by Richard Gowan | Jul 14, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks, North America
You don’t have to believe that the end of the world is nigh to enjoy this blog, but it helps. A scan of recent posts throws up Alex on “life after the flood”, Charlie on why the government won’t tell you when that flood is coming, and David on how John McCain is a harbinger of much nastiness to come. Fair enough – the future does look sort of shit right now. But, I hear my co-authors cry, can we quantify the level of shitness, possibly through the utilization of funky social science?
Their answer? In sum, “ooh yeah”. Alex set out some ideas on how G8 leaders could spice up meetings on the Guardian website last week, and his proposals sound more productive than the reality by a long shot:
Global leaders need to develop much deeper shared awareness of common challenges – and each other’s positions on them. Today’s summits are too formal and rushed to produce that. Leaders should spend more time together outside the tightly scripted confines of formal meetings – the original idea behind the G8 – and they should employ full-time rather than part-time “sherpas”, tasked to think through (and even “war game”) future scenarios, rather than fill time drafting communiques.
Now, I’m basically kept on this blog as the in-house miserable reactionary with a remit to point out that very little is really new out there, but I do actually believe in a lot of this stuff. But, as ever, I sense a historical precedent coming on. Reading Alex’s piece, I wondered what rules the G8 gamesters might follow. The set that came to mind were penned by Herman Kahn, a Cold War-era RAND thinker who founded the Hudson Institute. Here are his guidelines on “The Uses of Scenarios”:
(1) They serve to call attention, sometimes dramatically and persuasively, to the larger range of possibilities that must be considered in the analysis of the future. Scenarios are one way to force oneself and others to plunge into the unfamiliar and rapidly changing world of the present and the future;
(2) They dramatize and illustrate the possibilities they focus on in a very useful way. (They may do little or nothing for the possibilities they do not focus on);
(3) They force the analyst to deal with details and dynamics that he might easily avoid treating if he restricted himself to abstract considerations;
(4) They help to illuminate the interaction of psychological, social, economic, cultural, political, and military factors, including the influence of individual political personalities upon what otherwise might be abstract considerations, and they do so in a form that permits the comprehension of many such interacting elements at once;
(5) They can illustrate forcefully, sometimes in oversimplified fashion, certain principles, issues, or questions that might be ignored or lost if one insisted on taking examples only from the complex and controversial real world;
(6) They may also be used to consider alternative possible outcomes of certain real past and present events, such as Suez, Lebanon, Laos, or Berlin;
(7) They can be used as artificial “case histories” and “historical anecdotes” to make up to some degree for the paucity of actual examples.
That may all seem quite useful. But beware where your ideas come from: Kahn is now largely forgotten, but in his day he was a notorious advocate of nuclear war-fighting. Some of his writings on the subject were reproduced verbatim by Stanley Kubrick in Doctor Strangelove. He used his scenarios to suggest that death-rates after a nuclear exchange might be acceptable, and he treated most arguments against nuclear weapons as “nonissues” or “almost nonissues” until the end of his career. And while some of his presentations lasted for literally days on end, most of his projections are now dismissed as baseless tosh.
None of which is to say that gaming scenarios, or even Kahn’s guidelines, should be abandoned. But if we are to promote a new generation of scenario-planning, strategy-making, war-gaming and thinking about resilence, we shouldn’t forget that a lot of the intellectual tools at our disposal have been passed down to us from defense intellectuals we might feel distinctly uncomfortable with.
It’s obvious really. But worth keeping in mind.
by Richard Gowan | Jul 14, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Influence and networks, Off topic
One or two readers may recall that, back in June, I created a bit of a rumpus with a whimsical post on items from the Putnam County News and Recorder, an upstate NY newspaper with some 3,000 readers. Now the New York Times reveals that I’m not the only out-of-towner to admire this 142-year-old publication:
Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, liked his local newspaper so much he decided to buy it. Mr. Ailes, 68, who counseled Republican presidents before creating the Fox News Channel, purchased The Putnam County News and Recorder last month.
But residents of the area should not expect any sort of makeover, ideological or otherwise. The paper will “probably stay the same,” said Elizabeth Ailes, Mr. Ailes’s wife, who will be the publisher. “We bought it not to change it, but perhaps it will evolve over time.”
The Aileses do not plan to manage the paper day to day; they will hire a general manager. To readers, the change may be imperceptible. “It’s a really quaint paper,” Mrs. Ailes said by phone. “It reflects the community. We really like it, and that’s why Roger wanted to buy it.”
I’d watch out if I were you, Mr. and Mrs. Ailes – this blogger found that the citizens of Putnam County don’t take being called “quaint” lightly…
(Hat tip to Roy Greenslade over at the Guardian for putting two and two together on this story – excited readers may be pleased to note that I have just returned from the Channel Islands, and will soon be posting on the local press there).
by Alex Evans | Jul 14, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence
Cory at BoingBoing and Alex at WorldChanging sat down for a coffee together last week and started brainstorming about life after the apocalpyse. Cory says:
I noticed that while there’s a whole ton of stories — and people who emulate them — about heavily armed survivalists bravely holding off the twilight of civilization after the Big One, there are damned few stories about super-networked post-apocalyptic Peace Corps who respond to the Great Fall by figuring out how to put it all back together. I even came up with a name for it: the Outquisition; the opposite of the Inquisition — missionaries who come to your town to remind you of how awesome it can all be, leave behind a bunch of rad, life-improving systems and tools, and generally get on with the business of being happy, well-fed and peaceful.
