The Meaning of the Golden Pager

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Hey, hey, hello, pals. Welcome to my audio blog, Keeping Sketch. My name's Aoife. I'm going to be your host today. I have a degree in history in English, but most of my career I've actually worked in technology companies and now I work as an artist.

So, I hope you're comfy. I hope you're settled in. You got your cup of tea. You're ready for whatever comes next. For today, the format I'm going to play with is this. I want you to imagine that you're in the corner of an Irish pub.

And you're at your table with your pals and the people at this table, they are really close friends. The gloves are off when it comes to conversation topics. All those rules about, y’know, we're not going to talk about politics. We're not going to talk about religion - that is all out the window. You are solving the world's problems tonight.

Ideas are going to be flowing. Maybe there's some logical leaps. And of course, in our pub today, it's going to be a little bit one-sided because that's the nature of this format. You're only going to get my side of the spiel.

So that's the vibe. Get into that space. And what's the topic, though? What are we going to talk about in this pub? What compelled me to sit down today, which is the eighth of February, and to hit record for my very first time? Yesterday, I saw that Netanyahu had gifted Trump a golden pager.

And I have so much to say about this. Why is he giving him this little golden pager? Pagers is all Lebanon, but Trump and him, they're doing their planning on Gaza. So what's going on? I'll tell you what I think is going on. But in order to get there, we're going to have to go on a few detours first.

We really need to start thinking about all the latest geopolitical garbage bullshit through a new lens. And that lens is war, technology and nationhood and how these three are influencing each other and also rapidly changing before our eyes. And this is happening in a way that we haven't seen for generations. So if we start thinking about war, right, what we're seeing right now, it really reminds me of what was happening at the start of World War One.

So World War One famously mostly fought in trenches. you're digging into the ground, you're hiding in the ground, coming out over the top and then trying to like manually force yourselves forwards. And the other side is going backwards, ideally. So you're getting your barbed wire out of that. You're getting your machine guns out of that. But what folk may or may not recall, or might not be aware of, is at the beginning of that war, armies were still using horses.

They're still using horses in a war context, and they thought horses were awesome. They're awesome for stuff like reconnaissance. They're awesome for things like rapid movement or if you want to charge your enemy, it's kind of scary a big horse coming at you, right? But now, we're in a muddy trench. And which military technology performs very badly in a field made out of holes, which is also covered with barbed wire and enemy machine guns? That would be cavalry troops.

So what's wild is like up until that point, cavalry was still sort of seen as an elite force in European war. World War One changed the face of warfare forever. But especially for cavalry, they're going to be replaced. So they're getting replaced ultimately by mechanized alternatives. So we're talking about tanks. We're talking about armored vehicles, things like that.

So I think that is what you're seeing happening right now. But what's being replaced right now isn't a cavalry, but it's the need for a traditional, heavily staffed army. It's the need for having an army that's mostly soldiers. Instead, we're getting into this era where we've had so many technological advances that we've dramatically reduced the requirement that we have for human soldiers. And because of that, you also need a far smaller proportion of your general population to go along with you or back you or agree with you if you're the ruler, when you conduct a war. And that bit is my hot take.

So I'm going to expand on that in a moment, but I also want to talk about the role of technology. So you have this change happening in terms of the face of war. And of course, tech is behind that in a variety of ways. We're talking about drones, we're talking about AI, we're talking about different mechanisms that tech is being used within a war context. But as well as all of that separately, tech has enabled various virtual spaces that are looking more and more like territories, in the way that we traditionally think about territories. So even though these spaces don't take a physical space, they have certain characteristics which we consider part of maybe a nation or, a defined and distinct territory. So these virtual spaces, we can map them out. They have shared histories. They have individuals of note. They have their own groups. They have insider knowledge, insider culture, resources, wealth, rituals, language, economies, infrastructure. And essentially these are bodies of people who are bound together in some way and who recognise each other as a collective apart from other people. And of course, in terms of these new territories or new virtual spaces, they also come with hierarchies, with politics and with leaders.

So there's starting to be collectives that look an awful lot like what we would usually call nations, but they're operating in a space that is generally unbound by physical dimension or by state borders. This is why everything feels so stressful and crazy right now, is because we're getting blasted in the face, right? You're getting force one, which is the changing face of warfare, and then you're getting force two, crazy technological advancement, leading to new communities which are unbound by physical location. And both of these forces are building momentum and together pushing the limits of how we think of ourselves as a shared society in a nation and how we as nations can work together or against other nations.

