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Saw this phrase on Tom Barnett’s blog and it jumped out at me.
“Bush seems unable to define a victory, so he leaves it to the Dems to define a loss.”
I have explored before the consideration that 5GW will in part be about context and more specifically about placing information in context that will lead to the emergence of specific memes. In fact, looking forward to a situation in which 5GW organizations will battle each other for memetic supremacy (Heh, that sounds pretty cool, eh?) the concept embodied by this short statement could very well be the battleground.
Just a bit of food for thought.
Posted by Arherring on Apr 2, 2007 07:36 PM
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3 Comments
Ha, I left a comment there, to the effect that ‘Discourse happens anyway.’
The Congressional Dem approach vis-a-vis the Iraq war is actually very 4GW; they are more focused on showing the King he has no clothing and no scepter or crown, less focused on shaping the ME, Africa, Asia, and so forth. Memetic engineering occurs in 4GW as well. In this case, defining loss is:
Defining loss may be a queer way of redefining victory, to the extent that the people want a people’s victory which just happens to be different than the ‘loss’ they see the President engineering: that is, the ‘loss’ defined by the Dems becomes a ‘victory’ for the people by becoming a validation of the common assessment of the current war.
Of course, using 4GW tactics in 5GW will be possible, so if the Dem Caucus — or someone behind the scenes who is shaping the Dem approach — has an ulterior motive for propagating these particular ‘loss/victory’ memes, then it might be 5GW after all. But as the paradox goes…
I agree with you Curtis.
When I was writing I was also thinking of the Bush administration not being able to define victory, yet would it be 5GWish of them to instead define the defeat, making the expectation (and definition) of failure so remote that anything in the end is a victory. I forsee a lot of 5GW action being directed to the formation and validation of expectation. When actors and/or targets are shown what they expect to see it just makes their conclusions that much more self-validating.
Looking at it through a 4GW lens the attack at the ‘will’ of the actor/target would be to define victory as being unattainable and defeat unavoidable. From a certain point of view this is very much what the Dems are doing.
Arherring,
I suppose, given the paradox, that the real 5GW players here (begging the question, that 5GW might be occurring) could as easily be the Administration, if allowing the Dems to win by defining loss is a first step in some convoluted chess game. Given the paradox, who can say?
Your look at this reminds me of the thread on the so-called Hockey 5GW and your perspective there. I may have been a little one-sided or stringent in my assessment; but this is because I at times think that the Great Unknown Factors simply by definition do not warrant too deep a look or exploration of whatever conspiracies might be imagined to exist: i.e., looking at what is known, I have thought, on the surface, it’s not really 5GW. When we begin to imagine all possible reverberations and antecedents, however, we might begin to postulate 5GW aspects, and I wonder if this is how exploration of 5GW will happen, or must happen, given the paradox.