Global Guerrillas

LINKS: 28 SEPTEMBER 2010

Some random items of interest:

• Crime wars from CNAS.  This report aside:  Has the beltway's CNAS become the McDonalds of military theory?  
• Interesting data/analysis on mass murders.   ...the trough in the mass murder rate during the 1940s and 50s may have been due to the upsurge in pro-social indicators like marriage, family, jobs, college attendance, home ownership, church attendance and an overall higher standard of living.   NOTE: the opposite of this being:  economic over social/income stratification (10's, 20's, 80's, 90's, 00's).  
• Al Qaeda in Iraq surges.  Baffles "experts (why do we continue to spend the big bucks employing these beltway experts when they get the basics of 21st Century insurgency wrong ?!?).  Here's some more from the article: Each member in a cell of the group, which numbers from 6 to 20 fighters, is trained in a range of specialties. The cell’s leader, or emir, has the authority to plan attacks, often working in concert with other insurgent groups, including Baathists. The organization is designed so that the loss of any individual, including a leader, has as little effect as possible.  NOTE: Why did it resurge?  The same reason for why it declined.  It got too big and aggressive for its partners/competitors in the Sunni open source insurgency.  It became a threat.  As a result, they killed it with US help.  Now that it's rightsized, it fits nicely within the insurgency and is free to grow again.  (hoisted from the comments, thanks)
• Opposition to the establishment of a US Internet blacklist.  Another example is the effort by the US to get backdoors into Internet/wireless communications.  China as the model for the future of the nation-state -- economic dictatorship (the Chinese, at least, delivering economic growth in exchange for this, we just deliver economic growth to the top 1%).
• Flows of Pakistani Taliban.  CBS.
• M. Lotus.  Another look at the Tea Party as an insurgency.  TARP as trigger.
• A short pause in the march towards...  Graber was also charged with possessing a “device primarily useful for the purpose of the surreptitious interception of oral communications" -- as in: having a video camera on a public street.
• HFT as a security risk.  Roderick Jones and Concentric takes a look at high frequency trading.  Nice application of superempowerment for disruption and small group enrichment.
• Data leak at corporate spy? 
• Cogitamus:  we think, therefor we are.  Collaborative knowledge culture and gaming. 
• Micro-entrepreneurial smash.  Colin Brayton is starting a daily newsletter on Brazilian business.  $10-15 a month.  There's still probably an open source business model here for less than english language paper worthy business news (twice daily, 5-7 stories per issue), $25 a month.

JOURNAL: Notes from Underground

Here's some food for thought:  Globalization has brought about an age when the only tests used to judge anyone's behavior are:

• Does it make you money or its equivalent?  The corollary is that the greater the amount of money acquired, the better the behavior is.  
• Did you get away with it?  This test is merely based on legal enforceability (were you caught in a place that matters) and the degree of punishment (will the punishment negate or exceed the benefit of the behavior).  Morality, virtue, ethics, shame, actual legality, etc. aren't considered factors.

Why is this so?  It's the only set of behavioral tests that are globally portable.  As in, we can't agree on anything at a global level except the minimal rules needed to interconnect (which is similar to how the Internet and the Web spread). 

Disagree?    Insets:  the city of Bell, CA and Wall Street Bankers.

COGNITIVE SLAVES (aka Crowdslaving)

The companies that have created the most new value in the last decade, are Internet companies like Facebook, Google, etc.  They've created hundreds of billions in market value, driven by billions in financial profits.  Good for them, but bad for us.

Why?  IF these companies represent the most valuable new industry of the early 21st Century, where are the jobs that will provide prosperity for millions today, and potentially tens of millions in the future?  They don't exist.  These companies create few real jobs.

The distressing part is that in reality these companies actually employ hundreds of millions of people, particularly young and otherwise un or underemployed superusers.  People that work for them day in and day out for free: finding, sifting, sorting, connecting, building, etc.

Let's take Facebook as an example.  Currently it's valued at ~$25 billion by the market.   However, it could be argued that ~100,000 superusers out of 500 million part time users, are the reason that Facebook is valuable.  They generate the core network that is the backbone of the tool.  Their devoted use, high levels of connectivity, and loyalty forms the engine that grows Facebook, year in and year out.  They are the materials, labor, and product of Facebook's assembly line.  Yet they aren't paid for their effort.  They aren't generating wealth for themselves or their families.  

