Global Guerrillas

THE GREAT REBOOT

"...we don’t just need a bailout. We need a reboot." Thomas Friedman got it right in that it's : "Time to Reboot America". Unfortunately, the prescriptive solutions in the article are garbage.

America does need a reboot but it can't be achieved through top-down stimulus or reconstruction. It has to start at the bottom and grow organically.

NOTE: A reboot begins when simple core process is started which in turn starts another process and so on in series until the entire complex edifice of fully functional system is reconstructed.

So, what does this new, better core process look like? It starts at the community level with a wholesale reinvention that makes networked communities:

• Resilient to rapidly propagating global shocks (an inevitable outcome of a global system that is too large, fast, and complex to control).
  
• Highly productive in their ability to produce everything from food to products to energy (they produce wealth). Networked innovation.
  
• Extremely efficient and low cost. This stems from: shorter distances, less energy, less space, less time, less mass, and less information (as in, less management overhead required).

Fortunately, all the technological trends are leading us towards radical improvements in efficiency and productivity for doing real things at the micro level -- everything from high intensity small plot farming to personal fabrication to DIY synthetic biology to global tinkering networks to high efficiency local energy production. Even better, the ability to connect these communities via networks means that these new local powerhouses can work together synergistically. In short, the density of the improvements offered by this new model are akin to the quantitative and qualitative improvements (and the decades of opportunity space to improve capability exponentially) that we saw with the move from vacuum tubes to transistors in computational hardware.

So, how do we escape from our failing vacuum tube economy with its incredible inefficiencies and inevitable heat death? You start at the small. Find the model for the first design of the transistor-like local economy that can be copied throughout the entire global network. Once that model is found, you begin a process similar to the equivalent of the exponential improvements of Moore's law for the local and ride that curve to success.

RC RADAR: Late December 2008

Some items of interest:

• Solar PV (photo-voltaic) roofing. Solar PV is still very expensive relative to other energy sources, although it enables a high degree of energy resilience once installed. Worse, the expense is often incurred in large expensive installments in addition to the existing costs of the structure. One interesting approach that may reduce costs is to integrate solar PV directly into a home's/structure's roofing system. This approach, currently being pioneered by MSR Innovations (a Canadian Company), is a modular roofing system that is first installed as a simple roof (on new structures or as a replacement to a roof in failure). However, the design of the system allows owners to organically (which means in small affordable increments) to replace standard tiles on the modular roof with solar PV tiles. It's an interesting approach.
  
• An interesting story about guerrilla urban geothermal efforts outside of Toronto -- to use roadways undergoing repair as an opportunity to drill wells for community geothermal systems. Fortunately, the town's government has been cooperative in both initial funding and right of way issues. Unfortunately, the commercial costs of drilling geothermal systems is still way to expensive. This could be fixed by using a cooperative model (contribution of manual work and the purchase of a community drilling system, costs for used equipment are in the sub $100 k range) to drill the required wells. Think in terms of a volunteer fire department, but for geothermal energy. If successful, costs for heating/cooling structures in the community could drop by 60% or more -- note that heating structures consumes half of all energy we use globally.
  
• Hackerspaces. A wiki on building/finding physical spaces to work on open source projects. Perfect for the resilient community projects underway.
  
• Cooperative farming to grow food for those unable to afford it. Here's one model: Gaining Ground. First, it's a healthy and useful way to help people, particularly if you don't have the funds to donate financial support. Second, it keeps farming in the community. Third, as the depression deepens, efforts like this are going to be more important than ever.
  
• A James Fallows classic: "Countdown to a Meltdown."
  
• Speed camera "pimping" to undermine the growth automated surveillance (a key ingredient needed for future privatization of security/roadways). Sounds like fun.
  

