A new history book called “Hidden Gifts” dives into the complexity of Middle-East stability and comes up with this enticing premise:

…embroiled in a paradox—an ever-increasing demand for security despite the increasing supply…

Except, this isn’t a paradox.

Unregulated increases in security have an inversion effect, which is exactly why Facebook boasting about its massive spend has made it also the worst platform.

Compare Facebook to Equifax, for example. The latter had tightly constrained/managed spend and efficiencies that stabilized it and made it a leader in safety. The difference is the ethics of supply.

This is how the “imperial interests” mentioned by the new history book make its paradox thesis… not a paradox.

Here’s the full thesis of “Hidden Gifts”, where you can see the crucial link to “interests” guiding the supplies.

From Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 to the foreign interventions in the ongoing civil wars in Syria, Yemen, and Libya today, global empires or the so-called Great Powers have long assumed the responsibility of bringing security to the Middle East. The past two centuries have witnessed their numerous military occupations to ‘liberate’, ‘secure’, and ‘educate’ local populations. Consulting fresh primary sources collected from some thirty archives in the Middle East, Russia, the United States, and Western Europe, Dangerous Gifts revisits the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century origins of these imperial security practices. It questions how it all began. Why did Great Power interventions in the Ottoman Levant tend to result in further turmoil and civil wars? Why has the region been embroiled in a paradox—an ever-increasing demand for security despite the increasing supply—ever since? It embeds this highly pertinent genealogical history into an innovative and captivating narrative around the Eastern Question, freeing the latter from the monopoly of Great Power politics, and also foregrounding the experience and agency of the Levantine actors: the gradual yet still forceful opening up of the latter’s economies to global free trade, the asymmetrical implementation of international law from their perspective, and the secondary importance attached to their threat perceptions in a world where political and economic decisions were ultimately made through the filter of global imperial interests.

Facebook’s security officer spent more on security because he wanted less safety, which would further balloon his own interests in self enrichment (and his friends). It’s no coincidence he purchased a $3 million home in the hills above Silicon Valley. Would anyone think of him as a descendant of Napoleon?

Before he was hired to drive Facebook’s infamous collapse of safety he was at Yahoo for only about a year, where he secretly pulled $2 million out of their budget to hand out to his friends and followers (under the line item: “bug bounty”), which did exactly nothing in terms of platform safety. Yahoo after he left had to report their biggest breaches of safety in their history.

It’s perhaps counter-intuitive, yet if you place an ethics filter over security spend you can see how sometimes massive investments proposed by immoral security leaders are in fact predictably going to reduce safety, giving them an excuse to demand more.

More investment therefore can lead to more safety, yet only if that investment has proper governance — adheres to principles of ethics like inherited rights and external accountability for harms.

I’m reminded of the days before “mutually assured destruction” had its total meltdown in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The unregulated hawks of America were trying to cook up another fictional “knockout punch” with a weapon (Project Pluto) that would demoralize the Soviets by being so egregiously awful to them.

This is a good reminder that the Japanese considered the nuclear bombs to be nothing more than a drop of rain in a hurricane that had lasted many months. In fact, the actual reason for rapid capitulation of the Japanese at the end of WWII was a fear of Soviet troops walking into their territory and seizing control.

In addition, the cost to American lives of the Manhattan Project is estimated to have been higher than what the Japanese suffered from it. And obviously it led to even further harms elsewhere, as well as destabilization of the world afterwards…

An expensive nuclear-ramjet-powered missile nonetheless following the fictional narrative of nuclear bombing, was conceived to fly around the world four times, dumping toxic radiation as it went, while lobbing hydrogen bombs with questionable accuracy.

Insanity? An excellent reminder of how “security investment” can be totally out of control without some basic morality as its guide.