Skilluminati Research

Dreaming 5GW: Invisible War

Posted May 03, 2009 17 comments

"Whoever finds me will kill me." --Gen. 4:14

5GW and marketing have a great deal in common. The one similarity I'd like to emphasize here: effective techniques are constantly mutating so fast that written theory is basically an autopsy. By the time we can recognize a pattern or strategy, it will be useless to actual 5GW operatives. It's hard to overstate the speed of the turnover here -- basically, what worked in 2008 will not work in 2008.

My Personal Dream of 5GW

The core tenet of Invisible Warfare is this: circumstances dictate. This is not a cop-out, but a rigorous challenge to expand your personal power, because most of the time, what circumstances dictate will involve skills you don't currently have.

That core tenet contains the first imperative: situation awareness. Circumstances can change in a second and you need to maintain focus and awareness. This more complicated than merely "paying attention" -- our human brains have built-in biases and design flaws that are hard to counteract, even after we've become aware of them. What you see is seldom what you're looking at.

"Thanks to telegraphs and modern communications, commanders are flooded with a tsunami of almost meaningless facts."

--Naval manual from 1949

It's impossible to achieve situation awareness when we're constantly distracted, and unable to isolate the important details from the meaningless noise. There are several aspects of warfare and power projection, all taken for granted as nescessary, that I believe are counter-productive although not useless: secrecy, violence, and intelligence.

Secrecy only matters when secrecy matters. In my own experience, it seldom does. Bear in mind that real secrecy is extremely difficult to maintain -- an intensive demand on time and resources.

Violence is only nescessary when violence is nescessary. Again, it can usually be averted or avoided, and more importantly every non-violent resolution you can create will increase your network and your strategic power. Rather than destroying your enemies, make them tools, if not allies.

Intelligence-gathering should be critical, and I'm not advocating that you run around blindfolded. I am cautioning against the downward spiral of paranoia, the disinformation hall of mirrors, and most of all, the delusion that your assumptions and information are correct. Awareness of the present moment trumps any and all models, patterns and beliefs that exist in your monkey head.

The Death Spiral of Containment and Control.

Here's one more common mistake, which is both counter-productive and useless: the strategy of containment and control. Government power is achieved through their population base: citizens generate the income, obey the laws and serve in the military, voluntarily or otherwise. Because of the extreme strategic importance of maintaining this power base, governments spend an absurd amount of resources on the containment and control of their civilians.

Fortunately for those of us on the recieving end, containment and control are both impossible goals. We're raised to imagine a grid of defined nation-states with precise borders, but in reality the entire system is riddled with tunnels, shortcuts, criminal networks, secret alliances, holes and cracks and just plain blindspots nobody's noticed yet. Perhaps you will.

Centuries after the myth of entropy first took hold, people are still catching up to the common-sense work of Ilya Prigogine, who demonstrated that "closed systems" exist nowhere in nature. By interacting freely with our environments, we free ourselves from the heat-death of entropy, but modeling our communities after a closed system is a literal death sentence. Endless books have been written about the advantages of collaboration, freedom of speech, open source development and globalization. Actually applying that logic is difficult, opposed by the powerful vested interests of those who have become wealthy and powerful protecting the sheep.

The containment and control system is dangerously stupid, and free humans have an imperative to disable that system wherever possible.

Invisible Warfare

The definition of warfare is being reconsidered, but the discussion among generals and academics is secondary to the more hands-on approach of global terrorists, field commanders, organized crime, religious cults, tech companies, and upstart corporations.

There is an evolving martial art of systems disruption that is radically skewing the power balance between individual humans and the existing control and containment system. Put bluntly, with open knowledge and legal tools, you personally can fuck shit up on a catastropic scale.

Global civilization is inevitable, and terms are being negotiated as you read this. Most of the humans on Earth are not part of these negotiations -- only a vanishingly small minority of powerful, connected and wealthy people. This is inevitable, too: why would the powerful negotiate with anyone else?

As officers Dunlap claim in their recent essay America's Greatest Weapon:

"There is really no escape...Today's captains carefully cultivate information sources among the locals as the Army’s new counterinsurgency manual teaches them to do. Schooled in the manual, such captains deliver offers the insurgents can’t refuse: be captured or be killed.