THE RESILIENT COMMUNITY: The Entrepreneur

The resilient community movement, like what we see with Transition Towns and a plethora of other efforts, relies on a global network of participants. This network is quickly evolving from narrow peer-to-peer conversations into a vast, diverse, and vibrant ecosystem capable of solving nearly every obstacle in the way of success. While much of this ecosystem operates on an open source basis, in that the evolutionary advances and insights on the common approach are shared with everyone, there is still room for the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur, extends an open source process, by providing it with the ability of the ecosystem to branch out into unexplored areas and build structures/systems/products that won't and can't develop organically. Here's more detail on entrepreneurs:

• An ability to generate radical breakthroughs and solutions to difficult and commonly held problems. Entrepreneurs can also fork or branch the standard process into new areas that wouldn't have been explored otherwise. Typically, this involves obsession with an idea -- sleepless nights thinking, tireless work habits, an ability to shrug off criticism from the entrenched/luddite establishment -- to drive it to fruition.
  
• A person that is willing to form organizations, run systems, and turn ideas into products that provide critical functions in the ecosystem on a full time basis. This typically means a full time commitment, at risk of financial ruin. Also, since entrepreneurs fail more than they succeed, this is tough.
  
• A need for enough remuneration to both allow them to continue to break boundaries. This isn't the corrupt Wall Street/Silicon Valley idea of entrepreneurial remuneration -- transcendent money that turns productive people into grotesque versions of their previous selves -- but rather enough to live day-to-day without the specter of financial ruin as a constant companion.

Here's an Example
Here's an example of an RC entrepreneur. Joel, from Australia, began with a passion for the idea of aquaponics*. Here's his experience in his own words:

I first came across the concept of aquaponics while surfing the web looking for information on organic growing back in early 2000. The idea of being able to grow fish in my backyard captivated me. I already had chooks and veggie gardens as well as numerous fruit and nut trees, but I could see that aquaponics would help close the circle and provide a wider variety of food. My passionate love of permaculture, and trade certificate in horticulture were a stable launching pad to understand that aquaponics was an invaluable growing method. That started me on a quest for information about aquaponics, but back in those days there wasn't a great deal around.

Read the whole thing.

*Aquaponics: Aquaponics by definition is the combination of aquaculture and hydroponics. The beauty of aquaponics is that in the combining of the two they equal out the negative aspects in each of them. Nutrient rich fish water is pumped from the fish tank into gravel beds, where plants growing in the gravel extract the nutrients from the water. The water then drains back into the fish tank cleaned of excess nutrients and freshly oxygenated.

NOTE: A common conceptual error is to award CEOs of large companies, financiers, etc. with the title of entrepreneur. They aren't entrepreneurs. They are better termed rentiers. Essentially, a rentier is a manager that is tasked with extracting the most out of existing accumulated capital.

BRIEFINGS: Spring talking engagements

Here's the top level of what I am going on the road with:

21st Century Meltdown
Global Guerrillas or Resilient Communities

In short, if your organization/group is interested in learning/understanding some of the dynamics and trends that will shape the early 21st Century, from warfare to economics, this is the talk for you (contact jposda @ neoplatllc.com for more). Hint: one trend is small, fast, superempowered and doesn't care about your politics.

URBAN FARMING PLATFORMS

To become resilient in food production, urban areas need more than the conversion of empty neighborhood lots and terraces into gardens. They need true farming platforms that can bundle commonly needed goods and services into an easily accessible package located in the middle of the community. One good example of this is the Community Food Center put together by Will Allen (a MacArthur award recipient) in downtown Milwaukee WI. In a small two acre space, the food center has packed 20,000 plants, thousands of fish, and hundreds of livestock. This farming platform prototype includes (note the intensity of the operation):

• Greenhouses, hoop-houses, and hydroponics systems that support the growth of plants, fish, worms and a wide variety of livestock (chickens to turkeys).
  
• Agricultural services such as a large rapid composting system and an apiary (beehives).
  
• Self sufficiency via a retail store and energy production from anerobic digester that produces energy from farming waste.
  
• Training services and classrooms to teach the community how to do nearly everything the farm does for themselves (with an eye towards helping entrepreneurs start their own efforts).

In short, this looks like an excellent prototype for a local farming platform that can serve as the basis for a revival in community agriculture. In particular, given the small footprint of this model, it may be the perfect way to return abandoned urban retail space to productive use in the years to come.

JOURNAL: Resilient Communities and Architecture

Short Op-Ed at Archinect (an e-zine for the forward thinking architecture community). The first para is conceptually dense, but it gets better.

