Your friend hasn’t seen the tiger close enough to notice what it’s made of. You should, when relevant, draw attention to it with historical and contemporary examples.

In fact, military logistical analysis is a pretty good way to introduce people to thinking materially. The line many people use is “I’m sure your AR15 will do a lot of good against a tank.” But let’s game that out. What does a tank need to exist in the field? It needs fuel, it needs to be mobile, the crew need to eat and sleep, they need to get out sometimes to piss or at least to empty the piss bottles, they need communications, they need infantry protection because otherwise the Abrams is so loud you could literally sneak up on it with a parade, and all of a sudden you’re mapping out a web of logistical choke points.

When you look at each individual part of an opposing force not just in terms of what it can do but also what it needs to survive, what first looked like an impenetrable interlocking wall becomes a rough cloth that someone could begin unraveling by pulling any one of many different threads. As the situation and your analysis both progress, an ideal order of operations might even present itself.

It’s definitely part psyop to get people feeling hopeless and giving up before they’ve tried. There is a word for this I’ve seen bandied about, panopticon; the idea is that people reach a point where they self-police because they believe they are being watched, even if the system can’t actually be watching them logistically at all times.

As to the actual part modern tech plays, there’s some truth to advances in tech making mass surveillance and aggregation of data more feasible, but it’s not magic. You still need people in the loop looking at what the automation pulls out and making decisions about it, and one of the side effects of handing off more stuff to automation is you can reach a point where you trust the automation to work / be correct and don’t bother to check beyond it. So the automation greenlights, you go “okay, everything is fine”, and move on. This is a thing that can happen in computer programming itself with unit testing, though I’m not sure how common issues occurs as a result: “The tests were passed, so we’re good.” But what about the stuff the tests didn’t cover?

It’s also just a thing that can happen with procedures and bureaucracy in general, and reminds me of a talk I watched some years ago about this guy who, IIRC, was a security consultant or something. And he talked of how easily he could get into otherwise secure places just by having a clipboard and looking like he knew what he was doing. To what extent that exact flaw is still a thing, I don’t know, but point is no system is immune to cracks in it.

The most secure places are the ones where regular people are largely motivated to protect them and follow the rules because they believe that doing so is to the benefit of them, their loved ones, and society at large. The US can make as many drones and algorithms as it wants, but it can’t settle a restive population by slashing pro-social policy and replacing it with more cops.

Many things that people take for granted as inevitable are inevitable right up until the point they are not. That’s probably one of the reasons death can be so hard to cope with. It’s easy to feel like somebody is just gonna always be there and then one day they aren’t, and you have to cope with the fundamental impermanence of things in a very up close and personal way that you can’t ignore. Liberators and oppressors alike have an expiration date. The difference is that forward-thinking liberation forces plan for their end and build a world that can go on without them. Oppressors sometimes try to do this too, but they don’t need to care in the same way, as long as they “got theirs”, and that not needing to care about the future is more so the grifter atmosphere we’re at in the US by now, I’d argue.

In short, the oppressor is not made of cardboard, but they aren’t made of titanium either. It’s still flesh and blood in the end. AI is still just an abstraction/indirection for the fleshy beings making decisions about it.

So was Tsarist Russia. Or was it?

The problem is not the tech. Czarist Russia had no problems infiltrating and imprisoning revolutionary groups in the early 1900s and they didn’t even have a national electricity grid.

The problem is class consciousness. The class antagonisms in america and the agitation by socialists have not reached a critical mass. Tech might be hampering agitation efforts but the class antagonisms are making up the difference. They can’t stop people from realizing that everything that sucks is capitalism’s fault and they can’t catch everyone who says it out loud.

The job in the imperial core at the present time is to talk shit about capitalism. Remember every complaint you hear is a chance to tell people that it is capitalism’s fault.

The u.s federal government literally ships its military secrets via UPS, who were literally just in the news for accidentally delivering them to the PRC. I would’ve been a bit more inclined to agree back during the height of the cold war when the greatest anti-communist minds were commanding the ship of State, but we’re now in the era of their aristocratic fail grandchildren ruling the land.

