Global Guerrillas

LINKS: 29 JAN 10

Some random items of interest:

• Growing solar cells via tobacco plants/e-coli.  Spray on biodegradable energy. 
• ACTA (leaked documents).  Secret intellectual property treaty currently being negotiated.  Basically, a rentier lockdown of IP.
• Washington Post.  Although he was not the focus of the strike and was not killed, he has since been added to a shortlist of U.S. citizens specifically targeted for killing or capture by the JSOC, military officials said. The officials, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the operations.  
• UK Police.  Unmanned spy drones.
• More later.

JUST IN TIME WORK

Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, has a very good article in his magazine on the desktop manufacturing revolution.  It's definitely worth the read and is complimentary with thinking being done on this blog re: resilient communities.  What was more interesting to me about the article, and perhaps to you, is the idea that this technology will help reshape work in new positive ways.   Here's the claim:

Thus the new industrial organizational model. It’s built around small pieces, loosely joined. Companies are small, virtual, and informal. Most participants are not employees. They form and re-form on the fly, driven by ability and need rather than affiliation and obligation. It doesn’t matter who the best people work for; if the project is interesting enough, the best people will find it.

This type of organizational model isn't new (although it may be for manufacturing).  It's currently sweeping the economy (an estimated 30% of the workforce are already temps), and we have copious insight into the effects of this transition.  It has resulted in:

• The elimination of benefits.  A complete shift of risk to individuals.  Costs are rising fast (often many, many times the rate of core inflation) and one slip puts you into bankruptcy.
• Record levels of job dissatisfaction (waiting for the next great project never happens on your schedule).
• Stagnation or a steady erosion of income at best (many see an immediate drop in income or long periods of unemployment between gigs with a shift to temporary status) due to pressure from off-shoring and automation.

In short, it's a disaster that's sweeping the economy. That being said, work is moving to a just in time model and it is not going back:

1. It works.  Virtual teams that use just in time labor can build things faster, better, and less expensively (by an order of magnitude) than traditional competitors (my personal experience building and operating virtual companies for a decade now, confirms this).
   
2. Barriers are falling.  The need form a corporation with long term contracts (to reduce information discovery costs -- Ronald Coase) is diminishing due to the availability of better tools, data, and connectivity.  Further most work is software mediated/managed info manipulation now, so telecommuting etc. makes it easy to form a virtual team for any project.
3. Pressure is growing.  The global economic and financial system is heavily financing the shift to temp work to capture the arbitrage in labor costs (globally) and reduce the bargaining power of individual workers.  This is inexorable since there is a huge profit (the aggregate of the delta between US/Euro incomes and Chinese/Indian) to be made.

Unfortunately, for everyone caught in this shift, help isn't on the way from the usual suspects.  So, it's up to us to develop a solution that preserves the productivity, speed, and flexibility of the just in time work model, but mitigates the deleterious impact.

I have some ideas on this, what are yours?

THE EVOLUTION OF CIVILIZATIONS

Took a bit of a risk with this, but it was fun to write.  Hope it does provide some useful frameworks for thinking about our present situation.______________

Last weekend, upon the recommendation of a very smart friend, I read Carroll Quigley's (a legendary professor at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service) 1961 book, "The Evolution of Civilizations."  It is a hidden gem of a history book, chock full of useful models he derives through the application of the scientific method and aggressive analysis/synthesis (which makes it very unusual).  Happily, I found this prescient para near the end of the book:

The hope of the future does not rest, as commonly believed, in winning the people of the "buffer fringe" to one superpower or the other, but rather in the invention of new weapons and tactics that will be so cheap to obtain and so easy to use that they will increase the effectiveness of guerrilla warfare so greatly that the employment of our present weapons of mass destruction will become futile, and on this basis there can be a revival of democracy and of political decentralization in all three parts of our present world.  This possible development in political and military matters, would, of course, require the development of decentralized economic techniques such as would arise if sunlight became the chief energy source for production and the advancement of science made it possible to manufacture any desired substance by molecular rearrangement....  

All I can say is WOW.  This was written at the height of the cold war, nearly 50 years ago, and he could still envision the end game of Western Civilization.*

Universal Empire

Quigley's models for how civilizations function are also very useful.  One model breaks a civilization's culture into six categories (there could be more, but these are useful):  Intellectual, Social, Economic, Political, Military, and Religious.  These categories develop at their own pace, and often (depending on the civilization), get out of synch (some are advanced and others very rudimentary).  In Western culture (don't think of this as related to any specific nation-state, but rather Western Civilization as a whole), Quigley maintained that the Intellectual, Economic, and Military cultural factors predominate.  The sophistication of political culture less developed.  Social and Religious cultural development is rudimentary. 

These levels of cultural development play a roll in how a civilization advances through Quigley's model (very similar to Toynbee and other historians) for a civilization's development.  These are:  1) Mixture, 2) Gestation, 3) Expansion, 4) Age of Conflict, 5) Universal Empire, 6) Decay, and 7) Invasion.  His analysis confirmed that all civilizations progress on this path, with an occasional jump from stage 4 (conflict) to 6 (decay).   At the time the book was being written, our current level of development was 4, an Age of Conflict (the Cold War) and he was unsure about the final outcome.  

What falls out of Quigley's models is something totally unexpected.  Universal Empire has arrived for Western Civilization (stage 5), but in a form unique in history.  Due to relative weakness of our political, social and religious cultural development, economics took control and vaulted to dominance.  Economics alone led the drive to Universal Empire (everyone has adopted financial capitalism, from China to Russia), and it is now firmly in control, while the other elements of Western culture wither.  

Instruments of Advancement vs. Institutions

Another of Quigley's insights is a description of how cultural elements advance through the use of social organizations that improve their function.  Organizations that radically improve the level of cultural development in their target area are termed instruments.  They do what they are supposed/designed to do and little else.  Over time, since these organizations are run by human beings, they become institutions.  They take on a life of their own, protect themselves and serve their own interests more than they advance the cultural need they were designed to advance/solve.  They become ineffective and ultimately damage the entire culture if they aren't radically reformed or replaced by a new instrument.  