JOURNAL: Winning Hearts and Minds

It appears that primary loyalty to gangs and warrior cultural values are gaining ground in northern Mexico at a deep level. From the Christian Science Monitor:

...it's also generating a cultural shift in Mexico that might be harder to turn back. Juan Daniel Acosta, a director of a secondary school in Chihuahua City, says one of his students posted on the Internet her pride that her father is a narcotrafficker. Mr. Acosta's wife, Irma Leticia Navarro, teaches at the local elementary school. She says that kids are taking turns playing executioner and victim; a first-grader recently stated his wish to become an assassin when he grows up.

Ricardo Ravelo, an investigative journalist with Proceso magazine, says that children in states torn apart by the drug war now idolize and imitate narcoculture. "The narcos are powerful, untouchable, undefeatable," he says. "For these children, it's not very important to them to study or imagine themselves on a career path. For them, the attractive path is drug trafficking and its personalities."

JOURNAL: More on Somali Pirates

Some stats:

• 4 ships were taken on December 16th, 2008 (one, a Chinese vessel got help from Coalition helicopters).
  
• 120 ships attacked and 40 ships seized over the last year.
  
• $120 million in ransoms for those ships were realized by the pirates.
  

As gaps in the global network open up, guerrilla entrepreneurship is sure to follow. The rewards are substantial.

GG RADAR: Mid December 2008

Some interesting data points:

• Supply convoys bringing food/fuel/equipment from Pakistan to foreign forces in Afghanistan have been disrupted. Recent attacks on Khyber Pass truck stops destroyed 150 trucks (and US military equipment) as well as hundreds of containers. For those vehicles that have survived, looting is rampant as truckers cut deals with the "Taliban" (which is taking 30% off the top) to share in the loot. Now, the association of truckers that supplies 60-70% of the supplies has halted operations. It's important to realize that 20th Century armies are needy -- they need constant attention/coordination and vast volumes of supply. NOTE: Modern maneuver warfare was founded on the notion that if you can break into the enemies rear areas and quickly range out, you can disrupt these lines of supply/communication. Even small formations, a handful of tanks and a smart commander, can penetrate deep enough to force hundreds of thousands of disconnected enemy troops into headlong retreat. In today's environment, supplies, support, and reconstruction (a critical part of counter-insurgency) is handled by private companies. They are much easier to target and force into flight than uniformed troops (see Targeting Halliburton for more).
  
• Greek riots/protests have expanded to include fire bomb attacks on police buildings and banks. Root motivations? All over the map, it's chaotic (there isn't an ideological mechanism to organize it, random groups are acting in concert via stigmergic communication). However, this may the be first signs of the impact of rapidly falling expectations among the middle classes in Europe/US.
  
• The Mexican meltdown continues. Selective government/police officials are gunned down (the honest nodes in the government system are being shut down). A US kidnapping expert is kidnapped. Bloody firefights between rival gangs competing for wealth given an absence of government control. Much more. Sounds like open source warfare. It's getting worse and spreading to the rest of the country as the economy deteriorates. How to slow the chaos? Worst case is to cut a deal with a handful of gangs, give them legitimacy in exchange for maintaining order/rules (this will be at the expense of relations with the US but it will provide a level of controlled chaos akin to Iraq, the strategy for which I laid out in 2005).
  
• Am I Gandalf? A review of my presentation at the Boyd Conference by Robert Paterson.
  
• Great energy shortage site. Lists/maps energy incidents every day. Earlier shortages due to high input prices and infrastructure problems. Current problems: lack of financing for ongoing operations and impoverished customers.
  
• Symposium on Smith-Mundt run by Matt Armstrong. A public diplomacy COI.
  
• Re: the ongoing militarization of police forces. The NYPD is starting to train new recruits and existing units to use M4s.
  

JOURNAL: Climate Man

The superempowered references are flowing for the man in the UK that shut down an electric power plant single handedly (without a boom):

The £12m defences of the most heavily guarded power station in Britain have been breached by a single person who, under the eyes of CCTV cameras, climbed two three-metre (10ft) razor-wired, electrified security fences, walked into the station and crashed a giant 500MW turbine before leaving a calling card reading "no new coal". He walked out the same way and hopped back over the fence. All power from the coal and oil-powered Kingsnorth station in Kent was halted for four hours...

