zenpundit.com

John has a nice interview with futurist and augmented reality pioneer Chris Arkenberg, over at BoingBoing:

John Robb Interview: Open Source Warfare and Resilience

….The United States is suffering both the economic decline of its industry and the ongoing dismantling of the social welfare apparatus supporting the citizenry. In your opinion, will this inevitably lead to some form of armed insurgency in America?

Yes. The establishment of a predatory and deeply unstable global economic system – beyond the control of any group of nations – is in the process of gutting developed democracies. Think in terms of the 2008 crisis, over and over again. Most of what we consider normal in the developed world, from the middle class lifestyle to government social safety nets, will be nearly gone in less than a decade. Most developed governments will be in and out of financial insolvency. Democracy, as we knew it, will wither and the nation-state bureaucracy will increasingly become an enforcer for the global bond market and kleptocratic transnational corporations. Think Argentina, Greece, Spain, Iceland, etc. As a result, the legitimacy of the developed democracies will fade and the sense of betrayal will be pervasive (think in terms of the collapse of the Soviet Union). People will begin to shift their loyalties to any local group that can provide for their daily needs. Many of these groups will be crime fueled local insurgencies and militias. In short, the developed democracies will hollow out

Hat Tip to Charles Cameron.

Two items:

RAND emeritus David Ronfeldt called my attention today (thanks David!) to this article by futurist David Brin:

Forgetting our American tradition:The folly of relying exclusively on a professional protector caste

Today we face (but largely ignore) a major historical anomaly. From our nation’s birth all the way until the end of the Vietnam War, America’s chief approach to dealing with danger — both anticipated threats and those that took us by surprise — was to rely upon a robust citizenry to quickly supplement, augment and reinforce the thin veneer of professionals in a relatively small peacetime warrior-protector caste.  Toward this end, society relied primarily upon concepts of robustness and resilience, rather than attempting to anticipate and forestall every conceivable danger. 

This emphasis changed, dramatically, starting with the Second World War, but accelerating after Vietnam. Some reasons for the shift toward professionalism were excellent and even overdue.  Nevertheless, it is clearly long past-time for a little perspective and reflection.

Over the course of the last two decades, while doing “future threats” consultations for DoD, DTRA, NRO, CIA, the Navy, Air Force, etc., I have watched this distinction grow ever-more stark — contrasting an older American reflex that relied on citizen-level resilience vs. the more recent emphasis on anticipation and the surgical removal of threats.  Inexorably, the Protector Class has increasingly come to consider itself wholly separate from the Protected.  In fact, our military, security and intelligence services have reached a point where – even when they engage in self-critical introspection – they seem unable to even ask questions that ponder resilience issues.

Instead, the question always boils down to: “How can we better anticipate, cover, and overcome all conceivable or plausible threat envelopes?”

While this is a worthy and admirable emphasis for protectors to take, it is also profoundly and narrowly overspecialized.  It reflects a counterfactual assumption that, given sufficient funding, these communities can not only anticipate all future shocks, but prepare adequately to deal with them on a strictly in-house basis, through the application of fiercely effective professional action…..

Read the rest here.

Secondly, I wanted to highlight that Don Vandergriff, a student of John Boyd’s strategic philosophy and the pioneer of adaptive leadership training , recently received a glowing mention in Fast Company magazine:

How to Buck the System the Right Way

….What GM is doing is mining the talent of its leaders in the middle. To lead up effectively, there are three characteristics you need to leverage.

Credibility. You must know your stuff especially when you are not the one in charge. When you are seeking to make a case to senior manager, or even to colleagues, what you know must be grounded in reality. At the same time, so often, as is the case at GM, you need to be able to think and act differently. So your track record reinforces your credibility. That is, what you have done before gives credence to what you want to do in the future.

Influence. Knowing how to persuade others is critical for someone seeking to effect change. If you do not have line authority, how else but through influence can you succeed? Your influence is based on credibility, but also on your proven ability to get things done. Sometimes persuasion comes down to an ability to sweet talk the higher ups as well as put a bit of muscle on colleagues (nicely of course) in order push your initiative through.

