When Frederick VI of Nuremberg called in his loan marker with Emperor Sigismund of the Holy Roman Empire in 1411, times got downright nasty in the old fief of Brandenburg. Sigismund, perennially short of hard cash, had put up the fief as collateral—when he couldn’t cover his marker, Frederick VI foreclosed, like any self-respecting strongman would do. Sigismund didn’t care, since the lands had helped him become emperor, and he had no real control over the fief anyway—it belonged to the Quitzow and other landed knightly families and now would be Frederick VI’s headache. Undaunted, Frederick VI worked a deal to contract a siege train—composed of what was then high-tech cannon like “Lazy Greta”—from Thuringia to blast the local Quitzows and the other knights out of their strongholds and make the foreclosure complete. It took only a few hundred years and quite a few suppressed rebellions, but the Hohenzollern family, of which Frederick VI was a part, became secure in their rule and the legitimate rulers of the fief. In time, Prussia and many other lands were added to the family holdings, with their Hohenzollern descendants eventually gaining the titles of kings and emperors. Not a bad run for a royal family that can trace back its origins to a medieval mafioso out of Nuremberg who made a killing—and killed with impunity—to get his principal and a tidy profit back from that fateful marker owed to him by a Holy Roman emperor.
Joaquín “El Chapo” (Shorty) Guzmán grew up a poor child of Sinaloa, Mexico, mostly in the 1960s. He was extremely ambitious, climbing up the trafficking ranks to become a member of the Guadalajara cartel while still in his twenties. With the split up of that cartel, due to the torture killing of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent “Kiki” Camarena and the creation of the plaza system, El Chapo went on to form the Sinaloa cartel with a triumvirate of other hardened traffickers. As a brilliant criminal mastermind, El Chapo thought strategically, only killed when necessary, and would rather corrupt his way into gaining influence than get into an all-out shooting war. “Shorty” at one time even made it to the Forbes list of richest individuals in world. Still, he is responsible for a number of invasions of plazas in Mexico controlled by opposing cartels, has sent his forces into Central and South America, and has readily terrorized entire cities with broken and tortured bodies dumped on the streets and hung from bridges to get his sanguine points across. Unlike the progeny of Frederick VI, though, those of El Chapo will probably not ascend to dynastic greatness as a legacy of the little man’s violent entrepreneurial tendencies. But then the narco wars in Mexico are far from over. While El Chapo’s family has taken a hit with his 2014 arrest—he has gotten away from prison once before—his kids are still alive and ultimately the Sinaloa cartel has plenty of gunmen, territory, and illicit profits at its disposal, making it the most powerful criminal organization in all of Mexico.
The above vignettes illustrate how historical patterns can and do repeat themselves. A Central American peasant’s fatalistic complaints of “La misma mierda, solamente las moscas son diferente” (The same shit, only the flies are different) about the Sandinistas pretty much nails part of this process.1 The insights offered by a science-fiction writer like William Gibson, on the other hand, are more focused with his take on conflict and entrepreneurship in cyberspace. We only have to look at the slogan of one of the predatory biotechnology corporations found in Burning Chrome: “Maas. Small, fast, ruthless. All Edge,” for that to become self-evident.2 Still, take away about 650 years of technological advances from his writings and the actions of Frederick VI of Nuremberg in the first vignette appear remarkably similar to those of Maas Biolabs GmbH. Strip away even fewer years of civilizational evolution—half-a-century or so—and, at its core, the vignette of “Shorty” also provides us with the same edgy and dangerous entrepreneurship vibe.
A more scholarly perspective identifies a four-stage process of human social and political organization that exists related to weapons systems and coercive-extraction mechanisms. This process, linked to the evolving economic and political systems of civilizations, not surprisingly underlies the key observation identified in this book’s introduction, “that, over time, the line between black, gray, and white markets blurs, and warlord enterprises become indistinguishable from other forms of legal enterprise or, indeed, even the state itself.” This process can be readily observed in the historical evolution of the knight—the rise and fall of a fundamental component of the medieval age.
