The Shroedinger's Cat Trilogy, pg. 380

"Knight knew what most people only vaguely suspected -- that Intelligence Agencies engage in both the collection of valid signals (information) and the promiscuous dissemination of fake signals (disinformation). They collected the information so that they could form a fairly accurate picture of what was really going on; they spread the disinformation so that all their competitors would form grossly inaccurate pictures. They did this because they knew that whoever could find out what the hell was really going on possessed an advantage over those who were misinformed, confused and disoriented.

This game had been invented by Joseph Fouche, who was the chief of the secret police under Napoleon. British Intelligence very quickly copied all of Fouche's tactics, and surpassed them...by the time of the First World War, Intelligence Agencies everywhere had created so much disinformation and confusion that no two historians ever were able to agree on why the war happened, and who double-crossed whom...

By the time of the Second World War, the "Double-Cross System" had been invented -- by British Intelligence, of course. This was the products of such minds as Alan Turing, a brilliant homosexual mathematician who (when not working in espionage) specialized in creating logical paradoxes other mathematicians couldn't solve, and Ian Fleming, whose fantasy life was equally rich (as indicated by his later James Bond books), and Dennis Wheatley, a man of exceptionally high intelligence who happened to believe that an international conspiracy of Satanists was behind every conspiracy he didn't invent himself. By the time Turing, Fleming, Wheatley and kindred British intellects had perfected the Double-Cross System, the science of lying was almost as precise as Euclidian geometry, and nearly as lovely to the detached observer.

What the Double-Cross experts had invented was the practical political applications of the Strange Loop. In logic or cybernetics, a Strange Loop is a set of propositions that, while valid at each point, is so constructed that it leads to an unresolvable paradox. The Double-Cross people drove the Germans bonkers by inventing disinformation systems that, if believed, were deceptive, but if doubted led to a second disinformation system. They enjoyed this work so much that, at times, they invented Triple Loops...

These Strange Loops functioned especially well because the Double-Cross experts had early on fed the Germans the primordial Strange Loop. "Most of your agents are working for us and feeding your Strange Loops."

Many German agents, it later turned out, had managed to collect quite a bit of accurate information about the Normandy invasion, but many others turned in equally plausible information about a fictitious Norwegian invasion; and all of them were under suspicion, anyway. German Intelligence might as well have made its decisions by tossing a coin in the air."

--Robert Anton Wilson

I wanted to share some highly memorable excerpts from Paul Rexton Kan's excellent paper "Drug Intoxicated Irregular Fighters: Complications, Dangers and Responses." You can download a PDF copy here. It's a very readable study of the role drugs play in asymmetric warfare around the world.

The first two quotes are entertaining, but the real brainfood is in the third part.

Really Bad Ideas

"Drugged conscripts have been a danger to their own forces; a soldier stationed near the Russian border with Georgia shot and killed eight of his colleagues (and wounded five others) during a hallucinogenic fit brought on by eating magic mushrooms."

Zombie Insurgency

"Combatant behavior is often influenced by an individual???s state of intoxication. For example, U.S. Marines reportedly had to change their tactics when notified that the insurgents in Fallujah were probably high and thus less likely to be stopped by standard shots to the torso. One Marine stated that ???on the second day of the fight, word came down to focus on head shots, that body shots were not good enough,??? while another compared it to ??????Night of the Living Dead???, people who should have been dead were still alive.???

Secret History of Vietnam

"During the Korean War, American servicemen stationed in Korea and Japan invented the ???speedball,??? an injectable mixture of amphetamine and heroin. U.S. troops in Vietnam preferred marijuana, but when subject to a sudden marijuana ban, they turned to heroin. Discipline problems quickly rose; as one commanding officer lamented 2 years after the marijuana crackdown, ???If it would get them to give up the hard stuff, I would buy all the marijuana and hashish in the Delta as a present.???

"Drug use was so severe among American troops in the later stages of the Vietnam War that more soldiers were evacuated for drug problems than for battlefield wounds."

"The addiction rate of returning troops has been of constant concern to average citizens as well as elites. In November 1971, New York reported nearly 10,000 heroin-addicted Vietnam veterans which, as discussed in this monograph, was the result of the U.S. military???s clamp down on widespread marijuana use by troops.