The shift from instrument to institution is ultimately why the Political and Military aspects of Western Culture stagnated.  For example, take military development.  Due to institutionalization, it stagnated.  It is bloated, inflexible, bureaucratized, still focused on interstate conflict, and relatively ineffective/inefficient vs. even ragtag foes.  Worse, it is still tied to a single nation-state (the US), which ultimately, due to this sole source vulnerability will be its downfall: global financial capitalism will soon starve it of financial support (along with its Political cousin).  A likely replacement for this failed institution on a global level will be private military forces.  This new instrument, which is in line with the needs of global financial capitalism, will sprout like a weed as the US military starves to death over the next decade.

The shift to institutionalism is also a good predictor of our future.  Financial capitalism, the owner of Western Civilization's Universal Empire is an institution.  It has taken on a life of its own at the global level and is no longer an instrument of cultural advancement for Western Civilization.  It will advance its interests at the expense of everything else.  From outright fraud (the Shadow Banking system) to rentier lawfare (the proliferation of intellectual property protection to usury), financial capitalism will enrich itself mightily while the world stagnates endlessly.  

End Game

Quigley suggests that there are three potential outcomes from an institution that has gone bad. 

1. You can attempt to radically reform it.  The institution either accepts this reform and improves - or - the institution
2. fights the reform attempt.  The recent global crisis and it's pitiful aftermath is a good indicator that financial capitalism will fight reform tooth and nail, and they will win.  
3. The only other option is to  build something new that routes around the institution (in this case global financial capitalism).  However, that's going to be very difficult given that it is now runs a Universal Empire and the power it can bring to bear to protect its interests is nearly limitless.

Hope this helps.  I think it provides some useful thinking to why we should build new instruments for economic, social, religious, political, and intellectual advancement.  The new network proposed here, in combination with resilient communities, provides a good start across all of these areas.  Maybe we should call this network Freedom in a nod to Daniel Suarez (without financial capitalism's addition of a TM to the title).  

* Maybe open source warfare and systems disruption is that method of warfare.  I'm currently trying to build the second part.

LINKS: 26 JAN 10

Some random items of interest:

• Demotix:  Lily pad extraction.  Two helicopters run by a private security firm evacuates American tourists from a pre-arranged landing zone outside of the earthquake disaster region of Port-au- Prince. Haitians believed it was urgently needed supplies ran up the hill only for the helicopters to take off as quickly as they had arrived. Port-au-Prince, Haiti. 24/01/2010
• DIYbio. The equipment was handmade, but brilliantly so. Elegance and function were clear priorities. When a panel could be replaced with a tinted membrane, it was. When metal could be replaced by sanded wood, it was. The on-site laser was modified from a tattoo-removal system. Costs were down, but the technical skill involved in manufacturing was top notch. Darknet needs to become an epicenter for DIYbio.
• DDoS attacks reach 49 Gbs (Arbor Networks).  Targeted attacks that exploit flaws in application architectures getting better.  
• Dallas Observer.  Waging lawfare against credit collection agencies.  Debt collectors call him a credit terrorist.
• They rule.  A network visualizer for board members at major companies (including academic institutions).  Click through to the application.  Very nice.
• $17 Quantum RC bomb system for unmanned aerial vehicles.  Nice. 
• Foreign Policy.  Top ten cyberattacks by Chinese cybermilitias.  Notice the use of GG language. 
• The US gov't is blocking access to SourceForge for people from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. Stupid.

DARKNET ECONOMIES

If you haven't had a chance to read "Make" magazine yet, please do.  It's likely the coolest magazine on the planet right now.  The current issue, 21, dives into the rapidly evolving world of desktop manufacturing (additive and subtractive 3D fabs).  What should be apparent to anyone reading it, is that desktop manufacturing is on the cusp of becoming as mainstream, inexpensive, and easy to use as personal computers (with similar effect).  

What this means in the mid to long term is that manufacturing will quickly become more about manipulation of information (designs, controls, etc.) than materials.  The actual physical production takes little space, money, and basic materials (perfect for decentralized resilient communities that need to make their own stuff).  

This also means that manufacturing will start to really ride Moore's law, particularly as network platforms are designed to accelerate it.  Fortunately, this shift towards information dominance isn't unique to manufacturing.  It's impacting nearly every industry, service, and product.  It's even taking shape in agriculture, as the first signs of a transformation from energy/labor intensive agriculture to information heavy permaculture design emerge. 

What's exciting about this shift to information dominance, is that it makes our efforts to build an instrumented network (a darknet), one that enables the rapid establishment of thriving resilient communities, not only possible but probable.  Our opportunity then, is to build our network in a such a way that the information flow for making and doing things is better, faster, and more easily utilized than the status quo system by several orders of magnitude.

Is this possible?  Sure.  A good starting point is the understanding that our new network's economy will be centered on the production and flow of information 'property'.  The only question that remains is whether we use the same broken systems for generating innovation, managing production, and allocating investments.  My answer: that's probably a very bad idea.  More later.

BOOK REVIEW: American Apocalypse

There's a new little book of fiction out by a writer named Nova called, "American Apocalypse."   It's a wild west scenario with the second American depression (D2) as a backdrop.  I really enjoyed it, although it was pretty grim at times.  It would likely make a good action movie (much better than the slow paced collapse flicks we usually get) given the well constructed plot arc, the believable environment (about the same as today but dirtier), and the number of shootouts/choreographed violence it is able to fold in (without being gratuitous).

Here's a little more detail on the backdrop of the book.  The US is gutted economically, in a fashion very similar to how the USSR fell (hint: not by terrorism, EMP blasts, warfare, drugs, environmental collapse, peak oil, etc.).  How?  US elites simply shift their loyalties to the global economic system and loot the country on their way out the door.  This defection causes a slow but inexorable economic collapse.  Incomes decline, the well off bunker themselves (transferring wealth out), fiat currency weakens/fails, pensions evaporate, and the government is ineffective (particularly as government employees are let go in floods due to a lack of funds to pay them).  

Against this backdrop, the protagonist starts as both unemployed and homeless -- completely unequipped for the new environment.  As things get worse, he develops survival skills, particularly fighting skills.  Over time, he rises to become a law man in his suburban section of Virginia (that is until the dictatorship arrives). 

