WPenner's Blog

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Reading Al Simon² this week, he talked about the difference between "magic" and "magick" where magick (with a K) is a set of techniques for sending intentions into the world and receiving feedback using symbolic actions as a signal to the subconscious brain. Magick, in this sense, is an excellent description of the war fighting going on in Ukraine this year.

For centuries, armies have drawn up lines of combatants and then done their best to slaughter each other. Guerrilla warfare, recently called asymmetric warfare, changes the calculus of war by using small, hidden forces to attack a larger enemy. Zhan points out that for defending a territory, this is an ideal strategy³.

Zhan's observations about the tactics in use go beyond the conventional, however. He describes the conflict as a beta version of a metaverse war. Defining the metaverse as an extension of the real world where gamification occurs leads to the observation that public participation is a feature of the new style of war.

"Public participation through gamification in the conflict" requires some examples to understand the change, and Zhan provides two. There is a fellow in Chicago selling Lego figurines of Zelenskyy to fund the war -- a lone individual engaged through gamification, leveraging the power of the network to raise money for a nation state. A rumoured app allows citizens to snap pictures of Russian troops to provide real-time location and other tactical information to the Ukrainian military command -- lone civilians engaged through gamification, leveraging the power of the decentralized network to collect actionable intelligence.

These tactics work together to create decentralized but networked victories in which real objectives are met: fund the war, find and destroy the enemy. Increasing the number of sources of funding to the nearly infinite creates an attack surface that is unassailable, unlike Russian funds which have been frozen virtually unanimously. Increasing the number of intelligence assets to nearly infinite means that, from the enemy's perspective, they are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. They also create strategic victory in the sense that they expand the possible future options for action⁴.

Today, these tactics work by the Ukrainian military command sending their intentions through symbols into the ether of social media and other networks. These networks are like the subconscious of the Internet in the sense that Zelenskyy's communication officer does not know who will respond or in what way. The return is action and feedback in line with (but not exactly like) the original intentions. In other words, "magick".

This will only work as long as the invisible rulers of social media determine Ukraine is part of "the good guys" and Russia is part of "the bad guys". Should that opinion change, the opaque and intentionally obscure rules of the major platforms will allow de-platforming without due process or transparent appeal. Anonymous officials mete out "Justice" like a cop shooting and leaving the victim as a warning to others. Because the nature of the warning is completely opaque, though, nobody really understands what it's a warning of. The ultimate result is an increase in terror. Which makes such warnings far more "Stalin-esque" than not⁴.

Does this mean that Musk should buy Twitter? Or does it indicate that global platforms like Twitter are on the downswing and that decentralized platforms will eventually take their place? If the latter is the case, the effort necessary to duplicate Ukrainian results will increase with the proliferation of networks that must be engaged to share one's intentions.