THE MELTED MAP

From Sao Paulo, Brazil to Baghdad, Iraq to Nuevo Lardeo, Mexico to Quetta, Pakistan to Port Harcourt, Nigeria to Narathiwat, Thailand... globalization is melting the map. The reason is that the hyper flows of the new minimalist global platform are centrifugal in nature and not centripetal. As people connect outward onto this platform, they see both threat or promise. In response, they look inward for sources of strength to support them going forward, and in most cases find it wanting. Their states (and corporations) can't or will not provide them that strength.

The result is an almost pandemic drive towards ethnic/religious identity -- and -- the increasingly muscular granular forces of clan, sect, gang, and tribe. To get a sense of what I mean, you should take a moment to read an excellent Ralph Peters essay on a redrawn Middle East per ethnic and religious identity for The Armed Forces Journal (the weblog The Coming Anarchy follows this thread and provides a similar redrawn map for Central Asia). They detail mechanisms that have put our maps into flux and which will gain momentum.

The big differences between this struggle and those of the past is that first, it will be never ending. Big states, even those drawn along ethnic, religious, or national identity, may never provide the level of support required by those contained within their borders. The drive for a valuable identity, one gives as much as it gets to every member the group, may be a race to the bottom. There is no inevitable equilibrium point.

Second, the competitive advantage is rapidly conferring to the revisionist group, no matter how small. These groups can, and will, continually gain strength (economic, technological, and influential) through interaction with an increasingly open global platform. The acceleration of technological progress will only make this process faster. As these groups move to challenge the state for control over identity, they will in many cases opt to fight. To fight, they will increasingly use a new method of war -- the systems disruption and open source warfare that I detail here on this site -- that leverages the power of networks to undermine the functioning of their larger, more cumbersome competitors.

The stage is set. History has started again.

Comments

[Cavolonero]

This is what I meant by " Cookie Monster Died For Your Sins ".

[tim302]

John,
History started again after the fall of the USSR. All those unresolved and unformed nations (tribes, ethnicities, whatever) were held back during the era of the bipolar conflict.

Once the Cold War ended, all those conflicts could play out again, and we're just seeing it in an undeniable way now.

[Devang]

I couldn't have put it better myself, John. Call it nostalgia and coincidence, but after watching the two documentaries made during the 1999 Seattle WTO protest (Breaking the spell (made by anarchists), and This is what democracy looks like). I have increasingly found myself thinking the same thing you've posted on.

The power of networks as you mention, is undeniable, but this is the most profound question I still have left (perhaps in my naivete), can these groups find "strength in diversity", as the cliche goes. Not so, if they keep getting more and more fundamentalist, as you say.

[Syn Diesel]

History is old. And what is old is new again it seems. John, are you familiar with R.B. Fuller's historic ideas?

"It is essential that anyone reading this book know at the outset that the author is apolitical. I was convinced in 1927 that humanity's most fundamental survival problems could never be solved by politics. Nineteen twentyseven was the year when a human first flew alone across an ocean in one day.(In 1944, the DC-4 started flying secret war-ferryings across both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. In 1961, jet airliners put the ocean passenger ships out of business. In 1981, the world-around airlines flew over a billion and a half scheduled passenger miles and carried hundreds of millions of ton-miles of freight.) This was the obvious beginning of the swift integration of all humanity, groups of whose members for all their previous millions of years on planet Earth had been so remotely deployed from one another that they existed as separate nations with ways of life approximately unknown to one another. It was obvious that the integration would require enormous amounts of energy. It was obvious that the fossil fuels were exhaustible. It was obvious that a minority of selfish humans would organize themselves to exploit the majority's transitional dilemmas. I was convinced that within the twentieth century, all of humanity on our planet would enter a period of total crisis. I could see that there was an alternative to politics and its ever more wasteful, warring, and inherently vain attempts to solve one-sidedly all humanity's basic economic and social problems."

http://bfi.org/?q=node/407

I can't help but think that the focus on the Global World over the past few decades has distracted us from our common identities as Local-In-World (as I imagine neologist Bucky writing it) Creatures.

Any tips on becoming a Creative Guerrilla?

Real name is Mark.

[Syn Diesel]

"Gradually discovering that the networking abandonment of the voting booth was the true cause of their claimed "overwhelming majority," the incumbent administration, fearful of a potential rejective voting tidal wave of the inter-networked world people, will probably try in vain to block networking. Because networking is apolitical and amorphous, it has no "cells" to be attacked, as did the communism of former decades. The fearful sovereign nation politicos will find that trying to arrest networking is like trying to arrest the waves of the ocean."