Mystified Greenpeace activists (ego and legacy protest thinking play a big part in their choice of strategy):

Should "climate man" ever show up, he will be feted for what activists say was the most daring individual action of the year. "We have no idea who he is - but we really want to know. Everybody's asking 'where were you on Friday November 28'," said Ben Stewart of Greenpeace, one of six people arrested for climbing the 76 metre (250ft) chimney of the Kingsnorth station early last year but found not guilty of criminal damage in November. "We would never act anonymously," he added.

More quotes:

"He left a banner but it was a real DIY job. It was really scrappy." "This is a different league to protesters chaining themselves to equipment. It's someone treating a power station as an adventure playground."

RC JOURNAL: Social Software Networks

One of the arguments against the focus on community resilience rather than big global fixes (to broad economic failure, etc.) is that it is too slow to implement. Instead it is argued that a plethora of bail-outs and technological Manhattan projects are the only solution to the seemingly intractable problems that confront us.

Fortunately, that type of legacy (archaic) thinking will likely be proven wrong. In contrast to the slow and simplistic ad hoc efforts from nation-states, resilient community efforts are spreading virally on a global scale. One of the catalysts for this has been the widespread availability of social software (which started with blogs and grew from there). The "Transition California" site, built on Ning, is a good example of how these tools are being used.

As the global crisis continues to intensify, we will see a corresponding increase in the rate of propagation of the resilient community model (all without reference to any governmental authority). Better, since the diverse movements toward community resilience are open source, the quality of the efforts will improve rapidly as innovation is shared. Despite these advantages, it's going to be a close race, the rate of decline is starting to get very steep.

JOURNAL: The Greek Riots

How fast can gov't legitimacy evaporate? Pictures from the riots in Greece. Summary of the situation from a Greek reader:

Riots started over the alleged shooting of a young kid by a police officer (he claims he fired his weapon towards the street to scare the group away and that the kid was hit by a ricochet). Within minutes, shopping carts are filled with molotov cocktails and hundreds of masked hooligans started rioting. It's the third day now and there are whole streets and avenues with every single building burned and destroyed. I have never seen it this bad - people on the streets breaking into antique stores and running around with swords and weapons. The local Communist parties called for nationwide demonstrations but the situation is now way beyond any semblance of control. Athens now resembles Mogadishu, with roadblocks, burning buildings and cars, stolen police and fire dept. vehicles.... Gov't totally paralyzed due to the public perception that the shooting was intentional - hence, riot police are essentially letting the now thousands of "protesters" run loose.

There's a whole logistical operation being run from the universities which are considered asylums under Greek Law, and hence no police can enter. The gangs get in, get drugged up, stock up on supplies (rocks, molotovs, crowbars, BB guns etc.) and then coordinate via cell phones and blogs. The "logistics" guys then scout around the areas with shopping carts for more supplies, and consolidate everything at meeting places.

Antidote: Here's a very brief story about how a community in PEI (Prince Edward Island, where I was this weekend for the John Boyd Conference), rallied to rebuild a local business that burned down.

JOURNAL: Open Source Cyberwar

The Economist has a new article on Cyberwarfare up (it's a terribly complex topic):

John Robb, a military futurist, calls the spontaneous, bottom-up mobilisation of volunteer cyberattackers in the Georgian conflict an example of “open-source cyberwarfare”. This approach has several advantages over centralised, state-directed cyberattacks, he says. Leaving the attacks to informal cybergangs (the extent of the Russian state’s involvement remains unclear), rather than trying to organise a formal cyberarmy, is cheaper, for one thing. The most talented attackers, with the best tools, might not want to work for the state directly. Best of all, from the state’s point of view, is that it can deny responsibility for the attacks. It is the online equivalent of the use, by some governments, of gangs and militias to carry out attacks on political opponents or maintain control in particular regions.

JOURNAL: A Break-up of Canada?

It's amazing how quick the forces that are driving global fragmentation are moving to break up legacy organizational structures. One good example of this is the political crisis going on in Canada. Will it lead to a breakup? Rob Paterson demarcates and handicaps the fractures/line of battle for this upcoming conflict.