The first stage of this process is that of entrepreneurism and experimentalism. A weapons system was required to contend with the barbarian raiders that had plagued Western Europe for centuries. These raiders were greatly responsible for the destruction of the Roman Empire and precipitated the shift from the classical to the medieval age. By the Battle of Tours, it was apparent that heavy cavalry was the solution to this threat. This required taking infantry and mounting them on horseback. The Carolingians and other empires of the era—essentially lead by local warlords and strongmen who had seized power—had to go through a trial-and-error process to make this new system work. The entire arms and armor, training and organization, and logistical support system (like the mass breeding and sustaining of warhorses) had to be created from the ground up. As this system was established, heavy cavalry forces grew increasingly deadly.
The second stage in this process is institutionalization. In this stage, not only have “things been worked out” but also standard operating procedures have developed. Mounted cavalrymen not only became the first line of defense for western Christendom but also gained position and privilege on their way to legitimacy within the new civilization that had formed. Lands were won, castles erected, and ultimately the knight allowed the empire and kingdoms of the West to go on the offensive in what were essentially crusades in eastern Europe and the Holy Lands.
Ritualism characterizes the third stage of this process. The effectiveness of the knight on the battlefield began to be severely degraded as technological threats matured. Dogma and oppressive bureaucracy set in, with armor becoming heavier and heavier and with cumbersome ornamentation beginning to appear. In this stage, things are done because that is the way they have always been done; process becomes more important than progress. Further, a climate of zero tolerance and risk aversion exists. Questions about the efficacy and logic of directives are suppressed while new and creative ideas are stifled.
The final and fourth stage of this historical process is satirical in nature. That visionary brute with a hunger in his eyes, quite willing to kill quickly and without remorse, who existed in the first stage has now been fully neutered. Strong arms and armor and a stout warhorse have given way to orders based on fluff, the wearing of gaudy dress, and cushy saddles. Once heroic figures, embodied in images such as St. George the Dragon Slayer, devolved into old men on broken-down mounts fighting monsters made out of windmills. The time of knights had passed and to field them now in battle would be blatantly suicidal.
In fact, the knight had been stalked for some time by a new visionary businessman and killer, one wielding early firearms and siege cannon. This warlord entrepreneur was not of polite society and was not an agent of the state; in fact, he was considered little better than a common criminal—if not worse, as his weapons smelled of fire and brimstone and suggested that dark and demonic forces were at play. His weapons were strange and disruptive, he had no stake in the prevailing status quo, and he would readily kill if disrespected or if the contract was lucrative enough. Against such entrepreneurs and their brethren, the technologically inferior knight was no more than prey and was eventually hunted into extinction.
So the process began anew, and another social and political life cycle was born as history passed from the medieval to the modern age. Mercenary captains and master gunners linked up with dynastic entrepreneurs who connived and fought their way to legitimacy. In the process, economies, warfare, and states changed. Proto-capitalism and mercantilism evolved into free-market economies; standing armies were formed and divisional elements added; crude firearms and cannons gave way to armored formations, air forces, and ballistic missiles. In fact, civilization itself was recast as the modern age advanced, with the early dynastic states of Europe evolving into the present system of Westphalian states within our current international system.
Contrary to some earlier allegations, history has by no means come to an end. Social and political organizational change is constant—it is how human civilization advances. As this book will attest, this four-stage process has begun anew. Charles Tilly’s prosaic statement that organized crime is inherently linked to war making and state making cannot be denied.3 El Chapo’s story in Mexico, and the stories of millions of his lesser contemporaries across the globe—such as computer hackers, nihilist terrorists, or Chinese triad members—represent the emerging techno-warlords of our era. This is a new type of warlord, who is increasingly exploiting the deviant and dark forms of globalization and illicit economies that have appeared, ranging from narcotics to organ harvesting to cyber crime and beyond. These are the violent entrepreneurs of which Martin van Creveld has said, “In the future, war will not be waged by armies but by groups whom today we call terrorists, guerrillas, bandits and robbers, but who will undoubtedly hit upon more formal titles to describe themselves.”4
And so, with their onslaught, comes the transition from the modern to the postmodern age, and with it, a rise in political instability, black markets, and transnational crime. This book, at a visceral level—analogous to the Central American peasants with their mutterings about shit and flies—examines such a future as it exists today, yesterday, and tomorrow. It is not a pretty one for the Westphalian state and its social and political form of organization. While it might be easy to overlook in the buzz of our daily lives, once you see, you can’t un-see. Dark swarms are massing on the horizon.