These are exactly the kinds of dilemmas the U.S. military loves to impose upon our enemies."

Systems disruption changes the containment and control game by offering a third choice: stalemate. This is somewhere between a Masada self-sacrifice and Mutually Assured Destruction. The social contract needs to be radically re-negotiated to accomodate citizens who are capable of crippling society itself.

Containment and control is no longer an option because of this precise problem of empowerment. You only need to protect citizens who are incapable of defending themselves -- the entire complex of "homeland security" and border control relies on ignorant, disempowered citizens -- helpless normal folks. This is not written for them.

Without the excuse of protection, government control and intervention become a naked power play. The choice is presented to you as "be captured or be killed." Submission equals life, resistance equals death -- the Military of a "free country" parroting science fiction monsters like the Borg. Systems disruption offers a third choice, but at great cost. Frankly, it's pretty stupid, but nescessary, because it brings us to a higher synthesis...

Invisible Warfare as Militarized Nomad TAZ Dowsing

In the interest of the proliferation of dangerous ideas, I'd like to propose a fourth alternative: organized groups of friends forming mobile TAZ units -- camouflaged as a circus, a business, or a music group if need be...but better yet, disguised as nothing at all and functionally invisible. Military manuals refer to this core discipline as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) and these TAZ units would be able to scatter into individual parts, disappear from view and recombine elsewhere.

This obviously involves a high degree of planning, training and reliable tools and technology. All of which translates into "hard work."

Barring a well-placed shot to the back, the classic rhyme is true: "He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day." However, it's important to know which way to run. When you are attacked by either domestic law enforcement or foreign counter-insurgency, their approach will be the same: using a spearhead unit to chase you towards a larger ambush unit. In other words, the first agents you see are the weakest line of defense, and your exits are probably covered.

That's just a single, specific example of the counter-intuitive logic of...well, reality. All power plays and confidence tricks are designed to distort your situation awareness, and you need to discipline your mind to remain calm. If a stance mentality leads to failure, can constant mobility (and invisibility) prevent that -- or does "no stance" just become a stance of it's own?

I'm advocating mobility through national borders, as well. Randomly swinging through small asian nations and undermining the containment and control machine with an unpredictable broadside will do a great favor to the natives. In the aftermath you will create large avenues of escape, and resources previously devoted to domestic repression and genocide will be turned towards a paranoid quest to defend against a threat that will never return.

9. Lurk! Withdraw! Upon them! this is the Law of the Battle of Conquest: thus shall my worship be about my secret house.

17 comments

Filed in: 5GW Project 2008

Superstruct Review: Unplayable, Unwinnable, Still Awesome

Posted Dec 02, 2008 4 comments

Although I was disappointed with Superstruct, that's mostly because of my own expectations. My first impression made me think the game was a much Fuller system -- more grounded in simulations based on actual data, more complex and testable. This is partially my cognitive biases at work, filling in details based on my own ideas. It's also because of the blog echo chamber that amplified the project in stature, from a cool narrative online experiment to a serious attempt at fixing world problems.

I'm writing a Brainsturbator article about the game that Superstruct should have been -- a game that still needs to be designed. I also think it would be unfair to focus on Superstruct too much during that article, so I'm publishing my short review here instead. Superstruct is not an Earth simulator, and in no way resembles an updated version of R. Buckminster Fuller's "World Game." On it's own rights, and by it's own modest goals, Superstruct was a valuable success.

As Sean Ness clarified for me, though, Superstruct was never promoted as a MMOG -- a Massively Multiplayer Online Game, which involves a continuous environment that's "inhabited" by thousands of players who all occupy the same space.

Unplayable and Unwinnable

First problem: the Superstruct website is a usability nightmare. Don't think I'm a grumpy critic, though: the background and layout was truly badass, very cool looking. It just didn't work. For instance, if you'd like to browse people's submissions, which include detailed plans for solving specific global problems, you'll need to navigate this:

Frame nightmares are easily avoidable -- and if you're paying someone money to make a website, this should not be happening at all. To scroll through all the contributions, you need to scroll down the frame to the left, then click on the "Struct" you'd like to read. Now, unfortunately, you're going to read it while it's crammed into the frame at the right.