How much wealth?  If we awarded 4/5 ths of the value of Facebook (and the same exercise could be done with Google at a couple of million superusers) to its superusers, leaving the tool managers $5 billion in value, each superuser would now be worth $200,000 from their contributions to this tool alone.  But they aren't.  They haven't earned a penny for their effort. 

One way to look at this is that we are truly in trouble.  If the industries of the future are based on cognitive slavery, we all lose.  However, as an entrepreneur, an optimist (believe it or not), and a believer in the potential for social/economic improvement, I think this can be corrected.  I believe it's possible to build tools and the companies that manage them, in a way that actually rewards the people that do most of the work.  All we need to do is make it possible.

NOTE:  The use of the term 'slavery' is a literary device akin to the slang 'wage slave."  It implies being compelled to do something against your will due to external pressures.  That pressure is commensurate with the value people place on online social connectivity.  
NOTE2:  Please don't compare this to TV.  TV viewing is passive.  TV viewers don't create, produce, and market the TV shows/content they watch.  

LINKS: 22 SEPTEMBER 2010

Some random items of interest:

• Drug inspection ruse.  Nice.
• High risk Natural Gas pipeline segments in bay area (CA). 
• Stuxnet.  A professional grade software worm that is designed to take control and destroy industrial systems.  It has infected 45,0000 industrial systems worldwide. "Stuxnet is a 100-percent-directed cyber attack aimed at destroying an industrial process in the physical world. This is not about espionage, as some have said. This is a 100 percent sabotage attack." What's interesting is that it is weaponized software aimed at a very specific industrial target. This is a great example of replication (and self-replication) as it applies to open source warfare and systems disruption.  The future of warfare has already happened, most people haven't realized it yet.
• 4Chan attacks the Tea Party.
• 4Chan's "Low Orbit Ion Cannon"  Nice.
• Salon's Leonard:  Bad things happen with high unemployment.
• Measuring the efficiency of black markets.  The price of weed.
• A friend sent me this from the book of Mencius (Chinese Literature): Where the humane and worthy aren't trusted, the state will be hollow and empty. Where ceremony and rightness are lacking, high and low will suffer turmoil. Where affairs lack governance, wealth and goods won't cover expenditures.
• Ushahidi.  Mapping tool for emergency response and decentralized groups.  
• Obama vs. the perpetual war machine.  Woodward's take on why Obama was forced to design his own strategy for Afghanistan.  
• BATMAN program.
• New Google tool shows where traffic is being blocked/censored globally.  Actually, I'd like a URL based tool that shows whether a site is being blocked by corporate/government censorship software.

JOURNAL: Notes on the Tea Party's Open Source Organization

Newcomers "often don't understand how badly we need you to lead the way," he says. "If this is an area of concern to you," he admonishes, "the way the Tea Party Patriots works is that you guys really lead the organization. We're a relatively small group of people who are just trying to help coordinate. We're not in charge; we're not telling anybody what to do. You need to take a leadership role and stand up."  From "How the Tea Party Organizes without Leaders"

Jonathan Rauch over at the National Journal has written an excellent article on the organization of the Tea Party.   As my friend Reihan Salam points out, this article is in a very similar vein to an article I wrote earlier this year on the Tea Party as an open (source) insurgency that formed due to the loss of sovereign legitimacy caused by the financial bail-outs.  There's too much goodness in Jonathan's article to quote, so I strongly recommend that you read it in full. 

NOTE:  I thought it was interesting, that many in the Tea Party leadership are using the business book, "The Starfish and the Spider" as an organizational bible (it does a great job of explaining the basics of open source organizations).  That makes sense, since this movement has modest goals and is operating within a low threat environment. 

OPEN WARFARE AND REPLICATION

Here's some warfare theory (a little studied field that's currently claimed/overrun by political scientists, regional experts, psychologists, and historians).  I find the below a useful model for thinking about drones/bots/bio-engineered organisms.  Mileage will vary.

___________________

Open (source) warfare enables individuals and groups to take on much larger foes. In short, it allows the weak to defeat the strong.  

One of the factors that makes open warfare so potent is superempowerment -- as in, the power of individuals and small groups is amplified via access to open networks (that grow in value according to Metcalfe's law = Internet growth + social networks running in parallel) and off the shelf technology (that grows rapidly in power due to the onslaught of Moore's law and the market's relentless productization).

