Power

"Information isn't power, power is power" - Sersi Lannister. 

(I must have started writing this before the final seasons of this aired as it seems wildly uncool in my reviewing of it!)

The concept of power fascinates me. It is ethereal, we intuitively know it when we see it but we struggle to accurately describe it. We seem to have left the analysis and study of power relatively well alone, the definitions remain imprecise and I put this down to a lack of need based on our ability to spot it when it is relevant as well as it being a purely contextual thing. There is hard and soft power but again, this is a contextual description of the interaction of states and governing bodies. You could certainly use hard and soft power to describe a situation between individuals, it might be less appropriate but generally you would be understood. Hard and soft power are still vague descriptions of power that require us to use our innate understanding of it to be able to appreciate what is going on. In physics power may be applied in many contexts however the building blocks that contribute to the power are the same, time and energy. I want to probe into the nature of social power to see if there are any building blocks so to speak. I want to reduce power down to its base components to see if that yields new insight or better understanding.

If I had to define power in a human context I would say it is the ability to impact the outcome of events to align with your desires. The more things you make happen that you wanted to make happen the more power you have. We can apply this to some very mundane situations. I want to drive to the shops because it is quicker and easier than other methods and I can do so because I have a car. My car gives me power. You could argue it was the money that bought the car which was the source of my power. What about when my car is at the garage? I still paid the money for it but I don't have access to the power it usually affords me. In my mind I am of diminished power when my car is at the garage.

Really I want to just teleport to the shops and back or imagine what I want and have it appear in front of me much like the people in Star Trek. These I cannot do and not because my transporter deck and replicator are at the garage or that I lack the funds to buy such things. I cannot do it because it isn't presently possible to do either of those fun fiction things regardless of the funds at your disposal. Money gives a lot of power but it is capped. With these simple pair of thought experiments we see that money cannot be a building block for power. A better analogy might be that of energy and electricity representing power and money respectively. Many of the things we use energy to power in our day to day lives runs on electricity. We convert other sources of energy into electricity so that it is easy to divide, distribute and transfer it. We use money rather than barter because it is a more efficient mechanism to distribute goods and services. Without this social agreement to respect the exchange value of money it would afford you no power at all in much the same way that a battery will afford you no energy without an appliance to use it in.

Although money is not a building block of power it is certainly a carrier of power, again going back to my analogy, much like electricity is a carrier of energy. This means that the things which generate you money within society are themselves some of the building blocks of power. Money is quite a good place to probe as it crosses all the various scales of power within society. Money is the same whether you are talking about nations, religions, large multinational companies, groups of activists, small local businesses, families or groups of friends. The quantities will differ but that is all. The higher up you go on the scale the more relevant money is, nations and businesses must consider it at all times but for fortunate families and groups of friends it should be almost irrelevant when considering the power dynamics at play.

The many possible scales at which power may be considered makes it further complicated. The power struggle between two individuals will be able to take on a variety of forms given the situation. Compare a mugging to a choosing of which particular pub to go to that evening. Both will be resolved in part based upon the power of the individuals in question but the methods and forms of power will be radically different. These one on one interactions are again wildly different from those between nations. Not only do you have the power interactions between entities at the same level but you have all the possible interactions between levels. Individuals against companies, nations against religions, families against nations. Finally, to make it all near impossible we have the reality of it all being one interlocking web of power interactions. All entities at all levels in relation to all others in an ongoing struggle to retain and gain power. A very similar mechanism to those at play in capitalism and evolution but general and universal. 

Maths is very easy when you have two things affecting each other. We can very accurately and simply describe the most basic atom with one proton and one electron interacting with each other. As soon as we try and throw more particles into the mix the maths becomes very hard and knowing what is likely to happen is much harder to predict. Even if we were able to map out the exact components of power we would not be able to use it predictively. The reasons are two fold, as with the three or more particle atoms, it is chaotic. Power also relies on using it, you can have loads of power and make bad choices and come out the worse for it. It is much like economics, you have to assume people do things in their own best interest which will work a lot of the time but not exclusively. As much of a science we might want to make of it the outcomes of power rely on human choice and so it can never be exact. The tides of power can be fickle like our stock markets and they can also be unpredictable and chaotic like our weather patterns. When talking about the expected results of a power dynamic they should be discussed in terms of probabilities and ranges at best.

We need to look at knowledge and information before moving on. Both are relevant to power and both are related to facts. I define information as time dependent facts such as Mr Bond is in Paris or the exchange rate is 0.71 £ on the $. These things are facts at the time but offer no assurance of remaining that way. Knowledge is immutable, it is facts that are not (or we generally believe to be at least) time dependent. The circumference of a circle is found by multiplying pi by its diameter or that aspirin is toxic to cats would count as knowledge rather than information. Both can be equally empowering but do nothing at all alone. You have to use to information or knowledge you have in order to gain power. The main distinction between the two is that you must use information before it expires which at least is a help in showing you how to use it! You also have to have either knowledge/information that your competition has not got or is unable to make use of.

