Foolish Rebellion
What The Rebel can teach us about risk: Cyber State; Long Tail; Public, Private Identity; Intangible Future
Actual freedom has not increased in proportion to man's awareness of it.
- Albert Camus, The Rebel
Risk Developments this letter:
Cyber State
Long Tail
Public, Private Identity
Intangible Future
Rebel Risks
Albert Camus, famous for “The Stranger,” “The Plague” and “The Myth of Sisyphus,” is one of the most important writers of the 20th century and the father of absurdism. In the same year that Ernst Jünger published “The Forest Passage,” Camus published “The Rebel,” a long essay (or short book) on rebellion, revolution and art. Like Jünger and Ge Fei, Camus is addressing the problem of resistance. Unlike Jünger and Ge Fei, he had first hand experience as a resistance fighter during WWII in occupied France. He describes the philosophy of rebellion as, “a philosophy of limits, of calculated ignorance, and of risk.” Camus’ explanation and description of rebellion is both more cogent and better explained than Jünger or Ge Fei, and yet his prescription leaves much to be desired.
“The Rebel” is split into five parts:
a psychoanalytical description of the rebel,
a metaphysical exploration of rebellion,
a historical exploration of rebellion,
the similarities between and consequences of rebels and artists,
and Camus’ prescription.
In discussing his argument, it may be helpful to draw on one of Camus’ most famous lines, from “The Myth of Sisyphus,” which concludes, “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Breaking this line down we can focus on three points which correspond to the five parts of “The Rebel.” The first part of note is “Sisyphus happy.” Clearly Sisyphus is unhappy and this dissatisfaction with injustice and meaninglessness in the world corresponds to the psychological and metaphysical roots of rebellion. To “imagine Sisyphus happy” is to create an alternative, either through change in material conditions, i.e. historical rebellion, or creation of new worlds, i.e. art. The “must” is Camus’ preferred solution, and this is where he fails.
The psychology of the rebel is the identification with the victim. It is the observation of injustice and the risk taking to correct it. It is neither an act of egoism, although the ego may provide drive, nor resentment, which ends in bitterness or unscrupulous ambition. What would make Sisyphus, the victim, happy? It is not simply hard work that makes one miserable, it is meaninglessness and repetition of the task as well as the excessive punishment. In Camus’ metaphysical exploration of rebellion he discusses the role of Christianity in unravelling injustice and giving succor to the victim. If Sisyphus shares his burden with Jesus and will be rewarded in the eternal afterlife, his burden is easier to bear and is given both finality and meaning, but in such a sacred world, all such evils can then be excused and rebellion is unnecessary. This is why Camus turns to Nietzsche, who believes god is dead, restarting the cycle of rebellion and oppression.
When it comes to historical rebellion, Camus begins with the regicides, which ultimately lead again to deicide, but here Camus goes further. The early regicides, like the French Revolution were driven by rationality, disposing the divine right of kings. In Germany, rationalist thought progressed under the unification of Germany, the a new type of federalist government with the separation of church and state. Meanwhile, Russia began to tear itself apart, influenced by French rationalism through the lens of German propensity towards action. The early Russian nihilists pioneered the tactic of suicide bombing the Tsars. These revolutionaries risked everything, especially because they rejected any afterlife, to demonstrate ultimate rationality. Without the sacred beliefs of pre-revolutionary France or the realism of Bismarck’s Germany, rationality became an exercise in faith. The dogmatic adherence to the principle that nothing matters and reality is whatever we make of it culminates in terror.
From here Camus discusses the development of individual terror into two branches of state terror; the irrational terror state, under fascism, and the rational terror state, under communism. Returning to Sisyphus, we may say that to imagine him happy we have two alternatives, we can imagine Sisyphus taking revenge against the gods (fascism), or we can imagine Sisyphus subjugating the gods (communism). Fascism, Camus says, fails to be a revolution, since it is not unifying, but depends on divisions in society to maintain order through fear of the other. Here we come across Jünger, as Camus quotes:
… Ernst Junger, even went as so far as to choose the actual formulas of nihilism: “The best answer to the betrayal of life by the spirit is the betrayal of spirit by the spirit, and one of the great and cruel pleasures of our times is to participate in the work of destruction.”
