(162) Any community that fails to prepare, with the expectation that the federal government or, for that matter, even the state government will come to their rescue at the final moment will be tragically wrong - Michael Leavitt, secretary of US Health and Human Services, on avian flu in early 2006
We have to save ourselves. Start with a flashlight, radio, extra set of batteries in case of emergency or disaster. For $25 you can buy the BogoLight, a solar charging AA battery-powered LED light and they'll send a second solar light to a needy community around the world, including Afghanistan and Iraq.
(165) In the modern brand of terrorist warfare, what an enemy can do directly is limited. The most dangerous thing it can do is to provoke you into hurting yourself - James Fallows
Aikido, jujitsu, using the antagonist's weapons and momentum to defeat them. Global Guerrillas have been doing this for years, as John Robb's Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization describes.
Good preparation is good security.
Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization by John Robb
Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2007
ISBN 978-0-471-78079-3
(155) We are vulnerable because we don't know, and our vulnerability is actually increased because we don't know. Because of this, he [Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable] argues (correctly), it is easy to engage in hindsight bias. This is the tendency to believe that the event was predictable based on knowledge gained after the event occurred. In effect, people unknowingly substitute current knowledge of outcomes into the gaps of knowledge that were present when building earlier expectations of potential events.
We don't know our own ignorance but must assume it. Imagine as many risks as possible, build resilience and local autonomy.
Personal defense becomes civil defense when practiced in concert. Solar IS Civil Defense provides an ad hoc emergency response system and the beginnings of a renewable infrastructure. Expand a solar civil defense into Solar Swadeshi and you have a bare minimum LED light, transistor radio and cell phone communications network, applicable from the refugee camp on up.
the war that matters is the war against the imagination
all other wars are subsumed in it.
Diane Di Prima
"Rant" (1968)
This poem was written against the Vietnam War. Today, small group or individual global guerrilla warfare may require more imagination for waging war and growing peace than ever before.
(163) For security to work, it needs to be:
Affordable. ...to really build security, it needs to benefit from competitive pressure (to reduce costs), innovation (to increase price and performance), and the vicissitudes of demand (change based on need)...
Efficiently allocated. ...resources must be allocated quickly through a dynamic process that sends them quickly though a dynamic process that sends them to the correct recipient. Nothing else will work in a world of rapid system shocks.
Broad-based and participatory. By their nature, state desire complete control over security (a de facto security monopoly). This creates a situation of dependence and a sloughing off of responsibility. To be effective, security systems need to involve people at every level.
(164) ...survival requires a new mind-set - or better yet, a philosophy, one that will carry us through the threats we currently face from global guerrillas and oil shocks to threats unimagined along the trend line of technological superempowerment.
So what do I mean by survival? It is simply the ability to dynamically mitigate and dampen system shocks. Specifically, it is those things we (and our state) can do to change the configuration of our networks to ensure that intentional or naturally occurring attacks on our society don't do much damage or spiral out of control.
Food, water, shelter, heat, light, sanitation... Start with the bare minimum, a refugee camp let's say and build from there. Think through the process from bare minimum to bare maximum, which, practically speaking, is one six billionths, one share in the Gross International Product, per person depending upon how it's counted.
(165) Philip Bobbitt.... The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History makes a historically detailed case that the bureaucratic nation-state is in an inevitable transition to a more competitive form called the market-state. He correctly tags the driver of this change as economics, or more precisely, the emergence of a global superinfrastructure that enables hypercompetitive economic competition.
Corporate feudalism
All these states are struggling with the loss of the core legitimacy of the nation-state - its ability to provide for the welfare of its people. This welfare is both too expensive and too cumbersome to administer within a hypercompetitive atmosphere. As a replacement, these states are in the midst of shifting their legitimacy to deliver maximal "opportunity" through the use of market mechanisms.
States have never been about providing welfare for the people, power for the few, with some few exceptions, has been the primary driver.
Bobbitt posits three possibilities:
entrepreneurial market-state
mercantile market-state
managerial market-state
Markets are man-made, determined by who controls the market but who controls the market? Is this man-made market unnatural, incompatible with ecological limits?
(167) ...as a dispassionate global marketplace adjudicates their efficacy...
The present marketplace is anything but dispassionate.
(168) The minimalist rule set that translates the experience we gained from the Internet into a working model is a focus on trade. Within this new minimalist model, open trade and communications are key. Open trade and communications rip down borders and ideologies and are pure poison to real warfare. Over time, they will cure most ills. The key is to give them time to work.