Commonly it is stated that knowledge and information are power, this may hold more truth to it than any claims about money being power but it still isn't the whole story. A better way to look at them would be as a power multiplier. You have to already have some power in more tangible forms so that you can use your information and knowledge to increase that previous power. I play a lot of games, much of the ideas of power can be equated to games. Information is a great resource in games, it lets you make better plays but there are two common problems with it. Firstly, if you don't have sufficient other resources that the game revolves around then you can't do anything with that information. Alone it is useless. The second problem with information is the skill level, in a new game that I don't yet play well gaining information is of little value because I am clueless how to implement it even if I have the other resources to do so. The games I am best at are the ones in which I can best use information to gain advantage.

In game terms my power would roughly equate to my in game resources multiplied by my skill at the game and some number representing my level of information in the game. As such, with no skill or information my power is just my resources. A gain in information and no skill and my power is still my resources, I need to gain both skill and information together before I am able to increase my power level beyond that of just my resources with information and knowledge.

This leads to another property like information or knowledge that is ethereal yet relevant to power and that is intellect, skill, guile, willpower, confidence, or whatever you want to call it/them. It is another power modifier that can increase your power level but only does so if you have real sources of power to begin with. Essentially it a way to fudge the numbers so as to reflect the nature of human choice in power. All it is really saying is that if you want something more or are clever about how you obtain it you have better odds of getting it than the indifferent or thoughtless.

I have lumped these things in together because they feel mathematically similar to this problem. In practice willpower is often at odds with intelligence. You are confident in a situation which gives you power but your confidence comes from a lack of understanding the situation at hand properly, for example. This is not to say they are always at odds, you can be both stupid and pessimistic or smart and confident, although in the latter case less commonly in the face of poor odds of success! For a more comprehensive outline of power we should separate out willpower and intellect. Far more so than the separation of information and knowledge. This gives us three things of our own character that do not directly provide power but all of which scale with power. Those roughly being grouped into information, intellect, and willpower.

So knowing lots of things, being confident, and being smart will make you more powerful provided you have some tangible power. This is where we look back to money to show us what tangible power might be. In the board game analogy we are looking for the resources, the things you use to do the things with! I have found four broad groups which seem to contain all these resources. I have called these work, influence, might and material. Typically they are tangible and external unlike the three modifiers but they do not seem to fall within any strict parameters to help with definitions. Changing the scale of which we look at the power dynamic has a huge impact on the "resources" used to enact the desired changes.

While almost all decisions will be formed from some basis of knowledge, intellect and willpower not all actions require all of the four groups of tangible power. Some are entirely left out and others are pretty negligible when compared to others in other situations. This is where the context comes into play so heavily. 

Material power is the easiest to understand and relates most directly to the board game comparison. How long you can carry on driving without needing to stop to fill up is a power afforded to you by how much you have left in the tank. How much food you can prepare for dinner is contingent on your access to ingredients. How much of a sandbag wall you can build in a flood situation will at some point be capped by the quantity of sand. This is all again very context dependent. When events are time critical it may not be about how much sand you own but how much you have available at the location that will be useful within the time frame. For the less time critical elements you will find economics simply taking over. Money is a nice simple way to represent the acquisition of the required materials and their transportation to the place they are needed.

Work is the next easiest to grasp. It is simply the ability to do the thing. You have the ingredients for dinner, the knowledge of how to make it, the will power and intellect to do so but you still have to put in the work and actually make dinner. You cannot just will it into being sadly. You can pay others to make your dinner for you. That is an alternative but it still requires work and you still need to obtain that work in some way. Conventionally we use money to obtain work from chefs in restaurants! We also use money to buy machines that increase our own capacity to achieve work. Historically there was a lot of work obtained via duress. These days it is mostly mechanical work, hired work, or good old fashioned doing it yourself. Usually some combination of these things. The improvement to our tools has been one of the most significant factors in the increase of power our species has enjoyed. It has been continuous improvement to our pool of knowledge however that has facilitated our improving tools. 

Next up is might. This is typically the relevant power when the rule of law is not being followed. This ranges from the mugging in the street to the wars between nations. Often the motivations are to increase ones economic position but not always. Greater might can be obtained with an investment of work or the procurement of tools. Money can play a role in the lead up to a conflict but for any given conflict at any given moment finance is not relevant, it is just about who wins in a fight. This is why you tend to find people unafraid of a scrap having more clout in social dynamics. It is a big part of international diplomacy too. Countries dump vast swathes of their GDP into their military so that at any given moment they are looking reasonable when the question of who wins in a fight comes up. If they don't do this and just sit on the money and don't invest it into "might" then when the question comes up it is too late. It is a form of power society mitigates greatly and this is a good thing. The power of might usually results in destruction or people winding up forced into bad situations. In many ways society is simply a power allocation and distribution system. 