So this is all very, very broad strokes. And I should mention as well, just in case it's not obvious, I'm talking from a Western perspective. I'm based in Dublin, Ireland. I don't speak for the world when I speak. World history is always going to look very different depending on who is telling the story and where they are based. But right now, from where I'm sitting, I can see that our ideas of nationhood and of international cooperation, and the norms that we've relied on, are being forcefully undermined. And all these lovely norms and all these lovely international agreements are cracking and creaking at the seams. So, that's where we're at. Let's just take a breath. Fucking hell.

You know, these ideas of nations and states and how we should all operate collaboratively and interplay with one another, it's all very new. Sometimes we forget that none of it's etched in stone and sometimes we forget that every agreement, every norm, every law, all of that don't tend to exist until it's thought that these things are necessary. And usually, it's only thought that these things are necessary after something terrible has happened. And usually that something terrible happens maybe a few times before you make the law.

When it comes to war in particular, we're used to a world now where we have some shared concepts when it comes to things like human rights, what is or isn't a war crime, ideas of “proportionality”, or proportional response to aggressors, an idea that civilians should be protected in general, you know, non combatants shouldn't be targeted in a wartime setting. And some agreement around what constitutes things like ethnic cleansing or genocide. A lot of this only came about after World War Two.

So let's take ourselves back again. All the way back. We talked about World War One. You're in your trench. You're starting off. Horses falling into holes, getting killed. We got our barbed wire. We got our machine guns. But I didn't mention another big development, which was aerial warfare. So for the first time, you got planes and they can be used for spying. They can be used for shooting. And just before World War One, Italy was like, wait. If we take a little bomb up here in our plane, we can just lob it out. Bomber planes. So for the very first time, aerial warfare is part of the picture.

And because of all of those innovations, World War One had an insane casualty rate for civilians. So you had obviously casualties in the military. An enormous quantity of people died who were military personnel. Depending on the source, it's going to be between nine and eleven million people who were killed, who were active military personnel.

As well as those people, you have between six and 13, because sources differ, six and 13 million civilians killed. So, if you take the top of those numbers, or you take the middle of those numbers, it's almost a one for one. You're talking about roughly for every soldier that dies, a normal person going about their business, not involved in fighting is also killed. This was unprecedented.

But World War Two. World War Two saw that destruction and it was like, hold my beer, babe. OK. So World War Two tech enabled destruction at such a colossal scale. We had never seen anything like this before in terms of civilian locations. So World War Two, you've got your military deaths, obviously going up. It's bigger. Military deaths, they're going to at least double compared to World War One.

But what happened to the civilian deaths for World War II? Civilian deaths compared to World War I increased more than fourfold. OK, so now instead of a one for one, one soldier dies, one normal person going about their business dies. In World War II, one soldier dies, two people going about their business die. And after this, Western countries looked around at this wild devastation and realized that with the technology and with the advances that they had, they realized how big and how scary and how destructive war could now be for the first time. For the first time, technological advance meant that we required international law. We required norms about how we conduct war that the majority of different countries, different nations could adhere to, We realized that we could get ourselves into a pretty fucking dark place pretty quickly if we didn't have some sorts of agreements. We couldn't allow the fact that we can physically do certain things mean that we will actually do these things.

Now that we can drop atomic bombs on each other or flatten cities in an hour or eviscerate full populations, we can't just sit back and allow ourselves to do those things, right? Because, you know, if you follow that to a logical conclusion, you will destroy the world at some point. A lot of these concepts, international law, conventions of human rights, international criminal courts, UN, it's coming through from this backdrop. That's not to say there was nothing before. The Hague, for example, predates this. There were rumblings so it wasn't just World War II, but World War II, that devastation, that really crystallized that need.

But what's happening now? Where are we today? There's this old quote that's very relevant right now, which is how do you go bankrupt? You go bankrupt in two ways. First, gradually. And then all at once. And that's how the world changes as well.

So the all at once bit, that's usually some unprecedented global crisis. And then everything is different forever. And again, this is my hot take, but I think now we're in a very brief prelude before the next big, terrible thing that happens. So in other words, I think we're entering into an historical cycle where unprecedented chaos and destruction is going to continue until the point at which the cost of resolving and rebuilding in a new way is deemed less expensive than the cost of continuing along that same path.

So World War Two brought us the casualty rate, like I mentioned, two civilians, one military personnel being killed. Israel is showing us that the next flavor of warfare will have a much, much higher ratio for civilians, and that's partially because you actually need less human soldiers to do your fighting. So that's going to bring us back to this Golden Pager, gifted from one head of state to another. That's where I started. I haven't forgotten about it. Why did Netanyahu give Trump a Golden Pager? What does it mean? What is this dance? What are we doing here?

