“O=W” is a bumper sticker beginning to show up on liberals’ cars. After the President’s speech Tuesday night at West Point, I suspect it will spread rapidly. 

For eight years, conservatives endured the agony of watching President George W. Bush attach the label “conservative” to a host of policies that were anti-conservative: Wilsonian wars, American empire, vast budget and trade deficits, increased entitlements, and the subordination of America’s interests to those of foreign powers. Now the shoe is on the other foot....

Read the rest on the "Lind" blog.

Some utterly random items (and thoughts) that may be of interest:

• Elizabeth Warren:  America without a Middle Class
• Bernanke  in trouble in the Senate.  I particularly like this statement from a Senate source:  "It’s great to see everyone come together – Democrats, Republicans, progressives and libertarians, against this Federal Reserve, which is not federal, and not a reserve, just a group printing money and giving it to their buddies."
• Broken strategy.  Reuters.  Surge goal:  400,000 Afghan troops and police.  The end game will be open source counter-insurgency (hyper-local militias).  Not sure they will get there before the money runs out.
• Micro P2P phone networks.  OpenVoIP overview.  Wiki.  Nice.
• In general, if you can turn the process structure used to make a product into more of a problem of information manipulation than physical work, you are likely see very rapid cycles of innovation and productivity improvement (due to Moore's law and open source tinkering).  That's what makes conceptual products like MIT's "food printer" interesting to me.  It's also why permaculture (as a replacement for traditional agriculture) is very interesting.  Your productivity in generating food using permaculture is a function of your ability to design better ecosystems and not how much energy or work you inject into the system.
• Party crashers and assassination opportunities.  Besides the implications of the lax security that allowed the Salahi's entry to a White House party without vetting, the funny thing (in the same way that you laugh about misfortune to lighten the burden) is that entry to the event was only a function of money.  They could have bought a ticket to the White House party.
• Wired.  How much does it cost to get access to your private communications from service providers?  This implies that the only difficulty in gaining access to say, real-time geo-location information on ALL of the cell phone users in Pakistan (for example), is what the service provider would charge you.  Sure, you could steal it, but with that much data and the need for real-time updates, it would be counterproductive to do so.
• Nigeria.  Lawfare aimed at the Oil Companies is picking up where MEND left off. Cool.
• Neo-Feudal Capitalism.  Is this model potentially viral?
• More on a rapid ice age (Gulf Stream break down).  Previous evidence from Greenland ice samples had suggested this abrupt shift in climate happened over the span of a decade or so. Now researchers say it surprisingly may have taken place over the course of a few months, or a year or two at most.   That's my experience with complex systems that enter catastrophic turbulence.  Change is fast.   Not sure if this is going to happen, but the ride looks very interesting.
• Robert Brenner on the failure of capitalism.  I have problems with modern, accepted economic theory.  It smacks of religion and not science, and that's a problem for decision making.  Some of my gripes:  It has failed to deliver predictive results, as we saw with the financial meltdown.  Worse, it has problems explaining historical results:  It can't explain why western economies haven't delivered any improvements to middle class incomes in three decades, despite rapidly rising productivity and growing GDP.  It can't explain the rise of Wall Street, the ongoing rush of assets bubbles, and our current ziggurat of debt.  It can't even explain why "free trade" works, for anyone but the low wage provider, in a world where all evidence points to the fact that information technology makes productivity hyper-portable.  Some effort to paper over this failure (in prediction) has been undertaken by followers of the Austrian school of economics, but that explanation is too narrow (it merely describes why the financial pneumonia killed you and not the economic AIDS that made you vulnerable).  Brenner, albeit a neo-Marxist, takes a stab at providing a more useful model.  Not sure he accomplished this, but it is more interesting and systemic than most of what I have read.  He makes that case that global capitalism as we know it is over and nothing is ready to replace it.