It's worth a read on two levels.  It's a well written story about the rise of a gunslinger.  It's also a good description of what resilient communities can help avoid.

LINKS: 21 JAN 10

Some random items of interest:

• The Supreme Court. The Supreme Court today overturned a century-old restriction on corporations using their money to sway federal elections and ruled that companies have a free-speech right to spend as much as they wish to persuade voters to elect or defeat candidates for Congress and the White House.  Wow.  The speed at which the US is hollowing out is rather breathtaking.  The document.  Analysis of this disaster.
• Pirate Bay's VPN (virtual private network) is now public.  Its new €5/month IPRedator service is an encrypted VPN that you can use to hide your traffic (whatever it may contain) from prying eyes. The servers are maintained and provided by Pirate Bay affiliates...   Here's where to sign up.
• PopSci.  HERF cannon for stopping cars at 200m.  Demo.  Pistol size in five years.  Nailing down a safe, efficient, low cost, and tested DIY design and a decentralized manufacturing network would be a very lucrative global business. 
• UK Conservatives call for a resilient nation as a means of national defense (see document).  If anyone finds anything interesting in it, plz let me know.
• Icognito.  Early operating system for end to end encryption through the TOR network.   Haven't verified its value yet.
• Roland Dobbins (Arbor Networks) presentation on BotNets and computer security threats (PDF).  Pretty nice.
• NPR.  Unplanned resilience in Haiti. Mr. STANTON: Haiti is one of the relatively few places in the world where you really can't rely on power at all, commercial power at all. So in every location we have a fuel tank. KASTE: Those fuel tanks power generators, which means many of the cell towers are up and running right now, even as the city's electricity grid remains a shambles.
• Kabul.  The Taliban attempt a low level "urban takedown" ala Mumbai.  
• The Taliban has finally created a simple rule set (69 points) for managing the territories they control to reduce resistance and speed growth.  Simple rule sets like this are very effective at displacing the government, particularly in a poor country where the citizens pay out $2.5 billion in bribes a year.

JOURNAL: Brands and Hollow Nation-States

"We have the best brand on earth: the Obama brand. Our possibilities are endless." Desiree Rogers, White House Brand Guru.

The nation-state, as an organizational form that seized control of the world from the starting gates at the treaties of Westphalia, is losing power across the board -- due to the rise of a much larger, faster, complex, and powerful global system.  The result has been a hollowing out of the nation-state through privatization, corruption, and outright abdication (of responsibility).  With each passing year, less of the historical nation-state is left.  A process accelerated by the financial demise caused by boondoggles from foreign military adventures to propping up massive global subsystems when they get into trouble.  

Despite this trend, the nation-state isn't going away.  It still plays a role in the growing global ecosystem, and nothing has risen to displace it (global ideological homogeneity of nation-state governance dictates this).  It will merely adapt to the evolving niche it is relegated to.  So, what does the nation-state look like in its residual and adapted form?

Naomi Klein has some excellent analysis of what it becomes.  It's a very good read, and if you disregard her dated nostalgia for populist movements and progressive government reform -- that legacy thinking is utterly useless, as a strategy for success, given the rise of a dominant and sovereign global system that doesn't have any governing body to appeal to -- the article provides a very incisive analysis of how the nation-state survives after tangible power is gone.   

Simply, the nation-state becomes a brand.

More specifically, it becomes a lifestyle brand, or worse, a lifestyle brand centered on a single person.   All of its functions outside of the strategic communications (public relations, information operations, etc.) required to support and extend it are outsourced, auctioned off, or abdicated.  

So where does that leave you as an individual or a family?  You can buy into that brand and get little except a name emblazoned on a t-shirt, since that brand doesn't have the capability to really defend your interests or help you succeed in a harsh/unstable global system.  The other option is to build something new.  A new resilient tribe to provide you with a real, tangible future that enables you to thrive.

LINKS: 17 JAN 10

Some random items of interest:

• Going through the wrong door shuts down massive airport terminal at JFK for hours.  Tactics of failure work amazingly well.  Imagine 5 simultaneous wrong way entries and wrong door exits at multiple airports.  Imagine a hundred.  It'd be a national alert resulting tens of thousands of hours of delays (cumulative per passenger) and tens of millions in losses.  The result, if they do catch them, is an arrest for criminal trespass?  Is it scalable as a strategy?  Could this be converted into a new form of civil disobedience via a flash mob? Just having fun with the concept.  
• Make magazine.  Issue 21.   Features how-to articles that give individuals and small groups the know-how to make three-dimensional parts using inexpensive computer-controlled manufacturing equipment. Both additive (RepRap, CandyFab) and subtractive (Lumenlab Micro CNC) systems are covered.   Sounds amazing, I need to get a subscription.
• The Amish are exempt from the new health insurance mandate and medicare / social security taxes.  A yawning religious loop hole.  This can be leveraged by synthetic tribes.
• Evan details the efforts to build a permaculture relief corps to help with disasters like the Haitian earthquake.  Basically the idea of leaving people economically improved after a disaster is pretty cool (as opposed to our current razor/razor blade model).  For example:  Building sewage systems, composting toilets, compost and recyclying centers, rocket and solar stoves, temporary shelters (perma-yurts), water catchment and filtering, and plant nurseries. Rocket and solar stoves are key because the major ecological problem in Haiti which causes huge hardships from many angles is deforestation for fuel. Solar stoves use no wood and rocket stoves, which can be made out of old cans and pipes laying around, use almost no fuel and can cook with twigs.
• More later.