Obviously the pager is a reference to what Israel did in September, which is they used bombs planted in pagers and walkie talkies to kill 42 people and injure 4000 people in Lebanon. They said they were targeting Hezbollah. And I'm going to give a little potted history here because not everyone follows the Middle East. I'm not some Middle East expert. So if I get some of this wrong, I apologize.

But, Israel has been at war with Hezbollah since 2023. Hezbollah is a multifaceted organization in Lebanon. So they were established in the 80s during the Israeli evasion of Lebanon, to counter the Israelis. But today it's straddling this line between being a political party with a strong presence in the Lebanese government and as well being a militant group, armed to the teeth, which is heavily supported by Iran and Syria. So Hezbollah has been tagged as a terrorist organization by a lot of countries, but at the same time, it's also entrenched in providing what we would normally think of as government services. So it's doing community services. It's running schools. It has hospitals. It has infrastructure projects. And all of this shores up support from the Shiite community in Lebanon.

To sum all of that up, Hezbollah have this political arm. They're operating what has been called “a state within a state” in Lebanon. And they also have this military, which is one of the largest non-state militaries in the world. Israel has been at war with Hezbollah, not with Lebanon, but with Hezbollah since 2023. And it's kind of like America's war on terror in that it's a war that's been declared by a state, but the war is against a body that's neither a state or a specifically recognized territory.

So that's the history lesson. But a while back, Hezbollah told their people, look, stop using phones. Israel's in our phones. Start using pagers, start using walkie talkies. And that's how we'll communicate now. But they didn't realize that the physical hardware, the pagers and the walkie talkies themselves that they used had already been intercepted by Israel and fitted out with bombs before they bought them.

So they were walking around with these devices with bombs inside of them unknowingly. Last September, Israel blew them all up. So when they did that, they killed 42 people, 30 of whom were connected with Hezbollah. But they didn't differentiate between the political party Hezbollah people and the militia Hezbollah people. They also killed two children and they injured four thousand people. Because when you detonate bombs at random, basically, they're going to be wherever they are. So, of course, there's a huge number of bystanders or civilians who get caught up in this and get injured.

Israel said, look, we believe that the type of people who use these devices are Hezbollah operatives and we're fine. We're just fine with it. We're fine with this inevitable collateral damage. Dead children, injured civilians, thousands of wounded normal people just in the wrong place, wrong time. Like that's grand. Whatever.

I was so amazed after this happened in September at the discourse that came after it. At least in my pocket of the Internet, my little world of podcasts and current events people, the things that were being shown to me, it seemed like everyone was missing the point. All these pundits were coming out and they were like, it's so strange how Israel did this. There's no strategic war reason for this operation, right? No important leader has been taken out. It seems very scattergun, seems a bit random in terms of timing. So people thought, maybe there was counterintelligence, maybe they realized that there were bombs and they had to set them off. They had no choice. It was now or never. Maybe it leaked, and so that was one side of it.

And then the other side, fucking hell, the other side were so amazed at Israel. They were like, guys, look what Israel was able to do. Isn't this so cool?! I have a direct quote from Politico, Politico said this act was “an extraordinary display of intelligence and prowess”. So, gushing reports on how incredible the Israeli state is to be able to get bombs into pagers and that they were able to disrupt the manufacturing flow at a certain point, get their bombs in undetected and when they feel like, detonate them. Incredible. It's stunning.

This attack for me, it was a watershed moment. And I'll tell you why. I'll tell you what I see, what I think that Israel was showing us in that activity. Like we said, it wasn't a strategic activity in terms of their war against Hezbollah, right? That wasn't the point. The pager operation was Israel's equivalent of marching their armies in formation across Red Square. It was a pageant. It was pageantry. They were peacocking. They're flexing at the gym. They had a message for us. They're saying we know systems so well. We have such good intel. We have such incredible technology. We'll get to you. And we don't need soldiers to do so. They're saying that our state can decide if a consumer item is the type of item that a certain type of “undesirable” might use. And if we decide that we're willing to use what you can call guerrilla or terrorist-style tactics to bug or to arm these devices before you even buy them. And not only can we do this, we've already done it and we'll do it again. And we could do it anytime remotely. And we could do it at scale.