A subset of superempowerment is replication. 

Replication is achieved through the manufacture and deployment of devices, software programs, or organisms that can operate independently (autonomously or without requiring active human control) in a target environment.  In short, this is a way technology can produce the equivalent of adding, albeit currently limited in terms of capability, new members to a group.  Already, high levels of replication can be accomplished through the repurposing of inexpensive, off the shelf technology that's well within the reach of individuals and small groups.  

Specifically, replication is realized through the design, deployment, and operation of:

• autonomous software (bots, worms, etc.),
• autonomous robotic devices (drones, crawlers, etc.), and
• genetically-engineered biological organisms.

In the simplistic form of replication, these devices and creations are manufactured en masse and deployed into the field of battle.   In an advanced and even more effective form, self-replication is used.  In self-replication, these devices, software, or organisms create copies of themselves using materials found in the environment they are deployed into.  Self-replication is a process that we already see in use with software bots and biological organisms.  With self-replication, tens can become thousands and thousands can become millions.  The superempowerment conferred by replication also grows multiplicatively through improvements in the intelligence (see below) each device, program, and organism is bestowed with.  

Here's a video that shows the state of the art in autonomous drones.  It's an example of how quickly the multiplier provided by replication is accelerates as the intelligence of the autonomous device is improved.

NOTE:  I'm in the process of working through some of the thinking on open warfare.  It's the result of attending the excellent "small violent groups" conference I keynoted at Pitt.

LINKS: 14 SEPTEMBER 2010

Some items of interest:

• The 3D Manufacturing Revolution (mainstream coverage at the NYTimes).  This is very similar to the type of story you would see on personal computing in 1980 or the Internet in 1994.  As with the two previous tech revolutions, this revolution will wreck the economics of certain types of work and enable others.  What does this means to us?  Hackers and entrepreneurs using these machines are going to make the re-localization of manufacturing possible.  The hands on work this revolution enables, in combination with online design services (that produce original, repurposed, or customized schematics), will become wealth creation engines for resilient communities, particularly as D2 worsens.  Build a hackerspace in your community to get ahead of the curve on this (these spaces will not only serve as incubators of new manufacturing jobs, they will compliment local production of food/energy through the production of new devices and they will also provide the tools necessary for a robust local defense if need be).
• Shareables.  Open source magazine/research.
• A formula for constructing virtual communities (Phyles).
• Haystack. There's been lots of press on the anti-censorship software called "Haystack" and its hapless founder, Austin Heap.  Danny O'Brian reports that Haystack is now dead as a project.  Danny thinks that lax management and a refusal to accept help from outsiders are the culprits. I think it offers a lesson:  Either a darknet project is completely open and it floods the target with variants/participants/innovation (hide in high volume noise) or it is completely secret where if it become public, it is dead (hide in plain sight).  
• Damon Vrabel's Council on Renewal blog. Taking on debt-money.  

SPEAKING: Violent Armed Groups

I'm doing the dinner keynote (on the 16th of September) for the Violent Armed Groups conference at the University of Pittsburgh.  

JOURNAL: A New Globalization?

Some food for thought on what's driving a shift in globalization and what it becomes:

• Big nation-state militaries => D2, no funding => corporate militaries and local militias.
• Transportation intensive trade => D2, Peak Oil => Virtual trade and local production.
• Nation-state => illegitimacy, insolvency, loss of control => Resilient Communities and Hollow states.
• Contractual legal system => extreme corruption, unsupportable overhead, trumped by violence => Reputation (a low overhead system that scales) and fear of reprisal.
• Global flows of people (immigration, tourism, etc.) => D2, pandemics, terrorism, repression, superbugs => People stay local and interact virtually.
• Global financial system => corruption, instability => alternative trading systems (outside existing global systems), local and network currencies (virtual).
• Intellectual property fueled by legalistic monopolies => low innovation rates, stagnation, inability to police => open source ideas fueled by reputation enhancement and services.

JOURNAL: D2 Update

Here's some interesting analysis from the IMF regarding global unemployment,
  which may lead (in their words) to a social explosion. The Great Recession has left gaping wounds. High and long-lasting unemployment represents a risk to the stability of existing democracies. 

Here are some interesting charts that show that there is a huge and growing group of people (nearly 50% of all unemployed have been so for 27 weeks or more) that have become structurally unemployable.  This group will continue to grow and increasingly seek group/tribal affiliations that offer alternative forms of advancement/protection.  

