Jun'25 ::: Chain Mail Gaze @ Protocol Berg, Berlin

Protocol Berg v2
https://protocol.berlin/
June 12-13 2025 in Berlin

With their dreams of new ‘Network State’ empires, resource extraction, and colonial domination, today’s tech overlords are the descendants of Europe’s mediaeval Crusaders: well-financed, zealous fanatics remaking the world in the name of their greater good. Through a psycho-political reading of scarcity, chauvinism, and colonialism, The Chain Mail Gaze connects Crusader ideologues’ desire for blood, land, and booty, to emerging ‘frontiers’ mediated by contemporary technologies.

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THE CHAIN MAIL GAZE: the techno-colonial legacy of the mediaeval Crusades
Wassim Z. Alsindi, PhD

Today, new forms of techno-colonialism are emerging, led by a cabal of messianic technology elites who seek to remake our planet, its territorial divisions, and its populations. These would-be patriarchs wish to challenge the very foundation of the nation-state system through the creation of privatised zones of exception known as ‘Network States.’ These aligned, distributed communities, driven by a desire to secede from the Westphalian paradigm, aim to secure political legitimacy and ultimately sovereignty for their territorial acquisitions, echoing the spirit of the First Crusade’s aftermath in the Eastern Mediterranean. Though the methods differ, the underlying insatiable will of the ‘just’, ‘holy’, and ‘righteous’ to power and conquest—The Chain Mail Gaze itself—remains the same, enduring for over a thousand years.

What if the mediaeval Crusades never truly ended? Instead, what if the brutal campaign of conquest by Latin Christian zealots became the template upon which modern finance and the capitalist economy was modelled: a blueprint that reveals its true horror in our current age of technology fanaticism? This project posits that the libidinal forces within mediaeval Christendom, which fuelled militarised pilgrimages to the ‘Promised Land’ in the late 11th century onwards, persist today, haunting contemporary politics and technology. The spectre of these forces manifests in the theatres of perpetual enmity that capital orchestrates, manipulating the occidental institutions of crown, church, and state to wage its battles.

Through a psycho-political analysis of scarcity, chauvinism, and colonialism, this project links the Crusaders' lust for land, blood, and plunder to present-day colonial frontiers emerging through networked finance and technology. The techno-libertarian vision of the Network State imbues US venture capital culture with nihilistic nation-faith: a place where Capital be thy God. Ideologically aligned, distributed communities crowdfund territorial acquisitions to create an archipelago of networked zones of exception, whilst seeking to exit the nation-state framework. This reactionary vision of ‘freedom’ is intimately bound to a prominent founder, so that the prophet (CEO) leads their followers (stakeholders) through adversity (financial risk) to the Promised Lands of abundance. Animated by a veneration of scarcity and ‘sovereign individuality’, the neoreactionary waters from which the Network State emerges are themselves a Chain Mail Gaze cocktail of Crusading zeal, techno-optimism, corporate armies, and other military-scale deployments of capital. From Pope Urban II to Christopher Columbus, from Eisenhower to George W. Bush, the concept of the Crusade as a righteous, civilization-defining war has left an indelible mark on world history. What lessons can be drawn from Athenian democracy and Mare Liberum to counter the Chain Mail Gaze of today’s captains of industry and their masculine (demi)urges?