Heroin use among Vietnam veterans created societal fears of rising crime and disorder. Time magazine reflected the public mood by reporting that ???the specter of weapons-trained, addicted combat veterans joining the deadly struggle for drugs in the streets of America is ominous...the Capone era of the ???20s may look like a Sunday school picnic by comparison."

It's not fair for me to keep discussing these concepts as "5GW," and it's not smart, either. I can only accomplish 2 things: first, confusing my intended audience with excess terminology, and second, infuriating those who were already covering 5GW years before I started writing about it.

I would like to thank the following authors: Tim Stevens, Bryan Finoki, Mark Safranski, Shane Deichman, Chet Richards, Fabius Maximus, John Robb, Purpleslog, Subadei, Curtis Gale Weeks, tdaxp, Smitten Eagle, Wiggins, and everyone at Coming Anarchy.

MEANWHILE: I'm building a thinking aid called the Invisible Experiment with the goal of "rethinking conflict and remixing concepts." I'm taking single "slices" of concepts and data and using a tag cloud to navigate. Currently less than 100 entries and I'm aiming for 333 before I'll consider this puppy operational.

Up Next

Rather than put the site on hold, I'll be returning Skilluminati to it's roots -- the study of social control. I'm working on a physics approach, considering social conformity as entrainment. I'm hoping that's still interesting and useful to the folks who've been reading. I'm very thankful for all the feedback and brainfood from you folks.

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.

A number of Skilluminati readers have voiced the concern that calling benevolent 5GW campaigns "warfare" is misleading or outright wrong. As Bruce Scanlon puts it:

WE have a great deal of choice about which scenario we will end up in, and WE have the power, within the scope of our own lives, to make significant contributions to these different scenarios.

I am not saying you can get the whole world to do what you want it to do, but I am saying that you can make your part of the world/find a part of the world a lot more to your liking-- and that you have a lot more power to do this than most people think.

This sizable power for change to me deserves more than to be categorized as ???warfare,??? 5th generation or not.

Is war merely overt violence? If you subdue your opponent using judo or aikido, is it still a fight? Bands of primates go to war, and I'm hoping humans can do better than the hunt-kill method. (Then again, maybe not: recently Israeli general Yossi Peled said "The only effect I know in warfare is to kill the enemy.") So first, let's take a look at my own cognitive biases...

Aikido Anarchism

My interest in warfare was awakened by the article Neocortical Warfare, which I immediately wrote a Brainsturbator article about. (I go into more depth about my vision for 5GW in a recent Wishtank interview.)

I suspect, but I cannot prove, that human beings can greatly amplify their personal power by aligning their goals and techniques with natural design. By fighting on the side of Life on Earth, we've opted for the most powerful available ally on the planet. Advances in human technology are based on principles decoded from nature, and nature remains vastly more sophisticated and robust than existing human technology.

So although my friendly local wikipedia has a detailed article on the history and theory of war, I find the "spectrum of conflict" and "measures short of war" drivel to be mostly intellectual apologies for the naked exercise of state power. We're all grown-ups, and we all know that power kills people every day. C'est la vie for better or worse, and it's obviously worse. Let's set academia aside and ask some questions instead.

Pointed Questions

Can you wage war without your opponent knowing it? Well, Condoleeza Rice and Donald Rumsfield were both totally shocked by 9-11, weren't they? The concept of planes as weapons was utterly unthinkable, despite the fact they were both repeatedly briefed about exactly that. You can view that as proof of conspiracy, or just another example of how cognitive bias blinds all humans equally.

The concept of the secret war is not new to 5GW, and I refer the reader to earlier and excellent reads from dan tdaxp, dan tdaxp again , and Zenpundit.

Is blogging warfare? According to the Department of Defense, the answer is "Yes." See, us independent media types are engaged in Information Operations (IO), formerly known by the less friendly and ambiguous term "Psychological Warfare." As John Rendon so eloquently put it: "Information is an instrument of national power, just as military, economic and political. Like any weapon or tool, the United States Government needs to use it or cede the 'battlefield' to someone else."

Is activism warfare? According to the White House, absolutely. All you non-violent liberal types are engaged in "Low-Intensity Conflict."

