Global Guerrillas

EXPONENTIAL IMPROVEMENT

The tech visionary Kevin Kelly has an excellent must read article on why Moore's law (and similar exponential improvement rates in other technologies -- see graph to left on months to double for other technologies) works. His conclusion, and I suggest you read the article yourself, is:

• Technologies that are amenable to exponential growth rates, do so by leveraging the microcosm (the very small -- as in, "there is plenty of room at the bottom", nano, etc.).   This makes a doubling in performance a technological imperative (it will happen no matter what, only the rate of doubling is in doubt).
• The rate of exponential growth is a function of competition, economics, and belief (in the curve of improvement). Which means the rate of progress achievable is a function of our how our system allocates resources and our belief systems.  Lots of competition and high velocity money = fast rates of improvement.
• There isn't a fundamental constraint (like energy use) that limits progress. A better explanation is that STEMI (space, time, energy, mass, and information) compression must be able to occur across all phases of the process and not be artificially limited/restricted in any way.  That's why improvements in the speed of transportation haven't happened -- you can't shrink the weight or volume of a human being....

Here's some blue sky thinking I'm running through my head at the moment, it may be of use (or not):

Based on the explanation above, we may see a rapid exponential doubling in the performance of society/economics as well.  However, to see this improvement, we will need to shift to resilient communities.  Here's what it will require:

• A technological imperative.  In short, a suite of technologies that can increasingly replicate the functions of the global economy at the hyper-local level (the equivalent of the very small or nano level of the global economy) -- with headroom for advancement/improvement as far as the eye can see.  There are signs that this is potentially true: think 3D printing ("fab labs"), computing, bio, communications, etc.  Is it true for agriculture and energy too?  The jury is still out but super-empowerment is in the air...
• New beliefs and well funded processes drive improved productivity at the local level.  The beliefs and process improvements required are already being developed at the organic level, but it's not getting much help from commercial sources.  A good example of this is the Transition towns effort.  However, new access to vast cash flows (like my proposal on using IRAs/401ks for investments in local resilience) would radically increase the velocity of money involved.  This money would likely speed up the rate of doubling, dropping it from decades to years, by supercharging commercial and open source competition.  
• No hard constraints.  An ability to avoid or work/route around "hard" constraints on any of items on the STEMI list.  The best way to avoid these limits is to obliterate thinking related to the current legacy economic system.  For example:  exploiting rapid advances in virtual presence and collaborative software to achieve an order of magnitude improvement in worker productivity.  This obliterates the need (which we would be unable to achieve) for exponential improvements in cars, transportation infrastructure, etc. for commuting/travel.  Another example:  exploiting communications systems to share or purchase virtual product designs that can be locally fabricated.  This is in contrast to manufacturing products in remote global locales, packaging them, storing them, marketing them, shipping them, putting them on shelves, etc. in the hope that you will purchase them.  

NOTE: This leads back to the notion that the only truly dangerous (in that it will upend everything, for the better or worse depending on where you sit) idea out there is a societal/economic bifurcation/phase change driven by the rise of resilient communities.

LINKS: July 30 2009

Here's some reading that may be of interest:

• Signs of "Privatopia" (my xmas 2007 article on the wholesale privatization of government function in the US):  Arizona to sell House/Senate buildings and lease them back.  Timeline appears to be on schedule.    
• Wired interview with a "Pirate".   Choice quote:  "a single mission with 12 armed men and boats costs a little over $30,000. But a successful investor has to dispatch at least three or four missions to get lucky once."
• CSIS Cyber Challenge. "The US Cyber Challenge is looking for 10,000 young Americans with the skills to fill the ranks of cyber security practitioners, researchers, and warriors."  Looks like open source cyberwarfare, although formally hiring them at the end of the process defeats the purpose of the exercise.
• A better term than irregular warfare for summing up conflicts with pirates, terrorists, insurgents, criminal gangs etc.?  How about:  "Ad hoc Warfare"  Ad hoc is a Latin phrase which means "for this purpose". It generally signifies a solution designed for a specific problem or task, non-generalizable, and which cannot be adapted to other purposes.  Sounds about right.  What do you think?
• Strong argument that the militarization of Mexico's law enforcement is making things worse, and not better.
• Black Swan?  Iran launched a satellite in February 2009 (which is "better" launch capability than a ICBM).  As a result, William Forstchen and Gingrich argue that this capability + a small nuke = the potential of an airburst EMP attack on the US (which would wipe out most electrical circuitry and could generate a catastrophe -- see report) .   Coming to a theater near you soon. ;->
• The "Talibanization" of Mexico's drug war?  La Familia -- home grown "religion" and populist politics.
• A real example of a heart of darkness. 
• Dragon Kings vs. Black Swans.   Basically, the argument is that some Black Swans can turn into self-perpetuating systems due to feedback loops.  These self-referencing systems cause more damage or grow to greater heights than any power law distribution would predict.  I concur, but this sounds like Ilya Prigogine's "dissipative structures" theory.  It may be a good explanation for what is going on now: a financial black swan has created feedback loops (as in:  consumer behavior has shifted, potentially irrevocably...) that will create a dynamic that will sink the legacy global economy.  The system may be bifurcating.
• Wars and Plagues key to Europe's Dominance?   Lots of death in Europe led to higher per capita incomes due to a labor shortage.  Higher incomes led to early industrialization.  In a round about way, this makes the argument that mean per capita income growth may be the only real way to measure a society's potential for success  (it's something we have failed at over the last 30 years, ergo: bleak future).
• Artificial life simulation: the intelligence of a complex system is measured by how many people it takes to shut it down.  Does it work in reverse?