LINKS: 16 JAN 10

Some random items of interest:

• Portland Oregon.  A public "tool" library.  Very, very smart (via Ran Prieur).The library survives on donations that help it buy new and refurbished tools, small grants, tool sales, late fees -- and the good will of members: Since the library opened in August 2008, it has lent about 5,000 tools, with only a dozen not returned... It lends from 75 to 125 tools each Saturday in winter and up to 200 a day in summertime, when it's open on Wednesday evenings as well as Saturday.   This needs to go exponential (with more complex fabing tools and more workspace....).  
• Sea gliders.  Unmanned submersible vehicles that can run off of thermal energy giving them a range of 40,000 km and 5 years.  Being deployed right now in scientific roles.  From a GG perspective, this is yet another indicator that UVs are going to going dominate cross border smuggling sooner than most people expect.
• Photos of US artillery from Michael Yon (has a sci-fi feel to them).  Cool.
• Open BTS.  2G DIY cell phone project for voice and text.  
• Ghostnet attack: In August, someone obtained a list of 5,000 subscribers to the China Leadership Monitor, a respected quarterly publication from the Stanford University's Hoover Institution. The subscribers received a fake e-mail from a Gmail account purportedly from the publication but with an attachment that would take over their computers. [I suspect the attack on Stanford PhDs rippled through Google] Regardless, it sounds similar to the open source scenario for Chinese hacking I did for Wired a couple of years ago.  It also points to the need for an open source Ghostbusternet to inflict tit for tat.
• A Fedex for smugglers.  Air bridge from South America to Africa.  It appears that Al Qaeda is finding it's most enduring operational role is as a facilitator of black globalization.  Who knew?  LOL.
• Jevon's law (TOD).  Basically, improvements in technology that increase efficiency tend to drive up total energy use.  We use an efficient device more often and in a greater number of applications.

JOURNAL: Heads up

Freedom, the new book from my friend Daniel Suarez, is now available for purchase.  It's a must read.

MILESTONE

So far, the new methods of warfare originated on this weblog (and associated book) have done pretty well.  These methods have had significant influence on:

• The most successful insurgent of the 21st Century and many other guerilla leaders/groups from around the world (and they are using this methodology to great effect).
• The leading effort in the scientific study of warfare (as this article in Nature magazine demonstrates) -- thanks to the authors for doing this great work!   Independent thought leaders across the spectrum/board and even best selling science-fiction.
• Top leaders in the DoD to Congressmen to White House advisors (as well as their counter-parts in other allied countries).  

One of the best parts is that this all occurred completely outside of the national security bureaucracy (shame on them, LOL).  Let's do it again.

It's time to up the ante and move onto the next phase:  the birth and rapid growth of new societal networks.*  This is going to be a fun ride!

* As in, new societal networks that can outcompete (trounce evolutionarily) all existing status quo organizational forms  (this should not be confused with the diminutive form of 'social networking,' as in Facebook and Twitter).

NOTE: Public Key (Updated with some tips on private communication)

Here's my public key

Basically, encrypted communications (via simple tools, user interfaces, plug-ins for browsers) and private browsing is easy enough for anyone to use.  

Here's a little primer on making your e-mail and browsing relatively secure from government and criminal snooping (by request).  You never know, you might need it in the future.  I'll do it for the mac (which is what I use):

1) First thing you need is a PGP encryption kit.  Personally, I like a kit called Gnu Privacy Guard.  Here it is for the mac.   Download both the core kit called "Privacy Guard  " and the "GPG Keychain"  Install them both.  

Now to make it easy to use with e-mail.

2) Set up a Google mail account.   

3) Download and install the Firefox bowser.  

4) Download and install FireGPG.  It's an add-on to the Firefox browser that allows you to encrypt/decrypt your mail.  

How to use it:

5) Use the key manager (click it).  Make a new public key by clicking the button on the interface.

6) Start Firefox and enter your gmail account.  Send your public key to a friend.  Here's how.  Right click in the body of the message.  Select export.  The keychain application pops up.  Select the public key you created.  The public key appears in a new window.  Select copy to clipboard/exit.  Paste the key into the body of the message.  Send the e-mail.  It's a little clunky, but it gets better after that.

7) You can also publish this new key to an open MIT key server (like I did).  Just copy and paste it into the window provided and save.   You are now searchable by the name and e-mail on the key.  Save that link to your bookmarks.

8) If someone sends you a public key that you trust, you can save their key to the keychain.  Highlight the string of numbers and select import to do that.  When you get an encrypted e-mail from that person in the future, highlight the entire message (including the PGP header) and right click, select decrypt.  The message will show up in a new window.  Really simple process.

Anonymous browsing is even easier.

Basically, if you want to ensure that nobody can track you easily.  You need to do a couple of things.

• Select "private browsing" from the Firefox menu.  This prevents your browser from being a spy.
• Download Tor.  Install it.  Start it up (click it).
• Download the Firefox plug-in for Tor called Torbutton.  Customize the toolbar to add the icon for Torbutton to the menu.  Click the icon whenever you want to block your IP address from sites you visit.
• If you have extra cycles/bandwidth, become a relay on that network.

Anyway, hope this helps.

BOTNET ECOSYSTEMS

Vitaly Kamluk has done some excellent work dissecting botnet business ecosystems. Most of this likely is replicated in any community that builds DIY weaponry (we've seen similar sophistication in IED operations).  Here's his taxonomy:

• Malware authors. Botnet owners are the malware writers' best customers, and use malware not only to create zombie networks but also to harvest confidential data, distribute spam, rogue antivirus applications and adware, and to transform infected computers into proxy servers.
• Guarantors.  Forum moderators and independent analysts that have good reputations that can test the validity of the claims made by malware authors.
• Encryption and packaging.  Service providers that find ways to enable malware to evade anti-virus protections.
• Exploit packages.  Service providers that have developed new methods of attack. 
• Marketing/traffic.  Service providers, many via spam, that direct people to infected sites for malware infection.  
• Bulletproof hosting.   As in RBN.  Hosted servers that are immune to shutdown.  Perfect for command and control of decentralized botnets and retrieving data stolen by botnets.
• Customers: Carders.   People that can exploit credit card numbers.  
• Customers: Extortion.  Those that can profit from shutting down a company's Web site via DDoS attack.
• Customers: Spammers.

Here's a simple graphic that depicts the ecosystem:

 

JOURNAL: Tribal Opportunity Space

We're all temps now.
Carl Camden, CEO Kelly Services

Here's a question:  what's the opportunity space -- the ease of recruiting members -- for a new tribe?  At the macro level, it couldn't be better.  

Why?  The tribe we're working on doesn't seek control or radical change at the macro level, but rather competes with the status quo for high quality members that are willing to make a lifelong commitment to a better/different life.  Within that framework, trends in employment driven by the global system are making it easier than ever.  The biggest trend is to turn workers into variable inputs so they can be easily interchanged, outsourced, or terminated.  The characteristics of this shift are:

• No benefits (from health coverage to sick/vacation days).
• Variable hours/employment.  Employees absorb all risks and costs associated with employment (i.e. training/education). 
• Pay slowly drifts down to global norms (much lower than current levels) due to pressure from off-shoring.