Low intensity conflict a political-military confrontation between contending states or groups below conventional war and above the routine, peaceful competition among states. It frequently involves protracted struggles of competing principles and ideologies. Low-intensity conflict ranges from subversion to the use of the armed forces. It is waged by a combination of means, employing political, economic, informational, and military instruments. Low-intensity conflicts are often localized, generally in the Third World, but contain regional and global security implications

Are domestic law enforcement operations warfare? It's an armed conflict, there's casualties involved, and the parallels between domestic law enforcement and foreign counter-insurgency are striking. Lethal use of force by police is legally justified, but does that nescessarily make it legitimate? (Every non-civilian casualty of war is legally justified, too.)

If You Want My Opinion

Resource shortages are manufactured and wars are not nescessary. However, in 2008 there exists a global power elite -- probably less than 100,000 of them altogether -- who posess far too much power and abuse it at will. As a result, millions of human beings around the world are suffering on a daily basis. Is that something worth fighting against? Would you term that conflict a "war?"

That graffitti basically sums up my outlook for 2008-2012. Every single human community on Earth has expanded exponentially and bumped shoulders on an abruptly crowded planet. Communities need to rethink everything and rebuild for a global future -- anyone trying to force a top-down solution is either willfully evil or catastrophically stupid. This applies from Al Gore to Vladimir Putin to Hugo Chavez to George Bush: you need to stop looking up to your leaders and start looking around to your neighborhoods.

More Pointed Questions

When the peace of Western affluence is made possible by the violent opression of Third World countries, what is the "spectrum of conflict" useful for? The thing to remember about the whole humans species is that it's the whole human species and all the lines we draw beyond that are arbitrary, often misleading and occasionally very useful. When you grow up in a home that's financed by profits from Lockheed Martin, is that peace? Is "peace" the condition that exists within the fortress walls of the gated communities and Green Zones?

Is the city of Chicago at war? Wikipedia has an outstanding map of ongoing conflicts around the world that's worth considering here -- armed conflict with organized crime surely qualifies as warfare, right? As the supporting data notes, "major wars are those that cause at least 1000 battlefield deaths annually," and if you dig around, you might it's kind of hard to find crime reported in human terms.

The usual factoid is the "Homicide Rate" -- how many homicides are reported annually, per 100,000 local residents. This renders death into an abstract index instead of a distinct and specific number of dead human beings. Reporting the numbers honestly is a body count, and body counts are alarming. Homicide Rate is like humidity, which is why you'll find most FBI/DoJ statistics published in that format.

In 1994, the city of New Orleans had 424 reported homicides. Drawing off data from Swivel's "Homicides in the US" spreadsheet, the Drug War in California is claiming more than enough lives every year to qualify as a "major war" -- a year before New Orleans peaked, Cali reported 4,096 homicides. From 1990 to 1994, the total number of US homicides floated between 23,000 and 24,000 annually -- then began a sharp decline. It's been stable at over 16,000 a year since 2001.

Last Word: Smitten Eagle

Smitten Eagle said "I???m not sure I necessarily buy into the 5GW frameworks yet. Trying to nail 4GW Jell-O to the wall is hard enough. 5GW is like nailing said Jell-O while it???s still liquid." His explanation of this is some of the best writing on 5GW I've found so far -- from a comment at Chicago Boyz:

As far as 5GW goes, I don???t think there is even a solid framework to rely on. Some have referred to 5GW as tactically being about changing the enemie???s Observation in the OODA loop to make him think he???s not even in conflict with the enemy. For me, this is too close to the political end of the Policy-War continuum of violence to be considered warfare.

Others have spoken about the role of the Super Empowered Individual (SEI) as a major actor in 5GW. I???m afraid that lone gunmen, in my conception of warfare, do not qualify as ???organized violence.??? For violence to be ???organized,??? it requires an Organization. An Organization of One is not an organization. I think there has to be more to organized violence than a single pissed-off dude with lots of cunning.

Finally, for 5GW to actually exist, it needs to have a strong track record of convincingly beating 4GW fighting forces. I???m afraid there really hasn???t been any evidence to support this. (Unless, of course, my denial of 5GW is evidence of it???s success???but if that???s the case, I think we???re getting a bit too close to Heisenberg???s Uncertainty Principle to speak anything authoritatively about 5GW, or any xGW for that matter.)