Some items of interest:

• Robert Young Pelton in a Daily News Op-Ed is on the right track with:  Abandon the 'mini-surge' and "...go back to what works: Empower the local tribes, enlist Afghans eager to fight the bad guys, don't force them to support a corrupt central government or bow to foreign forces - and keep picking off Al Qaeda with Special Operations troops and drones."  Sounds similar to what I told the Armed Services Committee ('... let's just skip to the end game.')
• Some nice conflict maps (Africa) from International Conflict Research in Zurich.
• Piracy Markets (community based).  Very cool.  LOTS of people sent this in to me (thanks much) since it is a great example of a global guerrilla staple:  'a bazaar of violence'....   '"Four months ago, during the monsoon rains, we decided to set up this stock exchange. We started with 15 'maritime companies' and now we are hosting 72. Ten of them have so far been successful at hijacking," Mohammed said.  'The shares are open to all and everybody can take part, whether personally at sea or on land by providing cash, weapons or useful materials ... we've made piracy a community activity...  Piracy investor Sahra Ibrahim, a 22-year-old divorcee, was lined up with others waiting for her cut of a ransom pay-out after one of the gangs freed a Spanish tuna fishing vessel. "I am waiting for my share after I contributed a rocket-propelled grenade for the operation," she said, adding that she got the weapon from her ex-husband in alimony. "I am really happy and lucky. I have made $75,000 in only 38 days since I joined the 'company'."    Wow.  Very cool to see my theory meet up with reality.   ;->
• Call for Boyd Links.  If  you have a paper, book, video, etc dealing with the theoretical work of John Boyd, plz let me know.  I'll post it to the John Boyd site. 
• This is one of the coolest government debt clocks I've seen.
• Sullivan, Elkus:  Global Cities, Global Gangs.

A guy I once knew, bought the factory purchasing experience for a high end automobile.  The experience was similar to a luxury vacation, except that he (with his wife in tow) visited the factory where the car was made, took some laps on the race track with his new purchase, and then drove it across Euroland (Autobahn driving) to the Netherlands (where it was shipped back the US).  Obviously, I thought it was very excessive (I get much more value out of my laptop than my car at 1/50 of the price, but hey, things don't have much of a hold over me), but it reflected an intellectual and emotional investment in a big purchase that you don't see very often.

That level of investment is one reason why the open source automobile start-up called Local Motors is interesting (unfortunately, their website needs a complete overhaul).  It's a decentralized car manufactory that invites the prospective owners to help build the cars, from the selection and customization of the design to actually joining the team that builds it (or doing it yourself if you have the inclination).*  That creates a connection between customer and product that you don't see often, and is very much in line with the "maker" spirit we see growing out there:  you actively build what you want rather than take what is sold to you.

The other reasons that open source automobiles are interesting is that it overcomes the slowness of innovation we see in traditional traditional car manufacturing.  The designs are open sourced.  This means that designers from around the world are able to generate innovation either alone or in teams with others and deploy them as plans that have the potential to get built (including electric vehicles).  The other is a factory free manufacturing process.  The company has a community directory of vetted mechanics/builders that will either build it for you or help you build it.  

I've had a little experience with decentralized manufacturing.  My team built a decentralized and global (30 countries) manufacturing system for a start-up in the professional print industry a couple years back that will likely serve as an early model for open source manufacturing and 3D fabbing.  One of they keys to making this work, is to build a platform (a system that regularizes and centralizes commonly used processes).  From this perspective, some things I'd like to see include:

• A better software enabled process for adding, modifying, and advertising designs.  A template process works well here to ensure all bases are covered.  A process of forking the designs would be interesting too.
• Review processes.  From safety to integrity to efficiency.  This can be partly crowdsourced.
• Standards.  In most cases, open source manufacturing in any industry requires the use of standards -- a minimal rule set -- from design to production.  This not only speeds things up, it reduces costs.  
• Manufacturing automation.  A ticketing and quality control process for decentralized production centers.   It sounds easier than it its, but it's essential.

Once the platform elements are cracked, this has the potential to revolutionize the industry.  Add in standardized, low cost and commoditized chassis/drive trains/software (or better yet, standard designs that can be inexpensively fabbed locally), particularly for electric vehicles, and the rest will be history.  Goodbye GM, Toyota, Honda, and Tata.