JOURNAL: Economic Failure Means Growth For GGs

For global guerrillas, the collapse of the global economic system will be a boom time. Money will flow and operations will expand like never before. Here's why:

• Profits zoom. As trade barriers rise (inevitable given China's focus on an export led recovery) and economic dislocation leads to shortages, global guerrillas will profit mightily from smuggling operations (which are already huge and growing rapidly). In short, the invisible hand of the now dominant global market system will bless them with success.
  
• Corruption will be easier. Many, if not most, nation-states and corporations will be at or near bankruptcy. Budgets will be slashed, pensions cut to the bone, and mass lay-offs will abound. As a result, the costs of corrupting government and industry employees will fall dramatically.
  
• Less interference. With nation-state budgets cut to the bone and the little available spent on stimulus and bailouts, security budgets will be slashed. The equipment used by many security forces will quickly slip into disrepair and much of it sold to the black market. Further, training and pay will suffer for security personnel, with a corresponding drop in moral. Global guerrillas will find that engagements with government security forces become much easier as the crisis wears on.
  

Organic Legitimacy
So, where will many groups invest these profits? The investment with the highest return is in legitimacy.

Here's why. The nation-state is rapidly losing legitimacy, world-wide, since it increasingly can't or won't provide stability, security, and other forms of political goods. Global guerrillas that fill this gap by providing a wide variety of political goods (example from Hamas) to local populations, as we are seeing with groups from the Naxalites to Hezbollah to Hamas to the Taliban to the Mahdi Army to LeT, can become irremovable fixtures of the local landscape (by either weak/hollow national governments or foreign forces). Some of the benefits include:

• Vast pools of highly motivated manpower to draw upon.
  
• Information dominance.
  
• Permanent sanctuary.

JOURNAL: Privatopia

The recent announcement of Chicago's sale of its parking meter franchise in order to cover current expenses (part of the growing tsunami of fire sales of public assets in the works by nearly bankrupt state and local governments), reminded me of a paper I published over the Christmas holiday of 2007. The paper (click to read) was in anticipation of the global financial meltdown. I wrote it to help readers get their heads around the implications of rapidly occurring events. Unfortunately, it is playing out to script. It's a good backgrounder for people interested in the future of warfare and resilient communities.

NOTE: Recent efforts to use economic stimulus to reignite the economy are likely to fail badly (Keynesian economics isn't likely to work). Why? Simply, you can't artificially stimulate an economy undergoing a solvency crisis (unlike the situation we faced during the first depression where we were a creditor nation with strongly positive balance of payments, we are now a debtor nation with deeply negative flows).

NOTE: The current crisis is global in scale (too big for any nation-state to handle) and far too complex to model. Worse, it morphs faster than governments can respond. This failure to return conditions to stability will cause a widespread and catastrophic loss in legitimacy for nation-states. As a result, a psychological shift is in motion, spreading at epidemic rates on a global scale, that will put loyalties to family, gang, community, church, etc. (in toto: primary loyalties) far above loyalty to nation-states. The end result will be that global guerrillas and resilient communities will become the two poles of the social spectrum in the future. Don't be caught in between.

GG RADAR: Early December 2008

Some changes of note:

• The Mumbai attacks are tied (loosely) to Pakistan's Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) -- an Islamic social system that operates as a state within a state within Pakistan in a way similar to Hezbollah in Lebanon. This is an increasingly classic situation. Non-state group gains strong legitimacy within a weak/hollow nation-state through the delivery of basic services that national government can't, or won't deliver. Non-state group has its own foreign policy, including attacks on foreign nations. Retaliation is nearly impossible, or made extremely complicated, due to the fact that the host nation has sovereignty and will be severely damaged if attacks are made. Host government is too weak/hollow to crack down (Shlok, at the great blog "Naxalite Rage" has more). Something similar to this is at work in Mexico, Colombia, Afghanistan, etc. with narco-guerrillas (it would be worse if they had better programs for social legitimacy).
  