A great example of the circular reasoning and collapsing logic of Invisible War. My next post is what I've been working on this whole time -- a thinkpiece on how to wage war in a Universe that actually runs on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Since that's the Universe we happen to live in.

This article is entirely indebted to the ongoing work and original research of Cryptogon. One of the very best sites online, if you're into "being informed."

This article might appear to be mere pessimism. To the reader with a good imagination and better common sense, though, I'm advocating an entirely different angle from the traditional binary trap of Fighting Against Power Elites vs. Fighting For Power Elites.

Humans fight -- let them. (Seriously, trying to stop a fight is dangerous and stupid 99% of the time, unless it's kids who are smaller than you.) The 5th Generation Warfare angle we'll be pursuing at Skilluminati is based on leveraging the existing fault lines, ongoing conflicts and profitable culture wars that we live within today.

I'm not advocating that we should stir up more bullshit -- I'm suggesting that we practice the martial art of invisibly exploiting the bullshit that's already here. To do otherwise is to ignore history -- here's a look at why.

Those Who Would Overthrow Them

Let's bypass Kent State, the fate of the Branch Dividians, disappearances in Chile, Argentina and everywhere else in Latin America, and the assassinations of Archbishop Oscar Romero, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, since none of them were actually advocating the overthrow of the United States government, they just happened to get in the way.

Let's focus on a single event which is much more recent, and far more relevant to the inept would-be "5GW warriors" among us.

This is the story of a federal agent who tried to get three hippies to commit to a plan -- any plan -- to blow something up and break Federal laws. It took her many months of prodding, lots of pushy confrontations, and a lot of her FBI money, but they finally managed to frame their targets. Yep, that's the story in two sentences -- here's a great article that explains it detail if you want more narrative backgroun. I'm going to be exploring the tactical insights here. What amazed me most: how "Full Spectrum Dominance" applies to the surviellance of activists.

On January 10, the four toured the Institute of Forest Genetics in Placerville, using fake names and posing as college students for a tour. They were under surveillance the whole time by FBI agents and agents of the U.S. Forest Service.

On the morning of January 13, the FBI was keeping a close eye on a cabin in Dutch Flat, about a half-hour north of Auburn. The government had the cabin and its four occupants--two men and two women--under 24-hour surveillance for nearly a week because the group was suspected of plotting acts of domestic terrorism in the name of the Earth Liberation Front.

The four left the cabin at around 10 a.m. in a 1997 maroon Chevy Lumina and traveled about 30 miles to a Kmart in Auburn. There were agents inside the store, watching them shop.

Hippies are the butt of jokes for a reason, and these kids were basically stumbling around in a minefield. Lesson: Effective 5GW is a process that takes total surveillance for granted. It must be exceedingly subtle and executed in plain sight.

YOU MIGHT BE WONDERING, as I was, how exactly Federal agents justify the dirtywork they do undercover, and there is a precise answer. It's referred to as a Tier 1 Otherwise Illegal Activity when an agent breaks the law in order to catch someone breaking the law. The question of legal rights and entrapment is far too boring and irrelevant to pursue, though, so let's move along.

Since this is a cautionary tale, it's worth remembering the overall rules for how punishment is distributed. Here is how a 4-member cell being set up on a Federal level will fare, on precedent:

Zack Jenson, age 20, spent 6 months in prison, then agreed to testify against McDavid.

Lauren Weiner has an unfortunate last name, but at least it was a wealthy one -- she's been free on bail with her family and also agreed to testify against McDavid. She was also 20 years old.

Eric McDavid was sentenced to 19 years and 7 months. He's 28 and got logically framed up as the dangerous ringleader. (Note to Derrick Jensen fans: shave the beard.)

And as for Anna? The article says she made out alright: "According to testimony from Sacramento-based FBI Special Agent Nasson Walker, she got paid at least $75,000 for her work."

The reader could be forgiven for thinking I'm telling some sort of moral story -- perhaps implying that "Anna" is down with 5GW and one of the cool kids. NAY. "Anna" is just a servant of power -- and those who serve power historically fare no better than those who oppose it. Which is the subject of my next cautionary tale.

