Years ago I went to a housewarming party of a reactionary that I knew back in Denver and during conversations in his backyard I articulated my intuition that drone warfare was going to get democratized, and that a new regime of assassination was going to rise. He dismissed these claims and we laughed it off, but more and more I'm convinced that my initial intuition was correct. Now with the killing of the Ayatollah I know for certain the future I grasped back then is coming true now.
Three things are happening simultaneously and nobody is talking about how they fit together.
First, drones. The US and everyone else now has the ability to kill a specific individual anywhere on earth at low cost, with no risk to their own personnel, and with a reasonable claim to deniability. This is genuinely new. Previous long-range weapons killed in zones — cities, grids, general areas. A drone can, in principle, kill one guy at a wedding and leave the people standing next to him alive. It is distance combined with specificity. More than ninety countries now have some kind of military drone capability. Turkey's Bayraktar TB2, which performed well in Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh, proved that effective drone warfare is no longer an exclusive club for superpowers. A middle power can buy or build one. They're getting cheaper, smarter, and more autonomous every year. Eventually the capability to identify and kill a specific person from the air will be available to well-funded non-state actors, private military companies, and wealthy individuals acting outside any institutional framework.
Second, the United States is exhausted. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq ate trillions of dollars and produced outcomes ranging from equivocal to catastrophic. The American public has made it absolutely clear it will not accept significant casualties in discretionary overseas conflicts. The national debt is enormous. The force is spread thin across NATO, the Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa. The era of the 150,000-troop deployment is over. So what replaced it?
Targeted decapitation. Rather than deploying an army to occupy territory and reshape the political landscape through prolonged presence, you identify the specific individuals who are the source of the problem and you remove them. The Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA's Special Activities Center between them have built an apparatus for identifying, tracking, and eliminating individuals across dozens of countries. The public knows the famous examples — bin Laden, Soleimani, al-Baghdadi — but those sit on top of a vast pyramid of lower-profile strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere that constitute not exceptional actions but a continuous, routinized practice.
Third, prediction markets now exist that price the survival odds of political figures. Polymarket processed hundreds of millions of dollars in volume during the 2024 election cycle, and its prices were cited alongside polling averages in mainstream media. The information aggregation function of these markets is genuinely useful. They also create a problem that nobody wants to say out loud: if you can buy a contract that pays $10 million if a foreign leader is "out" by December 31st, and you have the capability to make sure he is dead by December 31st, you have turned assassination into a financial transaction. The prediction market becomes a kill market. Not hypothetically — the logic of it is just plain arithmetic. This even allows intelligence services like the CIA to self finance their own operations independent of congressional budget approval.
Put these three things together and you get something that deserves a name: an Assassination World. A global political order in which great powers govern the internal composition of weaker states not through the expensive and visible instrument of occupation, but through the precise, cheap, and deniable instrument of targeted killing.
The empire of the trigger
You don't need to invade a country to control its politics if you can reliably kill anyone who tries to consolidate power in ways hostile to your interests. You don't even necessarily need to do much killing. If foreign elites understand that accumulating too much power or taking too confrontational a posture will result in their elimination, they will self-moderate without any killing being required. The most efficient form of domination is one where the dominated police themselves.
This is not a new idea. The CIA's involvement in the overthrow of Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953, Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, Allende in Chile in 1973, and the documented plots against Castro and Lumumba demonstrate that the United States has long viewed the removal of inconvenient foreign leaders as a legitimate tool of policy. What changes now is not the intent but the capability. The tools are dramatically more capable, more precise, and more deniable than anything available to the Cold War CIA. The infrastructure for global assassination management has been built. The question is what gets done with it as the technology matures.
This infrastructure is also not going away. Bureaucracies persist. Capabilities, once built, get used. Programs, once established, expand. The JSOC and the CIA's paramilitary apparatus have their own organizational culture, their own career structures, and their own momentum. Nobody is going to dismantle them when the strategic environment changes; they're going to be repurposed and extended.
The United States won't remain the only actor either. China is rapidly developing armed drone capability. Russia has conducted poisoning operations against dissidents in multiple countries. Israel has run one of the world's most sophisticated targeted killing programs for decades, including the cyber tools (Stuxnet, Pegasus) that are essentially the digital version of the same thing. As the technology continues to democratize, middle powers and eventually non-state actors will acquire comparable capabilities. The assassination world, initially a product of US technological dominance, will gradually become a multipolar regime. Multiple powers competing to eliminate each other's proxies and clients is not a stable equilibrium. It is a recipe for perpetual covert war.