So I'm Irish, obviously, and thankfully I'm young enough to be mostly peace process Irish, not active war in the north Irish. But I do still remember when I was a kid and I would see the car bomb sweeps in the news, you know, folk doing sweeps under the car before they started, in case it was rigged. And with the pager, what Israel said was the State can do it too. We can use the things you buy to determine the type of person that we believe that you are or the type of person you're most likely to be, which is not the same thing. And then if we want to, when we want to, we'll use that to destroy you. And nothing will happen to us. And that's what the pagers represented to me. And that is why he's giving this gift to Trump now. It's not about Lebanon, obviously, because him and Trump are talking about Gaza, aren't they? They're not talking about Lebanon.

It's representing we can do whatever the fuck we want, wherever we want. And we will. We will do it. The rules that these other people have that should govern normal activity, not only do they not apply to us, but we're going to systematically dismantle them and we're going to step so far across the bounds of what anyone has done before that we're actually going to reinvent not only war itself, but also aspects of control and aspects of the state as a force in the world.

So last year, Israel also worked very hard to remove the idea of collateral damage as something that the state considers at all during military operations. So this pager attack, which, by the way, Israel nicknamed this “Operation Grim Peeper”. All right. That's just one tiny moment in a tapestry of dismantling and degrading international law from Israel. But today, let's keep our focus. Keep our focus on the pagers. That's what Netanyahu wants us to do. That's what he invited us to do. So let's stay there.

And whether the people who had the pagers, who had the walkie talkies were politicians trying to do it in a better way, or they were military, that distinction didn't matter. If they were just people who were physically in close proximity to a pager, those people: unlucky. But why were they there? Why were they there? Why were they in the wrong place? They're trying to remove this distinction that there are civilian targets and separately there are military targets. Instead, they're saying anyone, everyone who's in a certain place at a certain time is seen as a combatant if there's a military operation going on.

Now, that's by itself not new, right? Since the Cold War, there's been a bunch of wars, a bunch of conflicts that aren't a traditional state versus another state, and that blurring of lines between active military personnel and innocent civilians. We've seen that a lot, unfortunately. But what we haven't seen, and what the pager is reminding us, is that the state can do it remotely. They can do it without soldiers on the ground and they can do it at scale. That was a warning in the pager operation.

So I've mentioned this whole pager explosion, it's pageantry. It's peacocking, it's flexing. It's a display of strength for the rest of the world to gawk at. And it's not random that the items that they chose to blow up were alternative communication devices. But we can talk about that in a minute.

So previous to now, say you want to go to war, you know, you've got your people, you're the leader, you want to go to war. You're to need a certain level of buy-in for your population, right? You're going to need a certain level of trust in a sense from your population. And if you don't want them to rise up or have coups or civil wars or just generally make a nuisance of themselves, you're to have to, you know, court them a bit. You want to be able to count on them if you want to raise an army and if you want to govern them, you know, appropriately, you do need a certain level of support. You need their buy-in.

But - another hot take from me - something that's changing and at least from what I'm seeing in the Israeli war, it's not so important to have as much buy-in from the general population, because you're less constrained by the size of your army. The next war that we have, it will have to have civilian targets because increasingly the size of the army in terms of physical personnel, in terms of people in the army, it's going to dramatically decrease. It's no longer as important to have that buy in from the general population because you don't need as many of them to build an army. If you have the tech, if you have the AI, if you have the upper hand in a certain way, you can have a smaller amount of people.

So one thing that's changing with the Israeli war is you don't need to have the biggest army. You just need to have the best army. So seeing as we are where we are, we have businessmen running America. We can use business terms. So let's call it your competitive advantage. And if you want to have your competitive advantage, you don't need to have the best software or the best hardware. It's what you know about how all these different things fit together, and what you're willing to do and where you're drawing the lines.

And Israel is showing us over and over again they're showing us this, right? There's nothing that Israel feel is beyond the pale at this point. And Trump and Elon, they're new to the party, but they're doing the same in their own way. So for the past week, American media and their pundits have been wringing their hands about this private citizen, how is this private citizen being given free rein?

And again, I think they're missing the message here. The message is there isn't a private citizen here. There are no civilians. There are no non-combatants. There are only people who are on the inside and there's people who are on the outside. You have a hierarchical society which is up and down, in or out. And you're working on sorting your folk into those various groups now, like some deranged corporate org chart. You don't have a sense that there's civilians and then there's officials. Everyone is or could be a potential target, a potential risk or a potential player.

You don't need a general level of buy-in from the public anymore, because you can use guerrilla tactics against them. The Vietnamese, they won the Vietnam War not because they're the bigger army or the better tech, but because they knew the terrain the best. And that's what's happening now. There's a new terrain: the technological landscape of the world.