Those Who Would Work For Them

Let's just bypass Paul Wellstone, Vincent Foster, the assassinations of JFK, RFK and the strange fates Roberto Calvi and Frank Olson. The past is dead, and the news has given us a even-more interesting example.

Roland Carnaby was a company man -- a veteran of the CIA, although that's a matter of some dispute. The other publicly known facts about Carnaby are not disputed, though, and they're eye-opening. At the age of 52, he was shot in the chest, handcuffed, and left to bleed to death while Houston Police officers watched. The image above is real -- I cribbed it off a Fox News website and it was taken from a news helicopter. My own interpretation of facts is obvious and predictable -- Carnaby either knew too much or threatened the wrong people, both essentially the same problem.

When you serve power, you cannot protect yourself from those who protect you. Of course, when you fight power, you're left with the exact same problem again, and I apologize for making resistance sound futile.

It is, though. Resisting the momentum of your culture is absurd. Who can seriously talk about fighting globalization? You might as well resist the Pacific Ocean.

"All of this other stuff (about Carnaby's mysterious life) is all very interesting, but it is of no consequence when you consider a man is dead and he died handcuffed and nobody tried to stop the bleeding or anything," Brooten said. "You know what you call that? You call that an assassination."

Jett defended the officers at the scene, saying they are not trained to assist people with serious gunshot wounds.

"We would handcuff people and try to get them comfortable, but we're not paramedics, and most officers don't know about giving first aid like that other than CPR, and you don't want to give CPR to a gunshot victim," he said.

Investigators later found three weapons in Carnaby's car, police said. One pistol was under the passenger-side floormat. A second was between the seats. On the back seat floorboard lay a pistol-grip shotgun with a round in the chamber and the safety off.

No Moral to the Stories

This is only food for thought, of course. Things are going to change a lot in the next decade, but archetypes will repeat like always. We will always rationalize our actions, no matter how callous or brutal. I'm sure you think you're a good person, too.

Here in the 21st century, talking about warfare is essential. Our planet is being turned into a slaughterhouse and Control is going to be a lot more elusive for everyone -- especially those in power. We've seen a nearly infinite array of permutations of "kill the enemy" -- 5GW is something new. Harmonize with the enemy, control the enemy, use the enemy.

Next week: my first Dreaming 5GW contribution, working out the details of my own theory, beta version though it may be. Sorry for the long lead-up, and thanks for all the brainfood from everyone commenting, especially Eric Patton who's been a huge help behind the scenes.

I don't want the reader to think I'm a cynic or a violent extremist...or a fucking moron. I realize the claim that 5GW has a role in positive cultural change raises eyebrows, and I'm working on an article explaining this in some depth. Meanwhile, I came across some truly potent brainfood that states it all better than I could.

What follows is an excerpt from the Marjorie Kelly and Paul Raskin essay How Food Riots, Pricey Gas and Home Foreclosures Point to a Better Future -- a highly recommended read. Mostly for this section here:

Transitions announce themselves in the language of crisis. We are in a time of turbulence as old patterns give way and new ones form. The multiple crises today signal a system transformation operating at the scale of the planet. Transformation is distinct from adaptation, which is the normal process of incremental adjustment to new conditions. Transformations are rare moments in history when dominant societal structures cannot cope with emerging developments and change in fundamental ways. With the converging lines of crises we face today, we may be entering a perfect storm of destabilizing stress.

We cannot predict the future. It may be good, bad or ugly, depending on how events unfold and how we respond. But scenarios can help us envision alternate futures, and our organization has -- with the aid of an international group -- crafted four scenarios of possible futures. In a "market forces" scenario, the United States continues with business as usual, other nations converge toward American lifestyles, economic growth remains the sine qua non of development, and environmental strain and cultural polarization intensify. In "policy reform," government seeks ambitious policies to protect the environment and reduce inequity; but with the ethos of consumerism unchecked, the reformist path could be overwhelmed by unsustainable trends. In "fortress world," reform fails and problems cascade into self-amplifying crises as the affluent retreat into protected enclaves amid oceans of misery.