Respect. Mavericks, which GM said it was looking for, may not always be the most easiest people to get along with on a daily basis. After all, they are ones seeking to buck the system. But mavericks who succeed are ones who have the best interests of the organization at heart and in time earn the respect of thier colleagues.

One maverick I know who has been pushing to change the way the U.S. Army trains and promotes its officer corps is Don Vandergriff. A former Army major and twice named ROTC instructor of the year while at Georgetown, Vandergriff has tirelessly badgered the Army’s senior leadership to institute changes that would recognize and promote officers who knew how to lead from the middle.

And now, after more than a decade of his writing and teaching, it is paying off. West Point has become the latest but perhaps the most prestigious Army institution to teach principles of adaptive decision making that Don developed. Many of Don’s students have implemented such lessons successfully under combat situations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Read the rest here. 

Don’s methods excel at getting students to think creatively under the constraints of limited information, situational uncertainty and time pressure ( making the cognitive effect somewhat akin to the effects produced by the Socratic method and complex game playing).

ADDENDUM:

This would also be a suitable post to remind readers that Dr. Chet Richards has moved his blogging operations to a new site, Fast Transients.

Adjust your favorites and blogrolls accordingly.

Freedom (TM) by Daniel Suarez

Shlok and John Robb have already endorsed Freedom(TM) by Daniel Suarez, the sequel to his earlier bestselling Daemon and I’d like to briefly join them in praising Freedom(TM) as a must-read work of science fiction. One that meshes well with the societal problems covered on today’s front pages while describing an emergent world of the Darknet being shepherded by the elusive, increasingly powerful, Daemon.

Other Posts on Freedom(TM):

Red Herrings

To the legacy society of the nation-state and the hierarchical transnational corporation:

MILESTONE

….It’s time to up the ante and move onto the next phase:  the birth and rapid growth of new societal networks.*  This is going to be a fun ride!

* As in, new societal networks that can outcompete (trounce evolutionarily) all existing status quo organizational forms  (this should not be confused with the diminutive form of ‘social networking,’ as in Facebook and Twitter).

Long term, I think this is correct and that Robb is, as usual,  ahead of the curve on what will become the zeitgeist in the next few decades ( I will add that this evolutionary path appears to be happening much faster than I had considered, by at least 15-20 years). The movement in the 21st century will be toward networked civilizations on one end of the spectrum that will be pretty nice places to be and on the other, a kind of emergent, hypermobile, barbarism where life is hell on Earth. 

The proper response for existing institutions is to swing their resources, their mass and their remaining legitimacy behind the triumph of the former and gracefully adapt and acclimate rather than be disintegrated by the latter. I considered this in the essay ” A Grand Strategy for a Networked Civilization” that I wrote for Threats in the Age of Obama (p.208):

….Nation-states in the 21^st century will face a complex international ecosystem of players rather than just the society of states envisioned by traditional Realpolitik. If the predictions offered by serious thinkers such as Ray Kurzweill, Fred Ikle or John Robb prove true, then  technological breakthroughs will ensure the emergence of “Superempowered Individuals”[1] on a sizable scale in the near future.  At that moment, the reliance of the State on its’ punitive powers as a weapon of first resort comes to an end.  Superemepowered individuals, separatist groups, insurgents and an “opting-out” citizenry will nibble recalcitrant and unpopular states to death, hollowing them out and transferring their allegiance elsewhere.

While successful states will retain punitive powers, their primary focus will become attracting followers and clients in whom they can generate intense or at least dependable, loyalty and leverage as a networked system to pursue national interests.  This represents a  shift from worldview of enforcement  to one of empowerment, coordination and collaboration. States will be forced to narrow their scope of activity from trying to supervise everything  to  flexibly providing or facilitating core services, platforms, rule-sets and opportunities – critical public goods – that the private sector or social groups cannot easily replicate or replace.  Outside of a vital core of activity, the state becomes an arbiter among the lesser, interdependent, quasi-autonomous, powers to which it is connected.”