When we think of tech, often we think of it in terms of phones and computers, which is true. But tech is also supply chains and logistics. The container ship is technology. And the global economy is powered by that as much as by all those other things. Israel, because they know how the global landscape works, they know how supply chain and logistics work. They're able to infiltrate that in a guerrilla maneuver, to pop in their bombs, unbeknownst to the manufacturers or the purchasers. That type of activity is new.

Not that governments, again, not the governments have always been perfect and have never used guerrilla-like tactics or never been, inspired by these. But what's happened at previous times is they have been constrained. They've been constrained in their ability to utilize because of the concept of collateral damage or because of the need to manage public opinion. What's the public going to say if you kill a child? What's the public going to say if you blow up a school? What if somehow the damage is a hospital or a church or a UNESCO World Heritage Site? But if you don't care about any of that, the gloves are off. And you can go a lot further and you can do a lot more. You don't have to bring them along with you.

And as I said before, the other constraining factor when it came to war was the idea you need an army, right? Like you need people to follow you. You need people to physically be in the army. And when you say something, they go, yes, sir. And then they do it. Right. But Israel's got a message on that one, too. and they displayed that last September as well. So a few days after the pagers, when they had all our attention and were in that pageantry mood, they then released a video showing them killing a Hamas leader using a drone.

And on its way to kill the leader, it also killed four civilians. So once again, the message is we could come for you without soldiers. You know, we're not constrained by the limitations of army. Because when you think about it, if an army is mostly people you need people who are willing to fight or at least don't run away or at the very least, don't double cross you.

Then, when you go with this volume of people somewhere physically, they do need to be kept alive when they're there. You need lots of boring things like food, medicine, all that bullshit. You need field marshals. You're going to need medical corps. You're going to need folk who can set up supply chains to get all that shit into them. You're going to need cooks. And like remember Russia, they were really missing a lot of that stuff when they went to war in Ukraine at the very beginning, right? Because they'd not fleshed out that logistics side of war. They hadn't got the war operations side down, because once you get into the country, once you get far enough in, you can't just pop back home for dinner. You're going to need to feed your soldiers. So if you don't have a supply chain, you're fucked. But drones don't eat. They work all day. And if you don't mind using those drones to kill whoever, do whatever, you don't really need to worry about any of that shit.

So, yeah, obviously they have some requirements. You're going to need to charge them, maintain their signal, maybe refuel. Maybe they have cool tech, and you don't want the enemy capturing them and using it against you. But if you assume that they're relatively cheap to produce instead of any of that, you could just keep producing them. Just keep producing them and have them explode when they're finished. Done. Or have a base that's like a beehive, and then they just go back there and spread out.

And this execution, the fact that there was a video stream of this execution of the Hamas leader, Sinwar, Israel was sending us a very clear message. They were saying, if we can do this level of execution fully by machine, our only limitation now is the number of machines we can produce and our ability to control those machines on an individualized basis.

So this was a problem. Up until recently, very recently, the idea of controlling large amounts of drones, like a big swarm, that was a computing problem. It was hard. And it wasn't something that was easily solved. You know, you could imagine a person somewhere else who's got their little controller and they're playing a video game, but it's real life and they're controlling the drone. Or maybe it's a computer controlling the drone. But it was actually quite tricky. It was a very tricky thing to do.

But at the same time that Israel is, flouncing around doing its pageant, something else happened that was interesting. Eagle-eyed viewers would have noticed that that same month, a particular record in the Guinness Book of World Records was smashed.

There's a Chinese company who are a drone manufacturer in Shenzhen. And they put on an incredible light show, where they showed that they are now able to control 10,000 drones with a single computer. And not only did they say that this was possible, they demonstrated it with this beautiful light show, which you can watch on YouTube if you like. And they called in the Guinness Book of World Records so everyone would know it was real.

So we now know they have this new ability to control 10,000 drones with a single computer. And you'd be interested also to know that this company updated us three months ago, in case we were worried, that they can now do it with any number of drones. Fabulous. So let's go back to thinking about drones being used in war. You can imagine that it's a one for one swap for certain scenarios, certain situations.

I'm not saying there's never going to be any more soldiers or we're not going to have people fighting in wars. That's not what I'm saying. But what I'm saying is, for certain contexts and certain situations, instead of a human, you're going to have a drone. You can swap it out. That's why Elon and Trump are very comfortable that they can sweep aside any number of women, non-white people, LGBTQ plus people, all of those folk get out of our military, because they don't think they need the numbers.

