Global Guerrillas

GG BOOKS: Science Fiction

Here's the first installment of the book recommendations global guerrillas readers sent in.  Thanks so much, there were hundreds of recommendations.  

The first category is science fiction.   

• Makers.  Cory Doctorow.  The second industrial revolution -- at the micro scale.
• Daemon and FreedomTM.  Daniel Suarez.  A second American revolution enabled by software.  Resilient communities.  Classic.
• Schismatrix.  Bruce Sterling. Technology causes everything/everyone to diverge.  This is where Blizzard got its idea for the Zerg.
• Islands in the Net. Bruce Sterling. City state warfare (Singapore vs. Grenada). 
• One Second After.  William Forstchen. EMP blast melts modern technology.  Society collapses instantaneously.
• Snow Crash.  Neal Stephenson.  Post nation-state thinking.  "Burbclave" city states vs. "Fedland"  (a bureaucratic nightmare of what's left of the gov't) vs. Criminal corporate franchises.
• The Diamond Age.  Neal Stephenson.  Nanotech warfare.  Nanotech future dissolves global social systems. People respond by recreating historical cultures to give meaning to their lives.  
• Eclipse Phase.  An scifi paper role playing wargame.  Transhumanism and spec ops warfare.  The manual is copyleft.  
• Across Realtime.  Vernor Vinge.  This is the book that kicked off the concept of the Singularity (the idea that exponential technological change will soon, within decades, lead to a break in human history as humanity bootstraps into something unknowable).  
• The Singularity is Near.  Ray Kurzweil.  The definitive non-fiction analysis of the exponential trends leading towards a break in human history.
• Ender's Game.  Orson Scott Card.  Classic of military scifi.  Boy trained via endless wargame simulations to fight intergalactic war.
• Tactics of Mistake.  Gordon Dickson.  Another classic of military scifi.  Guerrilla war on distant planet -- ruse/deception used to force enemies to manufacture their own defeat.
• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.  Robert Heinlein.  Colonists fight guerrilla war to secede.  A classic.
• The Windup Girl.  Biotech dystopia. 
• Halting State.  Charles Stross.  Detective thriller about an infowar fought via MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games).

 

LINKS: 20 DECEMBER 2010

Some random items of interest:

• Private navy for combating Somali piracy gaining steam.  This leverages the same insurance industry dynamic that makes Somali piracy possible.
• Private security guard industry in the US continues to grow.
• Amazon's Mechanical Turk 40% spam.  That was my observation too.
• CBS on state and local budgets in the US:  they are going to implode soon. 
• The attached graphic is a nice depiction of how the price of oil was impacted by minor shortfalls in oil production.   NOTE: The shortfall in production caused by MEND in Nigeria and uncertainty in Iraqi production caused by its global guerrillas, drove the timing of the price spike.  It's a good demonstration that open source warfare + systems disruption works.
• The physics of terrorism.
• Huge blast/oil fire in Mexican state.   Streets turned into "rivers of fire."  Was this bunkering (likely the Zetas, who are on an upswing again) or systems disruption? Either way, it's GG.  See inset pic.
  
  
    
  

STATUS: What I'm Working On

Sorry for the slow posts.  I've been busy.  Doing what?

• Working on a business plan for an open source venture.  It's very cool and will likely be a non-profit organization.  Shooting for a Google scale venture that can employ millions of people world wide and serve as a way to bootstrap Resilient Communities.
• Selling my new tool S4Momentum (good progress there).  This helps me fund the work I'm doing above.

