The Great Rebalancing

In May a company I remember called Google declared war on the web. They propose to replace all their search results with slop. The predicted consequences are emerging, such as searches for strings which contain the words “disregard” and “ignore” failing because LLMs cannot separate instructions and data, or search strings that are too long producing responses in random languages because the LLM places less weight on earlier parts of its context window like the part that tells it “answer in English (Canadian).” Every query to a LLM is a SQL-injection attack waiting to happen. For those of us who host websites, this poses the question of how to respond, because Google has broken the social contract where we let them scrape our website and they send visitors to our sites. When search engines provide slop instead of links, traffic to many sites collapses (although mine has been steady for a few years). Computer scientist Paul Cantrell is arguing for blocking Google’s crawlers and filing DMCA takedown requests. I stopped using their search engine in 2013 for many excellent reasons, but I am curious if any of my gentle readers still find my site on it. I will be back next weekend with a post about swords, but right now I would like to talk about why I am not sure we will have to think about these companies and their race-obsessed executives twenty years from now.

When a certain Codomannus became Darius, Great King, King of Kings, he inherited enough gold and silver to run his empire for several years without collecting taxes and tithes.1 It had been squirreled away by the kings before him through all the wars with Egypt and the Ionians. Older historians often said that this showed the Achaemenids were foolish kings who did not understand how to use silver, even though Thucydides boasted that the Athenians had enough coined silver in the Acropolis to run their empire for ten years (Thucydides 2.13.3– look it up!). A few years later, Alexander the king of the Macedonians overthrew Darius and took his treasures. Thirty years later, most of them had been spent on grandiose construction projects and wars between Alexander’s generals, and buried in pots in Thrace or set in motion between Sidon and Carthage. Empire gathered all those sparkling treasures into a few pillared rooms with mud-brick walls in Persepolis and Damascus and Ecbatana. Once the empire was divided, the treasures scattered like water from a burst skin.

When Barack Obama left office, he saw a United States which had been the center of global finance for almost a hundred years. Many Americans resisted their new role, and the global capitalist system that caused the Great Depression, but by about 1950 American institutions stood behind the new order. And slowly in the Great War, then faster and faster, capital started to flow to the United States like silver flowed into Mughal India and Ming China. The United States headed the global institutions which governed the postwar world and enforced a policy of free trade and free navigation. The United Nations headquarters was in New York City not Kuala Lumpur, the International Monetary Fund was based in DC not Vienna, Canada extended copyright when the Mouse told them too, and every Internet standards meeting had representatives from American megacorps who pushed in whatever direction the NSA was pushing. Someone who looked at the world in 2016 might have thought that this was natural. Someone who looked at the world in 1906 might have expected that China would always have an emperor and Britain would dominate global finance for decades until the United States or Germany finally caught up. Things changed more quickly than expected, as they often do. The people who did best when the coal-burning empires collapsed were the people who understood that things could change and took precautions, and the people who saw that they had changed and moved much faster than their friends thought was wise.

One of the basic principles of investing is rebalancing. If one part of your portfolio grows much faster or shrinks much slower than everything else, that might seem like a good thing. Exponential growth compounds. But this means that if anything goes wrong with that successful investment, more and more of your total assets are at risk. So prudent investors check every so often, and sell off some of what is doing best to buy a bit of everything else. The classic example is selling some stocks and buying bonds or other fixed-income assets when stock markets are booming. Fixed-income assets rarely make much money after inflation, but they rarely loose much money either. And when stock-markets crash, central banks usually lower interest rates, which causes the value of bonds paying the older higher interest rates to rise. Just as important is selling stocks in a sector that is booming and buying some boring banks and fertilizer companies and carmakers who ignore the nagging economists and pay dividends. One day soon BreX or Nortel or pets.com may be worth nothing. But if you have turned some of your wins into something safer, you keep them once it goes away.

