Very interesting presentation from South by Southwest (SxSW) 2011. He's pretty candid about the longer-term threats embedded in a data-as-a-platform world, but also very interesting rewarding the opportunities for creating businesses out of data streams. For me, it's been worth multiple playings, even though it's almost an hour (but it works fine as background audio).
Beyond tech, I quite liked his general point about "It wasn't that the future [predicted in the 1960s/70s] wasn't magical, it was just sooner and stranger than we think." The crack about "I flew here on an airplane, courtesy of the Wright Brothers, and customer service, courtesy of Darth Vader" is also a keeper.
But the rest is equally worth your attention. Feel free to discuss among yourselves.
It's not quite an aftermath yet, as there are a few steps to go. But the shape of the landscape is clear enough - and unsurprising. President Obama, as was easy to forsee, is well on his way to becoming one of the USA's most divisive Presidents.
That a guy who proclaimed himself to be "post-partisan" should take toxic partisanship to heights not seen since the Watergate era... is only surprising to those who wanted to be conned. To believe that the most left-wing senator in the USA, with a congress run by Nancy Pelosi, and a personal history of abdicating the initiative to his party, would be anything other than the divisive figure he has become, was always a fool's expectation.
The rise in partisanship, and rancor, may not even be a bad thing. Obama and "President" Pelosi have been uniformly excellent at exacerbating the USA's most pressing problems, and that has consequences. Dealing with those consequences will require major shifts in America, as is characteristic of Fourth Turning/ Winter generational periods. In that cold environment, clarity of choice is a virtue, and bitter battles to be expected.
In that environment, too, the destruction of 60+ vote and bi-partisan expectations for major reforms may also prove useful. What it will not be, is stabilizing.
Armed Liberal has discussed "skybox liberalism" here on several occasions, as well as the conceit that the future of our cities belongs to a "creative class" that just so happens to correlate with that political tendency (the "Teixeira vs. Kotkin" debate). It appears that actual evidence suggests the reverse - a "skybox exodus" that is hollowing out the middle class, and pushing city growth away from the "hip".
The kind of hostile environment that skybox liberalism creates for people who are upper lower to lower middle class is definitely part of all this, but a pair of questions occur to me that go beyond the "Red State/ Blue State" dynamic. Maybe you'll find them interesting, too, and i'd welcome comments.
One question is the connection the skybox exodus might have with the current role of the financial sector in the economy, which includes the bubble-creating mentality entrenched in the Fed.
Another involves the long-term viability of the "service economy" paradigm itself, even as I wonder whether this sort of hollowing out might even be a move toward a "service economy" country's natural steady state. Lewy had asked that in the comments a while back, basically what if you created an economy that just needs a small percentage of highly-trained smart people, and the rest are just menial services or a drag? Is this the natural steady state of an economy that abandons the physical production of exportable things? Can an economy like that really prosper or even last, over the long term? If the steady state hypothesis is true, can a free republic?
My answers lean toward: probably, probably not, and no. But maybe you have different answers, or a different take....
Alan Cooper was once known as the father of Visual Basic. In recent years, he has become better known for his work on designing software that works. "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" remains one of the best books I know on the subject.
During the Agile 2008 conference, InfoQ took the time to interview Alan, who came to the conference with a tag reading "Student." What had he seen? What had he learned? How did the concepts behind the spreading wave of agile software development fit with his work on interaction design?
What followed was one of the most thoughtful expositions I've heard regarding modern software development, with some great lines and deep connections drawn. If you're involved in software development on any level - and especially if it's on a managerial level, this is a must-see interview.
Some of the better takeways:
The proliferation of micro-satellites is just the start. USAF journals like High Frontier [5/1, PDF] are already talking about nano-satellites, or in civilian parlance "CubeSats." Their effects could be profound, and will be felt in many ways. San Jose's Good Morning Silicon Valley covers an Institute for the Future project called The Signtific Lab. The premise, which you're invited to discuss and build on, is:
"...in 2019, cubesats - space satellites smaller than a shoebox - have become very cheap and very popular. For $100, anyone can put a customized personal satellite into low-earth orbit. And space data transfer protocols developed by the Interstellar Internet Project provide a basic relay backbone linking low-powered cubesats with ground stations, and with each other. Space is open.... What will you do when space is as cheap and accessible as the Web is today?"
You're welcome to participate. The exercise is open until end of day on Match 12/09, and readers can sign up to play "positive imagination" [see example] or "dark imagination" [see example] cards, or supplement existing cards with an "antagonism" card (disagree), a "momentum" card (and then what?), an "adaptation" card (introduce a twist), or an "investigation" card (follow-up questions). Remember, as the IFTF reminds participants:
"Your forecasts don't have to be probable. They just have to be possible."
In the classic noir film The Maltese Falcon, there's a scene that contains what I've always called "The Gutman Moment." Kasper Gutman aka "the Fat Man", the unsavory but well-heeled Sidney Greenstreet character, tells the protagonist
"Yes, but this is real coin of the realm. With one of these you can buy ten of talk."
I'll avoid spoiling the movie by telling why he says that, but its relevance to current events is as follows: Tim Oren has pointed out that
The Decent Left magazine Dissent has a pair of features in this issue. Robert Taylor asks "Does European Social Democracy have a Future?"
Based on demographics alone, the answer is clearly "no" within 30 years or less. In the near term, however, the answer is yes, despite or possibly because of the rising neo-fascist hard left. Taylor doesn't have a full answer to his question - at this point, nobody does. Nonetheless, his explanation of the key stress points is valuable, and so are the pointers to new thinking from people like Dutch Labour Party leader Wouter Bos. Given that soft socialism's failures have led to fascism in Europe before, that kind of adaptation and thinking is a service to all.
