The car and the telephone allowed for the bureaucratization of coercion

Tuesday, July 14th, 2026

The car and the telephone, Kulak argues, allowed for the bureaucratization of coercion:

If you look at the orders given to British Captains and Admirals during the Napoleonic wars, these orders were often shockingly cursory. Sometimes only 1-2 sentences would be the whole of the Admiralty’s direction to a ship’s Captain for months at a time.

[…]

These orders were not so simple because the task was simple, but because it was COMPLEX and skilled British Captains needed the greatest of discretion with which to act. They were weeks if not months out from new orders, and the admiralty weeks if not months away from news of occurrences on the other side of the world.

[…]

You see this not only in the royal navy, but also on the American frontier, where Marshalls, Sheriffs, Mayors, and US Army Captains often wielded power to rival knights and dukes in the old world, and ran not inconsiderable risk in doing so.

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What the invention of the Automobile and telephone did was it changed all of that. By increasing the speed of reaction times from days to minutes or hours, and by increasing the speed of communications from days or weeks to seconds, the very nature of authority changed.

Before applying something such as the income tax would be an unfeasibly dangerous proposition. A simple modicum of non-compliance would require tax agents to go out, and even if they went out in force, they’d probably be disappeared very quickly, with the only lead being that they disappeared between Thursday and Sunday and were vaguely going to be present in some area or county. It might take another 4 days after they were noted missing to get someone out there to check on them.

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Whereas before trustworthy, competent, literate, moral Ethically predictable, men who were capable of distant travel, dynamic decision making, and enforcing their decisions with violence were the major limiting factor in the depths of state control that is possible… And such men were inherently prideful and had class interests around their rights as high status free gentlemen and their places of respect within the communities they administered; Former Colonel Washington LED the rebellion against the Crown… Whereas before you had to deal with all of that, Now you could use Anyone.

Indeed the modern state invariably chooses for it’s regulators and inspectors sexually failed women, the disabled, the sexually isolated or despised, and the racially and ethnically outcast. All explicitly BECAUSE they are of the lowest status without the state (what do you think Diversity, Equity and Inclusion means? It mean selecting people for being low status without the state) and will obey basically anything the state demands because, unlike the violent competent men of discretion who could do anything else or go anywhere and assume a leadership role, the DEI bio-slop who fill the government bureaucracy are complete nobodies without their jobs.

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Unlike the earlier generations of lawmen, these infinitely expanding regulators need never actually enforce anything themselves, they need only send messages or “reach out” and if at any point they feel the slightest physical threat, they can call the police who are empowered to make ZERO decisions but are still capable of violence, and of calling in an endless stream of more police officers, tactical teams, and Helicopters should you prove resistant.

Posted in Policy, Technology, War | 4 Comments »

Comments

  1. Bob Sykes says:
    July 14, 2026 at 4:46 pm

    “Bioslop,” coining a new racist insult. Loving it. Congrats to Kulak.

    Wasn’t “kulak” itself a derogatory term under Stalin?

  2. Mike in Boston says:
    July 14, 2026 at 11:22 pm

    “Bioslop” is more purely derogatory, but the earlier term “Bioleninism” offers some insight by analogy:

    As Lenin and the communists rallied the downtrodden to overthrow the bourgeoisie, so bioleninism rallies those with biological or identitarian disadvantages (perceived or inherent) to Leftist causes. In a system based on ability or traditional hierarchies such as a meritocracy or most Western civilizations, these groups would be at the bottom of the ladder – but when the state or culture gives them status, they become loyal warriors of the Left.

    — Bioleninism by Spandrell

  3. Isegoria says:
    July 15, 2026 at 10:09 am

    Spandrell explained why “kulak” became a derogatory term:

    What did Lenin do? Exterminate the natural aristocracy of Russia, and build a ruling class with a bunch of low-status people. Workers, peasants, Jews, Latvians, Ukrainians. Lenin went out of his way to recruit everyone who had a grudge against Imperial Russian society. And it worked, brilliantly. The Bolsheviks, a small party who little popular support, won the civil war, and became the awesome Soviet Union. The early Soviet Union promoted minorities, women, sexual deviants, atheists, cultists and every kind of weirdo. Everybody but intelligent, conservative Russians of good families.

    […]

    In Communist countries pedigree was very important. You couldn’t get far in the party if you had any little kulak, noble or landowner ancestry. Only peasants and workers were trusted. Why? Because only peasants and workers could be trusted to be loyal. Rich people, or people with the inborn traits which lead to being rich, will always have status in any natural society. They will always do alright. That’s why they can be trusted; the stakes are never high for them. If anything they’d rather have more freedom to realize their talents. People of peasant stock though, they came from the dredges of society. They know very well that all they have was given to them by the party. And so they will be loyal to the death, because they know it, if the Communist regime falls, their status will fall as fast as a hammer in a well. And the same goes for everyone else, especially those ethnic minorities.

  4. Isegoria says:
    July 15, 2026 at 10:14 am

    This dynamic played out differently in the West:

    When Communism took over Russia and China, those were still very poor, semi-traditional societies. Plenty of semi-starved peasants around. So you could run a Leninist party just on class resentments. “Never forget class-struggle”, Mao liked to say. “Never forget you used to be a serf and you’re not one now thanks to me”, he meant.

    In the West, though, by 1945, when peace and order was enforced by the United States, the economy had improved to the point where class-struggle just didn’t work as a generator of loyalty. Life was good, the proletariat could all afford a car and even vacations. Traditional society was dead, the old status-ladders based on family pedigree and land-based wealth were also dead. The West in 1960 was a wealthy, industrial meritocratic society, where status was based on one’s talent, productivity and natural ability to schmooze oneself into the ruling class.

    […]

    The West started to build up a Leninist power structure. Not overtly, not as a conscious plan. It just worked that way because the incentives were out there for everyone to see, and so slowly we got it. Biological Leninism. That’s the nature of the Cathedral.

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