NOTE:  Granted, this may not be the company that cracks this opportunity space, but it's interesting to see it in motion.

* This is similar to the kit plane community that sprung up due to the failure of the small aircraft industry (it died due to lawfare: insurance/liability).  

Some items of interest:

• BBC documentary on YouTube.  Farm for the future.  Recommend skipping 1,2 and going straight to 3,4, and 5 are the best.  1, 2, 3, 4, 5.  Permaculture, etc.
• McCartney: meat free day.   If you can't see/experience the failure in the foreground, you focus on climate change.
• Gangs of Rio photobucket.
• Ferguson.  Empire at Risk (due to debt).  He's still thinking old model.  Here's another way to look at it within the old model.  The middle class system in the US and Europe has been intentionally gutted (over 30 years) and power, prestige, and (most importantly) stability will recede with it's passing.  
• Pakistan.  High inflation, stretched critical infrastructure, illegitimate governance, injustice, etc....  The perfect target for systems disruption.
• Somali pirates grab an oil tanker.
• More on in-vitro meat.  Pork.
• Senior Goldman Sachs employees loading up on firearms.  This is hilarious: "talk of Goldman and guns plays right into the way Wall- Streeters like to think of themselves. Even those who were bailed out believe they are tough, macho Clint Eastwoods of the financial frontier.."  
• Doctorow:  hyper localized book production.  Skip the Shirky stuff and read the exploration of on-demand printing of Google book search results.
• Corruption map.

Some items of interest:

• Twitter/cell phones and gang communication in NYC.  
• Viral videos:  swine flu conspiracies 2.6 m views and growing.
• In vitro meat?  LOL.  SCOP?
• Deep web.  More yucks.
• DARPA and nano-hummingbird.  Would like to see more bio-mimicry open sourced.
• Massive UN force (25k) in Congo gets trounced.  Interesting note:  the CNDP militia's parallel taxation scheme generates $250,000 a month (in the Congo!).
• Concur.  If you are underwater on your mortgage (by a lot), mail in the keys.  Since your contract is with the global system, it's a business decision and not a moral one.  Don't be an idiot.  15m homes in the US fall into this bucket.   Reconfiguring your family's life for an accelerated future will likely require downsizing the property/things you own from the old economic/societal -- unless you can upsize the family in the home.
• Trolling for non-violent methods to immobilize pirates.
• India's naxal insurgency uses the inflating TAZ method.
• OODA loops and cops on the John Boyd blog.

The journey to resilient communities won't be a top down effort (in fact, there will likely be top down resistance), nor will there be only one approach.  One simple and straightforward approach is being used in Todmorden, UK.  It's called Incredible Edible.  The goal with this program is to simply gain food independence for the town by 2018.  So far, it appears to be working.  The most salient signs of this include a:

• Big increase in local food production including community "help yourself" food gardens in central plots (fruit to herbs).
• Thriving local food market.  7 in 10 buy local food regularly.  The market "groans" with local meat and vegetables. 
• Switch at the 8 local schools to serving only local produce at lunch.

Process

The incredible edible process appears to be relatively simple (17 tips):

• Start small.  Self-financed plantings with a small group is all that's needed.
• Expand organically, using a very practical approach.  Only do what can be done now (forget the rest).  Ask people to do what they can, not what you wish them to do.
• Leave big issues/philosophy out of it.  Be reasonable in your requests and terse in your explanation of why.
• Attach your efforts to community building activities at the town/neighborhood level.  Harness institutions. Always propose things that lighten the workload/costs of the town/neighborhood governing council.
• Be patient and nice.  Things move slowly.

Platforms and Engines

To accelerate efforts, here are some things that the Todmorden team has done or has in the works:

 A surplus egg map (Google mash-up -- click pic at left).  

 Daily blogs, twitter, and flickr

An effort to build/fund an aquaponics facility (fish/vegetables) at the local school.  The byproduct being training for students in food production that will yield awareness for all and lots of meaningful jobs/careers for some (given that conceptual or academic eduction = preparing for jobs that increasingly don't exist).  The school already has a polytunnel.

Workshops on honest food like preparing a chicken from scratch.