NOTE: for those of you interested in S4Momentum, it's pretty amazing and there's nothing on the market like it.  Here's some of the social networking data it uses to unearth trends in any topic you designate:

• Number of Tweets
• Facebook Statuses
• Facebook Shares
• Facebook Likes
• Facebook Comments
• Facebook Clicks
• Digg Votes
• Reddit Votes
• Reddit Up Votes
• Reddit Down Votes
• Place On Page
• Clicks
• Bitly Clicks
• Delicious Bookmarks
• Big Blog Mentions
• Imgur Views
• Youtube Views
• Youtube Rating
• Youtube Favorite Count
• Digg Comments
• Reddit Comments
• Youtube Comments

Complete with data, charts, ranking, and an index.  All for the price of $150 a month for three topics, with an interface nearly anybody can use.  $15k a month for 300 topics and a dedicated server cluster (enough coverage to blanket an industry, region, etc.).  If you are interested in the dedicated cluster, contact me directly.

JOURNAL: Book Recommendations?

I'm looking for new additions to the Global Guerrilla recommended reading list.  

Please send me ( [email protected] or tweet me @johnrobb ) the titles of the top three books you would recommend to global guerrillas readers this year.

This includes:  new titles, amazing reads, and must haves.  

I'll boil down the lists provided and post the results.

JOURNAL: Ronald Coase and Open Source Ventures

One of my favorite economic philosophers is Ronald Coase.  His paper "The Nature of the Firm" is a classic.  In it, Coase asked the question:  if markets are extremely efficient (as maintained by many), why isn't everything built/done using contract labor?  

The reason he found is that when trying to get something complex done, market prices don't capture many of the costs involved.  

For example:  It costs money/time to find the right people, to negotiate for their labor, to find/acquire the right investors, to establish the right processes, to set up the organizational control systems, etc  In short, because it's expensive to do this, entrepreneurs typically create a company so that they only have to go through this process once.

Is this still true today?  

In many cases, it isn't.  A combination of networks, communities, software, and much more makes it possible to drive many of these costs towards zero.   Here's some crowdsourcing elements we've already seen (not even counting the impact of software enabled self help, training, and matching):

• Behavioral controls (via reputation that mitigates bad behavior) (eBay)
• Finance (Kickstarter) 
• Sales (from Groupon to Amazon's affiliates)
• Content production (Associated Content).

The list goes on and on.

This innovation leads to the question: is it possible to build ventures that can get complex things done that don't involve forming a traditional company?  

I think there is.  

There is a way to form a open source venture that anyone can join,  that polices itself, that funds itself, etc. and rewards it participants fairly.  Further, as we move down the learning curve on how to do this, these ventures will likely easily outcompete all traditionally organized firms in many areas.  

All it takes is a desire to build them.

NOTE: This approach uses strategic judo. Most attempts at new currency or economic platforms are typically launched as defensive strategies. They focus on bootstrapping activity in depressed communities/regions/industries. This is an offensive strategy aimed at reworking a very lucrative segment (Internet ventures) of the current economy. Working from wealth backwards. Turning a strength of the old economic platform into a strength of the new.

LINKS: 1 DECEMBER 2010

Some random items of interest:

• Peter Sunde, of Pirate Bay fame, is working on setting up an alternative DNS system that routes around ICANN.   UPDATE:  It's called Dot-P2P.  It's a DNS system that runs as a P2P system.  If open distribution doesn't work, it could always be distributed as malware.
• Cory Doctorow book:  For the Win.  On using games to create economies that challenge the status quo.  Doctorow: As soon as you're talking about economics, you are talking about games. The economy is the economy game, really. It's got tokens that we pretend  have value, it has rules, referees, it's a congenially entered negotiation, there are different ways of playing. 
• Phylo.  Using crowdsourcing + online games to find the sources of genetic diseases.  Needs to be reworked into an open source venture = metacurrency + game + wealth creation.  
• Leila Janah of Samasource is pioneering ways to train people to work virtually.  Much of this will work nicely with open source ventures, particularly in distressed areas.  
• Digital stalking on a grand scale.
• The great sellout of America by the numbers.  
• Julian Assange: tens of thousands of… internal documents" on an unnamed bank's "ecosystem of corruption."
• Looks like Bruce Schneier, the digital security expert, has bought into open source warfare and systems disruption.  He's calculating ROIs for attacks.
• Archive of Julian Assange's old blog.