Q&A Interview with John Robb: Author of the Global Guerrillas Report
John Robb is an American author, military analyst, veteran, and entrepreneur. He graduated from the United States Air Force Academy in 1985, with a Bachelor of Science in Astronautical engineering, and completed Undergraduate Pilot Training in 1986. In the military, Robb served with US Special Operations Command, specializing in counterterrorism and participating in operations in the Middle East and South and Central America. He resigned his commission in 1992 and graduated from Yale University with a Master’s degree in public and private management in 1995. Robb later worked as a senior analyst for Forrester Research, co-founded the performance measurement company, Gomez, and served as president of UserLand Software, before devoting himself to military theory.
In 2004, Robb founded Global Guerillas – “a monthly report that provides decision-makers with unique frameworks for making sense of our rapidly changing world” – and in 2007, he published Brave New War, which introduced the concept of open-source warfare. In 2021, he testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Competition, Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights on reforming social networking, and in 2023, he consulted the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff on AGI and robotics.
I decided to reach out to John to ask him about his concepts of network tribalism and fictive kinship, in light of the War in Ukraine and the border crisis. What follows is an edited transcript of a conversation between myself and John recorded on September 2, 2024.
Note: The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Lafayette Lee: How did you develop your ideas of global information warfare?
John Robb: It goes back to 2003. I was working on early social networking software, and the Iraq war was happening at the same time. Before getting into software, I had been in special ops, and I started seeing parallels between the world of social networks and what I was seeing with the insurgency in Iraq. I started writing a blog, and then I published a book, Brave New War.
Lafayette Lee: The Iraq war was the moment when the concept of networks first started to penetrate mainstream military thinking. I served in the War on Terror and part of my duties involved mapping communication networks to better understand how insurgencies were organized. Today this paradigm has been extended to mapping online communities. Do you see a connection between online networks and the insurgencies that we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan?
John Robb: Yes, there’s a direct line. What we are seeing online is a networked, open-source insurgency which developed from the same dynamics that drove protests in Egypt and Tunisia during the Arab Spring, as well as the Occupy Wall Street movement that followed the financial crisis. Now it’s moved into mainstream politics. Trump won the Presidency in 2016 because he was able to use an open-source network to circumvent the centralized media firewall. Network dynamics made Trump immune to the kinds of attacks that the media previously used to destroy people.
Lafayette Lee: Trump’s victory in 2016 saw the birth of a new political paradigm. The institutions were not able to keep him contained, and they reacted as if his election was the result of Russian espionage.
John Robb: This charge was clearly fabricated, but there is a link. America’s current problems began after the Cold War concluded. The globalist orientation became dominant; we started focusing on globalism and neglecting the welfare of American citizens. This eventually resulted in the financial crisis along with other problems, including the fact that our system became hyper-centralized.
Lafayette Lee: What do you mean by hyper-centralized?
John Robb: Narratives are held as authoritative, and if anyone tries to challenge them, they are marginalized. That also happened to critics of globalism. But discontent and anger were brewing. People didn’t like the fact that the political establishment was taking us away from American national interests and towards a global state without borders. This discontent wasn’t being addressed by the existing system, and Trump was able to capitalize on that. Because of the new power of the network, the system wasn’t able to destroy him. Trump didn’t obey the authoritative narrative. And that made the media furious, because it meant they were no longer authoritative.
Lafayette Lee: How did Trump challenge them?
John Robb: There’s something in linguistics called the Russell Conjugation, or emotive conjugation, which is the rhetorical modifier used to frame any piece of information as either positive or negative. For example, if someone doesn’t like to change their mind, that’s a neutral fact. But one could describe this as steadfast, which is good, or pigheaded, which is bad. The conjugation changes the way that something is perceived. The media controlled that. Then along comes Trump and he stops following their script. So the action they decided on was essentially reviving fascist tactics.
Lafayette Lee: What do you mean by fascist tactics?
John Robb: Fascism is widely misunderstood. People focus on the little trappings, like jackboots. But the reason why the system was successful was that it enabled a government to direct a capitalist economy towards totalitarian goals. It’s not a communist economy, where everything is bureaucratically controlled. In fascism, a government set the goals, and all the corporations turned to face the same direction. The way they did that was by creating enemies and demonizing those enemies. But the fatal flaw of fascism is that once you start this process, you can’t stop. Soon you’re at war with your own population, and then you’re at war with the rest of the world. In this case, we’ve seen the demonization that connected Trump to Putin spilling over into a new Cold War with Russia. They convinced themselves that Trump was put into office by Putin, and they pushed NATO membership for Ukraine to punish him. But if you read George Kennan, his main point is that Russia is primarily a defensive power. Russia is paranoid defensive. If you push up right next to their borders, they’re going to react.
