Global Guerrillas

STARTERS: Modular Tools for Resilient Communities

A universal mechanical power source is one of the key components of the Global Village Construcgtion Set – the set of building blocks for creating resilient communities.  Marcin Jakubowski, PHD, Open Source Ecology

Marcin, over at Open Source Ecology, is a starter (an entrepreneur, risk taker, organizer, leader, innovator, etc. focused on building resilient communities).  Instead of building a venture focused end users like Stacy (with her Backyard farming), Marcin is working on building the modular tools (the equivalent of physical platforms) that are required to rapidly achieve local self-sufficiency.  Here's a short video on his efforts to build a universal mechanical power source using hydraulics called the "powercube."  The idea is that a device like this can be used to drive everything from workshop tools to fabrication equipment to utility vehicles, using a simple plug-n-play hook up.

The above video not only demonstrates not only the powercube but the open source tractor Marcin's team has built.  

Why reinvent these tools?

Almost all of the tools that Marcin and his team at OSE are working on can be found in the commercial marketplace, so why reinvent them?  Here are some of the reasons:

• Cost.  OSE's tools are inexpensive relative to commercial equivalents.  Modularity via plug-n-play design allows tool modules that have similar functionality to connect to each other.  This eliminates the excessive duplication and cost of single use commercial items.
• The ability to build these tools from scratch.  Given that the design is open source, there are no idea monopolies to pay taxes to.  Further, it's way that allows those working on a bare bones budget to substitute sweat equity for financing.
• Low cost maintenance.  All of the tools are designed to be quickly repairable.  Not in the time it takes (easy accessibility) but in the simplicity of the parts needed to fix it (off the shelf or something that can be fabricated).

Why now?

Another good question is why is this happening now?  Here are some reasons:

• The designs can be shared with others via the Internet.  Everyone can benefit from the effort going on at OSE.  The reverse is also true.  A small team like this could never pull off a project of this scope without all of the innovation made possible by fellow tinkerers across the Web (and those that directly provide ideas to the OSE team).
• The plunging costs of CNC fabrication make it possible to make many of the parts used in the manufacture of these tools in a small, local shop.  
• Low cost sensors and computer controllers (like Arduino and reprap) make it possible to build complex devices at a very low cost.

STARTERS: Backyard Farmers in Brooklyn

"My mission is to be an instigator.  I just want to connect people that want to do these things."  Stacy Murphy, Founder, BK Farmyards.

Stacy Murphy is a starter.  Someone actively building resilient communities.  Her small business (see the excellent video below) collaborates with home owners to turn their backyards into intensive gardens.  Some highlights:

• Using raised beds (very similar to the extremely simple Square Foot Garden approach) she can quickly and methodically convert decorative backyards into productive gardens.  
• This not only improves the quality of life for the homeowners through a share of the fresh, quality food produced in their backyards, it will increase their value of their homes in the future.  
• A large number of these backyard farms can be stitched together to form viable farms that benefit from economies of scale and synergistic effects (shared equipment/labor, volume discounts, supplier relationships, etc.). 

Local Farming Platforms

Not content with growing this business organically, Stacy is embarking on the construction of what could be the secret sauce of building of resilient communities quickly: an online platform called Farmshare.  Essentially, an online platform is a tool that makes doing repetitive tasks easy (see my book, "Brave New War" for more on platforms for resilient communities) and for socially coordinating group activities.  For example:

• Shareable tools to donated seedlings (it can also be used to create micro-markets for the same).
• Data.  From maps of decentralized farms and resources to trend information.  
• Coordinated political action to put pressure on local governments to free up land and open up resources for the effort.
• Compost coordination.

 Read more about her effort in her application to the Buckminster Fuller challenge.