The new tyrant is algorithmic
The tyrant that comes out of this is not the strutting dictator of the twentieth century with his rallies and his gulags. The new tyrant operates through markets and intelligence services and corporations rather than through identifiable institutions of state repression. His instrument is not the concentration camp but the targeted strike. Not the midnight knock but the sudden and unexplained death of someone who might have threatened him.
This tyranny is harder to resist than the old kind because it's harder to name. You cannot organize resistance against an algorithm. You cannot rally public opinion against a kill list you're not allowed to know exists. The traditional mechanisms of resistance to tyranny — collective action, legal challenge, international solidarity — are all severely weakened by a system where the violence is invisible, deniable, and technically sophisticated. And the surveillance required to run targeted assassination at scale is mass surveillance of everyone, because you can't identify specific targets without first watching everyone. The two technologies reinforce each other: better surveillance enables more precise targeting; the demonstrated capacity for targeted killing creates incentives for broader surveillance.
There is no obvious clean solution to this. Revolution requires organizing large numbers of people in physical proximity — targeted surveillance and preemptive killing can prevent that from reaching critical mass. Legal challenge requires courts with jurisdiction, independence, and information. International pressure requires an international community capable of agreeing on what the problem even is, which an assassination tyranny that operates covertly and deniably is specifically designed to prevent.
Distributed and decentralized counter-infrastructure is the direction that makes the most sense, for the same reason that it's hard to kill: you can't decapitate a Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) the way you can kill the leadership of a conventional organization. Encrypted communications, open-source intelligence, distributed storage networks, and censorship-resistant financial infrastructure are the building blocks of whatever resistance eventually limits this system. These aren't utopian projects; they're practical necessities for the medium-term future. The tools that will limit the tyranny need to be developed before the tyranny is mature enough to prevent their development. This is the work of decades.
What comes out the other side
Here is the uncomfortable conclusion: the capability for targeted killing cannot be uninvented. The formal prohibition on assassination as a tool of statecraft—enshrined in US law since Executive Order 12333 in 1981—has been consistently violated for decades. Demanding that existing international humanitarian law be applied to drone strikes is not wrong, but it treats the problem as a deviation from norms rather than asking whether the norms themselves require revision in light of capabilities that are now permanent.
If targeted killing capability is going to exist — and it is — the choice is not between a world with it and a world without it. The choice is between a world with regulated targeted killing and a world with unregulated targeted killing. Regulated is better. A framework that narrows the permitted targets to state officials who have themselves committed serious human rights violations—genocide, crimes against humanity, systematic torture—and that requires real procedural accountability before action is taken, is better than a formal prohibition that everyone violates and that therefore provides no constraint at all.
Getting from here to there is likely to take fifty years. It involves the tyranny deepening, the counter-infrastructure developing, and the accumulated weight of documented abuses eventually making the status quo politically unsustainable. It is not a comfortable arc. The generation now entering political consciousness will live through the worst of it.
What I am saying is that history has two possible paths it can take with this technology. First it can take the long route. In this scenario some sort of assassination tyranny sponsored by the nuclear powers of the world rules despotically over the so-called third world and probably its own citizens. This involves a combination of technologies: Palantir style mass-surveillance, lethal drones (from large to microscopic), and assassination market coordination mechanisms into a supercharged tyranny of corporate domination, clothed behind anonymity of the killers and potential obscurity of the victims. It would start as killing political tyrants like the Ayatollah and evolve into lower and lower levels until ordinary local elected leaders, business competitors, and bureaucrats live in fear. Technology gets cheaper the more it is deployed and that means the capability of autonomous killing should get democratized over time. Into this situation a counter-resistance of the distributed autonomous organization first attempts to resist and regulate the assassination system and then attempts to control it. Eventually The tyranny combines with the DAO to form a kind of DAO-Assassination Republic. This arrangement arrives because the Distributed Republic provides moral legitimacy to the process and structure to chaos. Formalized rules let people know where they stand and let people avoid running afoul of the lethal system. The first route involves a long tortuous process where the state actors who initially control the lethal system refuse to give up that control or democratize it and face distributed resistance that eventually overthrows and captures their power. The second path, and the path humans never take because they procrastinate, is to cut to the chase and create the DAR (Distributed Assassination Republic) sooner rather than later. I don't really have a time horizon but this process could last anywhere from 30 to 150 years in my estimation. It will start as a thesis-antithesis dichotomy and eventually arrive at a synthesis organizational structure.