Tech means dogshit if popular resistance gets their hands on that same equipment, learns its ins and outs, has the mass support of the working class, and has established organs of a new society. The thing is, a militant war against the imperialist regime isn’t feasible if there isn’t political, material, and principled support from the working masses. From within the foundation of the current capitalist order, workers movements and organizations need to be aligned and unified along a correct, revolutionary political line. This is the only way that material pressure can be put on the bourgeoisie’s economic system of profit upon profit, as well as resist attempts to be broken up by fascist/CIA operations. We need to have a thorough understanding of all the machinations, whether material or conscious, that keep this system intact, discover their weaknesses and contradictions, and actively struggle to overcome them. It’s very much doable, but this isn’t to say that it won’t be a protracted, bloody political endeavor. We’ve seen what revolution looks like throughout history, so we can expect a similar struggle, if not, one that the world has yet to bear witness to. It’s a tough and large task, but luckily, we don’t have to do it alone. Thinking that we as individuals are capable of overcoming a struggle that requires a unified, collective front is incorrect and we must combat this type of thought and treat it as unreasonable simply because it is.

I actually agree with him in the sense that if a revolution happened tomorrow in the U.S., the U.S. still has enough money and a loyal-enough professional military to suppress it using extreme violence (picture the BLM protests plus ultra-ICE).

In order for a revolution in the U.S. to be successful, most of the U.S. neocolonies need to have revolutions/move toward sovereignty, and thereby stop paying the United States. When that occurs and the U.S. by definition loses its empire, it will no longer be able to afford for its own advanced military. At that point, a revolution will be winnable because it doesn’t matter how many F-35s you have if you don’t have the money to fly them.

after devouring countless true crime documentaries in the US, i am absolutely convinced that it might be the easiest country to organize a resistance group. The feds/cops etc are a bunch of stupid dumbasses, a barebones level of OPSEC and secrecy and you’re basically unstoppable. the things people get away with is frankly absurd.

They’re right at the moment. Things would need to be bad enough for military disloyalty and failures within production chains (resulting from failure of imperial policy) limiting the states capacity to do violence.

It is also the case that their weapons can become our weapons

He’s not going to start an uprising with that attitude.

The US isn’t particularly powerful. It wants people to think it’s powerful, but it doesn’t have the gas to really deal with people in revolt.

The technology is a substitute for actual people to enforce the laws. The state is relying on the equivalent of a plastic owl to scare people, and people acquiesce because that’s what they’re told to do.

Next, air power doesn’t win wars. It’s boots on the ground talking and holding land. Concentrate enough like minded people in one area, and it would be too costly for state agents to operate.

Guerrilla warfare and sabotage is pretty well know at this time

what many people miss is that a lot of successful communist revolutions had foreign support (china - USSR) (USSR - funded by sympathetics) (north korea - china and USSR). nobody wants to fund a revolution in the USA

Probably more complicated than a socialist uprising ‘succeeding’. I’m not entirely sure what that actually means. Solid point that the western intelligence apparatus is as sprawling as the west itself. And the state maintains a powerful monopoly on violence and the flow of information/propaganda. But the idea that somehow the US governemnt would be able to continue if its reality deteriorated into needing to drone strike its civilian population is kind of nonsensical.

Occupying armies cannot really win a war only battles. And the scenerio I’m hearing brought up here is that threatening occupation would or does calm a populace- I’d offer it incites the opposite. And if the us army or whatever body you like actually becomes an overt occupier… There is no win game for the state, every success recruits more opposition. Other people have expressed these ideas way better than I could(and have used historical examples, someone did a great breakdown kind if based on Syria style collapse) but it seems like it is very difficult/impossible to maintain a society that occupies itself.

Maybe, the idea of ciritcal mass of people not having a ‘minimal’ level of survivability, is more important. It seems like all successful revolutions occur when a state has meaningfully failed to provide a base level of material conditions. And it horrifically seems to be a level around what we’d consider as societal collapse(tzarist Russia, emperial China), that at such a point revolutionary conditions will occur- might not prevail (see the hundreds of uprisings that have already happened over US history), but it will happen. So, do you or your friend ever think those conditions could happen in the US? If so, a socialist revolution could totally happen(so could a non socialist revolution- gross. And I think that’s what the idea of a vanguard party is kind of about). I’d say if you can imagine a future where the US is failing to provide food for a state- you’re in the uprising is possible camp. Its all about those material conditions! Edit: added a ()

Marx etc believe the revolution will never happen in the imperial core, it always starts in the periphery. So yeah I don’t see American people rising up, as long as there are treats, MMA on the Whitehouse lawn, and the believe that just one more election can fix it…