Perhaps it is because “The Forest Passage” had not yet been published, or because Jünger matured and distanced himself from his early bellicose writing, but this seems to me a misinterpretation. Betrayal of life by the spirit is a good description of fascism. Fascism is the revivification of the sacred without god at the center, but the worship of the will to power. As Jünger points out, the only way to defeat the irrational terror state is o appeal to greater irrationality, that of divine individuality. The rational terror state, which Camus focuses on for the remainder of the chapter, has no such ethical reservoir to draw on.
The demand for justice ends in injustice if it is not primarily based on an ethical justification of justice; without this, crime itself one day becomes a duty. When good and evil are reintegrated in time and confused with events, nothing is any longer good or bad, but only either premature or out of date.
Here Camus makes the distinction between revolution and rebellion. Revolution is rebellion situated in history. “Every revolutionary ends by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic,” he says. Therefore, and this is where, again Jünger, Ge Fei and Camus agree, “art should give us final perspective on the content of rebellion.” This is because art, like rebellion, is a demand for unity, the impossibility of revolution and ultimately the creation of a new universe. The artist can imagine Sisyphus, enjoying his task and finding meaning in his punishment. Thereby the artist creates for him a new universe.
If this sounds absurd, that’s the point. Camus believed that by embracing the search for meaning in a meaningless universe, one could create meaning. He ultimately suggests a moderate path between God and history, between formalism and realism, between unity and nihilism and between divine right and state terror. This is why he describes rebellion as “a philosophy of limits, of calculated ignorance, and of risk.”
This brings us to the final point of analysis in “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.” It is evident, by now, that Camus, Jünger and Ge Fei agree about the importance of resistance, the centrality of the artist and the tenuous middle path, but Camus, keenly aware of the danger of serious nihilism, did not anticipate the more insidious danger of absurdism. It is the paradoxical “one must” that Camus stumbles over. Absurdism may be a coping mechanism for those in dire straits, but as anybody who has feigned laughter at a joke knows, mandatory humor loses its rebellious quality. The required criticism and self flagellation of modernity is no less totalitarian, just because it has a jaunty ironic pose, as Katherine Boyle points out in her terrific essay “On Seriousness”:
Camus could not have anticipated the total triumph of absurdism, and how in complete conquest it would become a victim of its own success. Here we are left, by process of elimination with Jünger and Ge Fei. Camus, brilliant in his analysis, but lacking in his prescription, is strongest when writing about art. He asks, “Is creation possible? Is the revolution possible? — are in reality only one question, which concerns the renaissance of civilization… Rebellion in itself is not an element of civilization. But it is the preliminary to all civilization.” As Jünger and Ge Fei point out, to create is to either withdraw from society or to do battle with it. Camus did not know how right he would be when he wrote:
To create, today, is to create dangerously.
Risk Developments
Cyber State
After repeated wake up calls in 2020, the State is asking for greater powers. NSA chief, Paul Nakasone, is requesting broader powers for the intelligence agency that is nominally prevented from collecting domestic signals intelligence. Instead of seeking permission to directly surveil domestic networks, he is asking for greater cooperation with the private sector. It is unclear what surveillance capabilities the NSA doesn’t already have through its private sector relationships, but it seems likely that there are gaping holes in both the information they can collect and the ability to use the information they already have. Closing the information gap without closing the capability gap would not produce the desired result.
Similarly, the Biden administration is issuing an executive order to make software vendors disclose data breaches to U.S. government customers. I’m more sympathetic to the idea that a customer should be notified if a product they buy is harmful, but both of these theories operate under the assumption that the main thing holding the government back is lack of information. The terror of cyberattacks can be used to justify plenty of injustice, so we should take these steps seriously. Perhaps the antidote to terror is not information or absurdity, but creativity.