Considering user-generated content is main attraction and asset for this website, I'm amazed that the designers went through such pains to make it inaccessible and unappealing. I know there's ways for competent Internets Users to get around that, but it shouldn't be necessary to out-smart bad web design in the first place.

The scoring system is downright cynical. Basically: get a bunch of people to sign up on our site and we'll declare victory. If that sounds like an unfair summary, here's how they describe it:

A three step process? Sounds complicated, which usually means it's not. "SEHI" is just their term for a user profile page, and "survivability points" are just based on SEHIs. So basically, they rename "number of users" three times and call that a process. Perhaps I should be writing this review at Pizza SEO, because there is surely some good business advice to be found here. In terms of the seed content, there was actually very little on the table beyond a few videos and enthusiastic word-of-mouth promotion. Fortunately, that's all they needed to launch a remarkable crowdsourcing project, which brings me to the subject of What Actually Worked.

Still Awesome

The reason I opened this with the Nick Douglas joke -- aside from the fact I thought it was funny -- is the fact that all of the best content from the Superstruct project grew outside the original petri dish. Most of the best brainfood wound up growing on the Tumblr platform, which makes sense...I would especially recommend The Gupta Option.

In fact, the Superstruct information works so much better on other platforms, I'm kind of confused why they'd take the time to code up a clunky site in the first place. Check out the Reconstruct Ning page -- it handles every aspect of usability and information design better than the actual site. Much like the Obama campaign, the best thing to come out of Superstruct is the community that it created. To me, that's awesome enough to still give Jane McGonigal, Jamais Cascio and the rest of the folks at IFTF credit for a job well done.

Please hire better web designers next time, though....or just use Ning. It works.

4 comments

Filed in: Future Tech

The Unlikely Green Revolution of the US Military

Posted Nov 14, 2008 3 comments

The best argument for "green" anything has never been morality -- it's just better business. When environmentalist genius Amory Lovins started his consulting group, the Rocky Mountain Institute, he probably never figured his clients would include Wal-Mart, Monsanto and Lockheed Martin. Massive scale leads to massive costs, though, and corporations are learning that their bottom line improves as their waste gets eliminated.

When it comes to massive scale, nobody beats the United States Military. Maintaining over 700 bases with 577,000 buildings worldwide and waging two simultaneous wars consumes over a trillion dollars per year. Despite a reputation for corruption and $900 toilet seats, the US Military is actually a very efficient machine. Through subsidiaries like DARPA and the Army Engineers Corp, they're also no strangers to experimental and fringe technology. If something works, they'll be interested -- and it's increasingly clear that gas power is not working out:

The rising cost of fuel has the Pentagon pressuring the four branches of the armed services to cut their energy bills wherever they can. It's easy to see why—every US $10 increase in the price of a barrel of oil costs the Air Force, for example, an extra $600 million. The Army, Navy, and Marines, too, are tearing through their budgets. In response, energy managers at bases across the country are reevaluating how they light, insulate, heat, and cool their buildings. The most ambitious of these managers have begun aggressively adopting renewable-energy technologies. Together they have emerged as a distributed network of clean-energy advocates...

This movement is even more impressive because it's decentralized. As consultant Thomas Morehouse bluntly states: "There is no energy policy. There is no coordinated Defense Department program for renewable-energy deployment and no single office in the Pentagon that tracks it."

The proposals outlined are remarkable: massive computer-controlled solar plants at Nellis AFB, "tactical biorefineries" that convert food waste into fuel and energy, wind power investment throughout the US, and one of the world's largest geothermal stations in the Chocolate Mountains of California. The military's timeline is more ambitious than anything the civilian government would attempt, too: several of the bases profiled in the article plan on being completely self-sufficient by 2015. More importantly, it's working. McGuire AFB in New Jersey has cut their electricity usage by 14% in a single year. As these small breakthroughs get high-profile attention, expect to see a snowball effect as bases around the world try to emulate the domestic trailblazers.

As Don Juhasz, chief of energy and utilities for the U.S. Army, puts it, "There are enough of us deep within the DOD who see that, long term, if we're going to be here 50 years from now, we need to be leaders and drive the country towards the future we want. We need to set the example."

Source: IEEE Spectrum, one of the best science magazines today.