JOURNAL: ATT goes to war and then hastily retreats

ATT vs. 4chan (an open source hacking network that griefs countries, corporations, organizations, and individuals).  More.

BLACK GLOBALIZATION: TED talks

Here's a presentation at TED that may be of interest to global guerrillas readers (no video links yet -- too bad it isn't live).  It's great to see GG themes get play like this.  

Loretta Napoleoni (researcher on the economics of terrorism):

She also discovered that the life of a terrorist was not ruled by politics or ideology, but by economics. They were constantly searching for cash...

Napeoloni began thinking that there might be commercial links between organizations. It was when she interviewed Mario Moretti, the head of the group (Red Brigades), she realized that terrorism is actually a business. When she talked to him, she realized that he thought like a banker or fellow economist...

She found in terrorism a parallel economy, that had been around since the close of World War II. It has followed step by step the trends common to any other economy. First, there was state sponsorship. During the Cold War there was a fully funded mix of legal and illegal entities, and she also points to the contras in Nicaragua. During the 1970s and 1980s, some groups carried out privatization. They gained independence and started funding themselves.

An even greater change came with globalization. Napoleoni says that now, organizations were able to link with each other and started to do serious business with crimelords. This is when we see the birth of Al Qaeda, an organization able to source money in many countries and operated in many countries. This she says, is rogue economics, which is constantly lurking in the background of history. Politics loses control of an economy and economy becomes a rogue force acting against us.

<<NOTE: she estimates that 5% of the global economy, or $1.5 Trillion in income and $7 Trillion in financial assets, is directly related to terrorism/guerrilla warfare, and reckons that 9/11 driven financial controls ala the Patriot Act caused a wholesale shift in the this economy away from the dollar/US, prompting the current financial crisis>>

Misha Glenny, reporter.  Author of the excellent book McMafia:

"These are grim economic times, so I want to cheer you up with one of the greatest commercial success stories of the last 20 years," he says. What is it? Organized crime. Criminal activity now accounts for over 15 percent of the world’s GDP, Glenny explains. In the last two decades, it has experienced massive growth. ....Canada has become a key area for the production of ecstasy and other synthetically produced drugs. That's a game changer, he notes. Production has shifted into the Western world. The trend has been set to overwhelm our policing.

<<NOTE:  Economies of this size + a revolution in military affairs (open source warfare/systems disruption/DIY weapons) = wholesale change.>>

Rob Hopkins of Transition Towns.  

Hopkins outlines the qualities of the transition response: viral, open-source, self-organizing, solutions-focused, sensitive to place and scale, learns from its mistakes and is a joyful process. It’s not about winning the argument, he says, it’s about changing the climate. Transition depends on the idea of resilience, which he thinks is a more useful concept than sustainability. Sustainability wants the supermarket to be more energy efficient, while resilience questions the vulnerability of depending on the supermarket.

<<NOTE:  it's interesting, although not unexpected, that TED is vanilla/boring in regards to financial capitalism and economics -- no serious ideas are being aired on the recent financial debacle, only legacy thinking.  I suspect that given the large number of investment bankers, venture capitalists, etc that sponsor them, this is likely a taboo topic given the potential conclusions.>>

RC LINKS: Mid July 2009

Some items of interest on the road to becoming super-empowered:

• DIY hydroponic window farms.  Leveraging windows (which is of particular use in urban settings) for food production.  An example Bruce Sterling calls favela chic -- an oxymoron that's an appropriate description of cultural methodologies that are essential to completely bypassing the impact of perpetual global depression/breakdown.
• Easy to use cutting machine for local fabrication (extremely slick commercialization of one of the tools needed):  

 

• Rob Hopkins releases the initial results of a "Transition towns" analysis on the ability of a town to "feed" itself.  Nice use of Google maps to map local arable land and food footprints.
• DIYbio.  A DIY project to create a professional grade machine for Gel electrophoresis (a commonly used tool in microbiology) for only a couple hundred $$. (wonky -- merely an example of high end bio-engineering that can be done in a local setting for low $$).
• More en route.