Lastly we have influence which is the most ethereal of the types of power. Usually it is bought with the other kinds of power. You have influence because you have might or the ability to control lots of resources and work.  Alternatively clever use of information can obtain influence. Simple charisma can do it too. Influence is at a bit of a peak presently with the internet being such a game changer. Companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook and YouTube have vast amounts of power although it is broadly in the spheres of information and influence. Celebrities have more power than ever before due to platforms like Twitter and their considerable influence over fans. Not only is the concept of influence tricky because it is intangible and often linked to other forms of power but also because it delves deeply into the realms of psychology, which itself it not a solved science! In this context I describe influence as the power by which one entity can entice action from others without any promise, exchange, or coercion. One entity simply wants something done and others follow, be that for love, or respect, or some other motivation. At the individual end of the spectrum this is commonly seen in people copying or following attractive or successful people. You could argue that this was a bit like an exchange but the attractive/successful people don't have to give any thing away. It is like potential energy that can be used to power things without being consumed in the process. 

In the larger scale pictures we call influence soft power. It is a funny one because it seems at once both a result of others interpretations of your other actual powers in a given context and a quality unto itself. Influence is a bias for others in your favour and it is obtained by being liked or admired or by being in an enviable position. This makes it more complicated than the others. If we were trying to map all this power out as if it were physics then the core three physical sources of power, might, work, and material, would be the base units. The modifiers such as information are more like the unitless values in equations that just change the scaling of the values with units. Influence however is a derivative power made up from a potential combination of all three of the other base units and then seemingly modified by it's own unique unitless value that we can consider to be charisma, charm, likeability, respectability, desire to emulate etc. That can then be further modified with the other conventional modifiers like information. 

So there we have it, the seven factors that contribute to human power. Four direct sources of power and three factors that help you scale up those four direct sources of power.  Of the direct sources of power there are three physical ones in material, might, and work and then the more elusive, or even resultant, force of influence. Those four are then affected by the context of the situation rendering them anywhere from the only consideration to irrelevant, and then modified as per the relevant information, willpower, and skill. It feels as if it is too hard to measure many of these factors in general and even if you could, each situation where a power dynamic comes into play is sufficiently contextually unique that each would need a model constructing for it. For now it seems as if our own intuition in regards power is far better than maths, science, computer modelling, and all that new age jazz! A rare novelty. I am not really sure of the benefits of having mapped out this concept which most of us seem to intuit naturally. I mostly did it as an exploratory exercise for myself. There is no real huge insight here, I am just getting my thoughts ordered. My hope is that it will help  me understand and evaluate events in the world more accurately, easily and quickly. I find it fascinating how it overlaps so directly into strategy games all the way to man made systems like capitalism and also natural forces like evolution. Power and logic seem somehow linked, both directly, but also in that they seem to underpin everything else while having this hard to pin down and define quality to them. 

Cultural Conquest

I write this essay in the wake of the assassination of the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. I have some mixed opinions about the situation most of which are irrelevant as I am not privy to all the pertinent information. I cannot as yet say if it was a good call from anyone's perspective strategically or even morally. I have always believed that war should be targetted at those giving the orders. It puts the incentives in the right place and would presumably tend towards a reduction in casualties and waste, and most relevantly the choice to go to war in the first place. That is a general case belief that goes on the assumption that the hypothetical war was inevitable, ideally from the perspective of the just against some objective evil. If there is an alternative way to avoid a war that doesn't involve killing people there is a good chance it is a better line of action. I certainly cannot speak to any of this in the current case of Iran and if conflict was either inevitable or justified.

I am left in this odd limbo of knowing a bit about the specific context enough to have my ideologies confused and conflicted but not enough to work it through and come to any real conclusion. I find the provocations unsettling. Major assassinations are a great way to escalate things towards a war. Indeed if the sides were at all evenly matched this would be taken as a direct declaration of war. I find the subsequent threats by the United States about Iranian cultural sites should they retaliate to be abhorrent. That is not an attack on anything bar humanity itself and does everything to suggest that such actions are not taken by the side of the just. Targetting those at the top of military operations might be the optimal way to fight wars, destroying cultural sites is the certainly not.

Mostly what this recent event has made me realize is quite what a backwards idea conflict between nations and escalating it really is. It is actively counterproductive and incredibly short term. It smacks of much that is done wrong by capitalism and democracy in their haste and hedonism. This is most so the case for the United States who are in a fantastic position economically and culturally. Leading the world in both aspects means they do a better job of conquering allies than they do enemies. It is in their interests to have a world full of economically developed and stable allies. Such places trade with them, they use their products and make them richer and more powerful.