Alex wrote up a great post about this and 24 hours later, some WorldChanging readers created Outquisition.org. I’m not sure what they’ll do there, but in my dreams, they’re off building a non-secret society of emergency-preparedness Nice People who think that the response to catastrophe isn’t lifeboat rules and militias, but humanitarian aid and kick-ass tools.
Alex elaborates:
What would it be like, we wondered, if folks who knew tools and innovation left the comfy bright green cities and traveled to the dead mall suburban slums, rustbelt browntowns and climate-smacked farm communities and started helping the locals get the tools they needed. We imagined that it would need an almost missionary fervor, something like the Inquisition (which largely destroyed knowledge) in reverse, a crusade of open sharing, or as Cory promptly dubbed it, the Outquisition.
Imagine these folks like this passing out free textbooks, running holistic programs for kids, creating local knowledge management systems, launching microfinance projects, mobilebanking and complementary currencies. Helping rural landowners apply climate foresight and farm biodiversity. Building cheap, smart, quality housing for displaced people (not to mention better refugee camps), or an Open Architecture Network for cheap informal rehabs of run-down suburban housing. Hacking together DIY windmills and ad hoc smart grids, communication systems, water treatment systems — and getting really good atadaptive reuses of outdated infrastructure. In other words, these folks would be redistributing the future at a furious clip.
Interestingly, all this has generated a torrent of debate on the comments section, with rural people cocking a number of eyebrows at the idea that urban folk will sally out to rescue them. One of the more gentle responses suggests that
The thought that a bunch of city folks could come out to the country and teach the farmers how to do their job is comical. Ideally it would be a two-way system with both sides contributing to the conversation. The farmers would be able to teach the city folk how to farm to grow their own food, while the city people would bring their particular skill set to the table.
On the other hand,
You know, maybe the city folk DO know more about some things than the farmer might. If the farmer has been dependent upon hybrid seed he must buy every year, because the seed produced by his crops is sterile, and the fertilizer he must buy is petroleum based and no longer affordable or even available. Some “City Person” showing up with non-hybid seed and plans for a DIY manure composter that produces burnable methane gas and, as a byproduct, high quality organic liquid fertilizer, well that “city Person” just might be that farmer’s personal saviour.
The whole comments section on the WorldChanging post is worth a look: a very lively and informative discussion.
by Daniel Korski | Jul 14, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, UK
The recent spate of knife-killings in London and the British government’s response illustrates the continuing problems policy-makers face in dealing with complex, cross-departmental issues – ten years after Tony Blair sought to develop a “joined-up” approach to policy-making.
It is hard to know whether there has been an increase in knife crime generally – but four fatal stabbings one day last week in London brought to 50 the number of people slain by knife this year in the capital, and of those 20 were teenagers.
To rein in the threat, Britain’s Home Secretary Jacqui Smith will unveil new measures tomorrow. Trailed in the media has been the idea of forcing knife-carrying youths to visit stab and knife-crime victims in hospital to see for themselves the effects of knife crime.
But you don’t have to be an opposition politician to feel that the government’s focus on law enforcement needs to be broadened to also address the underlying causes of the knife-crime surge, including economic dislocation, family break-down, drug and alcohol abuse, debt, problems in the education system etc. etc. It was Gordon Brown, after all, who coined the famous phrase “tough on crime; tough on the cause of crime”.
To develop a cross-cutting strategy, the government should take a leaf out of Alex and David’s work, and seek to build a “shared operating system” that can develop and implement a new knife-crime policy across the multiple layers of government involved, including Whitehall departments, City Hall, the London Boroughs, the private sector etc. etc.
Here’s what I’d do if the Prime Minister asked me for advice (a pretty unlikely scenario, I admit):
- Jointly appoint, with the London Mayor and the London Boroughs, a high-profile Youth Crime “Czar” with Cabinet and a £ 10 million discretionary budget. Serious, top-flight candidates like John Reid, Charles Clarke, Paddy Ashdown come to mind. The appointment of a senior police officer will not do.
- Give the “Czar” real authority to propose changes in policing, credit provision, education etc. etc. That is, authority to cut across all departments, whether in Whitehall or City Hall.
- But this should not be another review. The task for the “Czar” is to draw up – and start implementing – a plan for dealing with the knife-crime issue, with a 400-day deadline.
Taking a leaf out of counter-insurgency theory, ideas to be considered by such a “Czar” could include:
- The establishment of permanently-based, 24-hour mixed civilian/policing teams in troubled neighborhoods. These teams could “patrol” neighborhoods and include parents and other community workers.
- Quick-impact economic projects, which can aim to give idle youths short-term employment or skills development, ideally developed with the private sector.
- “Targeting” potential trouble-makers for pre-incident counseling, re-socialization through trips to Africa for troubled youths.
- Development of a pilot scheme for the Peace Corps-style idea advanced by David Cameron.
The knife-crime problem in London has been a long-time coming and it will take a long time to deal with. But many other cities, including New York, have been successful in dealing with similar issues.
To my mind, the answer requires a re-tooling of the bureaucratic system, the appointment of a single focal point, and the implementation of a comprehensive strategy. Anything else will grab the headlines, but is unlikely to address the problem.
