Wonderful as always Ashish. You did let slip the word we were not supposed to talk about in the section heading "The Two AI word we are not supposed to talk about" :-) and if course the title of the article but a joy to read as always
Ashish, this is brilliant — and the QI framing is really clever. The conceit mirrors the argument: you can't even name The Thing properly, and yet The Thing keeps shaping everything.
Your two-battlefield thesis has a Catch-22 nested inside it. A won in the physical battlefield so comprehensively that it eliminated the very officials required to certify the victory. You cannot negotiate with the regime until you have destroyed the regime, but once you have destroyed the regime there is no one left to negotiate with. Meanwhile, on your second battlefield — the narrative one — I is winning precisely because it has no internet. No internet means no counter-narrative to manage, no dissent to suppress, no TikToks of your own casualties. The blackout that looks like a weakness is actually an advantage: it forces all content outward, into A's information space, in A's idiom, for A's audience. A's government is producing memes for its own base. I is producing memes for A's base. One of these is propaganda. The other is warfare.
I tried to follow the Catch-22 thread to its logical conclusion in a piece this week — a Heller-ian satire in which sovereignty enters the platform era and the Board of Peace is rebranded as the Board of Pieces.https://rajeshachanta.substack.com/p/catch-26
Wonderful as always Ashish. You did let slip the word we were not supposed to talk about in the section heading "The Two AI word we are not supposed to talk about" :-) and if course the title of the article but a joy to read as always
I was wondering who would pick up on the “War” in the heading! And thanks, Sandip!
Ashish, this is brilliant — and the QI framing is really clever. The conceit mirrors the argument: you can't even name The Thing properly, and yet The Thing keeps shaping everything.
Your two-battlefield thesis has a Catch-22 nested inside it. A won in the physical battlefield so comprehensively that it eliminated the very officials required to certify the victory. You cannot negotiate with the regime until you have destroyed the regime, but once you have destroyed the regime there is no one left to negotiate with. Meanwhile, on your second battlefield — the narrative one — I is winning precisely because it has no internet. No internet means no counter-narrative to manage, no dissent to suppress, no TikToks of your own casualties. The blackout that looks like a weakness is actually an advantage: it forces all content outward, into A's information space, in A's idiom, for A's audience. A's government is producing memes for its own base. I is producing memes for A's base. One of these is propaganda. The other is warfare.
I tried to follow the Catch-22 thread to its logical conclusion in a piece this week — a Heller-ian satire in which sovereignty enters the platform era and the Board of Peace is rebranded as the Board of Pieces.https://rajeshachanta.substack.com/p/catch-26
You're welcome :)
Haha, loved how you ended your comment, touche!
Lovely post! Thoroughly enjoyed reading it - and I wish I had a way to disagree with it, but alas