Lafayette Lee: People sometimes misunderstand your work as claiming that institutions are not only opposed to networks but defenseless against network swarms. But network swarms are now being propagated by institutions. Consider the NAFO phenomenon that emerged in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Some participants were immigrants from Ukraine, but there were also politicians, DOD personnel, and others on the federal payroll.
John Robb: Swarms work on the basis of tribal dynamics. There’s a common enemy, and they pattern match against that common enemy. Anyone who opposes this enemy can join in. Networks expand by having that very low bar and scaling up from there. They mobilize extremely quickly, and as momentum builds, they go sideways into organizations. For example, after Israel went into Gaza following Hamas’ attack on October 7, Biden began seeing an internal fight between people who were pro-Gaza and people who were pro-Israel within his administration. That fight was being driven by network connections: basically, his staff was being pressurized by networks on both sides. But with something more one-sided, like the swarm against Russia, it sweeps up the whole organization. The Biden administration would have proceeded a lot slower on Russia if they weren’t overwhelmed by the swarm. But the network mobilization was so extreme that the Biden Administration was blindsided, and they started aligning their rhetoric with the swarm to try to get its energy behind them. The rhetoric got more aggressive and acquired this fascist dynamic, where they started lining up all their enemies, on one side, as a single target. It was freedom versus evil, dictatorship and totalitarianism versus democracy. That is how fascism works. It’s not about the Left or the Right. It’s a political structure that uses demonization of enemies and network authoritarianism to control a capitalist economy by forcing alignment with a narrative, which is decided at the top and then imposed. People don’t fully appreciate what’s going to happen if the establishment “Blue Church” is able to reassert control. They will impose a narrative and dictate its alignment across all the social networks, blocking anyone who says anything else.
Lafayette Lee: Network swarms are now driving all sorts of consequences, without any coherent objective…
John Robb: Marshall McLuhan foresaw all this early on. “World War Three will be a guerrilla information war where there’s no distinction between military and civilians.” That was already true in the TV world, but TV was still a broadcast medium then. Now we’re in the network world where everything is interactive. It’s a participatory medium, and our future will be decided by it. Furthermore, as technology continues to advance, it increasingly dominates our perceptual space and therefore, our sense of reality. So imagine all that being centrally controlled. Take VR. It looks clunky now, but so did early PCs. They miniaturized and eventually became part of everyday life. VR glasses and earphones are going to do the same thing. At some point, disconnecting will cease being an option.
Lafayette Lee: The new communications networks have normalized public exposure to images of horrific violence, enabling a much more systematic and intense manipulation of emotions. This means more control over our perceptions than prior “colder” media. As a result, it is almost impossible to have rational conversations online because of the amount of emotional response involved.
John Robb: Empathy is an evolutionary mechanism that allows one to model the mind of the other by reconstructing imaginatively what they are feeling. So if somebody sees someone else experiencing pain, they experience it too, like when a mouse sees another mouse getting electrocuted, they feel that electricity in their teeth. It’s a fast information transfer that we don’t have a good mechanism to defend against. So when people are scrolling through posts on their phone, and they come upon something upsetting, they have an empathetic response. We see the video of George Floyd, and we feel that in our neck as well. We get angry, and this anger generates a form of fictive kinship.
Lafayette Lee: What is fictive kinship?
John Robb: Fictive kinship is our tribe formation. In a pre-modern environment, we had families, clans, and tribes. Everyone is ultimately blood-related, and tribes are just clans composed of multiple family groups. But an increase in scale introduces new organizational challenges. Groups respond by developing narratives that tell the story of how the group came together, where it is going, and why it is good. Today, this same process takes shape in the online world. Online tribes are connected by empathy triggers which generate fictive kinship bonds. These bonds are narratives defining imaginary enemies which online tribes target with the objective of hurting them. For example, there is a network tribe that constitutes itself through fictive kinship bonds of anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-colonialism and anti-fascism. It searches out patterns of behavior and language to try and identify evil people to attack, and this is how it holds itself together.
All this is already in McLuhan. His predecessor Harold Innis noticed that new communication technologies create mental changes. Our minds are rewired around new systems of communication, and this process aggregates and rewires society. The last time this happened on a global scale was the printing press. Literacy was universalized, scientists started to write up their research and circulate it, and technological discoveries in Europe skyrocketed. Constitutions became printed documents used to form governments, and the economy reshaped around these written documents. A literary mindset prevailed.