LINKS: 29 APR 2010

Some random items of interest:

• YouTube.  Sir James Goldsmith from 1994.   What I really liked is his belief that an economy is merely a tool (like a government) for the improvement of society.  It doesn't have any value unless it works for us by improving our lot (which, given that we have lower median incomes today than in the mid seventies, it isn't).  This is in direct contrast to the dogmatic belief prevalent today, that the market is more important than society.
• David Graeber.  Debt:  The first five thousand years.
• Fraudonomics.
• Haven't seen a good article/paper on Arizona's new immigration enforcement law. In short, welcome to societal fragmentation.  
• Taibi on Goldman's demise culls this gem that reflects market-derived ethics. "More and more leverage in the system," he [Goldman's Fabrice Tourre] wrote. "The whole building is about to collapse anytime now. . . . Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab . . . standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created!"
• "The enormous budget squeeze of 2009 saw revenues fail to cover entitlement spending and interest for the first time." Gene Steuerle.

JOURNAL: Crowd sourcing meets the real world

IT giant IBM told Personnel Today that the firm's global workforce of 399,000 permanent employees could reduce to 100,000 by 2017, the date by which the firm is due to complete its HR transformation programme. Tim Ringo, head of IBM Human Capital Management, the consultancy arm of the IT conglomerate, said the firm would re-hire the workers as contractors for specific projects as and when necessary, a concept dubbed 'crowd sourcing'. "There would be no buildings costs, no pensions and no healthcare costs, making huge savings," he said.

JOURNAL: "Printing" Houses

3D printing (desktop manufacturing or fabrication) isn't only limited to building small parts and products (from plastic, metal, circuit boards, etc.).  It is also scaling up to take on bigger tasks, including the construction of houses and buildings.   A very cool recent example comes from Enrico Dini, of Monolite UK LTD in London.  He has developed a new 3D printer called D-Space that uses stereolithography that has the potential to print complete buildings.  Here's an overview of the printing process he is using:

• A layer of base material (sand, gravel, sludge, or dust) is applied.
• A magnesium-based binding agent and fibers (nylon or glass) are "printed" onto the base material per the computer design (CAD) of the structure at 25 dpi.
• The resulting "sandstone" is microcrystalline that's similar to marble and structurally equivalent to reinforced concrete.
• The material hardens to full strength in hours, allowing a continuous printing process from the foundation to the top of the structure.

Early claims are that it can build buildings four times faster and at half the cost of conventional methods.  It can even build buildings with curved surfaces.  In short, as the building industry aligns with Moore's law, expect the costs to drop dramatically (particularly as open source variants emerge for the machine and the binding agent).   Think: "printing" the structures that form the basis of resilient communities (small team + printer can support an entire community).

LINKS: 27 APR 2010

Some random items of interest:

• Kidnapping (Mexico) and Piracy (Somalia) would be slow growing activities without a global insurance industry to fuel them.  Insurance coverage provides rapid high dollar payouts for seized people/ships, greased by expert negotiators (i.e. Controlled Risks Group) .  A similar mechanism is now available for guerrilla/financial entrepreneurs that specialize in the destruction of governments (from the nation-state down to the municipal level).  Credit default swaps, which played an important role (Magnetar, Paulson, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, etc.) in getting paid for gutting American households, are increasingly popular for betting on the bankruptcy of governments.  
• The US creating autonomous local militias in Afghanistan to enable communities to defend themselves.  This is a process that is central to what's called open source counterinsurgency.  Naturally, the  effort is being blocked by Karzai, who rightly sees it as a blow to Afghan sovereignty since "it runs counter to the goal of giving the state a monopoly of force" (which, by the way, is also the central tenet of US COIN doctrine).   As with Iraq, this effort is being run as a grass roots effort by soldiers that see the benefit of using open source counter-insurgency rather than a defunct US COIN doctrine.  Unfortunately, given the restrictions being placed on these efforts, it looks like the US defense establishment didn't learn anything from the unanticipated success of open source counter-insurgency in Iraq (it was the secret sauce of the "surge" and not the troop build-up).   
• Club-K.  A very cool new containerized weapon system from the Russian arms industry will soon be for sale.  It's a relatively inexpensive system ($10-$20m) that puts 4 ground/sea launched cruise missiles into a standard 40 ft shipping container.  Check out this advert on YouTube.  One of the missile variants undergoing design is considered a "carrier killer."
• Kevin Carson has posted a great review of Daemon and Freedom at the P2P Foundation.  
• The decimation of local governments in the US continues. NPR.
• Damon Vrabel (USMA/HBS) on the financial oligarchy.
• A hilarious business idea:  an adwords network that allows people to slam companies that abuse them.
• S&P rates Greek bonds as junk.  Sovereign defaults as far as the eye can see en route.

