April 10, 2025 — In one short year, the reborn red political network has:
- taken over the Republican party,
- neutralized the legacy media,
- and thoroughly disrupted the blue political network that controls the Democratic party.
It’s proven it can wage an online political war and win, but now comes the hard part. Can it govern? Four years ago, the blue network faced the same situation. It put a candidate who mailed in his campaign into the White House and the red network was in tatters (particularly after Jan 6th).
However, a mere four years later, the blue network is shattered and out of power; a failure caused by flaws in how that network made decisions. Is the same fate in store for the red network and if so, what are these flaws?
A Venn diagram of the two predominant political parties in the US doesn’t yield much crossover and even less in common.
We’re in the midst of trying to find a way to integrate networked decision-making into our system of societal governance.
- The development of the printing press changed the way we think (at the neural level), and by extension, it changed the way we govern ourselves.
- Over time, we developed three types of decision-making; bureaucratic (gov’t and corporate), market (financial, economic, and elections), and tribal (converted to nationalism); combining them into a functional, systemic whole. It was a turbulent process of trial, error, and disaster (the implosion of two failed systems, Communism and Fascism, in the 20th Century are a case in point).
- Now, we’re adding networked decision making to the existing mix using two political networks (red and blue). Each network has their own way of making decisions and have the potential to become invaluable to how we make decisions, but they so new, they are filled with flaws and dangers. Don’t confuse this newness for weakness though. These networks have proven so powerful, it took less them than a decade to dominate our societal decision making system.
With this in mind, let’s dig into how we got to where we are today.
How Political Networks Evolve
The red and blue networks aren’t changing incrementally. They are undergoing a rapid process of evolution; birth, death, and rebirth (in a stronger configuration). The competition between them and the relative lack of friction in forming networked organizations, is driving this process forward at a torrential pace. Let’s use the evolution of the red network as an example:
- Back in 2016, the red network was a decentralized open-source insurgency held together by a simple goal (put Trump, a weapon of mass disruption, in the White House).
- Its extreme decentralization made the insurgency nearly impossible to suppress (the establishment tried) and its open source dynamic — Anyone could join in. Anyone could contribute. Successes were copied and amplified. — made it far more innovative than the establishment they were at war with.
- This combination of strengths made it possible for the red network insurgency to take over the Republican party, overload the Democratic party, and place Trump in the White House in less than a year. However, that’s when things went sideways. Due to the way they work, open source insurgencies have a fatal flaw. They fall apart when they achieve their goal; in this case, when Trump won, the insurgency faded, leaving him to govern alone.
Four years of blue network rule later, a newly evolved red network emerged to put Trump into the White House and shatter the blue network.
- The red network in 2024 wasn’t as decentralized as 2016’s open source insurgency because it didn’t need to be. Elon’s acquisition of X removed the blue network’s suppression (media, corporate, government, individuals) that made decentralization a requirement for survival in 2016.
- Instead of millions of semi-anonymous individuals working to put Trump into the White House, the 2024 network was run by hundreds of big, powerful, and professional accounts (highly evolved digital ledgers with hundreds of millions of followers collectively) with a media presence many times that of the legacy media.
- These accounts, acting as gatekeepers for innovation, amplifiers for online maneuvers, and the curators of narratives usable in governance. They anchored the network, providing it with a permanence and a cohesion it didn’t have in 2016. In this unevolved form, it didn’t have the capacity to persist after reaching its goal (win the White House).
The Collapse of the Blue Network
The blue network formed in 2017, to oppose Trump. At that point it was apparent to me (long before it became a journalistic cottage industry to complain about censorship, etc.) that the blue network’s decision-making processes were deeply flawed and that these flaws would drive it to seek increasing levels of centralization and control. Worse, my fear that this effort (particularly with AI on the doorstep) could rapidly overshoot the mark and plunge us into a stasis I named ‘The Long Night.”
—John Robb
Global Guerillas & Grey Swan
P.S. from Addison: As you might expect, the Grey Swan inbox has been active. And, well, animated. I’m happy to report Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is alive and well. As are the folks who are critical of others who resist without providing productive alternatives. Oy!
For our part, we’ve been busy tending to the Grey Swan model portfolio and getting our April monthly bulletin in the hands of paid members. If ever there was a time for diligent updates… this would be it.
That said, the inbox continues to be a source of wonder and entertainment. Please share your ideas here: addison@greyswanfraternity.com
