Of Coin, Cannon and Code
An anatomy of the three engines that quietly govern the modern world: its money, its wars, and the rules by which it is taught to consent.
It is a familiar sort of platitude, repeated nightly on the cable channels and weekly in the newspapers, that the world is governed by the people whose photographs hang in its embassies. The duller and considerably less photogenic truth is that the world is governed by a layered, largely nameless, and entirely transnational stack of capital, whose operating system was drafted in a London coffee house in 1694 and has been patched, with full ceremony, at intervals ever since.
The mechanism was elegant in the way that all confidence games are elegant. Every pound henceforth issued came into circulation as a debt; the interest owed on that debt was nowhere present in the money supply, and could therefore be serviced only by the issuance of further debt. A system whose continuation depends upon the indefinite expansion of its own liabilities is, in the language of any honest accountant, a pyramid.
Once one accepts that money, weapons, and code now operate as a single coordinated stack, the architecture of the modern world becomes harder to mistake for the architecture of the modern state. There is the state for which one votes. There is the system one funds. They are not the same building, and they were never meant to be. The chapters that follow are a tour of the latter.