Static, Transparency, and Systemic Resilience:
Part One

Static

In my last post, “Steve DeAngelis, In Other Words,” all three words were mentioned, and my use of them spurred debate.  At issue:  Can a system wracked by systemic problems be ‘fixed’ openly, transparently?  I answered, No, although I had an ace up my sleeve: Static.

Steve DeAngelis, of the Enterprise Resilience Management Blog, had implied the possibility that open maneuvers to correct systemic problems may in fact cause more problems than they solve; as he put it, prevention is better than mitigation.  In the case given, of a company suffering from the fraudulent behavior of numerous executives, forces outside that company reacted to the news of that behavior by, in effect, shutting that company down — with a little help from other forces not reacting directly to the news.  One reader suggested that the system had worked; such companies deserve to lose.  The fact that the CEO had openly addressed the problems, attempting to correct them transparently, made no difference and in fact may have hastened the company’s fall.

In the future, the question, “Which force is empowered to make judgments — or, to make ‘justice’?” will determine who deserves to lose and who deserves to win.  Static results from a profusion of voices, of forces, and creates confusion.

As I said in the linked post, the Once - Upon - A - Time - World of a more distant past had relative monopolies on data creation, at least within particular domains.   If the King declared a war on another country, none of his subjects doubted that their nation was at war with that country; indeed, few of his subjects could have knowledge of the casus belli beyond what the King and his men gave to them.  There was no power to dispute the truth of the casus belli, even if many disagreed with it.

In a later Once - Upon - A - Time - World, revolutionaries fought back against such monopolies on data creation (whether the data was discursive or capital), as a result not only of a multiplication of sources of data but also out of fear of such monopolies as had already dominated societies.  The process has repeated in many ways, whether with the Protestants against the Catholics in Europe, or with secular humanists against sectarian religionists, or with American Revolutionaries against a tyrant.  Later, unions and antitrust laws and civil rights movements continued the process and still continue the process at home and abroad.  Even so, monopolies on data creation persevered; it is only with the relatively recent advent of a profusion of cable and satellite television channels and Internet connections that the monopoly held by a few broadcast and print media empires began to disintegrate.

When considering static in this context, it is important to remember the many types of data being transmitted, as well as the many sources.  For shaping a world view — and thus, for shaping activities, and from them, shaping the world — not only the spoken, written, and electronically broadcast discursive data has a major effect, but material realities also have major effects: paychecks, armies, families and tribes, manufactured items, natural resources, infrastructure, etc.  Thus, whereas the United States may have had a relative ‘monopoly’ controlling its own infrastructure before 9/11, bin Laden’s foreign fighters upset that monopoly: there, al-Qaida became a source of relevant data within the domain of ‘U.S. infrastructure.’

When considering the future, we must keep in mind the realities of interdependencies and how these work in a confluential manner. In discussions of 5GW, we often contemplate the role of influence; confluence is what happens with or without conscious direction, as the many sources of data flow tightly together or, more often than not, as their effects interact to shape the larger system from multiple directions.  Globalization in its many forms increases the amount of available data at every point it touches.

Thus, we have what has been called an emerging open-source environment. 

   Detour: “Open Source” vs “Static”

Utilizing the confusion created by an open-source environment may become a customary strategy for success.  Take for instance John Robb, who has given a name to one type of actor in an open-source environment, Global Guerrillas:

The decentralized, and seemingly chaotic guerrilla war in Iraq demonstrates a pattern that will likely serve as a model for next generation terrorists. This pattern shows a level of learning, activity, and success similar to what we see in the open source software community. I call this pattern the bazaar.

[“The Bazaar’s Open Source Platform”]

As far as that goes, the terminology is correct: it is a platform.  Or an environment.  Inasmuch as innovation in warfare has always occurred, the outline given in that post for the ways these actors operate in such an environment differs from past examples only by degree — but it is an important degree. More data is theoretically available than ever before. Experimental trial-and-failure may destroy one independently operating group but serve as a lesson for another yet to attack; successes may verify the tactic for another observant group.

Where John Robb goes astray:  When he labels every insurgent group, “open source opponents,” as he did recently in a post called “Thailand’s Global Guerrillas.”  By this point, he has moved from considering a pattern that has similarities to open-source platforms to calling human actors definitively open-source.

Clearly, these two terms, open source and static, which represent John Robb’s future-view and mine respectively, appear to be quite similar, quite related, but quite different in the way they are interpreted by each of us; i.e., the terms have different implications although I believe they are being used to address the same real condition. Deciding which term is most appropriate will prove very, very important.

From one commenter in the linked thread, Syn Diesel, we have the general Robbian view via an anthropomorphism, “information wants to be free, and will be free”. I love using metaphors as cognitive tools, but such usages as this almost always point toward lax thinking. In this case, the comparison of data with a human as if they are identical with respect to a) being able to desire freedom and b) actually being free in the sense of having no barriers inhibiting movement or the ability to act, means the speaker is incapable of seeing the differences between a human and data. The same is true of John Robb, whose theory of open-source includes an assumption that just because data levels increase generally and that data becomes more available to larger numbers of people, then those people will actually access and use that data.