HOW STARTERS BOOTSTRAP RESILIENCE

Almost all of the ills of the coming future, from 

• disruption/instability to  
• rising insecurity to
• the end of middle class prosperity 

can be used by starters (social, cultural, and economic entrepreneurs, risk takers, organizers, leaders, etc. that want to build a better future) to bootstrap* networked resilient communities.  Another way to look at this:  think of ongoing disruptions as a normal part of how a modern market functions, not as an anomalous event, and act accordingly.   

Here's a simple example:  

Starters can use shortages and price spikes (common disruptions) in critical commodities as a way to attach customers to secure local supplies.   These relationships, secured by long term contracts (fairly priced), provide preferential treatment during future disruptions.  Think of this in terms of food, power, energy, security, etc.  

*A bootstrap is a process of building something from the ground up through small, incremental steps.  Each step adds to the previous until a fully functional systems is finally realized.  The benefits of this approach include: low cost and few barriers to entry.  This is how a computer starts when you turn it on.  It's also a popular term: as in "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps."

LOCALIZE AND VIRTUALIZE

An ash cloud from an Icelandic volcano has shut down air travel in northern Europe.  This event, or more precisely the far reaching impact of this event, is what's known as black swan.  It wasn't an event we could fully anticipate or build plans against (even more so if it lasts a couple of months or on and off for years).  The event, which has left tens of thousands of travelers stranded and essential products undelivered, is yet another demonstration of the perils of global interconnectivity without resilience.  

An Age of Instability

Unfortunately, due to rapid growth in global interconnectivity, black swans like this (or worse) are going to occur more often and with greater amplitude.  Why?  With each new connection, the potential that a black swan (technological, natural, political, economic, financial, etc.) will have far reaching effects, increases.  For more insight into this, read the new study by Buldyrev, et. al. entitled, "Catastrophic Cascade of Failures in Interdependent Networks".  It demonstrates that within interdependent networks, an increase in average connectivity makes a cascading failure more likely.

So, what can we do to prevent instability?  The solution isn't to formulate vague contingency plans or return to passive optimism.  Obviously, that won't work.  No, the solution is to improve our resilience to these systemic shocks through a social and economic transition that follows this simple formula:

• Localize production.   
• Virtualize everything else.  

JOURNAL: Goldman Sachs Charged with Fraud

The SEC formally charged Goldman Sachs with defrauding investors out of a billion dollars in a sub-prime mortgage CDO (collateralized-debt obligation).  Essentially, Goldman sold a complex financial product to its customers with a hidden secret:  it had a backdoor that allowed a bigger customer (a hedge fund named Paulson & Co.) to secretly replace the good assets in the product with bad ones.  

Does this signal a reversal in the titanic life and death struggle between nation-states and the global financial oligarchy?  No.  The amount of lawfare needed to reverse the course of this war before sovereign defaults litter the battlefield is immense:  thousands of trials, trillions in assessed damages, and tens of thousands sent to jail.  Even that might not be enough without a long campaign of financial COIN to pacify and disassemble the too-big-to-fail banks and hedge funds.  ;->    

LINKS: 15 APR 2010

Some random items of interest:

• Thai guerrillas attempt attempt systems disruption of electricity grid. "Seven bombs were found at three electricty towers. Four bombs exploded and the other three malfunctioned."  Think: thermite.
• 8 IEDs seized by the Mexican military.  This is a follow up to a cache found earlier this month. "The Mexican military disabled an IED in Oaxaca, Mexico in February. Another IED blew up in Nuevo Leon last month."
• Long Now Video on "Six easy steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization"  These are presented as Internet patches to the current social/economic paradigm.  However, the only way to get to the point were any these recommended innovations can be realized is through establishment of mesh networked resilient communities.
• Reuters.  Somali pirates are developing segmented marketplaces (per OSW theory).
• Two thumbs up for the documentary, "Bulletproof Salesman."
• Mexico is planning to disconnect 30 million unregistered cellphones to fight crime.
• Running COIN ops in Rio's favelas.
• Parkour training camp video.  Variant for low overhead RC and urban combat training?
• US consumer spending holding together due to strategic default?  That's not going to last long, banks are using the current stability to rush the exit.