Are suburban communities viable post crunch?  To many, the answer is a resounding NO!  under any and all circumstances.  They see them, ala James Kunstler, as a gross misallocation of societal resources, that will inevitably devolve into a vast blight upon the national landscape as high energy prices and economic collapse run their course.  Given this preordained failure, the question these people (see the comments here for a sense of the sentiment) ask is:  how do we repurpose all of these broken suburbs (or in a moralistic tone: how do we provide salvation to suburbia's damned soul)?  

So, given this starting point, it's little wonder that efforts to answer this question (like Reburbia) dive headfirst into the fantastical -- from the conversion of ex-homes into purification systems for city waste water to the use of homes as business offices for start-up companies.

I start with the view that a suburban town is a community and not just a type of architecture.  People/families live their lives in these towns.  So, as a community, its ability to survive/thrive is a function of its adaptability.   If the future is going to be as tough as we think it is, then the question of suburbia really becomes:  are suburban communities adaptable enough to thrive in the future (as in:  becoming resilient communities).   Given the advantages of the suburban landscape (land, surface area, security, etc.) has over rural/urban in many revival scenarios (post crunch), the only existential threat to these communities appears to be the from the global financial system -- aka a foreclosure tsunami that decimates communities faster than they can reconfigure/change.  I think that problem is solvable.

What do you think?

For small groups of guerrillas, the shift in method towards the disruption of critical infrastructure has been fairly spectacular.*  Not only have the physical results of this methodology been noteworthy, its also been able to generate social and economic rewards of a similar magnitude.  

For example, Nigeria's MEND (coordinated by innovator, and global guerrillas reader, Henry Okah) was able to disrupt the production of one million barrels a day of oil for years with relatively few attacks/people, and little money.  Given that this production was light sweet crude and the tightness of the global oil markets (little slack), it's very likely that this disruption played a huge part in the rise of oil to $150 a barrel, which in turn forced the collapse of our fragile (akin to a termite, aka parasite, ridden structure) financial system in 2008.  This success has forced the Nigerian government to capitulate and negotiate with the group.  Another example has been the rise of India's Naxalites, who through physical systems disruption (a process of innovative disconnection called Bandhs) has been able to exert economic and social control over nearly a quarter of India. 

However, once you get over the mental leap required to adopt physical systems disruption, it's fairly straight forward.  From selection of targets (systempunkts) to the methodology of attack, the process is relatively scientific/tangible (although the results can be goosed with creativity/art).  This isn't the case with the disruption of social systems/networks.  The process required to successfully disrupt social networks is very murky -- so much so that attempting it is often akin to playing horseshoes with live hand grenades.  

Classically, attempts at social system disruption are what we typically term terrorism.  Terrorist methodology typically falls into following two categories (you can split the hair to get more, but why?):

• Symbolic.  Attacks on people or places that hold high social or political value to create shock and over reaction.  For example, the assassination of Pakistan's Bhutto or the attack on Iraq's golden mosque.  Note that both failed to yield the desired result.
• Blood and guts.  Attacks on the general population.  Maximal body count to create maximal shock.  Many, many examples.  Fortunately, although it hasn't caused attacks to cease, this method of attack suffers accelerating diminishing returns due to desensitization.  

Due to gross imprecision, fortunately, both techniques have historically been very, very weak in terms of measurable returns on effort and improvements in that attacking groups freedom of action/movement.  In short, they are more likely to fail than succeed in achieving the disruption desired (usually via overreaction).  The question is (for those interested in military and warfare theory): has, or will, an alternative methods emerge?  I think so, and if so they will crowd out ineffective competitors and inevitably become the dominant strategies for small groups.  What do you think?

UPDATE:  I shortened the post, the rest wasn't ready for prime time.

