Two weeks ago we linked a piece called “Drones will realize the promise of suicide terrorism”, calling it “hopefully not prescient”. The premise of the piece was that there are innumerable soft targets in modern society, and the thing that has kept them safe from attacks is that (a) such attacks would mostly be suicide missions, and (b) it’s harder to recruit attackers when when you have to write “Willingness to die” as a must-have on the job description. Using Ukraine’s attack on airfields deep inside Russia as an illustrative example, the author argued that drones change that math:
But the threat of soft-target suicide terrorism never came to much, because a suicide bomber is a targeting system with an ego.
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But a drone is a suicide bomber without the expensive bottleneck in targeting.
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It will be expensive, but Russia can change some security protocols and harden its airbases. Both sides of the Ukraine War have demonstrated credible counters to drone operations against recognized military targets.
What the Russians can’t do is harden every mile of highway, every bridge, every dam. Neither can the United States, and — critically — neither can the Chinese.
Soft-target drone warfare will transform the global political order as profoundly as the stirrup or gunpowder.
The 20th century world was carved up between two gigascaled superpowers, and finally conquered by one, because there were insurmountable returns to scale: only the biggest boys could field ICBMs, satellites, cruise missiles, fighter jets, mass-media infrastructure, etc. — and those big expensive weapons systems were utterly dominant.
But a $500 drone destroying a hangar full of $150 million supersonic nuclear bombers is an existential threat to that whole geopolitical architecture.
Drones are a deeply decentralizing technology. But do they really increase a rogue actor’s ability to commit violence? The knee-jerk answer is “Obviously yes”, and that’s not entirely wrong. You can imagine acts of violence that can only be done with a drone. But that’s not really the issue. Since the invention of high explosives in the mid 19th century, we’ve been at a saturation point for the decentralized capacity for violence. Anyone who has wanted to commit mass violence, even without dying in the process, has been able to do so for all of modern history. Adding drones to the mix is like pouring a cup of water on someone in a swimming pool. Yes it’s more water, but you didn’t make them wetter.
The only thing preventing violence from being 100x the current rates isn’t law or technological blockers — it’s that people freely choose a better path. Vanishingly few people want to commit acts of mass violence. That’s what does almost the entire job of keeping us safe. Everything else — security, surveillance, laws, etc. — is just nibbling at the edges. If 100x more people wanted to be violent, there would be no stopping them.
What did the rise and fall of those lone wolf ISIS attacks look like empirically? I included only the Americas, Europe, and Australia in the chart below — the vast majority of victims died in attacks in Middle Eastern countries, but the scope of this inquiry is to see how a meme (in the selfish gene sense) translates into real world violence. In other words, how the ISIS meme translated into violence in countries where ISIS could support attacks largely only through ideas, not materiel.
The chart almost perfectly tracks the rise and fall of ISIS’s territorial holdings, on a trailing 6-12 months basis.
But why should that be? Very few of these attackers received material support from ISIS, and in fact for many of them, the only sense in which they were ISIS attacks at all is that the attacker pledged allegiance to the group. So this graph could mostly be titled, “Loners who rent a truck or get a gun or make a bomb, shout something about ISIS, and then kill people: 2014-2019.” People are no less able to do that in 2019 than they were in 2015, or 2005 or 1995 for that matter. In most cases, ISIS’s contribution was just the awareness that this is a thing that one can do. And there’s no reason that would have changed from 2014 to 2019. The internet still exists, people still post pretty much whatever they want, and information spreads anarchically.
Actually, though, I glossed over an important nuance: “ISIS’s contribution was just the awareness that this is a thing that one can do.” I think that may be a lot more powerful than we think. The declaration that hey, this is a thing. If you are part of this, you are part of something.
Contrary to popular belief, the people who commit mass murder aren’t necessarily mentally ill, at least not in the sense of having a diagnosable condition. Some do, but most don’t. So that’s not the common thread.