Oh DAYUM. Old guy saw this coming John. ;)

[John Robb]

Sam Rose has some suggestions on creative guerrillas:

http://socialsynergy.typepad.com/social_synergy/2006/06/globalization_a.html

Another endless source of ideas is Dave Pollard's site:

http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/

[stevelaudig]

"Big states, even those drawn along ethnic, religious, or national identity, may never provide the level of support required by those contained within their borders. The drive for a valuable identity, one gives as much as it gets to every member the group, may be a race to the bottom. There is no inevitable equilibrium point."

Any thoughts on how the de-welfare stating of the West being suborned by the predatory capitalists will enhance the dissolution of "nation-state" identity. I may have said it before but the only thing that keeps the U.S. together seems to be the tax code and professional sports franchises.

[Robert Schunk]

I had just posted this on another site when I read John Robb's piece, and I thought it seemed appropriate to this discussion. Here goes:

World War I might be seen as a collision between modern-type multi-national business corporation-led globalization on the one hand, and effective states (with their attendant imperial systems) on the other.* (The old imperial systems might be seen as, perhaps, Eighteenth Century-type globalization, with the Imperial Corporations of that day (e.g., Dutch East India Company, Hudson’s Bay Company being quasi-State agencies of distinct national character.) One might just see the sweep of history of the last one hundred years as containing a great 77-year detour beginning in 1914 and ending in 1990, with the larger continuity being such that the date following December 31, 1913 (i,e., the end of the Balkan Wars) might just as well have been January 1, 1991 (i.e., the beginning of the Balkan Wars), with the strong states and globe-girdling imperial systems that stopped modern-type globalization in 1914 forever changed by the blood-drenched international chaos of the 1914-1990 period. Today, multi-national business corporations and multi-national non-governmental organizations have led the way in globalization, and they are the primary inspiration for the development of the technology and infrastructure (i.e., computers and the internet) which can just as easily be used by transnational criminals and terrorists. Simultaneously, international (i.e., inter-state) conflict has been largely overcome, only to be replaced by global internal (i.e., intra-state) conflict, plus the usual Moslem versus non-Moslem struggle that’s been going on since the Seventh Century.

Modern globalization, and the massive global concentration of wealth it has engendered, has created a vast new worldwide class of “losers” from people who would never have been candidates for this label in the past, who exhibit neither the personality traits nor the personal habits traditionally associated with loser status. “Born losers” generally tend to accept their status without too much resistance, but the same cannot be expected of “made losers”, who are, presumably, made of “winner” material to begin with. This has support from the field of biology, with primitive human societies being typically patterned after the “Alpha Male” system (dominant male gets exclusive possession of all females or of his choice of the most desirable females), with non-Alpha males having the choice of either making peace with their lot or of subverting the social order in order to gain “Alpha” status for themselves.** In terms of mob psychology, the “Alpha Male” system is exemplified by low-status males at scenes of civil disorder temporarily gaining leadership status (even over persons who usually enjoy considerably higher social status during normal times), with particular emphasis on the most extreme, most violent advocate usually gaining the greatest degree of sway over the crowd. This example also shows the extent to which “normal” civilized society exists to temper the “Alpha Male” system and its attendant threat of permanently lurking chaos, thus fostering “made losers” (the dominant type low-status male at the riot scene) and “made winners” (the high status male with a non-dominant personality type who falls under the mob leader’s influence). In our current winner-take-all system, an essential reversion to the “Alpha Male” system seems to be arising from the ruins of the former social order, with non-recessive-type males being swept out of society in ever increasing numbers. These non-recessive “made losers”, not being in the habit of blithely accepting bottom status, can only be expected to attempt to sabotage the order which has given them a social status for which their biological and psychological makeup has not prepared them, much like his type-fellow the mob leader who has similarly been sidelined by “normal” society, but, in normal times, in much lower numbers. In other words, the chronic chaos of the “King of the Hill” type expression of Alpha-Male society seems to be resurfacing with the passing away of a civil order designed to ensure SOME honorable place in society to most males.

In any case, I’m not optimistic about the future of the US, as our society emerged from the Cold War in rather decrepit condition (compared to Europe and Japan, whose Cold War defense we massively subsidized) due to massive military spending and to the socially disruptive effect of the social engineering of that period. A renewed global conflict, beginning before we were properly healed from the last one, wasn’t what we needed at the time it came. The offshoring of jobs, the dismantling of our primary heath care system at the hands of the private insurance industry, and the general picking dry of the national carcass by corporate America clearly don’t help, either.

*A more peaceful example of that collision might be the litigation consequent to the Titanic disaster of 1912, in which a British-built, British-crewed, British-registered ship was owned by a British Corporation which, in turn, was owned by an American corporation, producing a huge legal headache over which country was the proper venue for the many lawsuits.

**I fully realize that modern technology has largely equalized opportunities between the sexes for both good and ill, but, as most studies of these phenomena have dealt with animals in nature and with humans at the most primitive technological and social levels, I will restrict my discussion here to males with the full understanding that similar peer-ranking occurs both among females and between the sexes.

[sanjiv garg]

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