Apperceptive Mess #15: The Nude General and What Military History Can Teach Us About Power

Hello friends, happy Monday! 👋🏻

This week I published a new landing site for the haiku game I am building. Meet Wuku!

I have always wanted to find an excuse to build an app on Ethereum, and think this will be a wonderful tiny little project to learn more about smart contract development. 

Here are some quick takeaways so far from building a “dApp” (decentralized application):

1. Solidity might only occupy a handful of files in your codebase, but it will take up >50% of development time.

2. Test-driven development (TDD) pays enormous dividends when you are writing smart contracts. 

3. UX is so crucial for dApps to handle the possibility of having a subset of users who may not have an Ethereum wallet like MetaMask installed. 

4. Because requests take longer to process, the dApp needs to be more considerate in communicating loading/failure states.

Taken together, I completely underestimated the endeavor required to bring the game to life at the outset. Therefore, I enlisted my friend Chester to help me with all things UI/UX.

We cannot wait to show you all what we have in store!

Thought of The Week: Why Learning Military History Can Be Useful

As you can tell by the section header and last week’s newsletter, I have fallen somewhat into a military history rabbit hole. While you are unlikely to unseat an incumbent by waiting behind thick vegetation to ambush them, metaphorical employment of said strategy may be useful. 

The exercise of it, however, requires a deep understanding of the power relations between a large incumbent and a small-yet-spry upstart. There is no better genealogy to trace than the oldest medium of power of transfer: war and conflict.

The Iraq war and Sino-Japanese war were great lessons for how a less-sophisticated incumbent force could push back against a better-organized and technologically superior invading force. History is also not short of examples of the reverse. The French Revolution, for example, was started by less-organized upstarts that unseated better-organized incumbent powers. 

So what can military history teach us about the power relationships between incumbents and startups? A lot. Military history is fascinating not because of the violence, but what it can teach us about people’s basal emotions. After all, The Odyssey was more about the story of hate, pride, vanity, and love than spears and arrows.

Find of The Week: The Nude General

Winston Churchill called the man a “genius,” and his subordinates loved him. However, Orde Wingate probably irritates a greater number of his peers and superiors on an average day. He shows up to meetings naked, eats raw onions, and thinks bathing is a farce, so he only scrubs himself with a rubber brush.

Orde Wingate was famous for his successful use of local forces to fight long-range and unconventional means of battle. He was most famous for his work in Palestine, Abyssinia, and Burma during World War 2.

The key to his success was not the size of the units but the use of auxiliary or foreign forces as a force multiplier against his conventional adversaries. Leading native troops, they fought away from supply lines, reinforcements, and without organic coverage of artillery or air support. Dispersed into small columns against the Japanese in Burma, the Chindits launched deep-penetrating guerrilla raids against the Japanese in the jungle. Harassing the enemy by frequently carrying out ambushes and destroying bridges, Wingate’s small strike force dealt a significant blow to the morale of the Japanese troops. The Japanese, feeling threatened, had to scramble and disperse their forces to protect their supply lines and rear areas.

Wingate, the garlic-and-onion necklace wearing general, was so revered that he has roads in Ethiopia and military training institutes in Israel named after him. Today, many of his “maverick” ideas have made its way into training doctrines of special forces across the world. 

Seen as mavericks during their time and geniuses in hindsight, iconoclasts like Orde Wingate and John Boyd makes you think about the efficacy of peacetime military leadership appointments. Morgan Housel calls these types of people “natural maniacs,” and correctly puts that “you can’t ask for the maniac parts you like without realizing there are maniac parts that might backfire.” Will today’s ultra-connected and scrutinized world affect the natural maniacs from doing their thing? Does genius only get its chance to shine only in times of crisis where people’s risk-aversion is low? I don’t know. Those are a series of questions to be answered another day. 

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That is all we have for the week! I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I did writing it. If you have any questions, suggestions, complaints, or feedback, please feel free to reach out by replying directly to this email!

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