zenpundit.com

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN NETWORKS MEET “THE LOGIC OF HUMAN DESTINY”?

Here’s a thought that occurred to me while writing the previous post:

Humans have been organizing themselves into complex social networks simce they emerged from the stage of tiny hunter-gatherer bands. They did so ” naturally” and unconsciously without understanding how this pattern mirrored that of other complex systems. Complex networks is a young field, not having only started until the late 1990’s but the promise and potential therein for heightening our understanding of the world is nothing short of vast.

Now that principles of scale free and small world networks are begining to be recognized, it is inevitable that this knowledge will in turn affect our behavior to an increasing degree. There are already attempts to understand networks in terms of terrorism and military strategy and these efforts to exploit this information in order to reap a comparative advantage will only proliferate, perhaps exponentially. In other words, as complex network theory meets cultural evolution, humans will attempt to consciously ” steer” the evolutionary devlopment of social and, eventually, biologically engineered networks.

The most likely and frequent social outcome of ‘ steering” will simply be the creation of semi-hierarchical modules within larger networks for reasons of utility (i.e. a decentralized, regional, fire department still needs a specialized bomb squad or CBR WMD team). On the other hand, “steering” of network formation might be very much like the ” pruning” of neuronal connections in the human brain, as the nonzero sum logic of cultural evolution begins to drive applications of complex networks, creating possibly dramatic systemic changes in our political and economic worlds.

Or, to take a page from Ray Kurzweil, our own evolution as a species.

DECLINE OF THE STATE, RISE OF THE NETWORK?

I am in the process of reading Martin van Creveld’s The Rise and Decline of the State. It is, on it’s merits, an interesting book and unusual for the enormous scope of history in whch the author dares to make his argument. Historians, by and large, are a cautious breed who like to make their boldest claims only for minute stretches of time and space. The most intriguing historical writers though, go against that grain. Whether it is Thucydides or a historian of the modern era like Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles Beard, Richard Hofstadter or Eugene Genovese, those who tackle the larger canvas seem to produce the most provocative and enduring contributions.

Along with William Lind and the late Colonel John Boyd, Martin van Creveld’s ideas underpin the theory of Fourth Generation Warfare, which is not merely a school of thought about the history of military strategy, or a mere model of warfare but is implicitly a theory about the direction of history itself. Among historians and philosophers, it simply does not get any bolder than that and there is no harder argument for a scholar to prove. Just ask Karl Marx.

I am pleased to report that van Creveld has been, on the whole, far more nuanced than many of his 4GW followers who run around asserting that the Treaty of Westphalia gave the state a monopoly on the legal use of violence; a claim that causes a great deal of bewilderment among other historians and political scientists who are not familiar with van Creveld’s book ( it certainly puzzled me at first brush). Without commenting on the global validity of van Creveld’s thesis, I’ll save that for another day and a different venue, his ideas have a lot of resonance for policy makers and military officers dealing with regions of failing and failed states brimming with insurgencies, terrorists, tribal warriors, sectarian zealots and narco-criminal syndicates.

I will say that while van Creveld is right that the traditional nation-state is in relative decline in many places, I think that network theory is going to provide increasing evidence that Philip Bobbitt’s assertion in The Shield of Achilles that the state is simply evolving into a new form that Bobbitt terms a market-state, and is not disappearing or declining. Markets, except perhaps under theoretical conditions of perfect competition, seem to have a strong bias toward creating enduring networks as a stabilizing function, as the many industries that are effectively oligopolies would tend to prove. How much of that is due to the random effects of competition sorting out ” winners” who later lock in their comparative advantages and how much derives from the behavior of humans, rooted in evolutionary psychology, to cluster socially, I can’t say.

What I can discern is that globalization and the removal of artificial barriers to connectivity on a grand scale is giving a wide field for networks to rise.

ZARQAWI’S DEATH

A few brief comments about the death of al Qaida terrorist leader and loose cannon Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

First, let me congratulate the military personnel in Iraq, at CENTCOM, in the IC who worked long and hard on this difficult operation. You pulled off a genuine coup for which you have not gotten adequate thanks or credit in the media or the blogosphere. Fantastic work !

And yes, the Bush administration deserves credit as well.

Secondly, the unseemly rush among pundits, partisans, cynics, politicians like Representative Pete Stark (D-Cal.) and carpet-chewing, mentally unbalanced, haters of the Bush administration to screech how Zarqawi’s death is irrelevant, a political stunt or a hoax is revolting as well as stupid. Yes, Zarqawi will be replaced. Admiral Yamamoto was replaced as a commander by the Japanese Imperial War Cabinet when we shot his plane out of the sky, but his death was still a great day for the Allies and a blow to the Japanese.

I’m sorry that some on the Left are so obsessed with George W. Bush that American victories cause them to feel depressed and bitter, but the fact they they are blindly partisan fools shouldn’t be allowed to detract from the accomplishment of the troops. No, this isn’t everyone on the Left or even a majority but it isn’t a fringe sentiment either.

Thirdly, overselling or overhyping the long-range implications of Zarqawi’s death, as some Bush administration officials were doing yesterday, is unwise and undercuts the real benefits derived from killing Zarqawi.