In other words, America and our “leaders” need a Boydian strategy and a ruthless commitment to honest clarity and sacrifice in order to weather the transition and retain some relevance. This is what makes the current cultural trend toward a political economy of oligarchy among the elite so worrisome. Their careerist self-interest and class values will push them to make all the wrong choices at critical junctures.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable and Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, had an op-ed in FT.com entitled “Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world” (Hat tip to John Robb and Pundita). Taleb was addressing the global economic crisis, but I was particularly drawn to Taleb’s fifth principle, which has a more general implication:

5. Counter-balance complexity with simplicity. Complexity from globalisation and highly networked economic life needs to be countered by simplicity in financial products. The complex economy is already a form of leverage: the leverage of efficiency. Such systems survive thanks to slack and redundancy; adding debt produces wild and dangerous gyrations and leaves no room for error. Capitalism cannot avoid fads and bubbles: equity bubbles (as in 2000) have proved to be mild; debt bubbles are vicious.

Taleb has encapsulated many important concepts very well here. Up to a certain point, increasing complexity represents a advantage for an evolving system (biological, financial, physical etc.) by increasing efficiency through adding specialization, interconnection, diversification, redundancy and checks for mitigation of risks. Complexity, in the earlier part of a development curve can add to a system’s overall resiliency – to a point.

Superfluous complexity, that which goes beyond the minimum required for additional gains in systemic efficiency or productivity, is a net drag on the system, an economic waste, a source of friction, a cancer,  a useless eater of resources and the earliest sign of the system’s inevitable decay. Worse, excess complexity represents an increasing probability of systemic failure by multiplying the number of variables involved in the normal process of the system. There are more things that can go wrong and more choke points where a catastrophic failure can occur. Increasing the degree of complexity moves the system away from simplicity and reliability and toward chaos and the creativity of emergent properties, but like an ice skater seeking ever greater range, go too far and the ice will crack under one’s feet.

This is an effect familiar to engineers and scientists but one that appears to escape the majority of politicians, corporate executives and economists. My co-blogger at Chicago Boyz, Shannon Love,  took GE to task for trying to get on the Federal dole by advocating needlessly complicating the nation’s power grid:

If Your Grid Had a Brain

GE is advertising to build political support for Obama’s plan to purchase billions of dollars of GE tech in order to make the power grid “smart”.  After all, who would want a “dumb” anything when they could have a “smart” something? 

The reason we should keep things dumb is that in engineering the word “dumb” has a different connotation. In engineering, “dumb” means simple and reliable. 

Increasing complexity in any networked system increases possible points of failure. Worse, the more interconnected the system, i.e., the more any single component affects any other randomly selected component in the system, the faster point-failures spread to the entire system. Power grids are massively interconnected. Every blackout starts with a seemingly trivial problem that, like a pebble failing on a mountain side, triggers an avalanche of failure. 

In the social and political domain, back in the 1990’s Philip K. Howard wrote a book called The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America in which he detailed example after example of how the overlawyering of regulatory systems in America by an emerging and hyper-aggressive legal class was producing neither restraint on government abuses nor fine-tuned social outcomes but instead created a state of paralyzed rigidity, risk aversion, perverse incentives and general dysfunction; in other words, chaos instead of order.

The Obama-ites in the White House are not “socialists” ( at least not most of them) but there is a great love of liberal-minded technocracy there, and a seemingly boundless self-confidence in the ability of high-minded, upper-middle class, progressive, wonks and lawyers from the “good schools” (or investment houses – in some cases, both) to micromanage not just our lives for us, or even the United States of America but the global economy itself. Sort of a Superempowered Oligarchy of Good Feelings.

The ancient Greeks had a word for that: hubris. More importantly, the Obama-ites are wrong here – adding endless amounts of regulatory complexity is not going to give them the kind of granular control or positive returns that they seek to obtain from the system. Counterintuitively, they should be radically simplifying where and to the degree they safely can instead.