They don't think that they are going to need those numbers where they're going next. And everyone's very confused. They're looking at Elon, they're looking at Trump. saying, how can you enact these policies? it's going to bring the US to its knees. Do you not care? Do you not care about the US? Why would you do it? Doesn't make any sense. But it does make sense. It starts to make sense when you stop thinking about the necessity of having a “bought in” population.

And you definitely don't need the level of public buy-in that we've had a requirement for previously to sustain the ruling class. A lot of things that we take for granted, in our world today, really basic human rights were really, really hard won after things that were big and terrible that happened. We as people, like as a people, we're given rights in exchange for political stability. So as an example, let's take the right to own land, the right to own property. OK. Which is a cornerstone of America. Buy something, get the title and it's mine now. I own this house. I own this land. This is mine. I own it. Can't get rid of me.

Can't get me off it, right? It's mine. And that's just the law. It's nature. It's natural. No, no, it's not. No, no, it's not necessarily the case. Everything is up for grabs these days. You could very easily imagine a world in the future where, of course, you got your land, you own your land, like except though these people, these people, they can't own land anymore. I know we say that they used to own the land, but they don't own it. It's not theirs. For them, that right to, the right to own property, it's rescinded. It's wrong. Gone. Executive order. If you think it's outlandish, if you think it's kind of crazy, literally, that's what's been happening for Palestinian families for decades. Their right to own the land that they have title for has been eroded piece by piece by settler colonialism.

So it's just an example. They're not going to go for that first. It's too hard. They'll go for other stuff first. But there's all manner of rights they can go for. They're going to go for them little by little and then all at once. The same as going bankrupt.

Like this ruling class, they're seeing a future where there's fewer jobs. They don't need so many people to be employed because the state can continue. The state can prosper without that. And that's already happened. So there was this economist in the 30s, Keynes, and he said, in the future, you're only going to have to work like 15 hours a week. Everything's getting more productive, the systems are working, the things that we have in motion, they're becoming more efficient and we don't have an infinite need for productivity and efficiency. There's a certain point at which, yeah, you got to do some work. Like there's certain things you can't automate, you have to do. But those things, they can be done in like 15 hours a week and then you can just bop around. You don't need to be working. But instead of, we shorten the working week to four days a week, like some folk have been talking about, or, universal basic income situations.

Instead any of that, which we could have done, we could have taken productivity gains, spread them out over a population, kind of balanced it out. Instead, we allowed an upper class to take the productivity gains and extract them and hoard them. That's why you have so many billionaires. They're not a natural phenomenon. But anyways, that's what we have. And for the general population, you still need to keep them busy. You can't have them sitting around having thoughts. So you need them busy.

And there is this anthropologist, his name was David Graeber, and he wrote a book which I love called Bullshit Jobs. His position was: we had the productivity gains. That's true. Like we are more productive. We are more efficient. But weirdly, instead of having more time, we're more busy. Why are we more busy? More and more of our work is completely pointless. And I think anyone who's listening, who has, in any way, a corporate or desk job can probably see aspects of that in their role.

Unless now, you have a proper job. There are still proper jobs as well. But the people who have the real jobs, the actual societally important jobs, jobs that are necessary, you know, COVID essential worker people, those people incredibly burdened. Instead of less work, they just have a bigger workload. They're getting busier. They've been really overstretched, and it makes no economic sense.

You have a group of people who do things that contribute to society, but those people are undervalued and overworked. And then you have a much bigger group of people who aren't contributing to society, but they move paper around or conduct meetings or whatever. And apparently there’s no limit to the amount of folk that do jobs like that that our economy would support. And because that makes no economic sense, Graeber argues that it has to be political. It has to be political that we allow this useless sector in the workforce to exist at all.

And the political reasoning is that you keep your population busy, you keep them employed,because people who are employed have a stake in society and ultimately they're less likely to revolt. You keep your population in check in this way. But in doing so, you degrade your society as well because, people aren't lazy. Most people, they want to contribute. They want to work. They enjoy feeling like they're doing something useful. People want to feel like day to day they wake up and they contribute to whatever it is around them. They want to feel like a part of their society. They want to feel like they are doing something in their neighborhood, in their family. They want a sense of purpose, and instead of getting a sense of purpose from their work, they're put in a position through no fault of their own that they have to do this bullshit that they know is bullshit. Everyone around them knows this bullshit, but it needs to be done because otherwise they cannot feed themselves.