The Internet gave us many good things, and a few people found value on corporate social media. However, corporate tech is driven by greed and the desire to surveil and control. All around the world, millions of us are considering what to do: should I learn how to block Google’s and Gemini’s crawlers to improve my webmaster skills at the cost of a few visitors, or even install Iocaine to poison their training data? Sticking with big tech is easy, and in the past they gave us free email and web search that just worked. Even if you are grateful for those things, it would be wise to take some of the money and time they freed up and invest it in alternatives.

I am not a prophet. But in my view, it is very likely that in twenty years, the power of a few American web service corporations will be much less than it was in 2016. Google’s business was showing you ads next to the search results, then ads on the site you visited. They would not be blowing up that model if they thought it was sure to survive. Facebook can’t launch a profitable new business to save its middle managers’ bonuses, and Microsoft struggles to keep one version of Windows functional. The people who run these companies are not serious or skillful at anything except gathering power and keeping their quarterly bonus. Sometimes the latest outrage is not a brutal expression of power, but King Lear’s cry to Regan and Goneril before they threw him out into the storm:

I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall—I will do such things—
What they are yet I know not, but they shall be
The terrors of the Earth!

If the power of these corporations does collapse, anyone who built their life, their business, or their university around them will be left like farmers on their housetops in a flood.

The great institutions can’t move fast enough. If the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth fund sells half its US stocks, someone has to buy them. Before the French government finishes moving off Microsoft software, it will have to build the FOSS systems it requires. The Prime Minister of Canada is torn between ordinary Canadians and security personnel who understand that we have to move now, and the useful idiots and middle managers who spent their careers and climbed the ladder integrating Canada with the United States and don’t see any reason to change course. But anyone reading a blog like this can reduce their engagement with big tech.

Maybe the open web will lose and drown in an ocean of slop or be locked away behind ID checks and requirements to use the company’s hardware and the company’s software to read simple HTML. Anyone who claims to know the future is selling something. But if you assume that the US’ information and financial domination will last forever, and could not go into rapid decline, you may find yourself like a moneylender waiting at the palace gates in Ecbatana for payment when the treasury contains only cobwebs and rats’ nests. Moving your email to Fastmail and your web searches to Mojeek is not the easiest choice or a path to wealth and power, but it is a way to prepare for the possibility that the world could change.

For (Mark) Carney (in 2019), the dollar system had structural flaws. It was inherently unsustainable. For (Israeli-American banker Stanley) Fischer, there was no reason to move on from a system that had been working when the problem was not structural but political (and he named a specific politician in DC). … For Carney, the dollar system must necessarily pass. For Fischer, it can only collapse if America is foolish enough to let it. Every disagreement about the future of the (US) dollar comes down to one of those two arguments.

Further Reading

Nicholas Taleb gestures at some of these ideas in his Incerto pentalogy. The Opt Out Project has pretty good advice for people who got entangled with Google and want to unwind. Dan Bortolotti has a good introduction to rebalancing as risk management on his blog and in his book Reboot Your Portfolio (2021). Journalism and blogging are full of bold speculations about the future of corporate tech and American hegemony, from mild newspaper columns and firm essays to spicy blog posts by Timothy Snyder or Baldur Bjarnason. They are also full of examples of executives, major investors, and board members at these companies talking like Lothrop Stoddard. I took a moment to write to Shopify Spotify about a particularly egregious example since in theory they are Canadian and we don’t accept that poisonous nonsense here.

Edit 2026-06-14: Leah Elliott’s Contra Chrome is one of many excellent explanations why someone who cares about privacy should have nothing to do with Google products.

(scheduled 25 May 2026)

The Thrust of an Argument

Sometime in the sixteenth year of Xerxes great king (circa 468/7 BCE in our calendar), someone at Persepolis turned a tablet with Elamite writing on end and rolled his seal along it. A conversation with Josho Brouwers of Karwansaray BV recalled it to memory. Because this seems to show the style of body armour with a tall neck-guard and flaps over the shoulders which is often understood as distinctively Greek and said to have been invented about a hundred years before Xerxes based on its appearance in Greek vase paintings. But there is no hint of the Aegean in this scene, and this armour is missing the skirt of pteryges around the waist which usually appear in depictions of armour with this cut from the Aegean.

