Break the Asian Machine Age

Two years before the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, two senior military officers in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) published the book Unrestricted Warfare (1999). They argued that to defeat a technologically superior opponent, an inferior power must erase the boundaries between the battlefield and civilian life and pursue a modern, asymmetric strategy. “The first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, and nothing is forbidden,” the authors wrote. A frontal assault on the battlefield would be suicide. But attacking the enemy’s currency, flooding his country with illegal narcotics, attacking his cultural and governance institutions through fostering social discord, and undermining his confidence through false media narratives and psychological operations can achieve national goals without ever crossing the kinetic ceiling. This kind of war is permanent and omnipresent—it happens simultaneously in the financial, legal, digital, and psychological domains. And yet, a regime that treats individuals as automaton gearworks is defenseless against an unapologetically American system of free-moving energy. What follows is part two in a series of conversations with entrepreneur and designer Ross Calvin on the future of global politics, the Chinese Communist Party, and how the West will overcome machine age psychology. Part one can be found here.