JOURNAL: Robocrime?

This year, the USAF will train more drone "jocks" than fighter jocks.  That's only the start.  The upsurge in drones wasn't coincidental.  It was driven by rapid improvements in Moore's law -- which states that the "power" of computer chips will double every two years.  

The important milestone in that improvement curve is that we just recently passed the computational equivalence of insects (Moravec's scale).  This means that commercial and DIY robots (now with military equipment, although that advantage will fade) will soon be able to handle basic functions required for stability, motion, maneuver, etc. required for operation in complex environments.  The fact that we crossed this milestone explains the rapid uptick in the utility/usage of drones and other robotics.  However, it doesn't mean that these robots can think at a level required for complex tasks, intelligence gathering, and warfare (much of that will arrive by 2020 as we reach rat equivalent intelligence).  As of today, and through the next decade, that capability is delivered to the robot through telepresence (drone "jocks" that rent their brains to robots).

What's next?  Robotic technology will shrink and cheapen quickly.  Applications (driven by open platforms and modular programming) will begin to flow from the commercial and open source sectors until they reach a torrential level. Additionally, robotic and "complex sensor" telepresence will, by the next decade, be as easy as in Internet connection and a Web application.  Add swarm management (the ability to manage massive swarms of micro-robots that work as a single entity, much as we see with software "bots" in the cyber-crime space) to the mixture of inexpensive robotics and simplistic telepresence (accessible to ten/hundreds of millions of people), and you have another technological avenue for open source warfare.  It also likely means that the heady world of cybercrime will soon be able to access the physical sphere ---> robocrime?

DIY drone tech:

AerialRobotics EasyUAV Scenario 1 using RVOSD and FPV from Krzysztof Bosak on Vimeo.

GG LINKS: Mid-July 2009

Some items of interest:

• The La Familia "mini-cartel" launched a series of hit and run commando attacks on Mexican military/police positions in Michoacan (to protest the arrest of a founder).  The 10 hour spree, replete with assault rifles and grenades, left five dead and a dozen wounded.  
• Naxiliate global guerrillas (nominally marxist) killed 27 police in India.
• Old Russian tech.  Mobile nuclear power plants. 
• MEND:  "The plague of sabotage descended heavily on major Shell and Agip crude trunk lines in Bayelsa state."
• GGs in Canada.  EnCana natural gas pipelines under attack. The Royal Canadian Mounted police, unable to find the individuals/groups launching the attacks, are getting aggressive. Pics of blast sites.
• Militia hacking group broadcasts their message against exploit disclosure by hacking an image hosting service.  One method of modern broadcasting is to turn all the links of a image hosting service into links to your image (although, in this case the image was lame).
• Something Awful vs. Sarah Palin.  Pwn pics of Trig.  Hacking politics is going to be a participatory sport.
• Teen media habits.  Right on. 
• Preventing another Mumbai, pg. 4 (Sullivan and Elkus).   Highlights:  Need for a police "operational art" vs. tactical focus. VoIP command and control node (via NJ VoIP provider, Vonage?) for Mumbai attackers.  The use of swarm "pulsing" -- rapidly changing point of attack -- to confuse police.
• Crashing Tehran's electricity grid.   
• Cyber attack?  The US government, Stratfor and others are hyperventilating, claiming it to be the work of the North Korean Government.   Essentially, there is a 50,000 PC botnet (using old software) in Asia doing the DDoS attacks against US and S Korean websites.  This is most definitely something a single individual could pull off (old thinking: only a government could do this... new thinking: superempowered individuals are more than capable).  The government/consultant cyberwar crowd can't seem to move beyond the state vs. state vision of cyberwarfare (not sure how you fix this mindset, it's so pervasive with those over 40 -- exactly the same guys about to spend tens of billions of a cyberwar boondoggle).
• Egypt:  al Qaeda cell of 26 engineers and technicians were arrested in conjunction with a planned attack on the Suez canal and a major oil pipeline. Again, searching for global systempunkts.
• Jeff Vail might want to spend some time on Cyberwarfare -- given his talent at writing about global guerrillas in Nigeria. 
• French car workers threaten to blow up plant. 
• Shake and bake meth -- single container/mobile cooking. 
• Video game, Modern Warfare 2, includes working Night Vision goggles in its prestige edition. 