The psychological result of this shift includes:

• Zero loyalty.
• Willingness to shift rapidly to new opportunities.  
• Broad dissatisfaction (only 45% of workers like the current arrangement).

How big is this opportunity?  In 2006 the percent of workers in this category was 26% (see Business Week, "The Disposable Worker").  It's accelerated markedly since then.  In combination with the unemployed and discouraged workers, we could see the easily accessible opportunity space exceed 50% of workers in the next couple of years (let alone the ability to recruit large percentage of those that are still employed full time that have seen benefits and incomes cut clean through the bone).  For people under 24, unemployment is well over 50% and work, when it is available, is almost ubiquitously temporary.  

It's never been this good for something new.

WHY A RESILIENT COMMUNITY NETWORK?

For those of you that have been reading this weblog for years.  You already know that I've been advocating that people start building resilient communities (RCs).*  Why? Resilient communities will:

• Shield us from increasingly frequent shocks and breakdowns of an out of control global system.
• Protect us from predatory and parasitical non-state actors -- from globe spanning banks/corporations to local/transnational militias/gangs.
• Provide us with a path that will allow us to thrive -- economically, socially, individually, and spiritually.  

Unfortunately, nobody is going to help us build them.   

The nation-state can't and won't. It is losing power across the board as the global system strengthens.  Organizationally, the nation-state has lost control of its finances, borders, media, economics, use of force, etc.   Worse, moral and ideological moorings that served the nation-state well for hundreds of years have rotted away.  The nation-state is now adrift, unable to orient its decision making cycles.

As a result, the nation-state has been largely co-opted by increasingly powerful non-state entities -- from parasitical banks that sit astride core functions of the global system (they profit from the ability to distort core financial and economic functions to manufacture virtual "wealth") to transnational gangs that puncture borders with drugs and other smuggled goods -- and that corruption is spreading.  Nothing can get done at the nation-state level anymore and what does get done (as the recent health and finance legislation in the US proves), is only being done to drive forward profitability in parasitical firms or sap our resources (making us more vulnerable to predation by local threats).  Worse, nation-state bureaucracies are becoming more insulated and focused on self-preservation by the day from the institutional level down the individual government employee contractor.

So, what can we do?  Attempts to bootstrap resilient communities are definitely possible.  However, isolated and small, I fear these efforts will either result in a reduction in the quality of life for its participants or quickly fall prey to parasites/predators (as in, you won't get far if bankruptcy, privatization, and gangs-disorder guts your community).  

The dominant solution to all of these pitfalls, dangers, and threats is to team up.  Create a virtual tribe that helps communities become resilient  -- by financing, protecting, and accelerating them.  While its possible to build a virtual tribe via a completely ad hoc process, the best way to build platforms in software that make the growth of tribal networks fast and easy.  If we can build these software platforms, we can turn the transition to resilient communities from a process prone to high rates of failure, into a process that spreads virally* and generates immediate improvements for its participants.  A vibrant future awaits, all we need to do is build it.

NOTE:  As soon as I get some cash flow, I'm going to self-finance the building blocks of these platforms.  I'll do what I can, but if there is someone with deep pockets interested in changing the world (for the better) reading this, here's a chance to do it.  Also, given the number of people that have sent me e-mails expressing their intent to join in, we won't be short of high quality talent to work on this.  

*Virally, as in the growth of self-reinforcing networks and not the diminutive sense of viral content/site traffic.

LINKS: 11 JAN 10

Some random items of interest:

• Chinese "black jails" and mercenary thugs settle civil complaints. Markets to the rescue: "Under the current for-profit system, private jail operators receive $22 to $44 a day per person."
• New Study.  Terrorism works, in its ability to generate political change, up to a limit. "Terror attacks beyond a certain 'threshold' level of deaths backfire, though, and cause Israeli attitudes to become less accommodating"   I've long maintained that bloodless systems disruption is one of the best ways to bypass these 'threshold' limits.  
• Hamas turns into a criminal militia.  Ponzi schemes and smuggling taxes.
• Killdozer chronicle.  
• Guatamala.  When terrorist violence mixes with crime and zero law enforcement.  Lynch mobs are the result.  It's hard to be a simple criminal when people think you are going to torch their bus with them inside it.
• Stigmergic communication:   Soccer ambush maximizing viral vectors for impact. Cool, the Chatham House analyst is using GG theory.  The Stratfor analyst sounds lame.  
• MEND knocks out 20k barrels a day of production (Chevron).  From a strategic perspective,  I still think that a tit for tat reduction in disruption in exchange for hard cash payouts -- for projects/development audited by external accounting firms -- is the best approach for MEND.  
• Computer games and education. EO Wilson: "Games are the future in education. I envision visits to different ecosystems that the student could actually enter...with an instructor. They could be a rain forest, a tundra, or a Jurassic forest." Concur. Comment on an article about a new school in NYC (39% of students in NYC leave high school w/o a degree) that teaches exclusively through games: "For homework tonight class you will have to reach level 73. Lmao that would be the life, I wish when I was in school thats what we had to do for home work. xD: EA Games Developer"    Games + virtual community  could potentially provide a very low cost educational system that moves at many times the speed of current offerings.  Professions as games hold amazing promise too.
• D2 still on track. AEP.   