JOURNAL: The Financial Oligarchy Hikes Taxes

Here's a chart (below) that depicts the growth of the financial oligarchy.  Of particular note is how quickly the financial oligarchy has looted its way back to previous highs in profitability.   How?  It has used control fraud to hike taxes on the real economy.  As with most forms of control fraud, our loss will far, far exceed their gain.  

What makes this looting possible?  Costless debt (from central banks), a free pass on usury, subsidies (bailouts), government collusion (no arrests, investigations, or meaningful new regulation after the crisis), mark to make believe valuation (a mechanism that allows banks to avoid realizing losses on worthless assets), government purchases of bad assets, and government guarantees (on all of the new bad "assets" of too big to fail banks).  

How to read this chart from Deutsche Bank:  It shows comparative growth (and not absolute valuations).  Everything is baselined at 1970.  

NOTE:  We've built a totalitarian global parasite and it can tax you into poverty.

JOURNAL: An Update on how OSW is driving innovation in IEDs

Greg Grant over at DoDBuzz has an update on open source warfare and the global bazaar of violence as it relates to IEDs.  Some items of interest from the article:

• ...it took the Irish Republican Army 30 years to progress from command wire bombs to remotely triggered devices. “By contrast, it took about six years for militants to make the same improvements in Chechnya, three year for fighters in Gaza, and about 12 months for insurgents in Iraq.
• The IED bazaar is found on the Internet, said retired general and former commander of the Pentagon’s counter-IED task force, Montgomery Meigs... How-to manuals and an extensive video catalog of attacks are readily available on the internet. The IED phenomenon has gone global, Meigs said, with drug cartels in northern Mexico now using the weapons.  
• Nearly 80 percent of all casualties in southern Afghanistan are caused by IEDs. The attacks in Afghanistan are deadlier than they were in Iraq because troops patrol on foot more in Afghanistan than Iraq. Even a small bomb can wreak bloody havoc on dismounted troops while it would have no effect against heavily armored MRAP vehicles.

AVOIDING COLLAPSE

The best books on social and economic collapse are from Tainter and Quigley.  They are the best since they both provide systemic models of collapse that can apply across all historical instances.  For example, Tainter sees civilization as  problem solving system that collapses when it begins to succumb to diseconomies of complexity.  Quigley sees civilization as a patchwork of wealth/solution creation engines that fail when they become self-serving institutions (organizations that perpetuate the problem they were built to solve) that fight renewal.  Better yet, the models they propose are not mutually exclusive. They compliment each other, Tainter's model anticipates increasing turbulence (the crisis of 2008) and Quigley's anticipates systemic predation (like the financial oligarchy).

However, as good as these theoretical models are, they miss one critical insight.  It occurred to me while reading these works in conjunction with Elinor Ostrom's work on self-managed resource commons (everything from fisheries to irrigation systems).  The common finding is that every system is unique at the local level.  No two irrigation systems are the same.  No two fisheries are the same, etc.  Further, the problems they represent are all rapidly changing, in that what's required to effectively manage them is divergent.    

This implies that complex societies, over time, develop a yawning mismatch between the local and the general.  More formally:

The need for evolutionary advances at the local level will always outstrip the pace of evolutionary change at the center.  When the mismatch grows too large, the entire system collapses.

I suspect this applies not only to governance (politics, bureaucracy and legal systems) but also to markets, in that the centralization of markets works against the development of local wealth (scale requirements, predatory behavior, etc.).

