The Division Industrial Complex Goes Global
Complexity, simplicity and the tyranny of the binary
When Dwight D. Eisenhower left the office of the presidency in 1961, America was deep into the Cold War and a hot one was beginning to boil in Southeast Asia. He warned us of what he called the Military Industrial Complex — the unholy alliance between our federal government and those who made the weapons of war for them.The key takeaway from Eisenhower: Conflict created its own marketplace, with clear incentives that generated billions of dollars for a well-positioned few individuals and organizations based on a presumed existential threat. Very simply, war, whether hot or cold, could make some people very rich. Sustained conflict, at any temperature, paid handsomely.
But the military-industrial complex was and still is just a subset of a far broader dynamic that we can refer to as the Division Industrial Complex. Whereas the transaction of the “MIC” centered around military weaponry in exchange for money, the “DIC”’s stock in trade is weaponized information in exchange for power. Thanks to major technological advances in information sharing over the last few decades, dividing us has become a much easier path to power and profit than uniting us. As a consequence, creating division is now a lucrative industry for those political and media merchants whose…