Some random items of interest:

• "Border Zones and Insecurity in the Americas" by Adam Elkus and John P. Sullivan.  
• Suarez International, the combat training company that's always at the bleeding edge of practicable tactical innovation, has a very interesting course coming up: "guerrilla sniper."
• Wired.  Software + webcam = 3d scanner.
• Some great posts on how to generate innovative synthetic thinking in technology/science at Eric Drexler's Metamodern blog.  My finding:  Great analysts are a dime a dozen, great synthetic thinkers are rare.  
• Comrade Simba.  I like how he writes.  This post reads like near term fiction.
• 17.5% unemployment in the US.  This is near depression 1.0 levels -- some argue that it already much worse if you track them according the stage of the event).  
• A law-enforcement reader submitted an short but excellent "five rings" map for analyzing the systemic structure of domestic violence cases (Download DV Systems Map).  This approach is useful in analyzing avenues of attack for social disruption targeting corporations/organizations.  
• The excellent blog, The Coming Anarchy (despite the name, it's very establishment), has a good post on how the Theban general Epaminondas neutralized Sparta through the creation of competitive cities rather than outright conquest (in the modern context, resilient communities and TAZs do the same to nation-states).  It also takes the strategist B.H. Liddell Hart to task (a little harshly I think).
• Sterling.  Growing small plot medical marijuana for income? Interestingly, this might be how home gardens get going again, pot income subsidizes the costs of setting it up and forces the development of the required skills....  Also, an ode to the UK surveillance state.
• Lt. Col. Dave Grossman.  Killology.

One of the ongoing themes of this column has been gangs and the role they play in a Fourth Generation world. Here in the United States they already serve as an alternative primary loyalty (alternative to the state) for many urban young men. Gangs will likely be a major player in 4GW because gang members are expected to fight...   Read the full article. 

NOTE: Bill Lind has asked me to host his columns and his collaborative work on fourth generation warfare (4GW) theory. I've set up a blog dedicated to this called LIND. I will be fleshing it out over the next couple of days.   IF this model proves successful, and I get the OK from the copyright owners, I'll add a site for John Boyd, Martin Van Creveld, and others.

UPDATE:  I think the new LIND site has most of the basics including the seminal 1989 article, "The Changing Face of War:  Into the 4th Generation" and the new 4GW manuals.  Still need a compilation of #242-322 for the On War series, more pictures, and an approved biography.

UPDATE 2:   I've also created a new site for John Boyd related material.  Right now, it's more archive than a blog due to the lack of a stream of new content.  If anyone has content I've missed (and that's likely plenty), please send me a note and I'll include it.  Also, if there are any ideas on what can be used to generate new ongoing content, please let me know.

Random items of interest:

• Washtimes:  Corruption costs Russia 18% of its GDP.  Is crony capitalism and hollow states the strange attractor for the nation-state?
• Reddit:  Q and A with a guy maintaining a middle class facade on $2,000 a year.   His approach:  downsize, get into the black (as opposed to debt), and add self-generated services (like solar power and lawn farming) when able to support yourself at low cost.
• Speculative post:  How relocalization happened. "That relocalization needs to happen, and will happen, is clear. Among other things, it’s clear from history; when complex societies overshoot their resource bases and decline, one of the things that consistently happens is that centralized economic arrangements fall apart, long distance trade declines sharply, and the vast majority of what we now call consumer goods get made at home, or very close to home."
• West Point CTC:  Analysis of the ISI (al Qaeda in Iraq).  A focus on networks and membership.  Sounds familiar:  The Sinjar Records reinforce anecdotal accounts suggesting that al‐ Qa’ida’s Iraqi affiliates rely on smugglers and criminals—rather than their own personnel — to funnel recruits into Iraq.  Good theory predicts.  Bad theory is doctrine.
• SNL anti-government comedy clip.  Somebody needs to tell China that the debt is a sunk cost from their mercantilist expansion.  They won't/shouldn't get it back.
• Building local militias.  Lots of stories today on the US plan to use open source counter-insurgency in Afghanistan.  However, the plan looks very shaky in it's application and doesn't consider what made Iraq uniquely suited to the strategy.  They (the US military) might want to rethink the implementation of it before wasting another year or so (in lives/treasure).  NOTE:  This is the strategy that I outlined re: Iraq in 2005 and re: Afghanistan in 2009 during my Armed Services Committee testimony (to a bevy of surprised Congressmen).    
• Societe General (the bank) advises its clients on how to prepare for economic collapse.
• US infowar conference site is hacked by "Turkish Hackerz"  View this photo.
• More later.