Why?  Simply, the global market system the US fostered/defended to defeat Communism, took on a life of its own in the late 70's.  It's now massive, insanely complex, blindingly fast, and completely out of control.  Worse, it's easily corrupted by cancers (a financial oligarchy) that operate without constraint inside its core platform.  All attempts at mitigation of this disease are intellectually rebuffed by an economic theocracy out of touch with reality (reminiscent of the divine right of kings).  Its rise is the reason incomes in the West haven't increased in over three decades (!).  Its dominance and increasing turbulence is the reason we are in D2, the second global depression.  

One potential future is that the social pressures of D2 will shred what's left of the social contract in the Western democracies. That would mean that the only way out (for those of us unwilling to be passive) is to build something new.  Something that mitigates our connection to this global system.   My best attempt at a solution to this conundrum is the resilient community.  A resilient community that can protect and sustain us.  A community that can provide prosperity and a future worth living in.  A community that can out compete successfully at a global level while protecting its members from the viciousness of an unconstrained invisible hand.

LINKS: 10 SEPTEMBER 2010

Some random items of interest:

• This is a good deal if you can get it:  In a highly unusual move, the DIA is now negotiating with the publisher, St. Martin's Press, to buy all 10,000 copies of the first printing of the book to keep it off shelves -- even after the U.S. Army had cleared the book for release.
• Here's an interesting theoretical question:  How long will it take for someone in the open source swarm forming around this, to surpass and replace Terry Jones now that a systempunkt has been both identified and proven to work?  His fumbling makes it possible for new entrants to run with this.  These efforts don't meet the level necessary to surpass/trump the efforts of Jones, but they add to the confusion.  
• Singularity University, seems like another California hype shop.
• More later.

JOURNAL: Koran Burning

The "Koran Burning" event is a interesting example of some global guerrilla themes.  

An unexpected global event occurs.  What caused it?  The event was produced by an individual, relatively powerless by traditional standards.  However, since this is the 21st Century, this individual is able to use unfettered access to a global super-network to leverage and amplify his actions.  The event he creates disrupts established global social networks and puts them into turmoil.  That turmoil creates the opportunity and sustenance needed to activate dozens of small subnetworks/groups.  As these groups interact, a new dynamic is formed.  

LINKS: 8 SEPTEMBER 2010

Some items of interest:

• OpenPCR.  An open source version of a high cost tool for biohacking, got double the funding it needed on Kickstarter.  More on the team behind it.
• Inside/outside refrigeration/cooling system.  Begs the question:  what would be the savings of a refrigerator that leveraged outside air temp intelligently?
• Shot spotter.  Being installed within lots of American cities.  Audio surveillance that can locate a gunshot within 35 ft.  See inset. 
• Gang maps of LA.  The alternative political landscape.
• Quran burning in Florida.  Right Wing Extreme, an armed militia, will protect the "Dove World Outreach Center" during it's first annual 9/11 Quran burning.  RWE is currently running a poll on its site:  "Do you think it's time for a second American Revolution?"  Charles C points out that RWE has withdrawn from the effort (see comments below).
• Haystack.  A project to foil national firewalls and state monitoring in Iran (China and Egypt next). Newsweek did an article on the leader of the project, Austin Heap and this turned up: When I first met Heap in January, he was regularly shuttling to Washington, D.C., for meetings at State and Treasury and with senior lawmakers.  
• Global police crack down on the open source insurgency, the Scene. They (the police) just wanted to know who or whom had used two different IPs during a couple of dates in 2009. Since we did not have this information (no logging) there was no information and/or hardware for them to seize. The police did not enter the datacenter, only the office, so no servers or network have been touched by them.

JOURNAL: GG Entrepreneurs Displace Mexico's Control Over PEMEX

Global guerrilla entrepreneurs, super-empowered by direct connections to the dominant global marketplace (a market that is relatively indifferent to the provenance of the supplies it demands), are taking control of the Burgos basin, home to Mexico's biggest natural gas fields.  To accelerate this seizure, these enterprising guerrillas (likely a Zeta offshoot) are kidnapping oil workers working for PEMEX (as Zenpundit kindly notes, this is a playbook we have seen before -- India, Iraq, and Nigeria).  Here are some choice GG quotes from the LATimes article about it:

"How is it, that Pemex, supposedly the backbone of the nation, can be made to bow down like this?" -- relative of a kidnapped worker.  

