RESILIENT COMMUNITY: Technological Acceleration

The pace of technological change is accelerating exponentially. Fact, not much real debate on that. Most important to our analysis is how this change superempowers small groups, allowing them to accomplish activities normally reserved for large corporations or governments. The keys to this supermepowerment are:

• Better tools. Moore's law, Carlson curves, and personal fabrication (DIY everything, the start of an exponential rate of improvement for matter/products). Shift from centralized production to 'grow' your own computer/chemicals etc. Local energy.
  
• Rapidly expanding network resources. How to's on everything. Basic education via open courseware (from the best Universities in the world). Sensor networks. Spimes.
  
• New social connectivity. Expert networks. Tinkering via open source development. Telecommuting. Wisdom of crowds and crowd-sourcing.
  

Unfortunately, this supempowerment makes it possible for small groups to do incredible damage to global society. Fortunately, it also making it possible for resilient communities to efficiently and productively emulate global production/services locally. As a result, the resilient community isn't a step backwards to 19th Century approaches (survivalism, scarcity, and low productivity), but rather a move in a direction that makes it possible to generate rapid and sustained (as opposed to the relative stasis and irregular progress of the current system) improvements how we live.

Comments

[Duncan Kinder]

An apparently useful resource:

CityStates: Commentary on an Urban World
The Institute of Urban Studies at the University of Winnipeg

http://citystates.typepad.com/ius/

[changeist]

What are the implications of this symmetry? While these tools are helpful to RC as well as GG, does it make RCs vulnerable to point-to-point disruptions? It downscales both aggressor and target, and changes the nature of the fight. Does it eliminate the conflict itself?

[gmoke]

"Asked about the biggest threat to their groups' survival, a militant says that "free secular education for all" leading to an 'increase in the literacy rate' is the gravest threat to the survival of the jihadi groups in Pakistan."

_Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill_ by Jessica Stern

Focus on basic literacy and numeracy and providing local livelihoods, especially for young men, and you go a long, long way to cutting down on the openings for terroristic violence.

Unfortunately, it ain't about the technology but the social and political will to use it to good purpose.

[Syn Diesel]

"It downscales both aggressor and target, and changes the nature of the fight. Does it eliminate the conflict itself?" - changeist

"There is no final revolution. Revolutions are infinite." - I-330

"Unfortunately, it ain't about the technology but the social and political will to use it to good purpose." - gmoke

That's wrong, gmoke. But it's very real. Yeah.

[Syn Diesel]

Micro-location values. That's what I call it.

[Duncan Kinder]

As we develop resilient communities, this is the problem we need to address:

http://www.iranian.com/Features/2000/February/Imbaba/index.html

quote:

As we drove further and further toward Imbaba, the stench of poverty overwhelemed my senses. The farther we drove, the more dreadful our surroundings became. All I could see for miles were piles and piles of trash everywhere and, here and there, children playing among them. I couldn't help but stare. People stared back at me. Tears welled up in my eyes. "What was the point of coming? I knew you would just get depressed," Ashraf said gently.

I had never seen anything like it. How was it possible for people to live like this, I thought. The dejection was unbearable. The area was completely neglected by government authorities, to the point that Imbaba must not have even existed in urban plans or received any municipal services.

We pulled into what looked like a narrow unpaved road. Pedestrians cleared the road and touched the car as it passed. It took me a while to realize we had entered a neighborhood with homes. Ashraf stopped the car. "Where are we?" I asked. "His house is right there, stay here, I'll go get him."

I looked around. The place did not look livable. It was strewn with all sorts of litter, I couldn't make out any clear living spaces, there were a few holes in a huge wall, the rest was dirt and trash. The apartments were makeshift mud and brick structures. I couldn't stay in the car.

I was the only woman in the alleyway not wearing the hejab. I walked around and saw what looked like a young brother and sister fighting. I smiled and began speaking to them in my broken Arabic. They didn't understand my classical Arabic; their dialect was incomprehensible to me. They touchd me and giggled.

