Rethinking Security

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.

The Stark Reality of Private Warfare

First off, I should point out that I've borrowed this bad, bad pun from Robert Farley. But even if he hadn't come up with it, I probably would have. In Iron Man 2, Tony Stark declares to an incredulous senator that he has "privatized world peace." The movie as a whole, however fantastic in its nature, points out an basic truth that is often eluded in movies that stereotype military contractors and private security firms as either praetorian guards or trigger-happy guns for hire. When it comes to the spectrum of force, state power alone is not the only game in town and never has been.

Feral Jundi reinforces this point by linking to an article describing the calls by some groups to bring back the premodern concept of "letters of marque and reprisal" to enable private groups go after Somali pirates. Regardless of the fitness of the concept, it illustrates what kind of conditions produce a reliance on private force.

Major states are often uneasy (or unable) to produce security in peripheral areas or advance their strategic objectives directly. This is especially true in areas that require international collective action - an area which is often more aspiration than reality. It is common sense that those who can pay for it will act on their own to deal with the problem. John Robb and others have also written persuasively about shifts in international trends that enable - for better or worse - an expansion of private entities acting in both domestic and international contexts to provide security and military advantage. Moreover, major powers wanting to act in an "indirect" sense often use private groups to act as their surrogates. In this mode, private groups are just one of several possible proxies that can be employed to do our bidding.

The point is that not that the use of privatized force is desirable. For a variety of reasons it is a drastically more limited tool than traditional state force. Anyone familiar with the 1960s and 1970s participation of mercenaries in African conflicts understands that in many cases these actors can also drastically worsen the problem as well. But privatized force can and will be employed by those with the ability to pay for it in the absence of credible alternatives. A variety of actors will operate on the lower rung of the spectrum of force. And in some cases they will be better placed to handle security problems than the United Nations.

We might as well come to terms with it, because it is most emphatically not new and will not be abolished by a supposedly more enlightened international order.

From Tinkering to Tedium?

Wired's Kevin Kelly has an interesting post on the how early adopters of innovative technologies come to sour on their favorite toys. Key point:

"Many of the qualities that early adopters love -- the way it can be modified, tweaked, owned, and directed into all manner of directions -- and its unlimited potential -- are also the same reasons why many others shy from trying to use it. In the same way, the very hardening and convergence that draw the masses to a technology also turn off those who like its earlier kind of generativity, when things were lose."

To Kelly's credit, he doesn't simply make the point that technology becomes boring when it "sells out:"

"A device become more specialized and 'complete' as it evolves. As it does, it becomes more specific in what it does, more closed in its identity, more clear in what it is. It becomes more powerful in evolving its identity. As it matures it becomes more completed, more approachable, more understandable, more able to do things for more people."

A lot of tech writers have an tendency to glorify and romanticize the individual tinkerer and shun the mass product. But Kelly points out that while the creativity of the tinkerer is important, it also a product of a given technology's incompleteness. The same "closed" nature of the mass product that turns off the tinkerer can be a boon for innovation of a different kind. Usenet postings in the 1980s were certainly creative, for example, but now we can blog!

Ultimately, the cycle between the incomplete innovation at the edge of chaos that tinkerers can play with and the mass product that can (sometimes) enable new creativity produces a consistent margin of innovation inhabited by those who want to play with immature technologies.

Fouche's Magnum Opus

I've searched in vain for a modern Hunter S. Thompson to satirize today's world of foreign policy and national security. But now Joseph Fouche has, after some prodding, expanded some of his more hilarious Twitterings into a farce of biblical proportions. If hearing the words "black swan" and "accidental guerrilla" excites you like the midnight premiere of Iron Man 2 , you have a PowerPoint-shaped dartboard, and you always eat soup with a knife, this entry is for you.

Everyone else will be completely baffled, especially when the George Kennan giant robot emerges in the beginning. It is a truly epic ride that manages to tie everything from the classical historian Ibn Khaldun's theory of civilizational decline to the Python programming language together. I'm frankly amazed he managed to write it without the world spontaneously combusting. But he did!

If you don't want to burrow deep into the inside baseball, his main point is that American strategy is split between two tendencies - the "magic bullet" devised by technocratic professionals and the emergent populist tendency of the crowd (e.g. Walter Russell Mead's Jacksonians). The merge point lies somewhere between the machine dreams of MacNamara's systems analysts and the 19th century P2P empire-building of Manifest Destiny. The problem, as Fouche argues, lies in generating cohesion that can animate the traditional sources of American power.

Naval Open Source Warfare?

Chris Rawey has an interesting post up at Information Dissemination on potential opposing force adaptations that range beyond traditional "anti-access" threats:

"So what will the next ten years of OSW bring to maritime conflicts?
- A proliferation of sea and beach-launched small (read model airplane size) UAVs utilized by non-state actors to help target their water-borne IEDS and anti-ship cruise missiles
- Small, randomly strewn maritime IEDS (mines) through vital commercial choke points – think the Verrazano Narrows between Staten Island and Brooklyn vice Strait of Hormuz. Really, the whole “E” component isn’t necessarily, just some sinister looking boxes and an emailed threat alone is enough to disrupt traffic for a while in any given port
- Commercially available UUVs designed for oceanography converted into torpedoes
- Cell phones and social media used to agitate “flash mobs” of local fishing vessels in order to block the movement of navy or merchant vessels."

It goes without saying of course, that countermeasures will be employed and the cycle of offense and defense will continue. The small, light torpedo boat concept advocated by the Jeune Ecole naval movement in late 19th century Europe, for example, was not as decisive as the French naval theorists thought. But the possibilities outlined here are still worry of study and concern.