LINKS: 9 JAN 10

Some random items of interest:

• YouTube agitprop for warfare.  Norteno vs. Surenos (scraps).  
• NBC LA. TSA Agent arrested. "I am God, I'm in charge." This happens when people with less training and experience than any newbie cop is given a blank check to to arrest, detain, search, and intimidate.
• Tribal warfare in Mexico reaches new levels of violence.
• David Brooks. Sixty-one percent of Americans believe the country is in decline, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey.  The rest of the article is mostly angst related to the decline of the Republican party in favor of the Tea Party. Armed and Dangerous comments.
• Wired.  Anonymous testing services for virus writers.  Also, new exploits for hacking Adobe PDFs.
• More on the opportunity space: NY Post. The number of young Americans without a job has exploded to 53.4 percent — a post-World War II high, according to the Labor Dept.
Unemployment over 26 weeks continues to reach new highs (graph).
• NYTimes. The double standard on debt defaults. The aggressive behavior of corporations and high net worth individuals relative to debt and contracts will be copied by the rest of society. Get over it, game theory dictates this. The result a legalism so intense (since basic norms of behavior can't be assumed, they must be spelled out with excruciating detail and enforced through lengthy and exhaustive monitoring) that the overhead expenses of running our economic system become unsustainable.  Why? This behavioral roll-out converts the economic returns on societal complexity already in place (systems we built to solve past problems) from marginally positive returns (I'm being generous) into deeply negative drags on all economic and social activity.
• Iran. A ham-handed approach to countering viral insurgency. The Iranian state's idea is on the right path (from a technical perspective and not a moral one), but the method used is badly executed.

TRIBAL LAYERS: Financial Data

Is it in the interest of any virtual tribe we build to make the assumption that all financial data should be completely transparent?  

Remember, this tribe will run in parallel to a global system and its intent is to provide members with a decisive competitive advantage within that system.  Let's do some free thinking on the subject to get your brain working.  

One caveat, this conversation is really early days in regards to building this new system, so the ideas I posit here are going to be malformed.  However, the ideas and implementations will get much better over time through successive iterations. Also, if you don't like this system spec, build/roll your own.  There will be lots of virtual tribes in a decade or so, in competition both with each other and with legacy parasites of the global system.

___________

I wrote the (rather silly) post, Ultimate Griefing in Lottery Economy to get people thinking about those issues within the current context.  It's ugly.  However, it's not as if our financial data is actually private, it's being gathered, sliced-diced, and used by corporate non-persons and the government all of the time (in ways you as the supposed owner of that data don't control or even know about).  Smart criminals can get access to this data too. 

So, people seem only to be worried about the issues related to it being publicly available.  Why?  Crime, certainly, but that is likely not much of an issue within a tribal system.  That leaves shame.  The idea that you will face social consequences based on your financial data.  That is a rather flimsy reason when all of the negative consequences of this privacy are calculated, namely the ability to hide graft, theft, hoarding, and bad behavior of all sorts. 

So, again, what if the tribal software we build makes all financial data, transactions, and processes completely transparent (both within and outside the tribal system)?   

What if that transparency includes a tag on everything you own, down to the buttons on your shirt, that identifies it as something belonging to you?  

What if every transaction you make and the inventory of everything you own is known to any random member of the tribe you happen to meet?

What if any use of that data is also required to be known as transparent as the data itself?

What do you think?  

JOURNAL: Ultimate Griefing in a Lottery Economy

Just having fun thinking about information bombs...

There's a widespread belief that we live in a lottery economy.  A place where the outcomes from gambling determine your future -- where random luck and an ability to cheat skillfully (as in card sharking or loaded dice) is more important to your success than anything else (hard work, skill, intelligence, training, education, etc.).   This shift in belief has even been embraced as social policy:  nearly every US state now uses gambling as a means of boosting revenues, leading to a degenerative trends in spending.

Of course, this also means that people don't believe that people that win in gambling deserve their fortune.  So much so, that when lottery players do sometimes win, they immediately generate a feeding frenzy of sleazy people that want to get their rightful share.  A good example of this is the story of Abraham Shakespeare, a truckers assistant from Florida.  Within three years of Abraham's winning a $30 m jackpot the money was gone and he is presumed dead.  Or Stuart Donnelley, the Scotsman so scarred by the feeding frenzy generated by his winning that he became a recluse and recently took his own life.  

Granted, these fellows were neither the most prepared people in the world, nor were they protected by a phalanx of lawyers and accountants (to the extent they can be trusted).   But, even with that 'protection' taken into account, who is really prepared for the type of feeding frenzy they experienced given their visibility?  

This leads me to think that the ultimate information age griefing attack (within gaming, this is an attack meant to disrupt the ability of the target to live within a gaming/fantasy world) in a lottery economy is to publish the names, social security numbers, phone numbers, addresses, banks account #s, memberships, e-mail addresses, etc. of people that have a net worth over say $5 million.  Since this is merely information, a text file of this data wouldn't be impossible to accumulate (very tough, but not impossible to accumulate) and relatively easy to distribute.  The result would be that anyone of a certain net worth would immediately be visible to the plethora of sharks that don't believe they deserve their wealth.  My guess is that the frenzy would be pretty horrible to watch.

JOURNAL: Take a Deep Breath, It's Not a National Crisis

I've spent a good part of the last year building a software system (it's for sale to anyone interested in buying it) that anticipates, benchmarks, and provides avenues for controlling viral information and content.  What do I mean by viral?  

Here's an example, let's say an event occurs in the early morning hours of Tuesday: 

• as of the Tuesday morning commute a couple dozen people know about it, 
• by noon Tuesday a couple of thousand people know about it, 
• by Tuesday evening hundreds of thousands know about it,
• by Wednesday morning millions know about it, 
• by Thursday its splashed across all of the major news organizations,
• by Friday, e-mail campaigns - critics - journalists are bombarding the government,
• by Friday evening, the White House and Congress launch a major investigation and an organizational purge.

Granted, this description is a bit of an exaggeration and the steps might vary somewhat, but the process is basically the same for every event.  An event occurs and our global communications system amplifies it into a cacophony.  Let's take two recent examples:

• An attempted airplane bomber (Newark).
• The assassination of a couple of CIA operatives in Afghanistan.

In both cases, relatively small events (in that neither threatened us, nor the organizations in question in any existential way) were amplified (in hours) to a level where the entire US government was put into a tailspin.  Organizational purges and strategy rethinks were launched.  Systemic failures were hinted at.  Etc.   

In short, the entire US government became a hostage to the global information network twice in the same week.

What can be done?  The first thing that should be done when something like this occurs is to take a deep breath.  Put the incident in perspective and communicate the same.  It's not a real crisis.  De-escalation should be the first response in anything but an acute existential emergency. 

The second step?  I'll leave that up to you guys.  That's one of the reasons I built the software I mentioned.  