Long Tail
Long tail risks are ill suited to modern attention spans. When Berkshire Hathaway’s oldest operating subsidiary, National Indemnity Company, which exploits this arbitrage, bought asbestos liability from P&C insurers, they created a complex and lucrative new market.
Cybersecurity breaches are also long tailed events, with it taking months, on average, to discover a breach and even longer to determine the impact. It was over two years later that Equifax settled with the FTC for its data breach and only last year that the Department of Justice indicted four members of the Chinese military on charges related to the hack.
So it shouldn’t be a big surprise that the SolarWinds hacks are still unfolding, now at the Department of Homeland Security. It appears that some high level officials had the confidentiality of their email compromised. Whatever the response may have been, DHS is one of the most cyber forward organizations in the U.S. government, so we can be fairly certain we haven’t heard the last of SolarWinds.
Part of what makes these events long tailed or not, is how the breach is handled. Insurance companies may have already figured this out, as major cyber insurance underwriter and recent hacking victim, CNA can attest. The most important cost control may not come before the breach, as most people assume, but after.
An example of what not to do has been provided by network and IoT device manufacturer, Ubiquiti. In a recent post by security blogger Brian Krebs, an insider claimed that their January 2021 breach was in fact far worse than reported. If there was a coverup and customer information was accessed, it could create much greater costs down the line.
While cybersecurity can never guarantee absolute protection, good planning, prepared employees and resilient systems, can greatly limit financial impact. In other words, “a philosophy of limits, of calculated ignorance, and of risk” is your best defense against the long tail.
Public, Private Identity
A lot of noise has been made over privacy and vaccine passports recently. New York State is rolling out their version, with help from IBM. With over $100B of economic impact, New York is eager to get the tourism dollars flowing again, so it makes sense that they would be first in the ring, especially making the passports free and voluntary. Optional vaccine passports do not need to be a concern for personal liberty enthusiasts.
A new transatlantic privacy deal is in the works as Europe and the U.S. continue to reset relations under the Biden administration. European regulators have been wrankled by American big tech, with a mix of legitimate cause for concern and some other more geopolitical objections. When monolithic organizations, such as governments or monopolies control information, that can be a recipe for disaster. Mike Solana of Pirate Wires, has a good writeup of the U.S. social media debate, which raises a good question about whether personally identifiable information should also belong to a protocol.
Google isn’t waiting for that day, but simply building a credential management system for car keys, house keys and identification cards straight into the Android open source project. While not a distributed and permissionless credential store, it is a step towards convenient, but sovereign digital identity. It’s easy to point out the fact that OEMs are still a point of failure, or that independent verification of Google’s work is challenging, but hopeless nihilism isn’t going to get us any closer to a future we want. Building just might.
Intangible Future
Whatever that future does turn out to be, we know one thing for sure, intangible assets will be a lot more important. Insurance broker Marsh is betting on this with new intangibles product leaders, one for digital assets and another for D&O. For at least thirty years, the economy has been dominated by software. This is such a truism that even the term tech has become synonymous with software.
Yet, the pandemic may prove an important turning point. The advent of mRNA vaccines was made possible by computer technology, and as the biotech revolution continues apace, we may see more gains from software leak into the tangible world. One area that is going to have to catch up in physical reality to make that happen is even more connectivity. Part of Biden’s infrastructure plan calls for $100B to bring broadband to every American. Now if only his plan was called something that implied less terror than “future proofing.”
Another intangible leaking into reality is the Prospera charter city project. We’ve discussed Franchise Owned Quasi-National Entities (FOQNEs) before in this newsletter, so the concept isn’t entirely new, but Prospera is taking an interesting approach. By building a digital community first and offering business and legal services, Honduras is trying to become a “tropical Delaware” or an American Singapore.
Gratitude
Big thanks to Katherine Boyle and Mike Solana for sharing your writing and ideas that helped inspire this post!