What is a common thread is that they are almost all frustrated losers. The anguished virgin. The disgruntled husband who explodes and kills the extended family. The racist killing the outgroup that he feels is threatening his ingroup. The religious zealot doing the same. And, for that matter, the impoverished high schooler who kills a classmate after school over some trivial slight, or the husband who kills his wife — both of which, awfully, happen hundreds of times more often than mass shootings.
The shape changes but the mass stays constant: a hopeless loser who feels like he or his group are losing, thinks he spots who’s to blame, and decides he’s going to show everyone that damn it, he’s not the loser that you (and, subconsciously, he) think he is.
This mental model does a lot better at explaining the decline in ISIS-inspired attacks. Roughly nothing has changed in terms of people’s ability to carry out such attacks. So what must have changed is their desire. Now that ISIS isn’t on the upswing, nobody wants to join a losing team.
“Joining” them no longer gives people “See, I’m not a loser” validation. Because now, to join them is by definition to be a loser.
ISIS attacks charted a course from “technically possible but culturally unthinkable” to “actually happening” and then went back to being culturally unthinkable. With zero change in feasibility at any point.
Applying this to guns, you get to a surprising result: all misuse of guns lives in this “technically possible but culturally unthinkable” zone. The reason it’s surprising is that history tells us all your impact will come from focusing on the “culturally unthinkable” part — but gun laws focus exclusively on the “technically possible” part. Rather than focusing on making misuse culturally unthinkable, the focus is on making it technically impossible. Empirically, the history of making something that’s technically possible and ubiquitous into something that’s technically impossible and rare is … not a successful one. But not everybody agrees about that, at least at an emotional level. You could summarize disagreement over gun rights as a disagreement about whether it’s more effective to focus on making violence culturally unthinkable or technically impossible.
Talk about drone regulation will mirror the themes you’re familiar with from gun regulation. Especially if someone commits an act of random violence with a drone. That will be ironic, because while drones don’t change the game for individuals’ capacity for random violence, they are transformative for government violence.
Government violence slips by unnoticed all the time when one person is the target. The brake on it has always been that there’s an activation energy to the backlash. If government violence impacts enough people quickly enough, the people push back. The only way it works is if it’s ramped up slowly and/or if most people can tell themselves “Well they came for that guy, but I don’t have anything to worry about.”
Drones make that much easier in lots more situations. It’s now technologically possible to come for a lot of individuals without rattling anyone else.
The cutting edge of state empowerment technology in 2024 is a system that can do the following:
Complete government surveillance of all electronic activity within a territory, and real-time 24/7 location data on all cell phones.
Use the data from #1 to assign every person in the territory a score.
Automatically kill them and their family when their score crosses a threshold.
Lower the threshold as desired, to use up a target quantity of munitions.
Gun rights advocates get mocked for imagining the far-fetched ways that a social credit system, or even the basic power to subpoena cell phone location data, could play out. [But these capabilities are] not only possible, they’re deployed in the wild today. So there’s no longer a question of what a government can do with this data. It’s only a matter of which governments do it.
Summary executions are hard to imagine domestically, at least en masse. But arrests aren’t. Surveillance isn’t. Recon isn’t. These things are easier to pull off without raising a fuss if you can do them to someone without, well, raising a fuss. Drones make that easier for governments.
Drones are still a decentralizing technology, if they’re allowed to be. But they are government empowerment tech if only the government can have the good drones.
The tax stamp/ atf stupidification rules only apply to law abiding citizens. Are not now, nor ever have been, any part of any problem!
AND
None of the unconstitutional stupid ATF rules even apply to criminals! Never will! That's why they are called criminals! And most of the ATF stupidification rules are ridiculous. Example- use one too many foreign screws on a gun, and you become a criminal!
The tax stamp/ atf stupidification rules only apply to law abiding citizens. Are not now, nor ever have been, any part of any problem!
AND
None of the unconstitutional stupid ATF rules even apply to criminals! Never will! That's why they are called criminals! And most of the ATF stupidification rules are ridiculous. Example- use one too many foreign screws on a gun, and you become a criminal!
Men will be governed by the strength that resides within them or by an external force. Either through scripture or through force.
Almost every man can endure hardship, but to truly evaluate a man's character, grant him power.