Showing where this style of armour was invented and how it spread and changed is more difficult than it sounds. It is true that the earliest evidence is painted pottery from mainland Greece in the early sixth or perhaps the late seventh century BCE. But in the sixth century BCE, it happens that we have much more evidence for arms and armour from the Aegean than from anywhere in the neighbourhood. The people there painted armoured men on their pots with durable glazes and carved them on stone, and they deposited large amounts of armour and weapons in graves and especially temples. So it is very dangerous to say that the Greeks invented an object just because it is first depicted in the Aegean, especially if that object is one which does not survive well in the ground. It is usually thought that the first armours with this cut were of cloth or felt or hide, and none of those materials survives 2500 years in the ground unless the conditions are just right. Although by the second century BCE armour with this cut was being worn all around the Mediterranean and made in every possible material, not a single fragment made from cloth or hide has been identified. So while this style of armour was probably invented somewhere in or near to the Aegean around the sixth century BCE, its hard to say for sure that it was invented by Greeks.

Whoever invented this style of armour, from the fifth century onwards it seems to have spread east and west with Greek and perhaps Etruscan and Phoenician sailors and soldiers and artisans. Yet its a bit harder to say how the people who borrowed it understood what they were doing.

If we look at the Darius Mosaic from Pompeii, an incredibly good copy of a painting made circa 300 BCE, we see this style of armour on both sides. The Persians desperately defending their king mostly wear armours with this cut but with a blocky shape and red surface. The king of the Macedonians who are pushing into the scene from the left as Darius’s driver turns away also wears this style of armour, but his is different in almost every detail. Clearly Macedonians and Persians adapted the basic form of this armour to their own taste. While Greeks liked to boast that Philip of Macedon had borrowed his phalanx from Homer, and Darius and his men had copied Greek swords and lances, no Macedonian or Persian has left us their words to tell us whether they saw their armour as Greek. And the soldier on the seal above was happy to wear close-fitted Iranian clothing under his armour, thrust a very Iranian axe behind his shoulder where he could grab it quickly, and leave aside the large round shield which warriors from the Aegean favoured for hand-to-hand combat.

Further Reading: Duncan Head, The Achaemenid Persian Army (Montvert: Stockport, 1992) p. 27 fig. 14a, John Curtis and Nigel Tallis eds., Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia (University of California Press: Berkeley, 2005) pp. 210-217. The Oriental Institute Publications on Persepolis are free and well worth the reading (link).

Edit 2022-03-12: Fixed formatting broken when WordPress introduced the block editor

Edit 2023-09-27: fixed broken image elements

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Two Perspectives on the Astronomical Diary for Gaugamela, Part 1: Background

It is notorious that few stories about Alexander the Great written during his lifetime survive. The embroidered narratives by Greek and Latin writers which form the basis of most modern accounts were written 300 to 500 years later. A few of Alexander’s coins and inscriptions have been preserved, but they naturally give his point of view. A few chance references in Greek literature give a sense of the shock which many contemporaries felt that the king of a land on the edge of civilization suddenly overthrew the greatest power which had ever existed and conquered places which were little more than legends. One of the few long stories about Alexander which does survive in a version written during his lifetime is a cuneiform text, the Astronomical Diary for Gaugamela. This week I thought that I would write an introduction to the Diary and what is involved in reading such a text. Next week I will talk about two different ways of reading them as represented in articles by R.J. van der Spek (English: Darius III, Alexander the Great, and Babylonian Scholarship) and by Robert Rollinger and Kai Ruffing (German: ‘Panik’ im Heer: Dareios III, die Schlacht von Gaugamela, und die Mondfinsternis vom 20. September 331 vor Christ). I hope that the second will be helpful for readers who are interested in ancient history but not comfortable reading German.

