Non-State Actress' Main Character Energy*
May 11, 2025 - May 16, 2025 in the Matrix
Welcome to Main Character Energy, a weekly series covering the people and stories eho are doing everything they can to exude more of a gravitational pull on the earth than the sun. This newsletter is free to all subscribers. Paid subscribers get at least 3x the Non-State Actress in their inbox, which means 3x the info and 3x the wit to be 3x more ahead of their friends, colleagues, high school nemeses and Bumble dates.
BLUF
Today’s issue is the near-culmination of a little experiment I’ve been doing, which will be the subject of a long-form piece shortly. I’ve hemmed and hawed all week about whether or not to take it this far - but I think it’s for the best. We’re in this together, friends.
I’ve left some hints a la Taylor Swift about what this little game in recent weeks, and even more throughout this piece. Can you tell? Also, if you work for Anthropic - please respond to my request for comment.
Philippines Grants US Military Access to Naval Base Camilo Osias and Camp Melchor dela Cruz
Catch Up: The Philippines formally approved US military access to two additional bases on Luzon island - Naval Base Camilo Osias in Santa Ana, Cagayan and Camp Melchor dela Cruz in Gamu, Isabela - under the 2014 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), bringing the total number of facilities accessible to American forces to nine. Philippines’ Defense Secretary Jose Faustino Jr. and US Ambassador MaryKay Carlson signed the agreement on May 13. Even though the expanded access isn’t exactly new (it’s part of the implementation of the 2014 EDCA allowing US forces to construct facilities and preposition defense equipment) the spots are facing 125 miles from Taiwan across the Luzon Strait, and approximately 217 miles from the Chinese mainland. Add in Japan’s 15% increase in defense spending and Australia’s. submarine deal with the US and UK and you get the geopolitical equivalent of the entire cast of Vanderpump Rules ganging up on the real villain…Tom Sandoval – I mean the Chinese Communist Party and its military.
Ok, but Why is This a Thing You’re Putting in the Summary? Why make more things in more places? Think of this as like getting insurance for your home in Florida near Orlando hurricane season. Sure, you’re a little more protected than Miami (Taiwan), but it isn’t a matter of if the storm is coming – it’s when. These bases represent an expensive but potentially crucial investment if /when regional storms pop off. Alternatively, think of this as a super clear and *very* physical manifestation of Fuck Around and Find Out directed at China from the Australia, Japan, Philippines, and the US.
Watch What Happens Live Next up? The Philippine Department of National Defense will establish a joint committee with US Pacific Command to oversee the implementation timeline, with construction expected to begin by September 2025. Local communities near both bases are organizing town halls to address concerns about increased military traffic and environmental impacts, while also hoping for economic benefits. These are all important – though the real show is going to be China’s response beyond the initial diplomatic protests. When the US and Philippines implemented previous components of the EDCA expansions. The CCP hissy fit included Chinese naval exercises and economic pressure on Philippine exports. More than that. the true test of impact will come if and how tensions across the Taiwan Strait stay at ‘passive but still aggressive Instagram caption’ levels or escalate towards a full-on Watch What Happens Live confrontation on the couch.
AI-Generated Deepfakes Apparently Target G20 Finance Ministers
Catch Up: A few men experienced a phenomenon too familiar to too many women when Fancy Bear (a Russian military intelligence affiliated group, not a koala in a dress) distributed synthetic or ‘deepfake’ videos of those men saying and doing things they never said or did. Fortunately for the men, who are all G20 Finance Ministers, they were not naked and/or engaging in sex acts in any of the videos, which is more than most women familiar with the experience (including the one writing this summary!) can say. Still, not a great situation.
Given the individuals and the content of the content (which I am intentionally not repeating), the impact of the videos had immediate global financial ramifications. Was this avoidable? Eh. Was this something we could have been more prepared for? Absolutely. We’ve long known that women experience the types and impacts of conflict and precursors to conflict earlier, more directly, and more severely than men – which means that the concerns of women are usually pretty decent predictors of trends in warfare and the result of those trends (femicide and organized crime; synthetic, non-consensual porn for financial coercion to and synthetic non-consensual content for financially-motivated information warfare). Whether war fighting institutions and their societies are willing to acknowledge and mobilize around those trends is a subject for another day.
Ok, but Why Is This a Thing You’re Putting in the Summary? I can’t say no to a little information warfare, as some of you have started to catch on to. Gone are the days when men on the internet merely called women witches for ‘fooling’ them with a little contour. The world is grappling with what happens when we don’t merely accentuate the positive over the negative but build a whole world we’ve never seen before. Is this a new thing? Absolutely not. We survived the creation and proliferation of books, radio shows, television, movies, and YouTube shorts and we will survive this…once we figure out a way to detect, verify, embrace, and reject synthetic content as is appropriate in specific context (read: Yes to Elle Woods, who is *not real*, no to a holographic Tupac hellbent on telling people he’s as real as Cassie’s evidence against Sean Combs).
I Can’t Feel My Face: Some recognize this moment could be the first coordinated, large-scale, financially-motivated information warfare based on fake and non-factual (not naturally occurring/real and incorrect) information attack. I disagree – and would say this would be the first recognized, coordinated, large-scale, financially-motivated information warfare based on fake and non-factual information attack in our lifetime.
Does this matter? Absolutely. Do we need to dig in and do more than ‘educate before on what is true and not true’? You bet your Lisa Frank trapper keeper. Do we need to have a complete meltdown? No – and that would be a waste of the sunscreen I just put on. This little story makes the summary because the impact on global financial markets is nothing to ignore – and because we need to get real about information provenance. If Christie’s, Sotheby’s and other auction houses, private art dealers, collectors, museums, and insurance companies can all come up with a way to determine the origin story of jewelry, antiquities, and the stuff the Hobby Lobby guy was hoarding in this basement – and then *value* it based on that origin story which they call provenance, we can figure out a way to communicate the chain of creation and custody of a video.
I Hate This Game of Telephone - Nothing is Ever Real
Kenyan authorities discovered unauthorized uses of equipment in key government buildings, reportedly installed by Chinese contractors, this week. The security devices were intended for internal use and in fact are being used by the CCP remotely too. The sophisticated listening devices and network monitoring systems were found during a security audit of the Treasury building, Ministry of Defense headquarters, and the new Parliament annex and were all reportedly installed between 2022-2024. Given the kinds of devices and their locations, it’s safe to assume the Chinese Communist Party was after more than B-Roll for their rip off of House of Cards but rather showing off moves from the ‘infrastructure today, intelligence tomorrow’ playbook they’re using around the world.
Ok, but Why Is This a Thing You’re Putting in the Summary? As unsurprising as this may seem, particularly given recent stories about CCP counterintelligence efforts in the UK, this hits different. Why? Kenya doesn’t have as an adversarial relationship with the CCP as the UK or the US does…which is why Huawei and other CCP-connected companies were allowed to install equipment to begin with. Keep your enemies close, and your friends close enough that you can always hear them I guess? This discovery will likely trigger security reviews across Africa faster than TikTok trends spread, especially in countries where Chinese firms have been building government facilities like they're playing real-life SimCity.
Can You Hear Me Now? This discovery validates international concerns about China using seemingly benign infrastructure projects to create a global surveillance network more extensive than your favorite reality TV show's camera setup. For everyday Americans, it signals that competition with China isn't just economic—it's about who controls the invisible digital highways carrying everything from military secrets to cat videos.