Skilluminati Research

One Billion Earth Homeless? Is this for real?

Posted Apr 21, 2008 9 comments

If it's accurate, the situation is way worse than I thought. I feel like a total dick when I type something like that, but damn, it's true. I was startled to find this on page 287 of the super-dope book Worldchanging, which was very much worth the $20.

There are 1 billion squatters in the world today, almost one in six people on the planet. If current trends continute, there will be 2 billion squatters by 2030 and 3 billion (more than one third of humanity) by the midpoint of the twenty-first century.

To keep up with the influx, the world must build 96,150 homes a day - roughly 4000 homes every hour. Generally, only squatters are prepared to make this effort. Their homes start out as mud and cardboard hovels. But once they know they will not be evicted and they can exercise control over their communities, they create permanent, thriving neighborhoods.

There's a couple other gems as well:

Alone, squatters have little power. Together, they can create great things. "The problem of the urban poor can only be solved by the urban poor, not anybody else," says Jockin Arputham, head of Slum/Shack Dwellers International, a global squatter-organizing effort. "The urban poor will be the change agents of the city."

And from the "other cultures are beautifully surreal" department:

A generation ago, the tiny hamlet of Sultanbeyli on the Asian side of Istanbul was just beginning to attract immigrants from the east. Those early arrivals lived in hovels, pirated electricity, and survived without water or toilets. But as more people came, the citizens of Sultanbeyli pursued their political rights - and this has made for an amazing transformation.

In Turkey, if squatters build overnight without being caught, they cannot be evicted without being taken to court. This is why Turkey's squatter areas are known as gecekondu, meaning "it happened at night." Further, once a gecekondu community has two thousand residents, it can petition the federal government to recognize it as a legal municipality.

Today, Yahya Karakaya, Sultanbeyli's popularly elected mayor, works in an air-conditioned office on the top floor of the seven-story squatter city hall building, with a view over the city of 300,000 people who do not fear eviction.

I'm still waiting on a recently ordered copy of The Job, a collection of interviews with the late great William S. Burroughs. In it, WSB proposed selling people in the "Third World" some Authority Kits, which were basically all the fixings for an official-looking police roadblock. Uniforms, badges, decorations, letterhead, stamps: everything, for a couple hundred bucks. (And over time, much much less.) This generates incomes for indiginous people and this undermines overall trust in authority. Not saying it's a good thing, just saying that option is out there.

Also worth considering that there's already a thriving global market in "Authority Kits" -- as Mao said, power comes from the barrel of the guns which are sold by the billions, all over the Earth, every year. Official-looking, comfortably fitted police unforms are nice and all, but in actual practice all you need is a group of people who all have guns, right?

Yeesh. Welcome to the Kali Yuga, and enjoy your workweeks.

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Filed in: 5GW Project 2008

The Irreversible Problem of Dangerous Information

Posted Apr 19, 2008 10 comments

Thanks to my friend Garrett Heaney for the discussion that inspired this one.

With publicly available infomation, self-training and luck, a single human being can have a huge effect on the everyday lives of millions of people. I could be talking about a terrorist attack or I could be talking about a YouTube video.

Is there any safe way to talk about this material? I'm dumbstruck by how much Peter J. Carroll and John Boyd have in common.

Here's the problem: there's a very defined vocabulary of destruction available today. Futurists and policymakers are concerned about "SEI" -- Super-empowered Individuals." Power asymmetry is presented as a bad thing, but for us peasants it's a more level playing field.

As you can imagine, that apparently spooks the shit out of the formerly ruling class.

What I'm doing with Skilluminati is codifying technique for solo warfare. Not only because it's a "manual" but also because it's an accurate model of the problem. Personally, I happen to prefer living in a peaceful community, being healthy and not having to carry weapons around. I would imagine anyone reading this feels the same, even those of you enlisted. I am probably more concerned with defending against these tactics than I am with codifying them.

After all, how precise can I be? I need to be at Esozone this year, so I can't get deported until November at least. Check out the John Robb thinkpiece "The Disruption of Saudi Arabia" -- he can only say so much.