JOURNAL: Leveraging Information Terrain

The Uighur protest/riot/crackdown in China provides some interesting data points on the uses of information terrain to disrupt social networks.  Note the amplification.

1. Rumors led to postings on the Internet that two Uighur men raped a Han woman at a Toy factory in Xinjiang.
2. An angry mob of Han men lynch two Uighur men, killing them. 
3. Pictures/video of the dead men are posted to the Internet. Here's one: "Chinese Commies Massacre Innocent Uyghur Workers 3"
4. Protest forms to march against the lynching.   
5. Combination of angry protestors and a harsh paramilitary response (China has a 1 million man paramilitary force to squelch domestic unrest) lead to a riot.  Cars, businesses are burned. 1,400 Uighurs are arrested.
6. Pictures of the crackdown by the paramilitaries are broadcast via the Internet/cell phones.  Also real-time news via SMS and Twitter flows out. 
7. The government restricts cell phone usage and shuts down Twitter and other social software systems in the area.  Images and information on the crackdown are "harmonized" (the creepy term for Chinese censorship). 
8. Pictures of Uighur violence against Han citizens (beatings, etc.) are allowed to spread and amplified by the official media.  Han gangs roam the streets beating Uighurs.  The army sets up curfew.
9. Official government media creates disinformation/information sites and equates the riots to terrorism.  Many Uighurs flee to avoid Han violence.  Tensions/anger on both sides is explosive.

JOURNAL: Chinese Exceptionalism

The great part about being a Chinese dictatorship in a world with one rule set (Adam Smith's), is that your paramilitary forces can slaughter 140 156 protestors without even a whimper from the global community.  Western political elites just don't care because a) business with China is more important than human rights and b) China reacts like a spoiled child when chastised, which makes it not worth the hassle.   Of course, the reaction we see today on Chinese repression may become the same we see when similar things happen in the developed world.  

What's even more interesting is how the opposition is using the information terrain to help get the message out.  From twitter (like Iran) to cell phone cameras, the images of the event were broadcast around the world.  China's response?  A combination of "shutdowns" of information systems and counter attacks by loyalist information militias.  While the opposition is learning how to use information terrain better with each incident (this response was faster than what happened when China cracked down on Tibet), it still hasn't branched out into using those same tools to spread disruption (which is the only effective way to disconnect).

JOURNAL: The Switch to Local Manufacturing

Here's a think piece that you may find of value:

It is likely that by 2025, the majority of the "consumer" goods you purchase/acquire, will be manufactured locally.  However, this doesn't likely mean what you think it means.  The process will look like this:

1. You will purchase/trade for/build a design for the product you desire through online trading/sharing systems.  That design will be in a standard file format and the volume of available designs for sale, trade, or shared openly will be counted in the billions.
2. You or someone you trust/hire will modify the design of the product to ensure it meets your specific needs (or customize it so it is uniquely yours).  Many products will be smart (in that they include hardware/software that makes them responsive), and programmed to your profile.
3. The refined product design will be downloaded to a small local manufacturing company, co-operative, or equipped home for production.  Basic feedstock materials will be used in its construction (from metal to plastic powders derived from generic sources, recycling, etc.).   Delivery is local and nearly costless.

The switch to local manufacturing is being abetted by the following factors:

1. Ever more expensive energy and raw materials as far as the eye can see, although every time the economy slows, those costs will drop sharply.  This means that the costs of global transport and mass production (overproduction, failed products, etc.) will become too costly to maintain for all but the most valuable and difficult to manufacture products.
2. The collapse of generic demand.  The debt-deflation fueled process of economic collapse has just begun in the developed world.  It will continue for decades as incomes globally normalize (become equivalent in all "connected countries").  This means that the critical mass in demand necessary to support a global production supply chain won't exist in most localities.  Centrally shipped e-commerce will fill some of the gap, but it will be expensive.  As a result, the diversity of consumer products we currently enjoy will fall initially, but will soon be completely eclipsed by a torrential supply of virtual designs for every product conceivable.
3. Local fabrication will get cheap and easy.  The cost of machines that can print, lathe, etch, cut materials to produce three dimensional products will drop to affordable levels (including consumer level versions).  This sector is about to pass out of its "home brew computer club phase" and rocket to global acceptance.