3 comments

Filed in: Future Tech

“Changing Images of Man” in PDF Format

Posted Nov 13, 2008 11 comments

UPDATE 11/11/08: Apologies to those readers who've been trying to get ahold of this fascinating document. We switched servers recently and neglected to transfer a lot of PDF files -- entirely my mistake. This is the single most-requested item in the Library, so here's an OCR scan of the 1974 forgotten classic:

DOWNLOAD PDF NOW

Changing Images of Man is the stuff of legend -- but the actual document is way more interesting than the conspiracy theory that surrounds it. It's an undeniably weird document, though, and even the most airbrushed versions of it's origin and history make for mind-expanding reading.

Changing Images is especially interesting today because the "future crisis" it was written to avert is now coming to pass. The Stanford Research Institute gathered a diverse group of brilliant thinkers and asked them to imagine how to change the entire world. Today it makes for occasionally challenging but rewarding brainfood.

When I first got ahold of this document, I thought it was the blueprint for world government and Willis Harman's beloved "Global Mind Change." There's no secret formulas here, and no admissions from the secret society. There is a robust and still-valuable body of work about how to change human culture for the better -- I'd like to think that's more useful. Let me know if you agree.

11 comments

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Filed in: Social Control

Newt Gingrich on Using Language for Social Control

Posted Oct 27, 2008 7 comments

NOTE: this is all verbatim from GOP documents

As you know, one of the key points in the GOPAC tapes is that "language matters." In the video "We Are a Majority," Language is listed as a key mechanism of control used by a majority party, along with Agenda, Rules, Attitude and Learning. As the tapes have been used in training sessions across the country and mailed to candidates, we have heard a plaintive plea: "I wish I could speak like Newt."

That takes years of practice. But we believe that you could have a significant impact on your campaign and the way you communicate if we help a little. That is why we have created this list of words and phrases.

This list is prepared so that you might have a directory of words to use in writing literature and mail, in preparing speeches, and in producing electronic media. The words and phrases are powerful. Read them. Memorize as many as possible. And remember that, like any tool, these words will not help if they are not used....

...third time I've said that. (Laughter.) I'll probably say it three more times. See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda. (Applause.)

--source link

Contrasting Words

Often we search hard for words to help us define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party.

decay... failure (fail)... collapse(ing)... deeper... crisis... urgent(cy)... destructive... destroy... sick... pathetic... lie... liberal... they/them... unionized bureaucracy... "compassion" is not enough... betray... consequences... limit(s)... shallow... traitors... sensationalists...

endanger... coercion... hypocrisy... radical... threaten... devour... waste... corruption... incompetent... permissive attitudes... destructive... impose... self-serving... greed... ideological... insecure... anti-(issue): flag, family, child, jobs... pessimistic... excuses... intolerant...

stagnation... welfare... corrupt... selfish... insensitive... status quo... mandate(s)... taxes... spend(ing)... shame... disgrace... punish (poor...)... bizarre... cynicism... cheat... steal... abuse of power... machine... bosses... obsolete... criminal rights... red tape... patronage

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."

"If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it."

-- Edward Bernays

Optimistic Positive Governing Words

Use the list below to help define your campaign and your vision of public service. These words can help give extra power to your message. In addition, these words help develop the positive side of the contrast you should create with your opponent, giving your community something to vote for!

share... change... opportunity... legacy... challenge... control... truth... moral... courage... reform... prosperity... crusade... movement... children... family... debate... compete... active(ly)... we/us/our... candid(ly)... humane... pristine... provide...

liberty... commitment... principle(d)... unique... duty... precious... premise... care(ing)... tough... listen... learn... help... lead... vision... success... empower(ment)... citizen... activist... mobilize... conflict... light... dream... freedom...

peace... rights... pioneer... proud/pride... building... preserve... pro-(issue): flag, children, environment... reform... workfare... eliminate good-time in prison... strength... choice/choose... fair... protect... confident... incentive... hard work... initiative... common sense... passionate

Editor's note: this could easily be re-titled "A Guide to Sarah Palin's Entire Working Vocabulary." It's worth sitting down with Wordle and a couple of her speech transcripts. For example...

7 comments

Filed in: Social Control