• Global Depression watch. As anticipated, the global economic system continues to careen out of control -- made worse by outdated economic ideology, ad hoc policy response, and parasitic actors. On the radar: a food crisis for next year (extensive underinvestment and credit fueled failures in global food production system), China edging towards economic contraction (it's degree of emphasis on infrastructure investment and value-added export industries is unprecedented in history and is therefore extremely brittle) and social instability, a Mexican fiscal crisis (a combination of rapid declines in repatriated income from workers in the US, a collapse in oil production, an expensive guerrilla war in the northern provinces, and a rapid decline in oil prices add up to fiscal failure), and much more (too much to list).
  
• The effort to build "resilient communities" is correctly focusing on viral models of propagation. Check out this movie on the first "Transition Cities" conference in the UK -- note the focus on entrepreneurial and cooperative strategies. As the global depression deepens and the system's non-linear motion creates havoc, the need for a self-organizing replacement that can provide structure and long-term wealth creation will become acute.
  
• Question: does anyone have any links or papers on potential collapse scenarios for Mexico or China? I'd like to compare notes.
  

URBAN TAKEDOWNS: TO WHAT END

Within the context of 21st Century warfare -- filled with crime-fueled, systems disrupting sons of global fragmentation taking on the nation-state -- cities are no longer bastions of defense as they were in 20th Century maneuver warfare. The question now becomes, why and for what end? The answer to why, as is often the case when dealing with global guerrillas, is as varied as the primary loyalties -- from religion to criminal to political -- that bind these groups together. So, the best starting point for analysis is to work backwards, from what it is possible to achieve rather than forward from motive. Here's the major categories of objectives possible to achieve using an urban takedown:

• Nation-state over reaction. Essentially, bait the nation-state and its people into reactions that will embroil them in external and internal conflict. From the "superpower baiting" of al Qaeda to the Mumbai attack's focus on new tensions between India/Pakistan (ditching reconciliation and moving back to open hostility) and the election of hard right governments (a win for the BJP, the Hindu Nationalist Party, in India's upcoming elections would be a sign of success).
  
• Economic failure. To force a city to decline from a high level of economic equilibrium to a lower one (decline tend to jump between levels as opposed to gradual declines). This is done by exacting a terrorism "tax" on economic activity. See the US Fed's report on how this works. Many of the urban assaults we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2003-07 achieved this goal. The late 2008 protests at Thai airports also achieved this, but on a country-wide scale.
  
• Coercion. Simply, a small group takes down an urban area to force a state to leave them alone (to allow them to continue operations without interference). The Brazilian takedowns of Sao Paolo and Rio are good examples of this. The violence in Tijuana Mexico is another.
  

NOTE: please read my article for the City Journal from last year, "The Coming Urban Terror" for more detail on urban takedowns. I was going to write a follow up for them on "Fear Management" as it applies to urban takedowns earlier this year, but didn't get it fully done. I should probably revisit it since it really brings the thinking on the Mumbai assault and inevitable future attacks of this type to a new level.

JOURNAL: Off the Shelf Leverage

How did the Mumbai attackers leverage global infrastructure and technology to facilitate the attack? Noah Shachtman, the editor of Danger Room, lists the ways (read the post in its entirety):

• Boat navigation was by GPS for precision.
  
• Satellite phone, found onboard one of the vessels, for coordination en route.
  
• Constant use of cell phones for tactical communication.
  
• Blackberries for real-time tactical analysis of media coverage (which provided details on the status of forces arrayed against them). Also, an ability to check Web sites, including that of the police, for tactical data and global media coverage for strategic direction. This allowed them to route around attempts to sever their connectivity.
  
• E-mail and remailers for communication to the local media.
  

The evolution towards ever greater leverage continues. It's pretty clear from the above that these guerrillas were better connected to both the tactical and strategic environment than any US and other developed nation military personnel have ever been (the opposition believes in the strategic corporal, why don't we?).

NOTE: The leverage available from off-the-shelf biotech and other DIY (do-it-yourself) advances is en route (at the speed of a Moore's Law Tsunami) and the long tail of potential enemies that will employ them is accelerating with each phase of the global economic melt-down. Unfortunately, we aren't even in the game because we won't even acknowledge the problem.