Black Swan and Toyota

This is an excellent post by Kotare:

"Toyota is a global institution. It enjoyed a global reputation as an innovative manufacturer of automobiles that are safe, reliable, and, with the development of the Prius petrol-electric hybrid, clean. No doubt it seemed like a safe bet, for company employees, auto-workers, investors, dealers, car buyers and so on. Then came the black swan - Fortune's KO.The crisis shows that one Black Swan triggers other Black Swans, at different levels. Imagine, for instance, the panic among Toyota auto-dealers as the crisis deepened, with thoughts turning suddenly to the impact on future sales, bonuses and livelihoods. The more extensive and influential an institution is, the greater the ripple impact when disaster hits.

Most people try to avoid the Black Swan by playing it safe. You take a job in a safe organization, like a bank, a bureaucracy, or a corporation. You put money in a safe investment. You buy a safe family car. Generally, this strategy works, at least for a while. But if disaster hits, the psychological impact on the person who plays it safe must be disproportionately greater than on the person who is accustomed to coping with a measure of uncertainty and risk in their lives."

Even if you don't buy into the Black Swan idea the words he writes here are still valuable. Mitigating risk is one of the most basic aspects of life. Merely getting into your car to drive to work or see your girlfriend could kill you.

Open Spaces and Systems

I missed this one, but Curtis flags an interesting initiative going on with P2P thinking.

Politics 101 for Futurists

Jamais Cascio has a bone to pick with futurists who don't factor politics into their analysis:

"I've heard the sentiment that advocates of Revolutionary Technology X 'must seek to escape politics' repeated in various forms time and again, even by people and groups I otherwise respect. It's a fascinating and sad delusion, characteristic of a movement that sees itself as both smarter than everyone else and unbound by the problems of the past. ..Politics is part of a healthy society -- it's what happens when you have a group of people with differential goals and a persistent relationship. It's not about partisanship, it's about power. And while even small groups have politics (think: supporting or opposing decisions, differing levels of power to achieve goals, deciding how to use limited resources), the more people involved, the more complex the politics. Factions, parties, ideologies and the like are simply ways of organizing politics in a complex social space -- they're symptoms of politics, not causes. Calls to get rid of politics can therefore mean one of two things: getting rid of persistent relationships with other people; or getting rid of differential goals."

To add to Cascio's own excellent words, I'd also have to say that denial of politics is also a denial of friction. Futurists, and technologists dislike politics because it subjects fine-tuned rational ideas to a state of irrationality they find genuinely threatening. The problem is that politics is not some kind of Bizarro World full of UFOs generated by the Bermuda Triangle. It pervades human life. The same irrationalities, unknown variables, and surprise upsets seen in politics also are characteristics of the wider world.

Futurists and technologists, especially those who prefer Hari Seldon/Foundation-style master plans, are going to have to reckon with the simple fact that those plans will be mediated through the social world--politics being only one face of it--and thus need to design their forecasts and technologies accordingly.

This does have geopolitical relevance as well. See Joseph Fouche's excellent post "The Tragedy of the Geopolitical Nerd" for more.

Moralism and Nichepapers

By now everyone knows that I'm not a great fan of Umair Haque. To me, he is the tech industry's version of Thomas Friedman. However, I thought his "nichepaper manifesto" was an interesting look a the changing dynamics of the media. He's right that small-start up and scaled-down ventures are increasingly driving coverage and content, especially stuff that eschews the dominant 20th century journalism model of "he said, she said" objectivity. This is hardly an original observation, but it's reminiscent of the early days of the press, with bloggers substituting as pamphleteers and the new "nichepapers" mirroring the somewhat sensationalistic and partisan tone of the 19th century press. The problem, of course, is Haque's enthusiastic over-selling of nichepapers and niche forms of media.

Disruptive Technologies May Change the World But They Don't Pay Much

Your invention can revolutionize the world but it won't necessarily make you rich, Marco Rinesi argues:

"But for all of its undeniable power, the printing press wasn’t the source of large fortunes for the engineers, investors, and businessmen involved in this industry. Profits were made, yes, sometimes significant ones, but nothing quite proportional to the influence of the technology. The bulk of the benefits came to the organizations that leveraged this technology for their own ends like modern states, which would have been logistically impossible without the printing press, or the myriad business that cannot be conceived without a superbly well-educated (for pre-modern standards) source of workers and consumers.

The same pattern can be seen in many other technical advances, specially those that impacted society the most. Contraceptives, telecommunications, refrigeration: they are often overlooked foundations of the contemporary world, each of them enormously disruptive, yet none of them, over the long term, a gold mine of extraordinary returns."

Why is this so? Rinesi notes that "most industries, no matter how advanced," simply sell tools to other people. Those who use the tools are most likely to gain the most benefit from them. When reading of this, I think mostly of Mikhail Kalashnikov, whose humble assault rifle was widely pirated and copied. Despite the production of 100 million AKs, Kalashnikov lives on a meager state pension and is buying shares in umbrella companies. This is a reason to look askance at claims of disruptive innovation making instant billionaires. Rather, it's worth reflecting on how niche inventions and tools developed out of existing platforms have been the most successful. Kalashnikov did not invent the first assault rifle--rather he invented the most cheap, reliable, and user-friendly variant. Similarly, the team behind Facebook didn't invent social network sites but created a juggernaut through innovative redesign of an existing template and platform.