My point here is that this technological arrangement is inevitable and you should just cut to the chase rather than enduring the pain of a century or so of tyranny, humiliation, and resistance. The reason I think that the tyranny will win in the short term, is that assassination markets don't necessarily have to limit themselves to foreign leaders but might be employed by financial oligarchs against judges and politicians themselves. This is a system that can rapidly escape containment by the oligarchs who invented it. It's consolidated power only lasts as long as lower levels of the system don't have access to the same kind of mass surveillance, software, and drone capabilities as the oligarchs. Keeping things consolidated seems plausible until you realize that competition drives innovation and this competition is international. If the Soviet Union had trouble maintaining control of its nuclear arsenal; how much more could foreign powers have trouble containing their software? All it takes is one spiteful regime to develop mass surveillance killing tools and open source them. Since state actors have sponsored terrorism this is probably inevitable. Everything is subject to the law of supply and demand, even nuclear bombs, and even more so drones. Technology has a habit of coming down in cost. In the beginning this system will remain heavily gate-keeped: we might even get a golden age of peace for about 30 years as foreign tyrants are systematically eliminated and US hegemony asserts in a total capacity. But pressure breeds resistance and software is the one thing that gets cheapest the fastest. In the end there will be no "moat" around the assassination system. I had an inkling the things would go down this path when Ukraine started using drones and my view has only strengthened since then. This is also why I was studying DAOs even back then. I saw this thesis coming years ago.
What I see for the future is a sequence of events unfolding like this:
- The military industrial complex builds out the assassination system
- Foreign governments copy this and develop their own systems
- It escapes containment and winds up in the hands of terrorists
- The price of the technology comes down and it gets democratized
- Targeted killing becomes a regular feature of society flattening hierarchies, or perhaps consolidating them. Tall poppies get cut down. Tyranny sets in.
- DAOs rise to contain the threat, first opposing it, and then co-opting it
- A new regime of order is created around basic rights enforcement. The DAOs become DARs, synthesizing the two forces into a new organizational structure
In order to achieve moral legitimacy (and therefore Order) the "network state" must enshrine a Bill of Rights, enforceable only against politicians and corporate officials, that substantially aligns with the attitudes of the public. It should prohibit starting wars without provocation, genocide, terrorism (by both state and non-state actors), and enshrine free speech, freedom of association, freedom from association, and freedom from economic rent seeking laws. These are the crucial ones that make a regime stable. Freedom from state-sponsored rent-seeking is especially important since it gives longevity to government systems. Governments have a habit of accumulating laws and also of making corrupt laws that impoverish the people. The combination of these two forces: legislative accumulation and rent seeking are lethal to nations causing their long-term collapse. If you really want a government to last a thousand years you have to prohibit rent seeking provisions in the laws and limit the total length of the legal code. The architects of the Distributed Assassination Republic won't design it properly, but if they did, it could lead to a golden age of humanity, where all nations respect a set of rights worldwide regardless of whether or not they hold elections. The DAR ONLY ENFORCES RIGHTS AGAINST GOVERNMENTS. Having it make global law is a severe mistake that would lead to another round of thesis-antithesis overthrow of the system on a global scale. There is no one legal or cultural system that is appropriate for all humans everywhere because humans vary in their dominance hierarchies, genetic strategies, and religions that further those strategies, and any single cultural or political order marginalizes one or more of those strategies leading to a backlash of terrorism. Variance is good, actually, prevents all eggs from being in one basket. Genetically diverse cultural and religious strategies are a resilience mechanism of the species. The attempt to create global monoculture is a mistake, so the DAR must only enforce a very minimal set of rights with no feminism/LGBT/woke queer monoculture in the mix. Humans of course won't limit themselves to this sane respect for diversity and history will continue.
All of this ties into the system of blackmail they are building. Unless decentralized governance wrests these methods away from centralized control we are in for a long dark age. History is proving that classically liberal and rights-based decentralized anonymous governance are the only thing with any chance of surviving the future. Both centralization and governance by identifiable persons are vulnerable to assassination. This Distributed Assassination Republic becomes the only viable form by default. This intuition is one of the reasons why I have rejected—I will admit somewhat inconsistently—the notion of any kind of rule by a dictator. How could fascism possibly protect itself from assassination? Stability requires rights and moral legitimacy, and apparently will also require decentralized anonymous leadership. There is only one form of government that complies with all these requirements.
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