And the psychological effect of that on a society is what he calls a scar across our collective soul. And he says society has essentially forgotten what society is for. So in general, I agree with his thesis. And when you look at Elon in particular and his philosophy when it comes to work, you can see he's making a big bet, which is I don't think we need these bullshit jobs anymore. I don't think we need to keep people occupied to maintain our power. We don't need them to be pushing paper around to stop them from rising up. He would prefer different ways of control.

So we know he loves a H1B visa. Who doesn't? Because if you're on a H1B visa in America and means you came from somewhere else and you have the right to work, but only at that company. So you have the right to work for the company that brought you on that visa. And if you lose your job, you have 30 days to find an equivalent job or leave the country. And people can be on these visas for years. They can have a full family who came with them. They can support that family. They can buy a house. But they're always got this hanging over them that if they lose their job, they have 30 days to get an equivalent one or leave. You do not have the free will and the usual choice that a person does, when they pick a job or they choose to work for a specific company.

Other ways that American folk were kept under control are through obvious ways, right? Education debt, insane. The spectre of health care, what will you do if you get sick and you don't have a job? Lack of any social safety net. People doing GoFundMe's because they were in a car accident. The rest of the world doesn't look upon that as business as usual.

So back to Elon and his ideas about you get rid of all these bullshit jobs. How can you control the population when you don't give them work to do? If you don't care, if you don't care about their standard of living, if you don't care that they're incredibly stressed, you don't care if they like you or respect you, you can still control people if you break them down and break them up. So you're going to have to break any natural areas of connection, you're going to have to break natural allegiances. You can show existing institutions are powerless. You can engender a sort of cynicism and apathy, a hopelessness in a population. And it's important that those feelings, even if everyone feels that way, it still should feel individual. It still should feel like it's your depression, your hopelessness, your lack of power, your lack of control. You shouldn't feel any sense of collective or any sense of society.

So if you're looking at Elon prancing around and wondering what he's doing, this is awful. I think what he's doing again, very much a hot take, is he has a hypothesis that he can essentially create a new indentured class with highly circumscribed rights. And that class can be I don't know, 80 percent of the population. And speaking of pageantry, Elon is such a pageant queen. We've seen his Nazi salutes, a lot of conversation again, why would he do this? It's him showing dominance, showing strength, baiting the public, impeach me, bitch. wait, you can't. I'm unaccountable because I'm unelected.

He's not a private citizen, but he's also not an elected official. What is he? Instead of looking back and thinking of old distinctions in this new world, we have new groupings, simplest of which is, are you an insider? Are you an outsider? Are you on the top or are you on the bottom? And Elon is just in and up. That's all he is. He's in and up. And if you're in and up, it doesn't matter who you are or how you got there, aside from that.

Another obvious aspect of his Nazi salute is he's also saluting the various folk who ascribe to his worldview and who are his fans around the world. He's saluting them showing himself on this world stage to be a leader at the level of the president of the United States. And he's recognizing his people. Because I haven't seen him being discussed in terms of an “extra-nation” leader. And by extra nation, what I mean is he's a leader of a people who don't have a physical territory. This whole new virtual world where there are tribes of folk who are prescribed to Elon dogma, who would happily pick up a gun and fight for Elon. He has an ability now to raise people and rise people up in whatever country he wants at this point. And he can use aspects of that virtual space to really fuck with the world.

So as an example, when you're online, everything feels immediate because you're reading it now. So you can read articles from five years ago and be incensed. I can't believe this happened. Then you read the date, and oh, this is kind of old. Everything's visible at the same time. So it does have that sense of nowness. Everything is now. Time is different. And he brought that into play in the UK recently by showing he was able to pull bullshit out of the woodwork from 20 years ago, and just set it to his nation. Off you go. And now you've got the UK government running around, pulling in oversight committees, building reports for something they had put to bed two decades ago.

Elon does this to show us again he can do it when he speaks, all these people who ascribe to his ideas, who are dotted around the world, those people act. And I think when people in America are looking at their row of tech oligarchs, they still only think about America because Americans love to think about America, right? And they're not fully understanding the level of influence that these individuals have, which is outside of America.

But it's also outside our traditional ideas of states and of nations. Like Bezos sat there, grinning in the front row. He knows all about us from Amazon. Grand, we've got our roomba mapping our house for him, whatever. He also has physical infrastructure. AWS, which he also owns, Amazon Web Services, is a company that owns data centers.

