Cumulative Effect: The Key for Super-Empowered Individuals?

During the mid-00s, a lot of bloggers (including myself) wrote about "super-empowered individuals," aka people who had been empowered by technology and globalization to have a vastly disproportionate long-term effect on national or global systems. The term, actually, was ironically coined by Thomas Friedman--a figure who many international relations and national security bloggers (including myself) sometimes mock. The September 11 attacks are seen as the keystone superempowered individual event, because they radically shifted the course of American foreign policy and defense for a decade. To get a feel for how radically things were changed, one need only look at the events of 2001 that preceded it, most notably a Cold War-style scrapup with China over a downed surveillance plane.

The more I've thought about it, though, it seems more accurate that absent the rare 9/11-style event, the only way for super-empowered individuals to really have a strategic as opposed to momentary tactical or operational effect, is to create a cumulative effect on top of a series of existing conditions. One of the biggest myths is that the Afghanistan is the "graveyard of empires," and that stems largely from the Soviet experience in the 1980s. But a bunch of insurgents with small arms and Stingers didn't topple Ivan.

The conditions for the fall of Moscow were present for a very long time. Fabius Maximus once noted that Robert Heinlein had visited mid-century Soviet Russia and saw long-term weakness. If the Afghan War had an effect, it was most certainly cumulative in that it helped aggravate an existing dysfunctional system.

The problem with this is is that determining the "point of inflection" is tremendously difficult. Revolutionaries of various stripes have tried to determine this since the mid-1800s, with varying pseudoscientific methodologies. Few of them predicted that it would be backward, agrarian Russia, not the industrialized West, that would be the first nation to fall to Communism.

And it is likely that any super-empowered individual's cumulative effect on events today will be visible only in extreme hindsight.

Comments

[Shlok Vaidya]

Yeah! Complex systems yield emergent effects.

9/11 was a mindfuck because everyone was assuming unipolarity post-1991.

In actuality, we saw the unprecedented growth of black globalization, even surpassing legitimate. This compounded. Hit a tipping point.

Of course, the derivatives boom was happening concurrently. The debt boom before that. And we've been watching hydrocarbon problems compound for a century now.

Each has the ability to yield a black swan event.

[A.E.]

I want to start a indie rock band called "Black Swan." Heh.

[russ greene]

Super-empowered individuals might not yet be a reality.

Super-empowered non-state actors, though, are. And you're right, it takes a cumulative effect and the appropriate setting.

I first heard of the super-empowerment thing before I read much of Friedman. I felt dismayed, embarassed, and somewhat cheated when I later read the term while casually browsing through The World is Flat.

Re: mindfuck, I think the joker had a good point in the Dark Knight:

"I just did what I do best. I took your little plan and I turned it on itself. Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets. Hmmm? You know... You know what I've noticed? Nobody panics when things go "according to plan." Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it's all "part of the plan." But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!"

[A.E.]

The Joker is a really great example of it. Maybe if we ever meet up I can tell you my elaborate "Dark Knight" modern COIN analogy.

[Eddie]

I would like to hear this DK analogy!

Also, why the immense focus in most works to view this through the lens of conflict, terrorism and negative outcomes? Arguably more "good" (thus far) has come out of the operations of super-empowered individuals either seeking an achievement of their own vision or merely using their wealth and influence in a variety of fields, having a net positive cumulative effect. Or perhaps I'm being overly simplistic here.

[A.E.]

Well, I principally write about conflict, so that's pretty much the lens that I'm going to look through at it through.

I'll tell you the DK analogy on Facebook.