On the other side of the spectrum, Kevin Mattson asks "Has Conservatism Cracked Up?" Here, Dissent suffers from the lack of an inside perspective, but American conservatives are indeed going through a self-definition and reflection process. Sarah Palin's nomination has paused it - but not stopped it. Note that Europe's conservatives (including Britain's) have a very different identity, and would represent a separate subject.
As "The Hunt for the Affordable Weapon™" noted:
"Just as anti-ballistic missile technology is developing itself for the coming age of the rogue state, America's nets are slowly being drawn up against the cruise missile threat from those states... and one day, of less-than-states. Persistent surveillance is reaching beyond the limitations of aircraft, and into constant surveillance using lighter-then-air platforms like JLENS tethered aerostats, HAA airships with huge flexible IRIS radars, and even Navy blimps. Fighters are being fitted with AESA radars as their cost of manufacture drops and new generations are bought, and interlocking land and naval defenses that include SM-2/3 missiles, mobile SLAMRAAM and MEADS missile launchers, and longer-range systems like THAAD that can be used against air-breathing threats in a pinch. All this is being networked into a single net via developments like Cooperative Engagement Capability, and more. In time, logic will also demand investments like very long-range supersonic ramjet air-air missiles to extend the intercept circle of patrolling aerial platforms, or threaten key enemy assets like AWACS and tankers behind the front lines. All this and more lies ahead, born of necessity in America - and beyond."
Now the USA's House Appropriations Committee has mandated both classified and unclassified reports covering domestic cruise missile defense capabilities, their deployment, and their integration into the ballistic missile defense system (BMDS). Aviation Week reports that the Senate has concurred with this language in negotiations, which is likely to place more weight behind, and scrutiny upon, the programs named above. Read Aerospace Daily & Defense Report's "Attention Turning To Cruise Missiles Defense" for more.
Analyst firm Forecast International's "Europe Market Overview" offers a less-than-optimistic view of Europe's status as a defense market, and provide very relevant background to US Secretary of Defense Gates' Oct 25/07 speech and Winds' associated article "What's Europe Worth? NATO in Afghanistan." Forecast International:
"Currently only four dual EU-NATO members have military budgets that allocate the NATO minimum requisite of 2 percent of annual GDP for defense: France, the United Kingdom, Bulgaria and Romania.... Greece - typically one of the bigger defense spenders in Europe - is reining in its budget, bringing it down to 1 percent of GDP or less through 2015. Forecast International projects that, by 2011, total defense spending across the European continent will amount to just under $300 billion.
The EU, which has no formal army of its own, declared its first two "battlegroups" operational at the start of the new year. These 1,500-strong multinational rapid response groupings are largely envisioned to lead peacekeeping or humanitarian operations and are considered by some a first step toward the creation of a deployable 60,000-strong EU Corps under the Helsinki Headline Goals of 1999. But the NATO Alliance, too, has its own NATO Response Force (NRF) of 25,000 troops which was formed with the intent that it would be deployable within days to conduct a variety of operations in intemperate zones. However, NATO officials already have been forced to scale back their [40,000 troop] ambitions in the face of the hard realities presented by its members’ smaller armies and tighter budgets, and believe the same issues will ultimately plague the EU battlegroup effort.
As it now stands, the European dual EU-NATO members have a rough total of $234.34 billion allocated toward defense among them for 2007, with the combined spending of France and the U.K. representing almost 55 percent of that total. And this is only the financial aspect – the manpower and equipment facets of each nation’s armed forces are also severely strained.... defense spending across the entire European continent will reach only $266 billion in 2007, or about 58 percent of the U.S. baseline defense budget of $462 billion for the current fiscal year.... many of these nations' domestic defense industrial bases feel the crunch from lack of state orders needed to sustain themselves.
"What you have today is a Europe that seeks to project greater international involvement and security responsibility, whether through defensive measures in Afghanistan or humanitarian or peacekeeping operations in Lebanon, Kosovo and areas of Africa," [Forecast International analyst Dan Darling, who is not Winds' Dan Darling] continues. "Yet these governments are asking more from their downsized militaries while providing less by way of defense appropriations.... So long as Europe's public at large lacks the perception of a distinct security threat, raising defense spending will not be an immediate concern in European capitals, thus forcing governments to confront hard choices."..."
The outcome of modern wars is decided in the mind
Armed combat, of course, is not about to disappear, although it may increasingly take the form of 'asymmetric warfare' as seen in Iraq and Afghanistan. It could also take the shape of proxy war, like the one India is fighting in Jammu & Kashmir and the United States and NATO are fighting in Afghanistan. But days in which armed combat alone decided the fate of wars ended a long time ago: with World War II and perhaps, the India-Pakistan war of 1971.
This is old hat. All out war became unimaginable as soon as the major powers acquired nuclear weapons. Those that didn't have their own usually came under the umbrella of one of those that did. The game of nuclear deterrence--in spite of bizarrely escalating to the level where there were thousands of warheads--kept the peace. The stability/instability paradox argued that while nuclear deterrence ensured stability at the highest (nuclear) level of escalation, it nevertheless created instability at lower (non-nuclear) levels. The United States relied on this to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. But the Pakistani general staff realised just how low the ceiling was at Kargil in 1999-2000. They were fine so long as they were only arming and injecting jihadis into Jammu & Kashmir. But when they decided to take a step further and actually try to capture and hold territory, they quickly found out exactly where the buck stopped.
But the outcome of most of these asymmetrical, low-intensity wars can go either way.
After writing "Apocalypse Everywhere" here at Winds, and reading Glenn Reynolds' "We're All Soldiers of Fortune Now" on the mainstream growth of citizen disaster preparation (like survivalist kits at Target and Costco), Chester has some thoughts on present trends and what's beneath:
"The Wisdom of Survivalist Crowds"