Open source wikipedia eBay globalization as an alternative to the present trade structure?
(169) ...the disconnection of Cuba and Iran
Model of post-peak oil and affordable healthcare from Cuba a result of their isolation?
(170) Within the field of global economics and communication, this [WTO] oversight body will look more like a standards enforcement body than any political entity.
(172) Here's how a platform works. A platform is merely a collection of services and capabilities that are common to a wide variety of activities aggregated in a way that makes them exceedingly easy to access. The benefit of this approach is that it becomes easier for end users of this platform to build solutions because they don't need to re-create the wheel in order to build a new service, and it is easier for participants to coordinate and interconnect their activities.
Examples outside Internet? Farmers' markets?
(173-174) platform attributes:
transparency
two way - both producer and consumer
openness
(176) Another stopping point in our emerging philosophy of resilience and survivability is to think in terms of what platforms spawn: ecosystems.
Robb is probably referring to business ecosystems rather than living biological ecosystems.
I like Bill McDonough's Ecological Design Principles:
waste equals food
use only available solar income
respect diversity
love all the children
If you want to go deeper, try John Todd's twelve ecosystem design principles.
In The Keystone Advantage by [Marco] Iansiti and Roy Levien maintain that an ecosystem is a large, complex, and loosely connected network of companies and individuals that share the same fate. This "shared fate" is the result of codependencies that derive from the presence of modularity and platforms in the network.
Codependency and addiction. As Anne Wilson Schaef has outlined, we live in a society that is based upon addiction, that manifests all the symptoms of addictive thought processes: self-centerness, permanent crisis orientation, strict dualism (everything's either all black or all white)... For those interested in going deeper into this subject, there's an interesting thesis that relates R. Buckminster Fuller's 12 Degrees of Freedom to 12 Step programs like AA, NA, and Alanon. Synergetic social psychology for sobriety.
(176-177) Criteria of ecosystem health: productivity, robustness [redundancy, complexity, overlapping systems], niche creation
(177) They find through copious analysis that the usual cause of ecosystem failure (as per the previously mentioned criteria) is due to the presence of two types of firms (or in a a more general sense, participants):
The landlord dominates a critical hub position in the network...
The dominator vertically integrates into all aspects of the ecosystem...
(178) These firms or organizations follow a strategy that focuses on the growth of the ecosystem as well as on the firm itself. It does this by:
creating high-value sharable assets
creating and managing physical and information hubs
supporting uniform standards (open connections)
creating and packaging state-of-the-art tools and building blocks for innovation
maintaining performance standards
acquiring financial assets for operating leverage
reducing uncertainty by centralizing communications
reducing complexity by supporting and providing powerful platforms
Growing the pie not the slice; investing in the commons and community; look at actual ecosystems structures not just business "ecosystems" for usable examples for biomimesis, even social biomimesis. Any examples from the sociobiology literature?
(182) A more resilient approach to sustainability requires a focus on the local production of energy.
Local production, self-sufficiency, swadeshi, Solar Swadeshi. World localism, backyard internationalism. This has been a vision of a tantalizingly possible future since before at least WWI. Edison and Ford even tried their hand at it.
Perhaps all it will take to turn these [efficient, green, renewable] innovations from a nice-to-have option to a necessity is to promote them in terms of security, resilience, and survivability.
Solar IS Civil Defense.
(182-183) Because we are unable to decapitate, outsmart, or defend ourselves against global guerrillas, naturally occurring events, and residual nationalism from causing cascades of failure throughout the global system, we need to learn to live with the threat they present. As we have already seen, this doesn't mean an activist foreign policy that seeks to rework the world in our image, police state measures to ensure state security, or spending all of our resources on protecting everything. It does mean the adoption of a philosophy of resilience that ensures that when these events do occur (and they will), we can more easily survive their impact.
By building resilience into the fabric of our daily life, our response to these threats will organically emerge in what seems like an effortless way. Without them, we will suffer the effects of dynamic shocks on a brittle system. With this in mind, I've created a scenario that characterizes what a breakdown looks like to serve as a warning of what we can expect in the future.
(185) Security will become a function of where you live and whom you work for, much as health care is allocated already.
Only if we let it. The only "private" healthcare system in the industrialized world is probably not a good model for public security. I'd like to see security become a function of who you are and how society is organized rather than a diktat from Blackwater contractors, bounty hunters, and political bandits.
Previous posts:
Brave New War I, Brave New War II, and Brave New War III.