizens may wander around the strip without being able to see the other side. There is more to this allegory than the one of the far side of the moon. Because you know there is a far side even if you can’t experience it. On the Möbius strip there is legitimately no other side. You may explore the surface for ever, it won’t change that fact. What was the twist ? The increasingly more intricate public private partnership and the rise of global internet corporations might be it. They serve one another this way: there are no borders for internet based corporation, they can impose their standards everywhere in a matter of seconds (think banning an app from the Apple or Google store). They don’t really care about legislation or anything. They just do things, more often than not faster than any traditional institution can react to. On the other hand global corporations have no way to implement force. At the end of the day it remains a prerogative of the states. States because of constitutions and legislation can’t act easily in the digital world. See : we have a win-win partnership. It was the social media platforms that banned Trump (it is not censorship if done by private companies right ?) not the state apparatus. On the other hand the FCC was recently granted new powers to regulate the internet service providers. The state can shut yourself from accessing your banking account because you protest, as shown during the “Trucks for freedom” protests in Canada etc.
In such an environment elections appear more and more irrelevant. The hard point is that it is not clear where the power really resides today: is it in the historical institutions ? in the corporations ? in their relationships (and so what does it mean precisely to talk about “power” ?). It bears more than superficial resemblance with distributed systems. In distributed systems it is hard to pinpoint where is the system. Is it on the client side or on the server side ? Actually it is in the combination and the dance between the client and the server that the system exists. Now disconnecting one node is not going to make the whole system to collapse (if it has been crafted with care). Said in another way: from the globalist side (for a lack of a better word) losing one election is at worst like a node that is compromised in a distributed system. The system is going to continue to work as if nothing happened (e.g. see how Bitcoin network quickly recovered from being banned by China). This is known as the “Byzantine fault” problem in computer science: until what proportion of failing nodes will the whole system continue to work properly ? Theory tells us that the theoretical threshold is 1/3. If more than one over 3 nodes is corrupted, then there is no way you can reach a consensus on what state the system is in. Conversely it means that up 1/3 the system, if set up properly, can continue to work. It surely doesn’t translate directly for political institutions but something along those lines might be. I don’t expect that the Milei experiment will bring a lot for this reason. At best he is one failing node. I see it more like the antithesis of the butterfly effect. It is not going to be enough to twist the ribbon another time.
Separation of powers
This idea that we are spending time looking for “the other side” of a Möbius strip made me realize that what were called “powers” are no longer what they used to be. The theory formalized by Montesquieu relied on the identification of three powers: legislative (edict laws), executive (head of the administration) and judiciary (interpret the law and assess the legality of citizen and actions). Our increasingly digital society is producing new kind of powers and make the older ones obsoletes. In my opinion this is why the political stage is at best useless nowadays: it is about something that is no longer existing. More on this later.