"These are territories where the organized crime infrastructure, inside and outside of the police forces, has established power — a parallel power, a parallel government. That territory is in the hands of a parallel power that has penetrated the government at all levels." Alejandro Gertz   NOTE: This is a nice description of a hollow state.

NOTE, we'll see variants of this in the US as the global economic depression worsens. 

HACKING FOOD

Here's an interesting video series by a resilient community hacker.  Here's more from his blog and YouTube channel.  Using tech to automate local productivity.

LINKS: 7 SEPTEMBER 2010

Some very random links of interest:

• Solid Parrot AR.drone review.  iPhone + drone + video stream (JJ). It's amazing just how much the AR.Drone does for you. It comes packed with some fairly advanced circuitry that will do everything it can to keep the device level. If you ever lose your connection to the AR.Drone WiFi, it just stops itself then slowly lands. Using sensor data from the bottom of the device, it can keep itself hover in place, even outside in a light breeze. Aside from actually running into something, the AR.Drone is also very difficult to crash, even when you're intentionally trying to get it to lose control. If it senses that it's about to tilt too far to one direction or otherwise lose control, it will abruptly correct itself.
• Agropolis.  Point of sale hydroponic/aquaponic micro-farms.  
• Verdant Earth Technologies.  Shipping container based micro-farms.  Enclosed soil-free high yield micro-farms via LED lighting (only allowing in the part of the spectrum that is used) and hydroponics.  More detail (see inset to right). 
• Energy:  Managing consumption and production at the household level.  GE's Nucleus (see laptop to right).  This should be open sourced so it can be run at the local level within smart microgrids (it runs as a website).  A small investment in smart plugs, etc. that work wirelessly would gather the info needed to use it.  Cisco has something similar.
• Bloomberg.  There is an increasing amount of evidence that the rich are a vicious tribe of people. One study last year from the University of California, Berkeley, found that the rich are ruder than others. Another piece of research, conducted at the same institution, concluded they were less likely to give to charity than poorer people were. A third study, carried out at the Humboldt University in Berlin, concluded they were “nastier,” in the sense of being keener to punish others.  
• National Academy of Sciences.  People's emotional well-being - happiness - increases along with their income up to about $75,000, researchers report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
• Kunstler:  Economics and necromancy.
• Greenpeace:  Social system disruption campaign via Facebook.  Here's another example by BANA targeting the movie Machete.
• Here's an interesting thought:   I’d love to see Davos sign a treaty.  Lots in motion here.  Informal > Formal.  Illegitimate > Legitimate.  Power > Responsibility.  Global > National.  Privilege > Rights.  Is there are war?  If so, what are the terms of the peace treaty?

LINKS: 2 SEPTEMBER 2010

Some very random items of interest:

• Open Farm Tech:  low cost ($200 in materials) steam engine design using an Arduino controller.  Pelletized biomass fuel.  Remote/mobile energy.
• Outsourcing to Arkansas.  This is all part of a larger trend:  the replacement of urbanized work (office, commute, expensive home, etc.) with telecommuting from a home located anywhere.  In other words, it will reverse migration from cities and a decreased need for a car.  The solution to finding a way to afford ever more expensive cars, 20% of top line income already (and climbing), isn't more fuel efficiency ala Rocky Mountain Institute -- it's finding a way to eliminate the need to own a car entirely. 
• CIA Red Cell research brief (wikileaks).   Seems to be "inside the box" thinking to me.  A red cell would be a lot less expensive if they just published revised versions of old GG posts.
• NPR.  Tea party as an open source insurgency.  The analysis uses the the term "starfish" to describe the organization rather than open source.  That term is from a good book called "The Starfish and Spider."  It's a nice compliment to "Brave New War" and a quick read (it's a light business book) to boot.
• Cambridge video from another John Robb.  He studies how we envision our bodies (machine, container of spirit, data, etc.).  
• Discovery channel manifesto.  Lots of nuts.  
• New issue of Interesting Times, a cyber-apocalypse-punk swedish e-zine is out.
• Pint sized Thorium reactors.  Not going happen.
• Cook.  Some interesting analysis on P2P thinking (featuring the excellent P2P foundation and Global Guerrillas).
• More later (after some coffee).