Data centers are where the Internet lives, right? So if you go on your phone or you go on your website and you want to see something, it doesn't just go up to a satellite, something, something magic, and then the Internet, the stuff has to be actually stored. It's stored somewhere physical. So those files, if you imagine them as actual files, they live in a filing cabinet, as an analogy. And so that those physical spaces are the data centers.

And AWS control at least a third of that for Europe. And it depends how you measure it. I'd be happy to wager if AWS just turned off, the European public Internet would not be having a good day. So if you are in Europe and you think all of this, it doesn't have anything to do with you. They have control here as well. And I don't think our politicians have really reckoned with the infrastructure of the technological landscape, the physical infrastructure, as well as the software. Who owns it? Who has access to it at both the nation and the state level?

Because we're getting into a world where this idea of nations is getting very different, it's getting very muddied and states that we previously thought of as “good guys”, “good actors” “on our side”, they're turning around to longstanding friends, like Trump talking to Canada and saying we're going to tariff you for seemingly no reason, and if those states are showing themselves now to be pretty bad friends, do you still want those states and the individuals who live and reside and abide by whatever those states are doing to be the ones who really control or can poke into your infrastructure whenever they like? And that's a very, very big question for Europe right now. Because our technological landscape is American, and America isn't looking great. And what are we going to do about that?

And I have one more hot take on Elon and his salute. Anyone who's tragically online like myself knows he did a salute, and everyone was like, my God, he did the Nazi salute. And then his apologists were like, guys, Nazi salute. Like, what even is a Nazi salute? You know, I think we can all see it's a Roman salute. Did you not know about Roman salutes? Everyone knows about Roman salutes. And I thought that was so amusing because, first of all, the Nazis famously co-opted the ideas of, Romans, Roman Empire into the narrative of Nazism to support their own brand of bullshit. But, let's take the Romans and Nazi Germany. What are they both centred on? The idea of empire. An expansionary idea. So both of these ideas of empire. They encompass many nations and Elon saluting in his Nazi way, or if you prefer his Roman way, what he's saying is we're going for a militaristic society here. We're going to be a war based society. We're going to be expansionist. We are going to drive towards empire as a core part of what we go to from here. And that was very clear to me.

Trump, of course, he's doing his own grandstanding when it comes to expansionism. And I did think about that when Trudeau came out and he was talking about what Canada is going to do now when it comes to tariffs, which obviously they've been putting off at the time of speaking anyway, they put off for a month. But Trudeau made a point that was so interesting and again, not picked up much, which was he put tariffs on the whole of the US, but then he also picked out specific States. And he said, these guys, the red States, the South, we're going to do a few like extra bits just for you. And essentially what he said was, look, we don't have beef with Washington. We don't have beef with California. But specific places where this is coming from, we're going to appropriately reflect that back.

And in doing so, Trudeau pointed out the US is a federation of states. We know that. But if we're going to be throwing out our conventions, we're going to be throwing out our rule books, that federation of states, it's not a given either. It's just another convention. The fact that America is America, that it has a certain number of states that only goes up and never goes down. You shouldn't take that for granted. And I felt when he specifically pointed out that the actions of certain states would receive different treatment, was pointing out that the federation doesn't have to be treated as a bloc. It can be broken up in terms of how other countries work with or against them. They don't have to be seen as a nation. They can simply be seen as a group of states that are held together by tradition, and maybe not going to be the case forever.

So I think we're in a new cycle. It's going to be generational, maybe the next 15 to 20 years. I would say it's really important to form community outside of purely online community, outside of the main routes that you talk to one another, because the golden pager - it's not only representing all the things I just said. It also represents leaders saying that if you try to circumvent us, you will not succeed. They're trying to say, if you're sitting there thinking, OK, I'm not going to use Facebook. I'm not going to use TikTok. I'm not going to use whatever else. I'm going to be clever about it. They're saying we're smarter than you. We're one step ahead of you, and we're going to get you anyway.

And that's the other message of the Golden Pager. It's saying you need to be scared and you need to be quiet and you need to keep your head down. And my personal opinion is you need to do the opposite of all those things, because if that's the way they want you to feel, it's because they're afraid of the power of the opposite. And that's it. That's my hot take.

I just don't see how you can exist in this world at this moment in time, have your eyes open and not talk about what's happening around us. If you did listen this far, thank you so much. I do give this freely. There's no paywall, obviously no ads. Who would put an ad on this? But if you want to tip me, go to my website, KeepingSketch.com. Thanks for listening. Come back again. And I will talk about something less depressing, probably in the future. But it is important to talk about these things. So Keep Sketch. All the best. Bye bye.