In a "great transition" scenario, mounting crises lead not to breakdown but to breakthrough into a sustainable culture, where we shrink our environmental footprint, not only because we must live lightly and equitably on this small planet, but because quality of life matters more than quantity of stuff. It is a world where global interdependence -- as both a fact of history and a moral imperative -- replaces the heedless pursuit of self-interest as a guiding ethos. Such a resilient, just and livable world order is possible, though not inevitable. We do not offer facile hope. Large-scale social transformation does not come from small-scale woes: A time of troubles lies ahead.

Nevertheless, there is a case for hope. In the turbulence of transition, small actions can have big effects. We stand at a moment of unparalleled creative opportunity that calls for bold leaders and engaged citizens to articulate new visions of a 21st century social order and to mobilize a global movement to bring these visions to reality. Our world today generates more despair and resignation than vision and action. But it would not be the first time that an effervescence of popular political energy arrived unexpectedly to shift the direction of history.

We are beset today not by random bad luck, but by a systemic crisis that could -- on the other side of calamity -- open the way to hopeful transformation. It is up to us.

But remember: random bad luck still happens, at every level of scale. Big "thinkpiece" on Wednesday....where do you guys put the probability between those four events?

My best guess: "fortress world" 40%, "great transition" 40%, "market forces" 15%, policy reform 5%. I obviously have no faith in top-down government solutions, and I'm fundamentally neutral on the moral character of human nature. We do what we do -- hopefully, we do the right thing.

While I'm working on the next round of material (for a number of sites) I would like to pose a question to the folks who've been commenting so far. Frank discussion of weapons and personal security is of course "dangerous," in terms of both potential consquences for myself and the potential applications of this information.

However, I'm also of the opinion that Western culture is very much full of shit when it comes to violence. I could write a separate essay on how violence can be simultaneously morally wrong and acceptable entertainment. I find it hard to reconcile how violence can be forbidden for citizens and compulsory for soldiers, or how violence can be admirable when practiced by our military, yet despicable when practiced by others.

I think it's a white luxury to even discuss "whether or not" we should be using violence, when fireams and explosives are a fact of life for the majority of the humans on Earth. We are a planet at war, but yet most of us with Internets will never be touched by it. I have been told that Ghandi's name does not come up very often in Palestine, but I've never been there.

So my question: how does a super-empowered free moral agent approach violence in 2012? Is violent action part of your toolkit?

Let's rewind.

I've been talking about 5th Generation Warfare, but that's because I'm a hyperactive little kid who's fascinated by everything in the Universe. Here's a remarkable fact: 4GW is a problem that hasn't been solved yet.

Sure, there's a lot of written material about counter-insurgency operations, some of it truly brilliant. However, on a reality-based level, 4GW outfits are still doing billions in damage to better-armed, better-funded nations and corporations. In the face of this continuous loss, something remarkable has happened: the generals and the technocrats are sounding like damn hippies and calling for smaller, sustainable communities, energy independence and other radical cultural changes.

The important point to remember is never underestimate the motivation, patience, and creativity of an adversary! He is attacking against a defense that is na???ve, arrogant, unbalanced, and fragmented. We are critically dependent on our technology, but the gap between offensive and defensive capability is huge and growing. We must find a different path.

We have to recognize that our systems are vulnerable to sophisticated attacks and find ways to defend against them.

Now, that sure sounds like Amory Lovins, especially his classic article "How to Get Real Security." But it's not: that quote is actually from James Gosler at Sandia National Laboratories. Of course, scientists are always saying weird things, so perhaps his call for rethinking the fundamental infrastructure of Western Civilization is just another voice in the wilderness. Gosler made that statement at the 2008 Unrestricted Warfare Symposium held by Johns Hopkins. The proceedings of the conference are available online, and there were some definite gems in what I read through last night.

Here's another clear-cut sign that 4GW remains an unsolved problem -- witness the palpable frustration of Philip Mudd, the "Associate Executive Assistant Director" of the FBI's National Security Branch:

What we have is an architecture of youth that is not organized in ways that we have seen in the past. They do not touch a known person; they do not touch a known cell. We cannot use known security tools. We cannot follow their phone calls because they are not calling anybody. We cannot follow who they are talking to on a computer because they are self-radicalizing on their own computer, and they are not chatting. We cannot follow them in terms of a vehicle or somebody they are meeting on the street because they are not a member of a cell. How do we stop them?