Today we have this new transformation, which is changing how we think, how we act, and how we organize society. This transformation is extremely disruptive: it is changing neurology and changing society. It will take time to develop new systems of decision-making. What we’re doing now is fighting over that reorganization and what form it will take. And we’re seeing similar conflicts to the conflicts that followed the printing press. We’re in a big battle over how we organize.
Lafayette Lee: How do you see this transition affecting the structures of government?
John Robb: The White House today is like a house in a sitcom. Everything looks normal, and they act as if it is normal, but in truth, the state is hollowed out by global networks. But there are different ways to solve this. One is to tighten everything up and go through network authoritarianism like China. A degree of control is now possible that wasn’t conceivable in the past. We’re talking an ability to monitor billions of conversations simultaneously and control them all. Plus cameras. That kind of network state is out there, and staying outside of its reach is impossible. That’s one path.
The other path is decentralization, strengthened individual rights and fragmentation into smaller groups. But this decentralized approach is very fragile. What I’ve heard through back channels is that it was the swarm response to Ukraine that made Musk purchase Twitter. He recognized that this power of unanimous consensus was extremely dangerous, and he felt he had to intervene to stop it from happening again. So now X is an open platform, but that depends on Musk. If someone takes him out, the platform gets locked down again, contestation disappears, and alignment happens. So the battle is over alignment. Without open platforms, things start to tighten up, and alignment takes place because there is no longer any pushback – neither on platforms, nor inside networks.
Lafayette Lee: Over the last three years we’ve seen at least 10 million people enter the country illegally. How do you understand this element within a broader context?
John Robb: A significant percentage of those 10 million people will be getting weekly visits from the cartels, who see them as a resource they’re going to continue to use. Most of these people are young men from places where unemployment is high. Many will never have had a job in their lives, they just did whatever they could do to get by. The globalist orientation of Republicans and Democrats wants to use them as cheap labor, to drive down labor costs to nothing. Globalization normalizes all incomes. That means that all the developing countries have rising incomes, and the developed countries have falling incomes.
Lafayette Lee: Against the wishes of their citizens…
John Robb: Have you noticed that there’s been a significant shift recently in mainstream political rhetoric? It’s no longer about America. It’s about democracy. What’s good for American citizens doesn’t really matter anymore. Democracy is more important. It’s the same way in Europe. National narratives are downgraded and replaced by a narrative of democracy. But democracy doesn’t offer much cohesion. Whereas in America one could say that we’re on this path together, we’ve had problems in the past, but we’re still moving forward. Democracy only really offers cohesion in the sense of fighting enemies.
Lafayette Lee: I’ve seen some claim that the Constitution is undermining democracy.
John Robb: Meanwhile the truly critical issues are never discussed. There is no organized group in the United States, for example, that’s worried about the budget. But it’s significant how much of history is written with the banks in the background. The British East India Company, for example, would never have been able to take over India without bankers backing them. They paid on time and the bankers liked that, whereas the monarchs weren’t paying, so they backed the British East India Company. They said, we’ll lend you as much as you need because you pay us on time. And that financed the whole takeover of India.
Lafayette Lee: In the past four years we’ve seen the global pandemic, the BLM riots, and J6. In each case, an institutional narrative has crumbled, with the institutions responding by doubling down. As a result, a lot of people now assume that they can’t trust our institutions. I don’t know how you recover from that. Even supposing that Trump prevails in the election, I don’t think this dearth of trust is necessarily going to change.
John Robb: A Trump victory would likely defuse the war in Ukraine, conflicts in the Middle East, and the confrontation that we are heading toward with China because Trump doesn’t have a war mindset. But he won’t be able to do anything domestically because the system will freeze up. The machine will oppose everything he tries, just like it did during his first administration. It will all just be back-and-forth fighting and legal cases and nothing will get done. Meanwhile, we’ll keep spending tons of money and going into bankruptcy. That’s not changing. My view is that we’re so far down the globalist road that we’re not going to be able to re-orient towards a national concept. The people who support the nation are so boxed in that turning things around is no longer possible. No one’s going to do anything aggressive as long as they’re still drawing a paycheck. But if things get tight, and people can’t make ends meet, that’s when the wheels come off. People stop cooperating and conflicts proliferate. The problem is that when you destroy national culture, you create a form of tribalism where no one really trusts others. Your coherence as a society goes to zero. Without coherence, you can’t make decisions and inertia takes over, which is why the government doesn’t do real programs anymore, where they take action and fix things. They’re just throwing money at stuff.
Lafayette Lee: It’s like going to Afghanistan and dropping soccer balls out of a helicopter and using that as the bullet point to say that we’re winning hearts and minds.
