The accent on positively remaking the world by Dr. Barnett is a noteworthy point to keep in mind. Numerically speaking, most highly intelligent, energetic, creative and task persistent individuals who function as change agents are overwhelmingly positive actors. Maslow wrote of a stage of self-actualization and in a certain sense, exceeding oneself by changing society in a positive direction may be an expression of both self-actualization as well as super empowerment The Ted Kaczynskis and Osama Bin Ladens are perverse and statistically rare anomalies; exceptions that prove the rule, in a sense.
Unfortunately, the exceptionally negative super empowered individuals do and will exist and have the potential to inflict system perturbations, at least on a one-shot, ” black swan“, basis. Deep uncertainty regarding the nature of such future superempowered individuals’ actions has to be dealt with in terms of proactively engineering systemic resilience to cope with these malicious one-hit wonders. Steve’s Development-in-a Box paradigm at Enterra is one effort to begin comprehensively addressing these deficits. Tom’s Sys Admin is another. Building new, highly decentralized, “Wikinomic” mass-collaborative platforms from scratch, may be yet a third.
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lester:
June 22nd, 2007 at 7:11 pm
I saw your Mr Barnett on C Span this morning. Good to know there’s someone who’s even more of a dinosaur than I am! yay, globalist good times, 9/11 and the iraq war never happened, people love us and there’s no harm in spreading our reach to scary places. yeah, no way our attack on the islamic courts in somalia is going to, oh i don’t know, spread al queda to that region. nah, muslims are very quick to forget US hegemonical murders of muslim civilians. history has shown that time and again. I never thought I’d be glad to have a democrat for president, but at least with the military budget more or less completely eliminated we won’t have to contend with chubby faced schoolboys like barnett playing chess with our lives.
Curtis Gale Weeks:
June 23rd, 2007 at 8:45 am
Mark,
I’ve been a little swamped and somewhat brain dead, failing to anticipate the new turns on the subject of “Barnett’s 5GW” — here and at his blog — so I’ve been letting these two posts sink in. (I’m really annoyed when my steam goes out just as excellent observations, deserving of response, appear. It’s an odd thing, to read interesting replies and have some sort of blank looking back at me from inside my own head when I think about incorporating the new takes on whatever I’ve written…)
To Lester’s excellent analysis — ahem — I’d add the following:
On your market analysis, I would agree somewhat. Just as Jesus said there’d always be poor among us, my more pragmatic side accepts the sliding-rule analysis of ‘equalization.’ However, I also think that even in America — which doesn’t have an absolutely free marketplace, in any case — wealth and capital tend to heap up around certain nodes, over the generations. To the degree that many of the extremely wealthy go largely unnoticed, that’s fine; but then you have Paris Hilton. She’s no big deal, mostly because she doesn’t do much besides make a fool of herself. Bill Gates is a philanthropist, and even if he weren’t conspicuously trying to help the downtrodden, most people would accept his superempowerment because they’re thankful for their computers! Should the superempowered Americans actually adopt a more nefarious role, perhaps in conglomeration, we’d see more conflict. Or, should more Katrina’s happen, we could have trouble. So I don’t see the sliding-rule being entirely absolved by a lack of overt state or strongman interference — although I do see much potential friction resulting from how the present-day superempowered Americans have great influence on the political process, particularly if, in the case of more Katrina’s or other civil strife, they begin to wall themselves in.
mark:
June 23rd, 2007 at 2:36 pm
Tom’s getting chubby ?
Don’t feel badly Curtis, sometimes after a major exposition of ideas, it’s time to reflect and let things gestate before moving the ball further down the field.
Most moderately wealthy families fritter away their wealth within a few generations as the pool is divided amongst a greater number of less competent heirs. Gates is an exception. He turned moderate wealth into becoming the wealthiest private individual on earth but chances are he could have done that regardless since his insight was hardly one that required an enormous amount of capital (” Hey…can I patent the operating system ?”).
Paris Hilton’s main claim to superempowerment appears to involve a video camera. ;o)