Good question, Mr. Mudd...

The Answer is: You Can't.

You can't defend strip malls, interstate commerce, nationwide electrical grids and our current system of agriculture. You can't defend the physical infrastructure of the internet and you can't defend huge borders.

As the distribution of power gets wider and deeper, old forms like nations and imperialism are no longer sustainable. As a general design rule: if it's not sustainable, it's not secure.

I'm a Vermont native -- an obscure part of the continental US, for American readers who might be unfamiliar -- and most folks there reached this conclusion about 200 years ago and have been trying to reverse the mistake of getting United to the US Federal Government. So it's remarkable that John Robb would be headed to my homeland to give a speech on "Defending Our Energy Security -Building Resilient Communities." (He'll be at the 2008 Vermont Distributed Energy Conference, if you'd like to attend.)

John Robb is a subject of controversy in 5GW circles, but more importantly, he's a really solid author and an original thinker. His last book, Brave New War, was excellent brainfood, and his blog Global Guerrillas is the best coverage on the topic I've found. So I'm obviously looking forward to his next project:

My goal with this book? I hope this book will provide readers with a useful eschatology for the current global system and a conceptual blueprint for the DIY (do-it-yourself) efforts necessary to build a Resilient Community.

The reaction the book will get? For those that completely tied to or immersed in the legacy system, this book will be a very scary read. For those that are fearless and willing to adapt in order to progress, it will become a go to reference.

You can get an early sense through his previous posts: exploring the pressures behind this transition with Transition Towns and Food and the RC, an exploration of energy independence through Microgrids, and the original brainstorm, The Resilient Community.

"The Internet is Killing Us"

That's from Philip Mudd again...I'll give him the last word:

CONCLUSION

In the nuclear age when the enemy was the Soviet Union, we had the luxury of imagery to look at sites, SIGINT (signal intelligence) to look at communications, HUMINT (human intelligence) to recruit sources and defectors, and international organizations like the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) to watch material. Try to apply a single one of those to a 17-year-old in the United States today.

When I wrote "Plain and Simple: Fuck 9/11," the title wasn't an afterthought or even a joke. Words were chosen carefully for maximum effect and sure enough, I still get an email a week about an article I wrote a year ago. It was in the context of asking 9/11 Truth activists what they expected that I raised a question I've been chewing on ever since:

Be honest with yourself: who are you asking for justice? Are you expecting the same power structure that has been running the United States of America for the past 50 years to give up because you?re right? Because you can prove mathematically that two buildings collapsed faster than they should have? Because you have thousands of pages of evidence to prove every point you?re making? Does the truth matter? Seriously. Does the truth matter? Or does power matter?

That's really the central question, and I'm not proposing it as an either-or. Both would be nice, but I'm also proposing it might be too late for that kind of hope. I've had a number of Skilluminati readers email the instant classic quote from an anonymous source, of course, in the Bush administration -- named as "a senior advisor to Bush":

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

This article emerged from some conversations I had after the first installment of The Language of Power. I was only sketching out a few points I would like to state much more clearly here.

Happiness is Slavery

Until about six months ago, I was unable to put my finger on why Barack Obama makes me uneasy.

I was having a (deeply hilarious) conversation with an Obama volunteer who stated it perfectly for me. She told me that Obama was all about how American 20-somethings were transforming -- from the Me generation to the We generation.

Skilluminati Research has nothing to do with the United States or the US military and I personally view all 195 "legitimate" nation-states on Earth as equally damaging to human progress. As Doug Stanhope puts it, nationialism is "baggage from dead people." All governments are founded on violence and maintained by exploitation.

I am very much indebted to the work of Curtis Gale Weeks, John Robb, Mark Safranski, and everyone at Dreaming 5GW and Small Wars Journal, but our language has some differences. I am unlike most 5GW bloggers in that I'm not worried about the future of the US as a global superpower. I'm writing for an audience very much like myself: post-nationalism, post-racism, post-religion human beings with no respect for authority, national borders or even the laws of physics.