Short Answer:  divide it.

It's long been my contention that Iraq was stabilized at an acceptable level of controlled chaos due to a happy accident by al Qaeda (in an attempt to expand/lead the loose insurgency in a new direction).  What did they do?   They blew up the Golden Mosque in Samara in 2006.  This act of symbolic terrorism did indeed disrupt social networks as anticipated, however the consequences were ultimately disastrous for the Iraqi open source insurgency.  

The reason for this is it broke the dynamics of the open source insurgency in ways the US and Iraqi government's COIN efforts could not.  First, it created a permanent split between Sunni and Shiite insurgent groups/militias.  Coopetition ended.  Second, it motivated large Shiite militias to start an ethnic cleansing of Sunni areas.  This put acute pressure on Sunni guerrilla groups who were too small (by design to avoid US counter-pressure) to defend themselves against large militias operating in the open.  The result was an opening, very close to the one I described in my 2005 NYTimes OpEd, that allowed the US to convert Sunni guerrilla groups into militias that were not loyal to the central government (in direct contradiction to its COIN manual).   

It's a nice example of the dynamics of many to many conflict, social network disruption, and the development open source counterinsurgency.

See this excellent description at the blog, "Musings on Iraq" for more detail on the ethnic cleansing operations.  It also includes this money quote: "the majority of the Sunni insurgency gave up and switched sides to align with the Americans rather than face annihilation at the hands of the Shiite militias, Al Qaeda in Iraq, or the United States."

NOTE:  it's pretty clear from the above that social network disruption (either through attacks on symbolic targets or blood and guts terrorism) is like playing horseshoes with live hand grenades.  It's ultimately a losing strategy for advancing an open source insurgency.  Social network disruption is very likely to break standing order 6:  don't fork the insurgency.

Some random items of interest:

• Vigilante militias in Rio are displacing the drug gangs -- favelas under the control of militias has grown from 108 in 2005 to 400 in 2008 (out of 965).  Why?  They have a better (albeit parasitic) conflict/business model than the drug gangs since they act as a substitute for missing public goods/services normally supplied by the government.  First, they provide a minimal level of security and conflict adjudication.  Second, they make more money than the drug gangs by "taxing" everything from propane to cable TV to the gray market.  
• US gray economy estimated at $1 Trillion (not including criminal, outside of the evasion of taxes and regulation, activities) and growing faster than the "legal" economy.  
• Proposal and wiki for an open source fabrication lab.
• Somali pirates are expanding operations into the Indian ocean.  The combination of positive feedback loops (maritime insurance + rapid payoffs by crisis negotiators) and legal ambiguity (the biggest fear of a western navy and governments is that they might arrest a pirate -- prompting a massive/expensive legal tussle with few certain penalties and the forced extension of a visa to the former pirate once he is released from his short incarceration).  Is a franchise model for other locales possible?

• A business group in Ciudad Juarez asks for UN peacekeepers.  Hilarious. "Ciudad Juarez, population 1.5 million, has an average of seven homicides a day, with the total at 1,986 for this year through mid-October."
• Seccession.net.  County based secession effort.  

Random items of interest:

• Chris Blattman on Diego Gambetta's book, "The Sicilian Mafia:  The Business of Private Protection."  "The book tells a fascinating tale of the mafia, traced mostly from court transcripts, investigator files, and some interviews. He essentially advances an economic theory of the mafia: they are entrepreneurs and firms who collude and compete; the good they sell is not violence, or stolen property, but protection. That is, they enforce contracts in places the government can’t or won’t, like illegal and illicit markets, or areas where the police and courts are weak. They actively compete with the police to provide protection, and this good is in high demand. Every transaction done under the table cannot seek protection from the courts, and the mafia step naturally into this gap. Their name is their trademark, and they prevent new entry by force but also by complex social rules and ethnic identity."
• Thoughtgadgets points out that the Wikipedia page on the FT Hood incident is a good example of "crowdsourcing."  That last term is the type of buzzword that is bound to get the intellectually inflexible fuming.  ;-P
• Here are some examples of open source software for insurgency.  The "Transborder Immigrant Tool" that works on a cell phone from the group, "Electronic Civil Disobedience."  Some reviews of the tool (1) and (2).
• Video of unrest at UCLA due to a slated 32% increase in tuition.  In short, the final round (the first being privatization of the cost) of closing off access to the US middle class is starting to accelerate.  
• Chet Richards is shutting DNI.  That sucks.  I'm working on a way to save the archive of Boyd's and Lind's work on this site.