Of course, this is also very similar to the problem I saw in John Boyd's decision making models (see "Open Decision Making" for more).   It also implies that a workable solution to this problem (as well as the drivers of collapse outlined by Tainter and Quigley) is to return sovereignty and autonomy to the local, to the extent possible, to enable massively parallel decision making.  The only way I can envision this working is through the establishment of resilient communities (aka, a semi-autonomous polis) that is economically self-sufficient, able to protect itself, and highly democratic.

NOTE:  Wow, thinking deeply today.  Hope you enjoy.

JOURNAL: The Financial Oligarchy Tax

What are the costs of a global financial oligarchy?  Here are some fun thoughts on this:

• A 35% tax on all productive activity.   In the US, financial sector profits rose from ~5% to 40% of all corporate over 35 years (much more if employee bonuses are factored in).  Given that financial functions are administrative overhead and not ultimately productive, this means that at least 35% of every dollar generated by the US economy is being misallocated.  Worse, the advent of computer automation (which is directly transferable to increasing productivity in finance) should have brought about a decrease in the economic overhead related to finance rather than a 700% increase.
• Privatized Gains and Socialized Losses. This started as a solution to boom bust cycles in finance.  Computer automation enabled participants to securitize risk (break apart debt primarily) in order to spread the burden among as many participants as possible.  As a result, during bust periods, industry participants were driven to cooperate in order to prevent widespread failures (usually by preventing realization of losses).  This allowed participants to use central bank subsidies (effectively costless loans) to earn themselves out of insolvency by taxing other market participants.  The moral hazard this created drove successive boom and bust cycles with increasing amplitude.  Ultimately, these cycles became so large and the financial sector so systemically important that it forced a taxpayer bailout in 2008 estimated at $20 + Trillion in outright subsidies or guarantees.  This is a cost that is in addition to the direct tax cited above.
• Greed, Control Fraud, and Looting.  In addition to the systemic costs cited above, there has been a change in behavior among individual participants.  Greed, which is the drive to routinely abuse trust in order to maximize personal profit, has become rampant.  Why?  Studies in political economics demonstrate that weakly enforced external legal structures rapidly displace established norms of behavior.  This situation leads to a rapid rise in selfish, greedy, and self-dealing behavior.  In contrast, the options that do work are strong self-governance that harshly punishes deviation from norms of behavior - or - strongly enforced, albeit expensively, external legal restriction.  The rise of greed has led to rampant control fraud.  This is a form of looting where the managers of private companies and/or governments use their positions to maximize short term personal gain.  Worse, there are indications that this behavior change has spread to the entire economy.  The costs of this rampant looting are incalculable.

It's amazing how close this tracks to my work on warfare.  Both predatory oligarchies and global guerrillas use the same methods: open source organizations, bazaars of violence, and systems disruption.  They both destroy prosperity (through systematic "taxes"), cause opportunistic collapse and eviscerate social cohesion. 

RC UPDATE: Microgrids

Three years ago, I wrote about the importance of smart electricity microgrids in Brave New War as platforms for networked resilient communities.  As a reminder, here's a short synopsis of what a microgrid is (the "smarts" are computer controls and data that allow people to see and manage the generation and use of electricity down to the device level through a simple Web interface):

Microgrids are modern, small-scale versions of the centralized electricity system. They achieve specific local goals, such as reliability, carbon emission reduction, diversification of energy sources, and cost reduction, established by the community being served. Like the bulk power grid, smart microgrids generate, distribute, and regulate the flow of electricity to consumers, but do so locally. Smart microgrids are an ideal way to integrate renewable resources on the community level and allow for customer participation in the electricity enterprise.

At the time when I first wrote about it, most of the interest in the topic was academic, and almost all of the implementations were very, very basic in design (hospitals and military bases, etc.).  What a difference three years makes.  Smart microgrids are now going mainstream with multiple software start-ups and big efforts underway at Siemens and Cisco.  Given this pace of expansion,  I suspect that this bottoms up approach will vastly outstrip and eventually curtail any efforts to build smarts into the larger utility grids (which is estimated to cost $165 b in the US alone, money that doesn't exist).   Also, with this level of interest, open source efforts are sure to follow. 

