I have made the case that the kind of structures that Jeff Vail describes as rhizome will emerge less through any kind of awareness of their theoretical superiority, than simple necessity. Long-term trends and historical examples highlight that argument, but it is still exceptional to see three different approaches that so clearly point to the same conclusion, all on the same day. Such a coincidence is worthy of commentary.

Global Guerrillas: The Need for Resilience

John Robb’s blog, Global Guerrillas, is always an excellent source of how the “War on Terror” relates to problems of complexity, and how our civilization’s increasing complexity represents an increasing probability of catastrophic breakdown. In his most recent brief, “The New Threats,” Robb outlines the threats Western civilization faces, and points to the only thing that can save it: increased resilience.

The only solution for these problems isn’t something that gains much currency from the current decision makers. There isn’t any built-in audience ready with money and support to make them happen (at least, not yet). The reason is that systemic resilience is hard. It reverses power relationships and pushes control to the edges. It simplifies processes and builds-in dampening forces to limit the impact of any shocks that ripple through our global network. It forces changes in individual behavior to broaden skill sets and limit dependencies. In short, it isn’t anything you will read in any report generated by current or past power brokers.

Faced with a rhizome network, according to Robb, the only means of survival our hierarchical civilization has, is to shed both our hierarchy, and our civilization, to become a rhizome network. This decentralization of power that Robb proposes is collapse, and like any collapse, it would vastly improve the quality of life for nearly all involved.

Savage Minds: Open Source Intel

On the anthropology weblog Savage Minds, a recent article—”You Only Link Twice: Spying 2.0“—discusses the problems of today’s spies. They’ve noticed that they cannot keep up with the open source warfare used by the rhizome networks that Robb calls “global guerrillas,” and so they’ve started a project to begin a more open approach to intelligence.

Of course our intelligence agencies are awash in raw data; that’s actually a significant part of the problem. Raw data is useless unless it can be processed and turned into actual intelligence, and with so much data, processing only becomes more difficult. NSA programs tapping American phone lines not only violate privacy, but they fail even to fulfill their stated objectives. All that useless information makes it more difficult to track terrorists, not less. Intelligence agencies are choking on all their information.

Of course, processing massive information is precisely what an open source approach does best. As Jeff Vail wrote in “Guerrilla Media, Swarming and Asymmetric Politics in the 21st Century”:

Osama bin Laden and other “central� al-Qa’ida figures are increasingly removed from everyday operations and instead function as a node in the al-Qa’ida Doctrine Network. Bin Laden & crew propose targeting strategies, praise selected actions and generally contribute to the clinical trial of new strategies and procedures. They communicate with their network via largely Open Source methods—tapes sent to Arabic language satellite TV channels, jihadist websites, etc. Other groups such as that of Abu Musab al Zarqawi—in no way under hierarchal control from bin Laden—then take the Open Source Warfare outcomes from these clinical trials and put them into action. The train bombings in Madrid and subway bombings in London are an example of this process in action, as are the steadily improving tactics of insurgents in Iraq.

Progressive political bloggers in America, while markedly different in ideology from al-Qa’ida, function in a remarkably similar manner. The network of blogs serves as a Doctrine Network, function as a Clinical Trial for political criticism, and constitute an Open Source communication infrastructure all at the same time. One blogger writes a persuasive argument against President Bush, another improves or expands upon it and posts it to a heavily visited site, feedback and critiques further develop the argument until it is a fully sharpened weapon in the progressive’s Open Source Warfare arsenal.

Our hierarchical intelligence communities never stood a chance against open source, rhizome information processing. It’s far quicker—and a fine example of how a bloated civilization begins to choke on its own complexity. The Savage Minds article notes:

I first heard stirrings of this kind a few months back in a Reuters news story about Intellipedia. The idea of a wikipedia for spies is so obviously intriguing that it was almost an inevitable story for the magazine. It starts with a similar gambit: a young geek obsessed with tools takes a job at an intel org, expecting to meet Q and learn about the super-hightech terrorist-nabbing tools. Realization: the bloated government bureaucracies, our first line of defense, are struggling with Windows 95 and Netscape 4.0—or their top-secret equivalents.

But apparently a few young geeks seeking to serve the nation have noticed … and have started to create the classified equivalent of Web 2.0. The article does a great job of imagining what might have happened (if hindsight=20/20) before 9/11. Were intel agencies actually furiously adding comments to each others blogs, hashing out the meaning of scattered bits and pieces of info, checking technorati and recent changes obsessively, pinging and trackbacking their way into the heart of the plot—well then maybe the course of history might have been different. It’s a nice thought experiment. Of course, the idea raises certain paradoxes: to get such rich information, nearly everyone from the beat cop in Minnesota to the flight school operaters in Arizona to Bond himself, needs to be constantly blogging and updating their tips and infos—0wn1ng the “Al Qaeda plots” page, so to speak. But if they do so in a public forum then the plotters themselves only need check their rss readers to know just what US intel knows. By contrast, keeping the Intellipedia secret reduces its effectiveness the more secret it is. Not only that, but the very problem of terrorism is that we don’t know who are terrorists and who are not—so we have no way to exclude them except to be completely paranoid. Sharing and secrecy each produce their own kind of knowledge/power order. Or as the article puts it “social software doesn’t work if people aren’t social.”