SOFT LAUNCH VIRTUAL GOVERNANCE

Here's another take (important caveat:  it's not my approach, although there's likely something here that's valuable) on how to build virtual organizations that compensate for the collapse of nation-state governance and 'softens' the rise of a global corporate economy.  It starts with a collection of work by Umair Haque, who writes for the Harvard Business Review.  It's a soft launch because it works within the system to "save capitalism from itself."

NOTE:   If you have a problem with terminology soup, this isn't likely for you.  Umair comes up with lots of new terms.  You have been warned.

The Builder Manifesto 

Dear World Leaders,
This relationship isn't working out. Its time for us to explore other government opportunities. We've tried to make it work. But it's not us — it's you (really). I've been thinking a lot about leadership lately. Specifically: why, today, when a wave of crises is sweeping the globe, does leadership seem to be almost totally absent? The answer I've come to is, ironically enough, leadership itself. I'd like to advance a hypothesis: 20th century leadership is what's stopping 21st century prosperity...
Umair Haque (Harvard Business Review)  "The Builder's Manifesto" Dec 18, 2009

Umair approaches the current crisis of global capitalism is a lack of the "right" kind of leadership (more type and approach than personality).  A classic Harvard Business School approach to any problem.  He defines the leadership needed as "builders."  Here's some more detail:

• The boss drives group members; the leader coaches them. The Builder learns from them.
• The boss depends upon authority; the leader on good will. The Builder depends on good.
• The boss inspires fear; the leader inspires enthusiasm. The Builder is inspired — by changing the world.
• The boss says "I"; the leader says "we". The Builder says "all" — people, communities, and society.
• The boss assigns the task, the leader sets the pace. The Builder sees the outcome.
• The boss says, "Get there on time;" the leader gets there ahead of time. The Builder makes sure "getting there" matters.
• The boss fixes the blame for the breakdown; the leader fixes the breakdown. The Builder prevents the breakdown.
• The boss knows how; the leader shows how. The Builder shows why.
• The boss makes work a drudgery; the leader makes work a game. The Builder organizes love, not work.
• The boss says, "Go;" the leader says, "Let's go." The Builder says: "come."
• They're not the only principles, and perhaps not even the best ones. But they begin to help us think constructively about how to build a better tomorrow. And that is, ultimately, what it's all about.  

He's even gone so far as to outline a type of "constructive" capitalism that accounts for the societal costs of innovation.  An approach that he believes can fix things. 

Builder Support Networks

To speed up the development of "builder" (aka maker) efforts, the non-profit venture fund OpenWorld has set up two sites.  The first is "Builder Challenges" which is essentially a financial support network using crowd sourcing to fund and support grassroots development efforts.  The second is the Buildership Lab (a platform for start-ups in the space akin to what we saw in the venture capital space a decade ago). 

LINKS: 6 JAN 10

Some random items of interest:

• More later.
• Parot drone.  iPhone + wifi + UAV. Nice.
• The war correspondent Michael Yon gets handcuffed by customs agents (not TSA) at the US border:   When they handcuffed me, I said that no country has ever treated me so badly. Not China. Not Vietnam. Not Afghanistan. Definitely not Singapore or India or Nepal or Germany, not Brunei, not Indonesia, or Malaysia, or Kuwait or Qatar or United Arab Emirates. No county has treated me with the disrespect can that can be expected from our border bullies.  More.
• Guardian. Goldman Sachs' employees are so special that they ought to be viewed in the same category as professional athletes and movie stars, according to a board member of the Wall Street behemoth.  Special?  Think about this in another way. Global financial elites have set up themselves up as a virtual global tribe through story telling, rites of passage, obligations, largely leaderless, segmented function, etc.  The allure is definitely there (a similar process led the elites of the USSR to jump ship, which precipitated the collapsed of that superpower).  Another way to look at it:  except for the method, there's very little difference between this tribe and al Qaeda.  Both do us damage.
• Bots.  Come to think of it, I also ran the company and did a lot of the viral marketing that made RSS (really simple syndication) a global standard and shipped the first RSS aggregator back in 2002/3 or so.  RSS/aggregators are one of the first globally popular (open/decentralized) bot systems.  LOL.

LINKS: 5 JAN 10

Some random items of interest:

• Dissatisfaction.  The Conference Board just released a new survey that found that fewer Americans are satisfied (only 45%) with their jobs than ever before in the history of the survey.  Apparently a steady drop measured over decades.  Those under 25 are particularly dissatisfied.  Translation:  opportunity space.
• Russian monocities.  Sounds like middle America.  Stasis and decay.
• The New Yorker.  Economics in free fall. For expansive theories discredited by events, confusion reigns. Keynes won't help either.
• WSJ: Personal bankruptcies skyrocket in the US despite a 2005 statute written by the banking industry to revive serfdom (perpetual, non-dischargeable debt). That statute makes entrepreneurship very dangerous in the US.  Again Global > National.
• Drones over America. LOTS more enroute as the automation of domestic order continues. Of course, DIY drones will be produced at 1/1000 th of the cost of government drones and will do much, much more.
• Nice insight into how the government is sacrificing the domestic economy to prop up global banks. Global > National. Hilarious. Financial Armageddon: "A senior person at Treasury said to a small group of us that it is now official Treasury policy to extend and pretend on real estate loans... When I pressed the issue of political interference [in the marketplace] she said -- what do you want us to do, bankrupt all the banks?"
• E-Fax connection is up for Bill Lind to start publishing again.  Thanks much for the support that made this possible.  It's up to him now.

JOURNAL: Central Question of 21st Century Governance

Which social, political and economic system can BOTH protect you from the excesses of an uncontrollable/turbulent global system AND advance your quality of life?  

One thing is increasingly clear:  hollow nation-states aren't the answer.  

They are merely lines on a global map.  Furniture in the global economy's vast estate.  Easy to manipulate and rearrange if you have the money.  Lounges of convenience for the global economy's numerous parasitical squatters.

Here's an option:  DIY your solution.   Roll your own tribe or community. Build it from the ground up to be resilient, decentralized, fair, and meritocratic.  If you are so inclined, cut the rules into software so you can be both local and global at the same time.  Change those rules by popular consent when the environment changes (and it will, often).  Attract members to your new tribe.  If it becomes unfair, leave it and roll another one. Compete for members.  Use this bootstrapped system to negotiate and connect with the global economic system on equal terms, rather than as supplicants.