John Robb: Everything’s on autopilot. Afghanistan was two and a half trillion dollars’ worth of autopilot. Once you’ve lost coherence and decision-making capacity, you’ve lost the ability to get anything done. So, withdrawal from Afghanistan turns into a rushed evacuation. If they didn’t pay off the Taliban, we would have never gotten those people out of the airport. It was an absolute disaster. Basic competence was missing, and nobody took responsibility. No one was fired.
Lafayette Lee: Veterans have frequently said to me how disillusioned they became over the course of the War on Terror. After 9/11, there was a big resurgence of patriotism, but it was immediately hijacked.
John Robb: Yes, by the Neocons. What did invading Iraq have to do with 9/11? Saddam killed jihadis. He ate them for breakfast. But we took him out. Then Libya. Libya becomes a conduit for illegal immigration. Then Syria. We end up funding ISIS, and then Germany imports the Syrians, thinking they’re going to get cheap labor, and it creates a backlash that causes Brexit, because the Brits saw the disaster of immigration and said, we don’t want any part of that. But they’re still stuck in it.
Lafayette Lee: Now the strategy is to get Iran to be the big player and stabilize the region…
John Robb: Imagine what an American nationalist with a George Washington mindset would have done after the end of the Cold War. He would have taken it as a cue to cut the military to nukes and special ops. But 9/11 happened, and it was used to massively expand our global presence. We went to the least strategic place in the world, the Middle East. But as soon as we started fracking, there was no need to get distracted by the Middle East. We should have been focusing on trade with China and Chinese competition. But we let that whole relationship spin out of control. In 20 years, through inattention and adherence to a set of false assumptions about how trade would impact China, we turned a totalitarian country into a peer competitor. China is an authoritarian country that uses network control to align everyone, and they’re just waiting for the US and the West to crumble.
Lafayette Lee: How would you describe George Washington’s mindset?
John Robb: George Washington’s mindset was don’t get involved. These entangling alliances, all these ancient hatreds in the Middle East, they’ll just keep pulling us in. So stay out of those wars, stay out of alliances, don’t get triggered. Consider our late entry into World War One and World War Two. We entered those conflicts when the enemy was already exhausted, so our casualties were kept to a minimum. We came out of these wars stronger than when we went in. By the end of the 20th century, we were the most prosperous and least damaged country in the world. But we treated it as a mistake. And we based the whole policy of globalization on the idea that being reluctant to engage in conflicts was a mistake.
Lafayette Lee: People pushing for conflicts abroad sometimes argue that the United States should have entered World War Two much earlier.
John Robb: But what if Germany had never gone into Russia? How would that have played out? Stalin was such a big believer in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that when Germany shattered the pact and invaded, he went into seclusion for two weeks because he was so depressed. He truly believed that the pact was stable. But if Germany had oriented against the US and the UK and not fought Russia, there was no way we could have beaten them. We would have ended up exhausted like the UK. The US at the end of the 20th century was in the best possible position because of how we played the European civil wars of the 20th century. Not to mention, the containment policy in the second half of the century came out of a recognition that Russia was defensive, paranoid, and we didn’t have to roll them back. We just had to hold the line. Russia hates risk, so you don’t encroach on them. You bolster your internal cohesion to defend against communist infiltration and wait. That’s what we did. Throughout the Cold War, we had very low immigration and fast technological progress. So we dealt with civil rights and things like that. There were problems, obviously, with the way it was implemented. But it made us more cohesive. But then we decided that this wasn’t what we wanted to be. We wanted to globalize.
Lafayette Lee: Globalization is the background to all our other problems. When we see how our institutions now operate, it doesn’t really make sense unless you understand globalism. From the point of view of a nation-state, nothing globalists do makes sense. But globalism changes the calculus. So what looks like a loss to us, does not necessarily look like a loss to them.
John Robb: Globalism as a decision-making model tends to minimize the importance of national interests in favor of becoming a global policeman. Now, orientation is a complex idea. it comes from the OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. When people think about decision-making models, they tend to think about speed of reactions. If you react faster than your opponent, you beat them. But orientation is the most important element because your orientation is what defines the solution. Orientation is everything. Imagine you’re in the middle of the woods and there are two different paths: one goes towards a never-ending wasteland, and the other one towards your home, where there’s food, shelter, warmth and family. If you set off in the right direction, as you get closer to home, things get easier. Every step you take is in the right direction. But if you orient yourself in the wrong direction, every step that you take moves you farther away. Even when you correct yourself, you’re still deep in the woods and starting to run low on supplies. So orientation is huge.