Almost all conflict theory assumes that there are only two primary antagonists.  State vs. State.  Mind vs. Mind.  Good vs. Evil.  Just vs. Exploitative.  Us vs. Them.  The list goes on and on.  What if conflict in a flat world isn't a two sided affair?  What if it consists of n sides? What if it involves many participants, each with a very different motive for conflict and each packaged in a variety of shapes/sizes/etc.?  How does that change conflict theory, strategy, tactics, organization, etc.?

Some random items of interest:

• The Coming Anarchy.  A warm embrace for violent corruption in the US.
• Climate change can happen very quickly.  I especially like the description of this type of change:  a climatic shift akin to physically repositioning the UK to the arctic in a matter of months.
• Used Xbox 360s for $40.  This price indicates Microsoft won the early battles with makers/hackers that want to reuse the Xbox.  
• Juan Cole on the Pakistani military in Waziristan.  Essentially, if guerrillas follow a a 20th Century strategy that emphasizes hard control over territory in combination with blood and guts terrorism that is focused on symbolic military/government/civilian targets, they are in for a world of hurt.  Contrast this to MEND, the Naxalites, and Mexico's criminal ecosystem.  However, the current situation might not last:  weakness often breeds innovation.
• Pew on US state government revenue shortfalls.  In short:  HUGE shortfalls as far as the eye can see.  This is going to have an interesting disruptive effect.  Here's an early example from California:   "California's finances have been so bad that the governor's finance director, Mike Genest, told a budget forum in Washington last week that back in February he had combed through the U.S. Constitution to research whether California could legally declare bankruptcy -- or revert to some kind of territorial status."  It's hilarious how close this is adhering to my very short 2007 paper on Privatopia.
• The mountain boyz scrapbook.
• Roubini:  a tale of two American economies.  As a sharp reader suggests: The inability to recognize this chasm exists, let alone bridge it, is a recipe for the spread of global guerrillas in the US.

Many people that want to organize groups online, typically attempt to do this through a site dedicated to a specific topic, an inflammatory article/video, etc.  This is a fairly arduous and suboptimal process.  A better approach is to build a site that enables people to accomplish things.  Software or sites that do this typically include:

• A database of some sort.  A collection of structured or unstructured data that can be used to do things.  This spans classic databases, file servers, wikis...
• A user interface that allows community participation.  Typically this allows the community to add to the database, monitor/vote on additions, reputation, etc.
• An open connection to the database (an open API) that allows new applications to be created.  From mash-ups to iphone apps.

The benefit of this passive approach is that it creates the potential to form an open source community around the topic.  As such, it not only attracts people tightly aligned with the creator's goals, but also a much larger group of individuals and groups that are pursuing tangential and marginally aligned interests.  Also, because the site is a tool, it benefits from a virtuous feedback loop that tends to accelerate growth:  people that use the site often see immediate benefit from the interaction.

Software tools of this type can be used to create open source communities for both positive endeavors (like building resilient communities) to insurgency.  

For example, say I wanted to run an insurgency against financial capitalism, and in particular an effort that specifically targets Goldman Sachs.  The software tool approach offers a variety of entry points for this endeavor.  One aggressive methodology that enables corporate targeting would involve:

• Assembling a public database of Goldman Sachs employees and alums.  This database could either be unstructured data in a wiki, or more forcefully, a structured database that includes name, work title, e-mail, home address, phone number, etc.  The key, in either approach is to seed the database with a critical mass of data to make it useful from the moment you launch it.
• Creating a method by which additions, creations, and improvements can be made to the database via the community.  Allow users to add info, from pictures of the individuals (cell phone stalking) to salary data and job roles... 
• Opening access to the data to allow an ecosystem to develop.  Community developers could use the data to create a mash-up tool that allows users to see all of the homes for Goldman Sachs employees on a Google map (or equivalent).  Another application could place employees into a model of the corporate hierarchy.  