Fourth, that Zarqawi may have been betrayed ” from the inside” is no surprise. Bin Laden’s career as a terrorist mastermind was launched most likely by complicity in the death of his friend, patron and mentor Abdullah Azzam at the hands of other Islamist radicals ( most likely affiliated with his second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri). There is no honor among thieves or takfiri extremists either.

All in all, a great day.

FRIED

There’s no shortage of hot topics to blog about but my brain is completely fried by a combination of very long hours since Thursday of last week, deep thinking about two special projects, lack of sleep and the joys of two high intensity small children.

I am drinking a Sam Adam’s that I chiled in the freezer for a bit and I will then turn my attention to something entertaining, yet, completely mindless.

Cheers !

NETWORKS ARE SURPRISINGLY RESILIENT BECAUSE THEY ARE NETWORKS, NOT HIERARCHIES

According to ScienceDaily, researchers Mark Newman and Valdis Krebs have mapped networked political communities in the blogosphere and from Amazon and discovered that political networks can become so “tight” in terms of internal links that they resist becoming fragmented:

“When analyzed using Newman’s method, the network of books separated into four communities, with dense connections within communities and looser connections between them. One community was composed almost entirely left-wing books, and the other almost entirely of right-wing ones. Centrist books comprised the other two categories. The computer algorithm doesn’t know anything about the books’ content—it draws its conclusions only from the purchasing patterns of the buyers—but Newman’s analysis seems to show that those purchasing patterns correspond closely with the political slant of the books.

“This behavior is unique in our experience among networks of this size and is perhaps a testament not only to the widely noted polarization of the current political landscape in the United States, but also to the strong cohesion of the two factions,” the paper stated. The network of blogs was compiled by another U-M professor, Prof. Lada Adamic of the U-M School of Information.”

The implications here are very interesting, both good and bad. First the bad:

Of immediate concern, it would seem that in terms of its political partisans, America is on a trajectory for the kind of mutually hostile, mutually self-isolating, societal dynamic that is so often seen preceeding civil wars. Or for that matter, our own Civil War, where intense sectional feelings destroyed the Whig and Democratic Parties and nearly the United States along with them. It would also seem that the alienation of moderates and independents from the two major political parties is ” condensing”. Meaning that no matter who wins elections, it is a conceivable that a majority of the population, if not the voters, would regard the winner as illegitimate.

This utter resistance to communication, engagement or dialogue with the ” other” is actually a form of resilience taken to an unhealthy extreme. Sort of an ideological immune response to prevent ” invaders” – links – from connecting to ” the network”. Socially, one example of this behavior can be seen in the comments sections of many blogs where some “regulars” act as enforcers of the party line, parroting pet phrases (whether or not they actually make sense in terms of relevance) and using ad hominem abuse to attempt to smother dissenting views.

Now for the good:

4GW thinkers and Global Guerilla theorist John Robb have been acutely attentive to fragmentation and reversion to primary loyalties – or going toward an even greater breakdown that John has described as “ granular“. I agree with Robb that this phenomenon is happening and it is a powerful, entropic force, but how might it be prevented or reversed ?

In light of the research by Newman and Krebs, the answer would seem to be to create networks that horizontally cross the primary loyalties existing within a society, the more links the better. Historically, Americans had a particular genius for doing this kind of social linking across class, ethnic, regional and sectarian lines, foundering only upon race, an aspect noted way back by Alexis De Tocqueville in Democracy in America. While totalitarian societies were specifically designed to atomize demographic groups into isolated, disconnected, individuals vis-avis an all-powerful state, America’s individualistic ethos allowed its people to freely aggregate themselves into a powerful and dynamic civil society.

“Disconnectedness defines the danger”.

UPDATE:

Steve DeAngelis, the noted expert on resilience at ERMB, was also intrigued by the research of Newman and Krebs (Valdis Krebs is frequently cited for his social network analysis of the 9/11 highjackers) and expanded on another point in the article:

“Safranski ends by referencing Tom Barnett’s mantra, “Disconnectedness Defines Danger.” I wish I could be as sanguine as Safranski. I agree with his prescription – dialogue and honest debate are good things. But in a world where people are deliberately avoiding such dialogue and prefer retrenchment to rapprochement, making connections is difficult. Does that make me a pessimist? Not exactly. I’m by nature an optimist and by training a problem solver. So what is to be done? The ScienceDaily article points to an answer from nature:

Newman’s methods have also been adapted by researchers working in molecular biology to study metabolic networks, the chemical networks that power cells in human and animal bodies. In a recent paper in the journal Nature, researchers Roger Guimer and Luis Amaral from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., found that metabolites that straddle boundaries between groups in metabolic networks show persistence across species. Commenting on the work of Guimerà and Amaral, Newman says that this could be a sign that the division of the network into modules corresponds to different roles that metabolites play within the cell, and could suggest new directions for interpreting data on biochemical networks.

An excellent point by Steve, one that I unfortunately had missed. The role of women, household or community ” economies” (those involving an array of exchanges, usually non-monetary but significant to the actors) and market actions are playing a critical role here but have been insufficiently examined ( Another vital point of investigation is the develpment of modules within networks in the research of Luis Amaral and Roger Guiner).