So what does this meant to those of building resilient communities?  Smart microgrids are a platform that can be built upon.  For example:

• It supports the development of a vibrant local market or ecosystem of power producers at the small business or household level.
• It enables communities to build in back-up systems that can keep them operational even when the rest of grid goes dark/down.
• It provides a way for innovations to reach end users immediately and new synergistic opportunities when combined with other local systems.

So, let me boil it down for you.  If you have found a community that you want to live in for the long haul, get them to explore the installation of a smart microgrid. 

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF COMPLEX SOCIETIES

If your interested in a very smart perspective on system collapse, please go read the anthropologist Joseph Tainter's book, "The Collapse of Complex Societies" (I've been a big fan of his work for ages).  In the book, he makes the compelling case that complex societies are, at root, very successful problem solving systems.  If they weren't, they would never have become complex in the first place.  Why?  Societies solve challenges by creating new rules and processes (new complexity) that are then added on to the existing system ad infinitum.  More successful outcomes = more complexity.

However, as noted above, problem solving comes at a cost.  Each solution leaves a residue, a layer of complexity that never goes away (laws, taxes, monopolies, treaties, etc.).  It builds up over time and saps the social system's flexibility and efficiency.  Eventually, ever new layer of complexity extracts more in costs than it provides in benefit (solution).  At that point, according to Tainter's analysis of ancient civilizations, the complex society collapses. 

So, the question always is, why don't these societies simplify themselves?  The problem is they can't.  The techpundit Clay Shirky words this eloquently in a recent post on Tainter's work called, "The Collapse of Complex Business Models":

In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change. Tainter doesn’t regard the sudden de-coherence of these societies as either a tragedy or a mistake—”[U]nder a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response”, to use his pitiless phrase. Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites. When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment where it becomes suddenly and dramatically simpler, which is to say right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last remaining method of simplification.

If this is true, then the question for all of us is:  is our global society an interlocking nightmare of complexity on the verge of trying to solve one crisis too many?  I believe it is.  When is the last time that anything big got done without more negatives, tradeoffs, corruption, or unintended consequences than it was worth?

However, there may be another away around this trap.  A clue to how this is possible may be found in a recent example of a successful transition from one complex system for another.  That's the transition of China from a decrepit Communist system into a fast growing Capitalist system.  It did this by growing an alternative at the periphery of the dying system, and those attempts at free enterprise grew a set of problem solving methods so quickly they are now dominant.  In contrast,  Russia and much of eastern Europe attempted wholesale change and emerged criminally deformed. 

Of course, there are caveats to this example.  China did have a model that they could copy (the US and the global market system) and a way to integrate with that larger system as their efforts grew.  These efforts also had state sanction.  Regardless, it does indicate that it is indeed possible to radically remake a complex society from seemingly simple bottom up efforts.*  

My belief is that networked resilient communities can replicate this strategy by growing at the periphery.  Given their potential for rapid problem solving, at nearly costless levels of complexity, it may be a short transition.

* However, hilariously, with this success China only jumped out of the fire and into the frying pan.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: "The DIY War" or "The Trillion Dollar Man"

Here's a quick update.  I'm spending the vast majority of my mental bandwidth and time working on my new book about networked resilient communities.  It should be out soon.  I hope to bypass the traditional publishing route for this book and self-publish (the systems are really good now) to get it out faster with more control, although I still am obligated to run it by my previous publisher (Wiley).  

All this hard work hasn't stopped me from thinking about plots for follow on books of near term future fiction.   Both of the ideas I'm toying with deal with warfare.  One book is a story about open source warfare in the US tentatively entitled, "The DIY War."  Another is the idea of a solo protagonist  that launches a systems disruption campaign against the US, finding and destroying systempunkts across a variety of critical infrastructures, in an attempt to become the anti-Bill Gates (and then some).  The tentative title for that book is, "The Trillion Dollar Man."  Both sound like fun projects.

JOURNAL: What Makes a Home Valuable?

This is some counter-trend thinking that might help:

It appears that in the US, the fall in home prices has hit a temporary bottom due to copious amounts of government support and a halt in foreclosure sales by banks.  Soon (months), the government support will end and this glimmer of stability will generate a stampede of banks to the exit.  Further, strategic defaults will continue to rise as the business sense of the middle class matures beyond the naive.  