In sum:  superempowerment can breed its own group dynamic.

Some utterly random items of interest:

• “There’s no point in talking to people who don’t have blood on their hands" and bribe potential Taliban recruits with bags of gold.  Updated UK COIN manual.  
• US:  Wall Street ethos hits main street.  Middle class shoplifting zooming.  "many people feeling the entire system is broken, that politicians are too corrupt or inept to fix it, and that there's nothing wrong with stealing from these big companies."
• Bailout wars.  iPhone game.
• Somali mobile phone business booming.  Connections rather than rules.
• Surviving in Argentina.  Riot survival kit.
• Nice codex that could serve as the basis for a discussion group/e-mail craziness rating.
• Decentralized/Resilient tracking.  BitTorrent doesn't need a tracker server anymore.  Pirate bay shuts their centralized system down.
• BBC.  Mexican journalist Julian Cardona on Juarez Mexico:  "We have an unsustainable economy - a globalised economy - which pays very low wages. That allowed an alternative economy to be created which also globalised - drugs. Both economies are playing here. Juarez is a very important place for both."  Good video attached to this article.  
• The minimal rule sets and insurgency.  Bing West, Afghan trip report at the SWJ:  "The theory of counterinsurgency is that villagers, once given security and services, will inform on the insurgents. In reality, the Pashtun Taliban aren’t oppressing the villagers, and the coalition doesn’t have the troops to provide security in many areas. So villagers hedge their bets."  Another example of theory in play.
• Washington Post.  Naval Postgraduate School applies military counter-insurgency methods to a crime ridden American city (early signs of a trend in the US twoards a Juarez scenario).

Synopsis: Here is a theoretical model for social network disruption (a compliment physical systems disruption -- as in the disruption of critical infrastructure).

_______________________

Why are organizations formed?  What keeps them together as a cohesive whole and what drives them to breakdown/fragment?  All of these questions are important from the perspective of warfare, particularly as warfare moves from a state controlled enterprise to one that includes a long tail of participants (from corporations to gangs/militias/etc.).

John Boyd's (arguably, America's greatest strategist) approach to these questions assumes that organizations form and operate to increase freedom of action -- they allow the accomplishment of actions that aren't possible through the actions of individuals.  Organizational breakdown in Boyd's models, occur when the disruption of moral, physical, and psychological connectivity within the organization creates non-cooperative centers of gravity (each aimed at achieving incompatible goals and unable to work together due to distrust, menace, etc.).  

An alternative approach is to use the transaction cost model of Ronald Coase.  In his model, organizations form to lower the costs of the transactions required to accomplish a task or objective.  Organizations lower these transaction costs by reducing the informational overhead required for a transaction -- by replacing an informationally expensive spot pricing mechanism with long term contracts that front load information discovery.  The natural tension between the benefits of each model (spot pricing) and long term contracts dictates whether an organization should be formed or dissolved.

This alternative explanation for organizational formation and cohesion suggests new forms of disruption.  Specifically, disruption aimed at increasing the information costs of transactions within and around the target organization may yield dissolution and breakup. A model for how to accomplish this includes:

• Existing measures and projections of external performance must become uncertain or risky.
• Internal transactions must be called into question by reducing confidence in long term contracts that bind the organization together -- distrust of internal reporting, employees, etc.
• The process of information discovery, for both internal and external transactions, must be slowed and or made prohibitively expensive to accomplish.

NOTE:  A transactions model might be more applicable to the many vs. many conflicts of the 21st Century than the approach advocated by Boyd, since the disruption to achieve success is lighter/easier to accomplish.  It also provides an upgrade to crude symbolic targeting for social network disruption.