The little boy wanted to get inside the car so I let him sit in the driver's seat and act like he was driving. He rubbed his hands around the steering wheel and made honking noises. The little girl came back holding her baby brother in her arms. She just smiled. There were scars from a fast spreading skin disease on their beautiful faces and hands.

Then I noticed the ground was moving beneath me. A closer look revealed millions of flies, flies as far as my eyes could see, swarming on the ground. Horrified, I got back in the car.

:end_of_quote

[Duncan Kinder]

Apparently MEND, in Nigeria, while willing to sabotage oil facilities, nevertheless favors other forms of development in the poverty-stricken Niger Delta:

"Nigeria's main militant group in the oil-rich Niger Delta said on Sunday it would seek the release of two German construction workers kidnapped by armed gunmen more than a week ago.

The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), which has led a campaign of violence against oil facilities since early 2006, said it would intervene because the pair were not part of the energy sector but were working to help build the delta's infrastructure."
http://africa.reuters.com/top/news/usnBAN126520.html

So MEND, perhaps, may be a global guerrilla outfit that nevertheless strives to develop its own resilient community.

[PaulinVancouver]

You know what's missing from this geek-love-in discussing the wonders of communication tech and Moore's law?

Any discussion of Energy.

You think you're gonna have your own personal fabrication running if the power's off? Local energy is mentioned like an afterthought to the "better tools" item, but it's not a _part_ of that, it's the critical part of all underlying infrastructure that allows us to have a high standard of living.

[TM Lutas]

Geography and personal relations networks tend to match in the 3rd world but not entirely. Once the fabbers can manufacture energy generators sufficiently powerful that muscle power or solar power is sufficient to manufacture further power units, the power problem will have been largely solved. We're far away from that happy day but the solution isn't intellectually difficult to conceive.

[Syn Diesel]

Local energy? Two solutions that point to future eco-system diversity:

http://h2-pv.us/H2/H2-PV_Breeders.html
Make PV panels with PV panels. Simple Sand Economy. Electrolytic Oxy-Hydrogen bonus. Oxygen contains more energy than reducing "fuels". 2/3-3/4 engine output devoted to "free" oxidizer (20% dilute) pumping from air. ANTI-H2 EROEI FUD always misses that part.

http://www.alcoholcanbeagas.com/
Combined-cycle co-production of food and fuel. Justified by Co-location and Enabling Technology economics (piggybacking), irregardless of EROEI MIS-INFO FUD.

Small 10,000-1,000,000 gpy ethanol plants run on topping-cycle (high temperature) capture of currently used fuel sources (co-generation, home heating). Low-temperature output of ethanol plant is re-captured by originally intended low-heat fuel consumer. Free (already paid for) energy we magically pull from our butts.

http://teh-internets.der
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=primary+productivity

[Azr@el]

Speaking of tools of resilient communities; i was scanning thru google knol, no doubt one of the future pillars of the internet, and I found the articles on terrorism
http://knol.google.com/k/knol/system/knol/pages/Search?q=terrorism&restrict=general#
to be completely disappointing. They ranged from apologist to attempts to attempts at abstraction without seeming to address the topic face on, a very sad start for knol.

Also, I ran across this article
http://knol.google.com/k/jahangir-vahid/fourth-generation-warfare/12lkc2gtf2u7n/4#
on fourth generation warfare. It's bloody hilarious, though I prefer Echevarria's refutation.

[Jeffery]

And now for something completely different.
The ForaTV Website has an interview from Uncommon Knowledge with military historian Victor Davis Hanson about the war on terror.

[Azr@el]

Hansen unfortunate problem is that he shoehorns too many divergent voices into one viscerally unpopular minority vision. Then he slams that POV, to my ears that's a strawman argument. Case in point, yes there are some people people who believe the war on terror is nothing more than a scheme by the government to extend it's control, yes it is becoming conventional wisdom that using terms such as Jihadi, Islamic terrorism, Islamo-fascism are self defeating and yes there are a lot of Neo-Cons trying to disown their words because they can't get laid anymore. But these actions are not a part of a monolithic movement in society to appease terrorist.

