“It would seem to me that global guerrillas, in the sense that they are different than regular old guerrillas are a more primitive form of super empowered individuals. The damage that a national army used to be needed for is down-sized these days according to Barnett. Eventually you down-size right down to the individual level and thus alienated super empowered individuals become a new threat. In between, you get global guerrillas.

But if two or more super empowered individuals act in concert, does that mean they cease to be super empowered? If a global guerrilla acts alone, does that make him a super empowered individual?

So the Barnettian identification of the grand movement of downsizing violence is affirmed and two instantiations of the phenomena are global guerrillas and super empowered individuals.

Now most super empowered individuals remain only potentially dangerous. Bill Gates or Oprah are very unlikely to morph into Spectre type villains. This is a separate question from whether they can. I think it’s pretty obvious that they could if they wanted to.

Similarly, the number of potential global guerrilla groups out there is vastly larger than the actual number in active operations. One of the things that make’s John Robb’s vision much less scary is the simple fact that the operation of global guerrillas are likely to activate other potential groups dedicated to neutralizing the first bad actors. The GG phenomena is thus much less likely to bring bad results to the entire system as these groups will not operate all from the same playbook. In Iraq the great Sunni insurgency is breaking up on the rocks of the Shia and Kurd death squadswho are not global guerrillas only by virtue of the simple fact that they gain nothing by adopting those systempunkt tactics.”

From Lexington Green:

“A second theme is that due to globalization the complicated economic and technical machinery we are increasingly vulnerable to attacks on “vital nodes” which can cause cascading failure — hence creating juicy targets for 4GW warriors and our putative nuke-armed Ted Bundy.

I find this second idea unconvincing. The essence of a market driven, networked, non-centrally-planned economy is the diffusion of skills and knowledge, redundancy, the capacity for work-arounds. The model I have in mind is the German economy in World War II. It was able to respond to devastating levels of attack and keep on going. And that was without cell phones, computers, the internet, etc. Just telephones, radios, and paper files and manual typewriters. Even if, as the Rand study posited, there were a nuke attack on the Long Beach container port, and it took $1 trillion off the top, it would not be fatal. We’d do workarounds. It would totally suck. No doubt. But we’d survive.

In other words, we are resilient, and we have the capacity to become much, much more so when the incentives shift to make us want to be more so.”

From Shloky:

“This will only still work while there are locks on knowledge/tech. Like Lexington touches on technology and information always move towards freedom. Including nuclear tech/knowledge. Give it another couple decades and the whole game changes.”

From Eddie:

“Reading the post, I think in the end you focus on those who would undertake action with malicious intent, but the other side is more disturbing IMHO, those who undertake action without realizing the extent or consequences of their actions.”

From Purpleslog:

“Bill Gates will nudge more toward 5GW territory as he will devote his time and his vast money (soon to be with a big chunk of Warren Buffet’s money too) to making changes to the world. George Soros has also been edging this way”

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