Happiness is a Warm Gun

Peter J. Carroll, who is himself a 5GW veteran, operating under a pseudonym and re-wiring tens of thousands of brains around the world, posed this question in terms of religion. On a planet with over 10,000 actively worshipped Gods -- none of which are currently visible, none of which can be proven to exist -- how can you be sure which Divinity to bet upon? Doesn't it make more sense to invest that faith in yourself?

With Skilluminati Research, I'm making the same argument on a political level. Why make appeals to power when you could build your own? You could be learning to weld, working out or reading a book with that valuable time. Why worry about your leaders when they can't actually control you, and don't care what you personally think, want or feel?

5GW is power.

Specifically, 5GW is dedicated individuals exercising their power to achieve their own goals at the expense of everyone who gets in their way. I think this kind of clarity is missing from the discussion because the occult dimension of power has no place in a respectable debate, from military theory to politics to history. For thousands of years, small groups of humans using ritual magick have been controlling nations, waging wars and engaging in economic and psychological warfare. One occult warfare master who does get mentioned in military circles is Hassan i Sabbah, long a muse of William S. Burroughs and Robert Anton Wilson.

I'm open to the argument that I'm only engouraging a plague of lone psychopaths declaring war on the world, but my own 5GW practice is informed and indebted to D.J. Kilcullen, author of the 28 Articles, which you should probably read right now if you haven't already. Article 26 states: "Build your own solution -- only attack the enemy when he gets in the way."

As I said at the outset of this project, "my interest in 5GW (5th Generation Warfare) is rooted in it's potential for positive social and cultural change." I am investigating warfare for the same reasons I investigated psychology and marketing -- beacuse the tools of social control will be less damaging when they're widely distributed. Executives who have power over millions of other humans are inherently dangerous -- millions of humans with executive control over themselves is where we're headed this century.

The dinosaurs of governments and corporations and media conglomerates and think tanks and universities -- the old legitimate White Control System -- will not let go quietly and politely. So I think every future mutunt has a common-sense obligation to learn how to disable and disarm them as effectively as possible. This is going to be a very bumpy ride and we can all help minimize the bloodshed.

In closing I realize that I have used the word "I" far, far too often in this post. That trend shall not continue -- it's all technique from here on out.

Thank you for listening.

QUESTION: Some are raising that the privacy aspects of this thing, you know, sharing of that kind of data, very personal data, among four countries is quite a scary thing.

CHERTOFF: Well, first of all, a fingerprint is hardly personal data because you leave it on glasses and silverware and articles all over the world, they?re like footprints. They?re not particularly private.

His stance has remarkable implications for the future of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) in a post-Bell's Theorem world. It's also a very naked statement that the only "privacy" you can expect to have ends at the surface of your skin -- everything else is exposed to the panopticon. Clothing hides nothing anymore.

Spooky action at a distance is a great single-sentence summary of 5GW. For brainfood I submit Henry Okah, David Myatt and Ronald Stark. In terms of clinical psychology, 5GW operatives are NOT SANE -- they are sociopaths, they are monomaniacs, etc. Effective 5GW is all-consuming and requires greater discipline than most humans are willing to subject themselves to.

Henry Okah ran a multinational fuel-piracy ring, which funded the purchase of huge stockpiles of weapons, which were used to arm constantly-shifting groups of mercenaries who were organized and mobilized via SMS text messaging. He's repeatedly crippled the infrastructure of Nigeria, and done over $29 billion in damage to Shell. He pulled all this off while living a respectable life in South Africa: he's since been arrested in Angola and deported to face charges in Nigeria. Read more.

David Myatt wears many masks: he's a leading neo-nazi philosopher, he's a Satanic occultist, and he's also a radical Islamic cleric. Sounds crazy and gets far stranger than that -- get to know David Myatt aka Ashton Long aka Abdul Aziz. Jeff Wells at Rigorous Intuition has the best summary and meditation on Myatt's twisted legacy: read Nine Angles of Separation.

Ronald Stark was the subject of the most entertaining article I ever did research for: The Man Behind the LSD Curtain. It was mostly guesswork, quotations and my own blend of horseshit, but characters like Stark -- or Barry Seal, or Finis Shelnutt -- are worth studying for the patchwork of connections they reveal.

Along those lines, check out the excellent Zenpundit thinkpiece, Who Would Declare War on the World?

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.

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.

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.

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?