In the Cold War, we had a successful strategy and a successful orientation. After the end of the Cold War, the environment changed, and we had to come up with a new one. We could have reoriented back to just being a country: leading by example, becoming prosperous and technologically advanced, increasing freedom and the cohesion necessary to make high-quality, competent decisions, and improving life for everyone. But we chose a different path by going global. During the Cold War, that was never something we were capable of doing, because all the geopolitical decisions we made in terms of war and peace were constrained by how they appeared to the Soviet Union and China. We had to think carefully because we had to account for what Russia could do. But after the end of the Cold War, we decided we could do anything that we wanted. So orientation. It’s a subtle and sublime thing. Imagine a guy who is really good at pulling women, getting dates, and trying to find Miss Right. But when he actually finds her, he has to reorient. An orientation can be appropriate or maladaptive depending on the pressures of the environment.
Lafayette Lee: Do you think we are coming to the end of the United States as we know it?
John Robb: There has to be a big economic reckoning where people are actually feeling the pinch. That could come as a result of a decision to start a cold war with China. We’d see a complete loss of confidence in the government, and the pressure to reform would be aggressive: either reaffirming the Constitution or reaffirming the globalist project and going towards networks of balance and control. Having the wrong orientation, and then adding the network stuff, has only accelerated our problems. The state wouldn’t be nearly as hollow today if the network stuff didn’t happen. It would have been a much slower process of decline. Networks accelerated our issues at the very moment that we were facing this transformation in governance, when we are starting to see drones, robotics, and AI-based robotics. We are about to see a decoupling between numbers and military force. It used to be that you have democracies because you have a very motivated army. It goes back to the Roundheads. It’s a new model army, and then you’ve got bigger armies. But with robotics and drones, it’s really more of a question of capital and technological expertise.
Lafayette Lee: I want to ask if you have any thoughts on the recent assassination attempt against Donald Trump. [Note: This interview was conducted *before* the 2nd assassination attempt on President Trump]
John Robb: With respect to the assassination attempt, it would be easy to get into conspiracy mode, but I would tend to treat it more like an outlier event that could trigger of cascade of further consequences. Real-world violence in the context of network war is like a punctuation mark. People are looking for things in the real world to generate effects online, like they’re trying to feed that beast. Even in big wars, like Ukraine, this is happening. Network perception is driving a lot of what we see.
Lafayette Lee: In this case, we experienced two reactions immediately. On the one hand, suspicion from the Right about the role of institutions. On the other side, the FBI director initially saying that Trump hadn’t been shot, reinforcing this online conspiracy theory. I’ve also seen people claim that Trump arranged for a shooter to shoot at him.
John Robb: People see the facts that fit their network narratives: this tribalism reaches inside institutions, right up to the FBI and the Secret Service. There are people there who are oriented towards this kind of tribal pattern matching, and they see everything that way. It leads to people losing trust in these organizations, and in turn, those organizations losing legitimacy. But for many people, it doesn’t really matter whether something’s true or not. What matters is the patterns. This is how many people see reality, and they cannot process reality if reality contradicts it. They don’t see the facts. They aren’t even willing to look at them. They just ignore them. That kind of mindset is obviously extremely dangerous, and in networked environments, it’s reinforced, not least because we also have this network elite that profits by having us divided, fractured, and distracted from focusing on how they’re running the system.
Lafayette Lee: It reminds me of the 1790s. The Constitution was brand new, but there were all these fears about French influence and foreign assets, and there were crackdowns on sedition. The mood was very pessimistic. A lot of people were concerned about the prospect of a civil war.
John Robb: The America that most people tend to harken back to is a closed America focused on internal politics, isolated by its oceans, that doesn’t have to pay attention to the rest of the world. Every technology now in the hands of average people came out of our methodology, even if the core invention might have been made somewhere else. We democratized it. We put electricity and phones in people’s homes and cars in people’s driveways, whereas in the UK, for example, they only put phones in the post office. In 1940, we were leading by example. Now we’re trying to lead by thumping people on the head and screaming and funding proxy wars and crap like that.
At some point in the twentieth century, we decided that managing the world was in our own self-interest. But now all those institutions that we relied on for managing the world are falling apart. We’re spending way too much, and no one even cares anymore. If we continue to spend like this, the budget will just be interest, and then what? Four years ago, I didn’t think we were dumb enough to get into another Cold War. And I never thought that we’d have no border. Now we have a broken border, a new Cold War, we are in all these entangling alliances that are detrimental to the future of the United States, and we’re edging toward bankruptcy. We’re so far out on a limb with this broken orientation that we don’t even have the language to express how screwed we are.
Lafayette Lee is an American writer and a contributing editor of IM—1776. He can be followed @Partisan_O.