JOURNAL: New article on "Containing Chaos" at the WPR

I have a new article at the World Politics Review entitled "Containing Chaos."  It's about systemic threats and the systemic solutions needed to solve them (although I don't touch on environmental threats, the threat profiles/solutions are similar).  There's a free trial subscription if you want to read it.  Here's the intro:

In 1946, George Kennan keyed the famous "Long Telegram," which identified the Soviet Union as an enemy of the United States. In 1947, the original telegram was reworked and published in Foreign Policy magazine as "The Sources of Soviet Conduct." Together, these documents formed the codex for the U.S. Cold War strategy of containment, and thereby the basis of the eventual U.S. victory in that conflict. Here's what a "Kennan" might have written for the 21st century....

QUOTEs that sum up the economic mood

We must overhaul everything. We cannot have a system of rentiers and social dumping under globalisation. Either we have justice or we will have violence. It is a chimera to think that this crisis is just a footnote and that we can carry on as before." Nicholas Sarkozy.

NOTE:  Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, writing for the Telegraph, connects the dots between the collapse of the debt-fueled economic system and widespread social fragmentation/disorder.  Employment, incomes, time worked, are all tanking.  Choice quote:

The Centre for Labour Market Studies (CLMS) in Boston says US unemployment is now 18.2 %, counting the old-fashioned way. The reason why this does not "feel" like the 1930s is that we tend to compress the chronology of the Depression. It takes time for people to deplete their savings and sink into destitution. Perhaps our greater cushion of wealth today will prevent another Grapes of Wrath, but 20m US homeowners are already in negative equity (zillow.com data). Evictions are running at a terrifying pace.

LINKS: GG news

Interesting items of interest:

• Efficient markets and entrepreneurial guerrillas: CNN. "This soldier and three Afghan soldiers were captured by low-level militants and then quickly "sold" to the clan and network led by warlord Siraj Haqqani -- believed to be deeply involved in the action."


• The new counter-insurgency "beltway think tank" at CNAS (the Center for New American Security) gets some push-back from Bill Lind and The American Conservative.   The reason?  They abhor the idea that military, armed with a "new" counter-insurgency doctrine bulked up by social welfare programs, can manufacture democratic capitalists in every corner of the world.  Essentially, they think this is merely a reprise of  the now thoroughly discredited neo-con theory (as in, all you need to do is topple the government and the people will immediately become democratic capitalists auto-magically), and doomed to failure/tears.


• One more point on CNAS.  Isn't this organization really the brain child of Tom Barnett given the sys-admin approach to foreign policy they are promoting?  I believe it is.


• Samuel Logan, fresh from his new book on the MS-13, thinks that looming leadership crisis/rift between the Gulf Cartel and the growing Zetas, will spark widespread violence/death not only Mexico, but in US cities. 

JOURNAL: Financial Capitalism's Failure?

Here's an article from the premier financial newspaper in the world, the Financial Times, on a situation that I believe is catalyzing the current crisis (hoisted from Paul Kedrosky's blog).  

Just why is there so much debt in the Anglo-Saxon world? Bankers and regulators know well that it is in nobody’s long-term interests to have allowed borrowing to escalate to a position where the US now owes far more, as a multiple of the economy, than at the start of the Great Depression.  

The answer is capitalism’s dirty little secret: excessive lending was the only way to maintain the living standards of the vast bulk of the population at a time when wealth was being concentrated in the hands of an elite.  The amount by which the elite has benefited is startling, and illustrates the problem with lightly regulated free markets: the rich get much richer while the rest do not get richer at all. According to Société Générale economists, the inflation-adjusted income of the highest-paid fifth of US earners has risen by 60 per cent since 1970, while it has fallen by more than 10 per cent for the rest. As was recently pointed out in the New York Review of Books, the Walton family, of Wal-Mart fame, is wealthier than the bottom third of the US population put together – about 100m people. These are staggering statistics, confirmed by measures such as the US and UK’s ever-rising Gini coefficients, which estimate income disparity. Another way of putting this is that the share of profits in gross domestic product is at a 100-year high, or was until very recently.

More GG posts that relate to this topic:

Open Decision Making.   

America's Economy and Open Decision Making.

Parasitic Predation.  

Economic Cancer. 

NOTE:  The reason I posted about this and think it is interesting is simple.  Like Kennan (the intellectual architect of Cold War's "containment" policy), it's important to recognize what really generates a long term victory in a protracted conflict.  Then, like now, real victory requires a long term improvement in the quality of life -- from incomes to wealth to societal trust to fairness -- of the maximal number of people (to slow/reverse communism in his case and to slow/reverse disorder in ours) while at the same time, blunting the kinetic advance of the collective opposition at the least possible expense/disruption to the first goal.  We appear to be failing at both of the goals required for long term victory.  Incomes and societal trust are evaporating while we spend tens of millions to kill each insurgent (of which there is an endless supply, particularly if you seek them out).