Posts Tagged ‘Tribes’

…threaten the established order.

We have already seen this, in one view. Corporations are legally individuals and they’re working towards, if they haven’t already, taking over our democratic institutions. After all, while FEMA was busy scratching it’s balls and and wondering what all the fuss on TV was about, it was corporations who were already shipping water and food and supplies down to hurricane-ravaged Louisiana. They had the power and the logistics in place to do what our cumbersome government could not.

One source superempowerment will be from winner take all economics and parasitic predation (see below for more on this term).  The top 0.01% of income earners will see have already seen their wealth accelerate faster than ever before (particularly now that their downside risk is backstopped by the coffers of morally weak nation-states).

Another driver of superempowerment stems from an ability to use systems disruption to cause economic damage.  Individuals that manage open source guerrilla networks — connectors/networks/coaches — have the ability generate economic damage at least as large (if not larger) as the most elite of income earners.  For example, the anti-entrepreneur ‘Jomo Gbomo’ manages the Nigerian guerrilla network MEND.  This network disrupts oil production by BP Shell, Chevron, and AGIP as a means to coerce the corrupt regime in Lagos into good governance.  ’Jomo’ been able to generate damage worth nearly 2x Bill Gates has generated in income.

Random Thoughts on SuperEmpowered Individuals

…from the ever-brilliant John Robb.

What to remember about 9/11.  The Chicago Boyz blog points out, correctly (I made roughly the same point in Brave New War), that the only portion of the American national security system that actually worked on 9/11 was…. drum roll please….  the formation of spontaneous civilian militias.  From the counter-attack on the one plane that didn’t  hit its intended target to militias that evacuated people in NYC.  The hideously expensive agencies and departments did nothing (which is one of the reasons, as perverse as it sounds, we went to war in Iraq:  to decisively prove the utility of these agencies and departments before a global audience).

Read the whole thing here.

…is the name of the game.

• Stagnant incomes.  Median per capita income has stagnated for 30 years and is now headed lower. The only increase in household income came from adding the income of a spouse (that typically gets less than the male income earner). The value generated by mighty productivity increases over the last thirty years was routed to the financial markets (aka casinos) and not shared with American workers.
• Increased fixed expenses.  The costs and amount spent on variable consumption have fallen (clothing, food, autos, etc.) over the last thirty years — which puts the lie to the “over consumption” charge.  Instead, the median cost of housing, health, and the costs of work (childcare, two cars, etc.  brought on due to a need for sending two people to work) have skyrocketed with very little improvement in the quantity or value of the goods/services received.

The rest is here.

Another gem from John Robb:

Essentially, it shows how the post-WW2 social contract that linked productivity improvements to median income gains was shattered in 1974.  Since then, the value created by a doubling of productivity went to global capital markets instead of doubling incomes for employees.  Nominally, this decision was made under the assumption that this money would be more efficiently allocated by the global financial network than individuals.  In reality, it was likely parasitic predation by a relatively small network that found out how to co-opt the economic system’s core functions, in a process that is identical to how cancer co-opts the host’s systems of cellular metabolism to grow rapidly (for more on how this works, read my earlier brief on “Bow-Tie Control Systems“).

The rest is here.

The more I read about this stuff, the more I wonder if technology truly has any place on Earth. If our precious electronics are so easily taken away by random spurts of electromagnetic energy from our mother Sun, well, why bother in the first place?

Go buy a sword, learn to use it, and read on.

It is hard to conceive of the sun wiping out a large amount of our hard-earned progress. Nevertheless, it is possible. The surface of the sun is a roiling mass of plasma – charged high-energy particles – some of which escape the surface and travel through space as the solar wind. From time to time, that wind carries a billion-tonne glob of plasma, a fireball known as a coronal mass ejection (see “When hell comes to Earth”). If one should hit the Earth’s magnetic shield, the result could be truly devastating.

The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth’s magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer’s magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer’s copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts. This is exactly what happened in the Canadian province of Quebec in March 1989, and six million people spent 9 hours without electricity. But things could get much, much worse than that.

Envision a world where every computer is rendered useless, manufacturing capability is at a standstill, and bullets are slowly but surely running out. It wouldn’t be long before we’re in dusty streets fighting with swords and knives again.

We’d be bitch-slapped right back into the dark ages, most of our current knowledge useless.

Read the rest here.

Juxtaposed against Run DMC is an old vid of Russian Folk Dancing. Perhaps the coolest things you’ll EVER see.

I’ll let the brilliant John Robb do the talking.

How do you manufacture a strong community that protects, defends and advances the interests of its members?  You build a tribe.  Tribal organization is the most survivable of all organizational types and it was the dominant form for 99.99% of human history.  The most important aspect of tribal organization is that it is the organizational cockroach of human history.  It has proven it can withstand the onslaught of the harshest of environments.  Global depression?  No problem.

The rest of the article is here.

Important stuff, as the world crumbles around us…