Victor Davis Hansen, poor misguided sod. I read his book on western military tradition. Can't recall it's name, it was pulp-rubbish littered with illogical arguments. I highly recommend the war nerd's articles on Hansen, now those proved a bit more memorable.

[Jeffery]

You've never read any of his books.

"Pulp-rubbish littered with illogical arguements". You've never read any books.

[Azr@el]

Ad jeffery,
Aren't we a little touchy? I'd have you know I just finished reading all of "harry potter and the prisoner of Azkaban" to my niece and nephew before this current blow up in Abkhazia, and S.Ossetia. So here's a raspberry from them to you and your silly Victor Davis Hanson Idol worship.

P.S. shame on you for trying to accuse me of using non-internet English, it's "arguments" not "arguements". If your going to quote me, well bloody heck spell like I and everyone else on the net does, it's called American English.

[Azr@el]

"your" should be "you're", you Yictor Davis Hanson groupie

[Jeffery]

I repeat: You have never read a book Victor Davis Hanson. Your just an adolescent troll trying to provoke a flame war. I think your little story about your "niece and nephew" is as phoney as your knowledge of the works of Victor Davis Hanson, at least I hope it's as phoney. I pity any children exposed to an obvious drunk like you. If these imaginary children exist the parents must be unfit parents. Oh yes, please review the sentence structure of your last post.

[Azr@el]

Ad Vicky Davis Hanson Fan

The book's title if I recall properly, is "Carnage and Culture". This is the one where Hanson invokes this shifting amoeba called "western culture" and anoints it as the long run queen of war. He adopts the silly notion that Greeks, Macedonians, Romans, Post-Andalusian Crusaders, Frankish and Burgundian troops, holy League sailors, U.S. soldiers and sailors, and British African expeditionary personnel shared a culture. Let's get this straight, the ancient Greeks had as much democracy as Iranians enjoy today, most likely far less. The Macedonians by comparison had as much democracy as Saddam Hussein's Iraq. In fact only the so called "Western Forces" of the roman republic, the U.S. at Tet and Middway, and the English against the Zulus had anything that could be called a democracy; where Victorian England was more like Mugabe's Zimbabwe and the Roman republic was more like Putin's Russian Federation except Russia and Zimbabwe both have outlawed slavery.

Hanson's relative lack of knowledge regarding military affairs leads him to ascribe tangential factors as casual drivers of events. By Delbruck's reckoning, the numbers at Gaugamela were roughly even, both sides had mercenary contingents of free men. The main difference? One side was fresh and utilized well drilled combined arms tactics, the other fatigued and ready to rolled up. Tenochtitlan was carried because Cortez had marshaled many of the Aztec's enemies; such as the Tlaxcala to siege the city where more than a quarter million had huddled in about a dozen kilometers of city to be decimated by Eurasian diseases. Technology and reason played little part in the victory, gunpowder was mainly used to convince the fatalistic locals that Cortez was a pagan god; sounds very reasonable.

All of Hanson's arguments are like some little kids rants about how his dad is kewler than the other kid's dads. Face reality, history's baddest army, the guys who are still studied to this days. The fellows who mopped up everyone in their path, and did it for a couple of centuries, were not westerners. They did not believe in democracy, they did not believe in individualism, they did not believe in political freedom, they did not believe in open debate nor rationalism. Their main war chief believed he was sent on a mission from God to slaughter that part of the earth that did not yield. Scientific inquiry was not big on the agenda, they did believe in slavery and income taxation and by extension allowed regulated mercantile trade. But in the end, these non-western people, born of many races and cultures were unified by belief in absolute victory at any cost, the history books call them the Mongols.

Feel free to use Paypal to send in your tuition fee for this lesson.

[docsharp01]

What is needed in the USA is technological acceleration insofar as high speed internet, because it is light years behind other countries such as South Korea, Canada, France and Japan.
http://www.pc-satellite-tv-reviews.com