Let’s put it back into terms of Syn Diesel’s anthropomorphism:  In the way that a human acts freely — i.e. without barriers — if he is free, free data must also have no barriers and be able to ‘act’ freely. In OODA terms, this would imply that the Act committed by that data automatically alters the World at least in some small part, just like every human Act always alters some part of the World. In John Robb terms, then, an open-source environment necessarily leads to a kind of free and open activity, which would mean that actual human actors in the world must be acting from all of that available data; when he describes “open-source opponents,” he is assuming that just because much more data is generally available, those opponents are actually accessing all of it and using all of it. Clearly, however, not one of them is capable of doing so.

Furthermore, describing the environment as ‘open-source’ in the sense of ‘data-rich’ does not mean that all possible data points are actually accessible to the human actor. Calling human actors ‘open-source opponents’ is therefore quite misleading — and just as lax as the anthropomorphism. Even given a world in which absolutely no data is hidden and all data flows in every direction without barriers (i.e., a fantasy world), no single human will be capable of accessing it at all times; and, thus, there can be no ‘open-source opponents.’

Simply because the larger system not being fully accessed by that opponent is open-source or data-rich, John Robb will call some insular, jungle-bound insurgent in Thailand an open-source opponent even if that opponent actually has quite limited access to all available data, perhaps relatively no more access to data than such a warrior would have had 100 years ago.

My use of the term static is quite different. Although I agree that data levels are increasing and that data is generally much more available to human actors, on the whole, than ever before, and will become even more available, I suppose a limit to the data levels any given actor may access and use at any given time. We do not see the whole world at once, but only ever parts — and usually, quite small parts. Humans are prone to generalize, or draw abstract pictures intended to fill in the gaps in our access to current data, often by using old data; but this does not make them ‘open-source.’ Because every individual human suffers severe limitations on observation, the acts that ultimately flow from observations are similarly limited.

Considered from the point of view of a group, a society, or the human population as a whole, these limited individual acts create changes to the world which are often at variance with the changes individuals would effect, perhaps quite beyond the individual’s observational range. Re-observing the changed and changing world may introduce data points that are unexpected or incomprehensible, etc., and such a phenomenon dispersed over a larger system will produce static.

John Robb may well assume that an ‘open-source opponent’ only uses the data he needs — he himself is not really open-source, but he makes use of such an environment — rather than that all data is not only available but also used by such a fighter. What is not clear is how Robb would incorporate limited observational levels, or limited access to data in an otherwise data-rich environment. He seems unwilling to consider actual humans, but only looks at masses:  Insurgent Group A on the whole accesses large amounts of data and so they are therefore ‘open-source opponents’ — but not one person within that group accesses very much individually! When you expand the example outward by lumping all possible guerrilla movements under the header Global Guerrillas, then it would seem that most of all available data is being accessed at some point in time, in some location — but each group of insurgents may have very little access to much of the available data, and individuals within that group may have even less individual access!

So he’s describing an environment, or drawing a generalization, rather than talking about humans. (You cannot describe humans without first describing individuals; and even then, must be wary of generalizing an ‘individual’ rather than talking about a real, unique person.)  He is not describing ‘open-source opponents’ but only an ‘open-source environment’ which we must assume has human actors of some kind within it.

Yet the epithet, demons, has been used to describe those so-called ‘global guerrillas’, who seem to have so many different, non-aligning, and unknown motivations and goals; and terms like incoherent have been used for describing the theory of Global Guerrillas.  ‘Global Guerrillas’ is what Robb gets when he looks at static.  In addressing what is occurring in Thailand, Robb quotes Matthew B. Arnold from the Bangkok Post:

Undoubtedly, it is hard to know who exactly is behind the violence since nobody ever claims responsibility. Yet, it is impossible to really design or debate policy response if nobody has a coherent, consistent understanding of who is actually perpetrating the violence.

The only thing that can be clearly known about this set of ‘open source opponents’ is that nothing much is known about them.  From that, presumably one may assume that these unknown actors have access to all available data and are always able to learn from the activities of others. And in like manner, John Robb looks at the static he sees everywhere and imagines the reality of these non-aligned data creators, which he calls GG’s, without realizing that what he calls an open-source environment may in fact appear to be static for many of those actors.  He singularly ignores the non-human data creators.  (The linear data flows have human origins he sees; he generally calls those actors, states.)

Yet it is precisely the increase in static, due to the effects of globalization and empowerment of individuals (and by extension, small factions), that will limit the effectiveness of transparency for creating a resilient global system.  Those who watch will have greater difficulty sorting out the profusion of data flows and determining their confluence.

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To be continued…

• Part Two: Transparency


• Part Three: Systemic Resilience


• Part Four: Implications for 5GW

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Update: See also, “Interlude: Static Visualized, Conceptualized”