However, all of this volatility masks a more important shift:  the need for a home to be a source of value creation and not just an empty box.  As D2 (the second great depression) meanders on, incomes will continue to drop, costs will continue to rise, systemic shocks will create shortages, and security will decline.  In this environment, the factors that contribute to the valuation of a home changes.  

Old model:  Location, location, location.  Basically, is the home located in a great school district?  Is it within commuting distance to city?  Is it close (but not too close) to public transportation (to the extent that is available)?

The problems with this model of valuation within the context of a long running depression and ongoing collapse are legion.  

New model:

• Is the home located in a viable community?   One that you could work with to solve problems as they emerge?  
• Is there a strong tradition of entrepreneurship in the community such that it allows the fast formation of new ventures?
• Is the community defensible?  Considerations include geographical footprint, proximity to cities, entry/exit, etc.
• Does the community have arable land available for food production?  There are so many factors here, it would take a book just to explore them.
• Can the home produce energy?  Does it have solar PV or solar hot water?  Does it use geothermal heating/cooling?  
• Does the home have sufficient space for or already mature gardens?  
• Is the home's connection to the electricity grid bi-directional?
• Is the connectivity to the global network both redundant and fast?
• Does the home have room for a workshop?
• Are the real estate taxes low enough to avoid liens in the event of inevitable job loss (by at least one of the members of the household) or a reduction in pay?
• Lots more here.  Suggestions are welcome.

JOURNAL: DIY Clean Rooms and Garage Biolabs

I continue to get push back from people who assert that "it is really too hard" to hack biology in a garage, or too expensive, or that garage labs just can't be up to snuff. This sort of dissent usually comes out of National Labs, Ivy League professors, or denizens of the beltway. All I can say to this is -- Doodz, you need to get out more. Rob Carlson (see more: Carlson Curves and Bioterror).

Rob spent some time in a garage biolab (good guys) that is really off the hook (read the whole post at his site).  Labs of this type can produce very bad things (via error or intent).  They are also necessary to push the tech forward (if it can be done, it will be).  The problem is that they can't coexist with a fully integrated global (or even national) system of the type we have today.  The only way out is networked resilient communities.

NOTE:  Here's a DIY clean room hack and some good ideas on how to test its integrity.  Very cool.

THE THREE HORSEMEN OF THE GLOBAL DEPRESSION

There's some confusion relative to whether the depression (D2 in shorthand) is over or not.  It's not.  The process will be uneven, but it will continue.  Why?   The three horsemen continue to ride:

• A huge, complex, and fast moving global system that isn't under any meaningful level of control.  The computer automated interconnectedness of this system makes very easy to spread contagion.   Worse, this system is leveraged to the hilt with debt and riven with imbalanced feedback loops (Chinese/German mercantilism).  Any crisis can set off a global crash.  NOTE:  Rick Bookstabber (via Kedrosky) thinks a collapse in the municipal bond market will be the source of the next crisis.


• A financial oligarchy that has shifted loyalties to the global market (think in terms of the shift to primary loyalties in fourth generation warfare).  This group is highly destructive to its host, and in a process similar to cancer have co-opted normal market function via the establishment of the shadow banking system.  The huge size and opacity of this system has allowed them to systematically loot the middle class and gut national treasuries (via a process known as control fraud).  If municipal bond are the cause of the next global financial collapse, these oligarchs will be center stage:  note JP Morgan's role in the collapse of a municipality in Alabama.


• A plethora of violent super-empowered guerrilla groups.  The legitimacy of nation states will continue to diminish due to a financial insolvency (which means it won't be able to finance social/stability programs), successive global shocks, and tolerance of looting by a financial oligarchy.   As national legitimacy weakens, people will give their loyalty to groups (gang, church, tribe, etc.) that can protect and provide for them.  Many of these groups will be violent.  As these groups multiply in number, open source warfare and systems disruption will spread.  For the US, think in terms of what is going on in Mexico or what went on in the USSR post collapse, but bump it up a couple of orders of magnitude.