I will probably say way more than that, way too often.

Blogger Types

The military gave humanity the Brevity Code, and thinking in military terms can be clarifying and useful. For instance, the Pentagon is engaged in ongoing "Information Operations" -- spending billions every year on what was formerly termed information warfare.

It's a small detail, but I bring it up because if online communication, information broadcasting and persuasion is being used as a weapon, where is that "common sense" metaphor actually taking us? The battlefield is "hearts and minds" of civilian "non-combatant" populations, as stated in Joint Doctrine. The insurgents are anyone counteracting military propaganda and gathering intelligence on their interests...you know, most bloggers, probably including you.

Stakes is High

We approach many problems from many different angles. Only a few of them actually work.

I'm a big advocate of trial and error -- in fact, that's the only way to explain most of my conscious life. But it's mostly error, and most of what intelligent humans devote themselves to is fluff.

I don't think where I'm taking Skilluminati Research is irresponsible. I think this is signifigant information, unlike my stoner fluff at Hump Jones. Warfare is just another skillset that future mutants need to learn, and it's a logical application of time, much like martial arts. I'm actively researching it, putting it into practice, and then codifying it for other people.

Back when Skilluminati was running on the regular, way back in '07, I featured an old Kevin Kelly essay title "Information as a Communicable Disease." He was meditating on how experiments tracking the spread of ideas, when graphed, bear a startling resemblance to maps of how diseases spread. As I've implied in the title, dangerous information is an irreveribile problem, from nuclear weapons to improvised explosive devices to pdf maps of electrical grids.

"Information," much like the "electricity" it's based on, is everywhere at once, interacts with everyone and everything, and yet it's impossible to precisely define. When information gets crystalized, though, it's undeniably dangerous stuff -- like the hotel room full of Ricin in Las Vegas, for instance.

There's a lot of good comments in an earlier discussion, Is Secrecy Ever Justified?, that relates to this. I'm definitely still curious what people think. I welcome opposition but tend to delete long rants.

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Filed in: 5GW Project 2008

Get Familiar with John Boyd

Posted Apr 17, 2008 4 comments

To comprehend and cope with our environment we develop mental patterns or concepts of meaning. The purpose of this paper is to sketch out how we destroy and create these patterns to permit us to both shape and be shaped by a changing environment. In this sense, the discussion also literally shows why we cannot avoid this kind of activity if we intend to survive on our own terms.

--from Destruction and Creation

I've covered military strategist/taoist warrior John Boyd once before, and as the tone of Skilluminati Research turns toward real-world instruction and application, Boyd will become a central figure. He was a very precise thinker and a very concise writer -- in terms of being stripped-down, bullshit-free and clearly understandable, you'd be hard pressed to find a better author in military history.

Well...barring Sun Tzu. But for my money, John Boyd is light years beyond Machiavelli and still running circles around existing military doctrine.

Boyd recognized, decades go, that the chain of command would eventually be used as a weapon against the military itself. Specifically, it would be wrapped around the neck of the top brass by small bands of insurgents who travel lighter, react faster, and refuse to abide by conventional warfare.

RESPECT THE TROOPS.

Earlier this afternoon I was out on the porch with my laptop and wound up talking to a passing stranger. He was a Marine and he was broke -- trying to raise gas money to get back home to Carbondale, Illinois. He said he'd been walking around all day and getting harassed everywhere he went. Local police had a problem with him being black and broke, and local liberals apparently mistook him an official spokesman of the Bush administration. I gave him as much as I could but less than I should have.

I mention this because doing this research has given me a newfound respect for our troops. Not merely because of their bravery -- and if you don't think volunteering to be on the line of fire qualifies as "bravery," you're just being stubborn (and dumbfuck).

What really got me thinking was reading The Small-Unit Leader's Guide to Counterinsurgency, which outlines the training and the daily job description of ground-level commanders. The sheer amount of details they need to keep track of is nearly super-human. The learning curve is more of a vertical brick wall you must scale or die.