PS:  I don't know about you, but I'm having fun with this line of thinking.

LINKS: 4 JAN 10

Some random items of interest:

• Some interesting thinking on the next decade from Kazys Varnelis (Dir. Colombia Univ. Network Architecture Lab).  Superrich (those able to manufacture fake wealth) in Roman splendor. Death of lower/mid middle class and suburban favelas -- a new world wide model.
• Telegraph/Pritchard.  The global depression is still on track.  Next up:  Japan.
• Tactics of Failure at the Newark Airport.  Even the slightest incident, at low risk to the perpetrator, can set of massive inconvenience/cost.
• Drone porn hits YouTube.  DIY drone porn is next.
• LA.  Synthetic tribal affiliation ports to the "middle class."
• A glimpse of the future of the western work force.  Work in a cubicle.  Sleep in a cubicle.  Die in a cubicle.
• Twitter to avoid checkpoints for drunk driving.
• Book piracy?  Wrong interpretation.
• The Appleseed project.
• Revolico.  Cuban Craigslist.

YOU ARE IN CONTROL

There's a great article in TIME magazine by Amanda Ripley (I wrote a review of her great book, "The Unthinkable" in the City Journal) on one of the most under covered security lessons of 9/11:  that an aware citizenry can defend itself.  It ends with this telling para which depicts the government reasserting its authority to prop up its legitimacy:

After the passengers [heroes] of Flight 253 deplaned in Detroit, they were held in the baggage area for more than five hours until FBI agents interviewed them. They were not allowed to call their loved ones. They were given no food. When one of the pilots tried to use the bathroom before a bomb-sniffing dog had finished checking all the carry-on bags, an officer ordered him to sit down, according to passenger Alain Ghonda, who thought it odd. "He was the pilot. If he wanted to do anything, he could've crashed the plane." It was a metaphor for the rest of the country: Thank you for saving the day. Now go sit down.

The same spirit of being in control, regardless of government inaction/incompetence, should be true for other aspects of our lives under a similar assault by a global system run amok.  

What am I talking about?  Our economic and societal future.  If it's not clear to you already after seeing a global economic meltdown caused by the gluttony of financial parasites, it should be.  But it's worse than that.  The entire system has failed to produce anything resembling improvement in our lives for years:

• Median male incomes today are the same as they were in 1974 in the US (and likely all over the western world).  No progress has been made despite a doubling of productivity and massive top line GDP growth. Worse, given that female incomes aren't on par with male incomes yet, the typical American family makes much less per hour worked than in 1974.
• All of the requirements for entry into the middle class are now private expenses.  From health care to a college education, if you can't afford the minimum (let alone high quality versions), you aren't allowed entry.  Worse, those expenses are spiraling out of control at rates many times the rate of inflation.  Nothing is being done to address this.
• The system is geared to make us fail.  Not only has outsourcing/off-shoring just started (everything that can be moved offshore to take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity in wage disparities between western and workers in developing countries will be) we are being laden with un-repayable debt. To wit: there's been NO job growth in the last decade (despite tens of millions in population growth) and total debt from all sources is still near ALL time historical highs.

To add insult to injury, efforts to correct any of the above through governmental or regulatory reform have failed miserably (the government and both parties have been captured by transnational business interests):   from endless bailouts to industries actually writing the legislation that covers them to guarantee rich profit growth while solving nothing meaningful (as we saw with both the recent health care and finance bills).  We are at a dead end.  

So, take control.  

NOTE:  My solution is to form a tribal layer.  Resilient communities that are connected by a network platform (a darknet).  A decentralized and democratic system that can provide you a better interface with the dominant global economic system than anything else I can think of.  Not only would this tribe protect you from shocks and predation by this impersonal global system, it would provide you with the tools and community support necessary to radically improve how you and your family does across all measures of consequence.  Of course, this may not be the right solution for you, but if it is...  

NOTE2:  Seems like the term darknet is confusing people.  Going to need to rethink the branding and terminology.  

BOTS AND AUTOMATED TYRANNY

NOTE:  What's funny about the following is that my team built and deployed a global bot network back in 99-01.  We put bot servers in 54 cities on 6 continents that gathered 20 million measurements every day, that we replicated back to our central server farm in real-time.  

Here's a brilliant video presentation by the author Daniel Suarez (Daemon and Freedom) on the rapid proliferation of computer automated decision making (see the NOTE below on bots).  

Daniel answers the question:  how does the globally dominant economic system operate at the root and branch without human oversight or governance?  It builds itself a body in the name of economic necessity and efficiency.  Specifically, an intricate system of trillions of morally neutral software bots that can tirelessly watch everything and execute on its decisions.  If you were wondering what the successor to the nation-state at the global level would be, as the nation-state recedes, this is it.

NOTE: Dan talks about "bots" in his presentation.  Basically, bots are software that gather information and make decisions automatically (ad infinitum).  Bots are everywhere.  They make decisions that impact our lives on a daily basis (from whether we get a mortgage or we are put on a no-fly-list or keep up with inflation on a stock based retirement fund).  Since bots are software, they can be copied endlessly (self-replication) and can work tirelessly. 

QUESTION: Darknet Architectures

This post may be more than a little technical for some, less so for others.  It's not sci-fi or a fiction of any sort, since it can have real world implications in the short term and it doesn't rely on some magical break-through in technology.

This post concerns the construction of a Darknet (I'm thieving this term from the P2P file sharing world and the author Daniel Suarez) to drive a viral roll out of resilient communities and other globally competitive synthetic tribal structures.  As in: why not embrace a massive competitive advantage in societal competition that is only accessible to new entrants/revisionists?

My assumption is that one of the hard requirements for a successful Darknet is that it must run on a decentralized P2P or botnet computing architecture.  It also needs to bootstrap quickly (provides immediate payoff to users across a wide range of activities) and have low barriers to entry (few resources and training requirements).  

With that in mind, take a look at Rhiza/Maya Labs' "Information Commons."  Feedback appreciated (either via comment or e-mail), from a technical critique on this architecture to pointers to competitive architectures that are better.