I would argue that the modern human in a western democracy has far far more in common with any other such person from any other such nation than they do with their grandparents and older generations. Indeed I would say that the western democratic nations 100 or so years ago have more in common with places like Iran now. We have changed and we have moved away from historic cultural elements. Not entirely and not evenly at all, I am talking on the large scale and in trends and averages. Democracy, capitalism, and especially the United States have become incredibly good at making things people want. From food, to gadgets to entertainment, giving people what they want is what the States is absolutely the best at. These commodities have shaped us and made those with access to them more homogeneous. The internet has sped this process up too. 

There are certainly subtle differences from place to place but broad strokes we humans like and dislike much the same stuff the world over. The more we mingle, trade, share and do anything at all with each other the more alike we become. It is not so much a case of American or British or where ever, it is a case of modernizing. We are leaving behind some older values and ideas. We should reasonably expect the people of the world to become more like one another as they mix and consume the same sorts of thing.

With this in mind it would make far more sense to remove trade sanctions with Iran. It would make even better sense to provide free wifi to the people. Free Netflix and BBC iplayer access. Low cost iphones. Get McDonalds and Starbucks out there. Much as I doubt it has a direct effect on the government it should have a more pronounced effect on the people which slowly indirectly affect the government in turn. People being much the same the world over are likely to embrace these things given the historic precedent set.

It is somewhat of a cultural conquest but it is a lot less arrogant than it sounds when you consider how quickly we have made the transition away from such things ourselves. It is not our culture we are attempting to replace theirs with in this cultural conquest. It is instead a new modern culture that is evolving. It is more like sharing than overwriting. The United States simply has a small head start.

Saudi Arabia is an example of a country where American influence is having a significant impact despite the different forms of government and ideological differences, mainly in the influence of religion on the governance.

This concept of cultural conquest also explains a lot about the tight controls on things like the internet places like Russia and China are attempting or enacting. I used to think it was an attempt to quell internal dissidents which seemed futile and ill conceived. As a means to prevent a cultural assimilation it makes rather more sense. Certain modern western values are not entirely compatible with how a number of governments like to act!

Now, I am not suggesting that a world full of consumerism and hedonism are a good thing. The idea of everywhere just being little America is pretty horrendous but it is vastly better than war or the persecutions of people by their own governments. A world full of Starbucks and McDonalds doesn't sound like the healthiest, physically or morally, but it sounds a lot more stable and peaceful than the one we have. It is at least a good way towards the global cooperation that is likely needed for humanity to take the next big steps in progressing the species.   

Certainly there would be plenty of kick back from governments on letting in external retail and media brands. You could encourage the companies in question negotiate with the foreign governments themselves. All the domestic governments need really do is offer subsidies and remove impediments for successful entries into the foreign markets and let natural forces do the rest. The BBC being what it is should just be free to anyone who wants it and who's government allows it. It should be better funded and more autonomous too but that is another matter! The US should be trying to get McDonalds and Starbucks into every nation, with appropriate twists to accommodate the culture at hand, be that certain kinds of meat off the menu or what ever. 

It just seems like such an all round win. No one wants to bomb retail outlets from their own companies. Why invest in missile defence systems that add little utility when you can just as effectively protect yourself with the companies of hostile nations. It works in all directions, would be aggressors gain compliance and alignment, and a bigger customer base. The potential targets gain a valuable defensive asset which in turn provides utility and employment to people. In even more simple terms it is applying resources in working together rather than working apart. 

In practice there are likely many reasons this is not common policy. For one it is only just becoming apparent how our use of companies and media align cultures. It is a slow process that operates over generations and as such is a little too slow to be an individuals goal or plan. Us humans like to see the fruits of our labours and so long term projects are less commonly found in societies, even less so in the policies of democratic governments with short term limits. I have witnessed the UK and the US becoming more alike over a couple of decades, accelerated with the advent of the internet, but they were closer than most to begin with. They are also still plenty different despite years of closer relations and exchange. There is every chance that such things would be a significantly slower process in more different cultures with a greater degree of rejection or required tweaking of products needed. Even so, we are not looking to make culture homogenous. That would be ghastly. Especially if it were a superficial consumerist US one! I am all about the freedom but I would like to see it used more nobly and productively. Ultimately I just think it is a good rule of thumb that countries should do their best to encourage homegrown industries to expand beyond their borders. We have a lot of protectionist subsidies and these would be far more productively used to incentivize global expansion rather than protect against international competition. 

The more ways we can interconnect and the quicker we can do so the better. We will be better positioned to tackle the problems of our age which are very much species wide issues not national ones as they have historically been. We need global responses to pandemics and to climate change. Anything that can help us see ourselves in the same boat as each other will really help us navigate that boat in the right direction. Things are clearly already going in that global community direction but there is a long long way to go and we can do more to help it along the way, or indeed in many cases stop resisting the change.