The article goes on to discuss how fundamentally at odds such an approach is to the traditional culture of the intelligence community; Jeff Vail already pointed out the flaw in the hierarchical logic: “if Party A’s OODA loop operates more quickly than the OODA loop of Party B, it won’t matter if Party B finds out Party A’s nefarious intentions—it will be too late.”[Source] Al Qa’ida plotted 9/11 in open chat rooms and message boards; it didn’t matter that the whole plot was out in open for any member of the CIA to read, because there was so much for the CIA to read, and such a bloated bureaucracy for them to navigate. In short, secrecy is irrelevant to good intelligence: it’s far more important to process information quickly.

But that’s relinquishing the very notion of hierarchical intelligence-gathering. The article discusses how our intelligence communities cannot embrace this approach without fundamentally losing what they are—at the same time, completely outmaneuvered by the speed of rhizome networks, they’re coming to the conclusion that it’s also the only way they can win.

The Weekly Standard: Tribes & Magic

I’m not a regular reader of The Weekly Standard, the flagship publication of the neoconservative movement, but Ran Prieur’s link to Ralph Peters‘ “Return of the Tribes” was sufficiently intriguing to read in full. Peters is a retired army Lieutenant Colonel, and though he was for a long time an ardent supporter of the Iraq War, the slow failure of that mission seems to have taught him some important lessons. For instance, his proposal for peace in the Middle East recognizes that much of the tension in the region comes from post-colonial borders (deliberately set specifically to create such violence, in order to create a system of neocolonial dependence); his proposal recognizes the regional differences in the region and draws new borders that respect genuine cultural differences.

In this article from September, Peters goes further, counseling the neoconservative audience that so values his advice that globalization is doomed to failure. His article begins:

Globalization is real, but its power to improve the lot of humankind has been madly oversold. Globalization enthralls and binds together a new aristocracy–the golden crust on the human loaf–but the remaining billions, who lack the culture and confidence to benefit from “one world,” have begun to erect barricades against the internationalization of their affairs. And, from Peshawar to Paris, those manning the barricades increasingly turn violent over perceived threats to their accustomed patterns of life. If globalization represents a liberal worldview, renewed localism is a manifestation of reactionary fears, resurgent faiths, and the iron grip of tradition. Except in the commercial sphere, bet on the localists to prevail.

Not only in the developing world, but even in Europe, Peters finds examples that the trend of history is moving away from integration, into “tribal” identities, with smaller groups identified with a specific ecology. Peters finds a parallel to modern globalization in the universal, monotheistic religions, noting:

When we speak of religion–that greatest of all strategic factors–our vocabulary is so limited that we conflate radically different impulses, needs, and practices. When breaking down African populations for statistical purposes, for example, demographers are apt to present us with a portrait of country X as 45 percent Christian, 30 percent Muslim, and 25 percent animist/native religion. Such figures are wildly deceptive (as honest missionaries will admit). African Christians or Muslims rarely abandon tribal practices altogether, shopping daily between belief systems for the best results. Sometimes, the pastor’s counsel helps; other times it’s the shaman who delivers. …

Even as they change their names, the old gods live, and our attempts to export Western ideas and behaviors are destined to end in similar mutations. Our personal bias may be in favor of the frustrated missionaries who try to dissuade the Christians of up-country Sulawesi from holding elaborate, bankrupting funerals with mass animal sacrifices (death remains far more important than birth or baptism), but the reassuring counter is that in the Indonesian city of Solo, where Abu Bakr Bashir established his famed “terrorist school,” the devoutly Muslim population drives Saudi missionaries mad by holding a massive annual ceremony honoring the old Javanese Goddess of the Southern Seas. Likewise, Javanese and Sumatran Muslims go on the hajj with great enthusiasm (on government-organized tours), but continue to revere the spirits of local trees, Sufi saints, and the occasional rock.

In Senegal, I found local Muslims irate at the condescending attitudes of Saudi emissaries who condemned their practices as contrary to Islam. With their long-established Muslim brotherhoods and their beloved marabouts, the Senegalese responded, “We were Islamic scholars when the Saudis were living in tents.”

From West Africa to Indonesia, an unnoted defense against Islamist extremism is the loyalty Muslims have to the local versions of their faith. No one much likes to be told that he and his ancestors have gotten it all wrong for the last five centuries. Foolish Westerners who insist that Islam is a unified religion of believers plotting as one to subjugate the West refuse to see that the fiercest enemy of Salafist fundamentalism is the affection Muslims have for their local ways. Islamist terrorists are all about globalization, while the hope for peace lies in the grip of local custom.

Peters is advising the same neoconservatives who plot world domination that their dream is fundamentally impossible. Universal aspirations—whether religious or economic—have no grounding, because that would root them in a specific place. It also makes them ephemeral. The magic that people so deeply need can only come from a specific place and a relationship with it—and that means that any globalization scheme will always fragment into smaller and smaller tribes. Salafist terrorists will be undone by the very same “spirit of place” that dooms Western plans of globalization. Peters concludes:

Globalization isn’t new, but the power of local beliefs, rooted in native earth, is far older. And those local beliefs may prove to be the more powerful, just as they have so often done in the past. From Islamist terrorists fighting to perpetuate the enslavement of women to the Armenian obsession with the soil of Karabakh—from the French rejection of “Anglo-Saxon” economic models to the resistance of African Muslims to Islamist imperialism—the most complex forces at work in the world today, with the greatest potential for both violence and resistance to violence, may be the antiglobal impulses of local societies. From Liège to Lagos, the tribes are back.