The astronomical diaries are a collection of significant events on earth and in heaven organized by date. In the first millennium BCE some of the temples in southern Mesopotamia paid scholars to observe and record these events. The Babylonians seem to have believed that by correlating events on earth with events in the heavens, scholars could better understand the messages which the gods were sending them and the interrelationships between events. By nature, these diaries needed to be a running account, and they often contain notes such as that the sky was hidden by clouds or that the scholar was unable to watch that night. This suggests that the scholars were concerned with accuracy and not willing to invent observations. Most historians of science are very impressed with these scholars’ ability to take careful observations of the heavens and generate mathematical rules to model them. The diaries survive on a series of broken tablets from roughly the seventh through the first centuries BCE. One pair of tablets devotes about twenty long lines to the events in 331 BCE which we call the battle of Gaugamela, the flight of Darius, and Alexander’s conquest of Babylonia. The left half of these lines is preserved, while the right is broken away. With luck some of the broken part will be found again amongst the tablet fragments in European museums, or another copy will be identified.

The most important thing to know about the Astronomical Diary for Gaugamela is that it exists and can be read. Having a source contemporary with the battle and only a few days’ ride away is very important, because every time a story is retold it changes, and working back from the changed version to reconstruct the original is a slow and subjective process. Most of what can be known about the chronology of Alexander’s career comes from cuneiform sources, because the Babylonian calendar was very regular and Babylonian astronomers were more interested in recording precise dates than Greek historians were. In 1988 A.J. Sachs and H. Hunger printed a transcription and English translation which is widely available in academic libraries, and for some years now a text by two respected scholars has been available online, so scholars who want to tell the story of the battle have a duty to use it and not just rely on Greek and Latin stories. If you already know about this source, however, the question is how to interpret it.

Have a look at the transcription of some of the most controversial lines of the Astronomical Diary for Gaugamela.

(14’) ITU BI U4 11.KAM hat-tu4 ina ma-dàk-tu4 ina qud-me LUGAL GAR-m[a .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..]
(15’) ana tar-ṣi LUGAL ŠUB-ú 24.KAM ina še-rì LUGAL ŠÚ za-qip-t[u4 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..]
(16’) GABA a-ha-meš im-ha-ṣu-ma BAD5.BAD5lúERÍN.MEŠ kab-t[u4 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ]
(17’) LUGAL ERÍN.MEŠ-šú ú-maš-šìr-ú-ši-ma ana URU.MEŠ-šú-nu [.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..]
(18’) [ana K]UR Gu-ti-i ZÁH-it-u’ (blank)

The numbers in (brackets) count the lines of the tablet. The square brackets enclose sections of the text which are missing, with two dots representing approximately one missing sign. As in most editions of a cuneiform text, this one prints signs which the editors read as words or morphemes in CAPITAL LETTERS and signs which they interpret as syllables in lowercase letters. The accent aigu, accent grave, and numbers in subscript differentiate between the different signs which can be read the same way, so that a reader who knows cuneiform can imagine which signs lie behind the editor’s interpretation into Latin letters and consider other possibilities. As you can see, this text is written in quite a logographic style. The original editors sensibly compared a modern almanac or other concise reference work which presents repetitive, structured information in a small space. Because the text is so concise, scholars today have to think carefully about how to read it.

Line fourteen describes some events two weeks before the battle, just after an eclipse of the moon. As is my custom, I have coded this page so that an explanation of each word will pop up if you put your mouse over it.

ITU BI U4 11.KAM hat-tu4 ina ma-dàk-tu4 ina qud-me LUGAL GAR–m[a …

At first glance, this line is easy to interpret: “same month, eleventh day, panic appeared in the camp in the presence of the king and …” In the Diary LUGAL is Darius III not his Macedonian rival.

The description of the battle was written on parts of lines 15 and 16 which have been lost. Line seventeen describes its end.

LUGAL ERÍN.MEŠ–šú ú-maš-šìr-ú-ši-ma ana URU.MEŠ–šú-nu …

All the signs on the first half of this line are legible, and all the words are common ones. As I will discuss next week, however, turning this line into an Akkadian or English sentence is not so easy.

Edit 2019-09-18: Fixed a broken link (livus.org is in disarray after converting from hand coding to a CMS)

Edit 2025-03-29: block editor

#Achaemenid #AlexanderTheGreat #ancient #AstronomicalDiaries #cuneiform #DariusIII #IronAge #LateBabylonian #methodology