The Marine I talked to was broke because our soldiers aren't paid well and there's less support for them on the homefront than ever. I don't mean people cheering and throwing confetti at them on the streets -- just health care and economic security. He's headed back in a month for his 3rd tour of duty in Basra.

As I will be repeating constantly in the weeks to come, I think a lot about what the next decade will bring. What happens when our warriors realize their masters view them as interchangeable meat property? What happens when young recruits in terrorist organizations like Hezbollah or FARC come to realize the beliefs they got raised with were merely bullshit? As the division between Superwealthy and 6 billion peasants and slaves becomes increasingly obvious to even the most domesticated humans, what will become of their warrior class?

The John Boyd Conceptual Spiral

To keep track of the dizzying responsibilities involved with modern warfare, you need a clear, simple, and effective overall system to organize your information overload.

Here's the entire conceptual framework, laid out in John Boyd's own words:

"Patterns of Conflict" represents a compendium of ideas and actions for winning and losing in a highly competitive world;

"Organic Design for Command and Control" surfaces the implicit arrangements that permit cooperation in complex, competitive, fast moving situations;

"The Strategic Game of ? and ?" emphasizes the mental twists and turns we undertake to surface appropriate schemes or designs for realizing our aims or purposes;

"Destruction and Creation" lays out in abstract but graphic fashion the ways by which we evolve mental concepts to comprehend and cope with our environment;

"Revelation" makes visible the metaphorical message that flows from this "Discourse."

All of the documents I linked to are hosted by the folks at Defense and the National Interest. BIG THANK YOU to Chet Richards for making this available.

That's more than enough brainfood for now, huh? I apologize for the overdose. When I find the single most concise summation of his overall body of work, I will definitely let y'all know.

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Filed in: 5GW Project 2008

Re-Opening Skilluminati Research for 2008

Posted Apr 16, 2008 8 comments

REAL QUICK SYNOPSIS

I lost interest in the Skilluminati project because I was framing it wrong. I believed I was engaged in anthropological and historical research -- studying How People With Power Behave. Obviously, the defeatism is built into the premise, with that kind of phrasing.

What I've recently come to realize is that Skilluminati Research is actually instructions for my fellow power weirdos and future mutants on how to apply their power. From RAND documents to UN studies to Neo-Con think tanks, strategic thinkers across the political spectrum agree that the biggest problem of our century is power asymmetry -- in other words, our "leaders" are becoming less empowered while everyday human beings can access more information and power than ever before.

Let's take a moment to savor the flavor of Newspeak here -- "Asymmetrical Warfare" is actually the most "symmetrical" form of warfare that's ever existed, because it puts small dedicated groups of insurgents on equal footing with any military on earth. It is actually the restoration of power balance in human culture, and these birth pangs of the Kali Yuga are the sign of something better on the horizon.

Or, unimaginable horror. I'm honestly not too clear on that one.

WHAT TO EXPECT

Models Instead of Narratives. What Maurice Strong has done is way less important to you and me than how he did it. The same is true for Willis Harman, Roland Stark and all the other parapolitical players I've profiled in the past. There's already too many projects keeping track of the past -- between History is a Weapon and Conspiracy Archive, it's already taken care of. Skilluminati will be focused on underlying technique.

Exhuberance Instead of Fatalism. Every problem really is an opportunity. That's not just smile-tard optimist tripe, that's an operational fact of life. Sure, we're diving headlong into a global food shortage, World War Three and probably billions of deaths in the next 10 years, but if you're smart enough, fast enough, strong enough and lucky enough to survive, HOT DAMN WILL IT BE INTENSE. My interest in 5GW (5th Generation Warfare) is rooted in it's potential for positive social and cultural change.

Suggestions Instead of Answers. I'd explain this one, but that would defeat the point, huh?

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Filed in: News

Cryptogon Agrees: We’re Living in Post-Reality Now

Posted Apr 13, 2008 1 comment

From a recent post on the only news site I still read, Cryptogon:

Remember, I’m taking a break from using the EMERGENCY designation when it comes to this type of news. This is the new normal. I guess we should get used to it.

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Filed in: News