JOURNAL: Mexico's Mercado of Violence Heats Up

Open source warfare often combines market-based functions to accelerate its innovation rates and expand its operations beyond the primary players.  These markets, or bazaars (as I called them) are very efficient.  For example: the price of violence plummets as the number of entrants increases and the capacity for violence improves as the market's participants specialize and hone their skills.  

Usually, the military/law enforcement response to the surge in the sophistication and quantity of violence is to assume some outside source of training or support rather than something that is the natural byproduct of rapid marketplace development.  

So, it's no surprise with the growing availability of the street/prison gangs (Barrio Azteca and the Artistic Assassins) as sources of cheap, violent labor the marketplace is heating up. Note the excellent quotes below from a WaPo article on the growth of the market for contract killings: 

"Our intelligence indicates that they kill frequently for a hundred dollars." Joseph Arabit, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in El Paso.

"Within their business of killing, they have surveillance people, intel people and shooters. They have a degree of specialization. They work day in and day out, with a list of people to kill, and they get proficient at it." David Cuthbertson, special agent in charge of the FBI's El Paso division.

"There has to be some form of training going on. I don't know who, and I don't know where. But how else would you explain how they operate?" An anti-gang detective with the El Paso sheriff's department, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

NOTE:  Given the economic decline (h/t Michael Panzer) underway in the US, it's only a matter of time before this marketplace of violence moves north.  When it arrives, it will take off very quickly with innovation and participation rates that will knock the socks off of observers -- Americans are very innovative and entrepreneurial when pushed.

NOTE2:  Mark over at ZenPundit has a good post on the possibility of a mass exodus from Mexico if the open source war going on there continues to evolve/intensify.  Think in terms of mass internment relief camps located in Texas, New Mexico and California that never go away.

LINKS: 2 APR 2010

Some random items of interest:

• Another example that US insurgents are starting to use stigmergic communication:  The FBI is warning police across the country that an anti-government group's call to remove governors from office could provoke violence by others.  The use of the media to communicate intent and to share innovation with other insurgent groups is a staple of open source insurgency (a feature of the model that a recent quantitative study featured in Nature magazine confirmed).
• More on the Guardians of the Free Republics, the group that sent the letter.
• Here's an earlier example of stigmergic communication, although not as slick, from Mike at Sipsey Street Irregulars. Break their windows. Break them NOW.
• Drug syndicate gunmen battle the Mexican army after simultaneous attacks in multiple cities.  With a little more decentralization and less in fighting, this could get interesting.
• Mafia bustouts as good examples of modern financial capitalism.
• Great video interview with Marcin of "open source ecology" (aka Factor E farm) on their progress constructing an open source kit for farming, building, and manufacturing at the hyper-local level.  
• Starving the Monkeys.  A video presentation on economic secession making the rounds.
• Taibbi has a new article in the Rolling Stone how JP Morgan looted an Alabama county. How the nation's biggest banks are ripping off American cities with the same predatory deals that brought down Greece.   Financial capitalists operate on different rule sets than you or I do.  Their morality is market-based.  

JOURNAL: Control Fraud

If you aren't familiar with the work of lawyer and regulator William Black, you should be.  His thinking on control fraud, particularly its use for looting, is fantastic.  

Control fraud, with looting as the objective, occurs when the CEO manipulates accounting rules to make the company he runs wildly profitable.  These manipulations usually involve the creation of intangible and very difficult to understand assets (think derivatives), that can be valued very highly but be in reality worthless.  This complexity makes unwinding the fraud from the outside almost impossible.

This manipulation allows the company to grow very fast rewarding the CEO and his accomplices outsized bonuses.  The success of this company is usually contagious and forces other companies to do the same thing in order to stay competitive.  Soon, a bubble forms and it keeps growing until it eventually collapses under its own weight.  In most cases, the perpetrators walk away rich and relatively unscathed. 

Here's a good video on the topic.

NOTE:  Control fraud was central to the collapse of the Soviet Union (and many Latin American countries).