Dreaming 5GW

Mark Safranski’s essay “5GW: Into the Heart of Darkness”, from The Handbook of 5GW, is included in the “Examples of 5GW” section of that book.  In the essay, Safranski first examines the role of the state in our present day, projecting into the future a dire warning for states confronted by decentralized 4GW opposition:

This is a path of grave danger.  States will either successfully adapt or they will fail.  Many will fail, lacking sufficient political resilience to weather protracted civil conflict or an economic base from which to wage it.

Of those states that succeed in adapting to the changing environment, two scenarios are given as the most likely strategies employed:  a) by becoming complex and able to attack problems on a granular level — attacking all points affected by or affecting the decentralized foe — or b) by utilizing “sustained application of extreme violence” to disrupt networks which support the decentralized foe.

Safranski embellishes choice a above by describing a systemic application of COIN tactics (counterinsurgency) but remarks on the extreme sophistication required and the difficulty those states will face.

Much of the essay focuses instead on the likelihood of choice b.  The Stalinist purge of networks (via the purging of all leaders and their immediate associates and even families) is given as an example of manipulation of context and the creation of new rulesets:  those surviving the purges would have little institutional memory of the purged networks/paradigms.  The Khmer Rouge of Cambodia is offered as a second example; unlike Stalinist purges (and unlike the Nazi campaign of genocide), Pol Pot enlisted the average citizen in the genocide, which furthermore co-opted those survivors into a complex system of future guilt and compliance.  Finally, Mark Safranski utilizes the example of the Rwandan genocide, which operated similarly to Pol Pot’s but was “perfected by the Interahamwe militias.”

One might note, as Mark Safranski has noted in this essay, the increasing granularity of these genocidal efforts.  Similar to option a above, these examples of genocidal 5GW were granular in their focus;  also similarly, they had as their goal the systemic ruleset reset that would continue to operate long after the operations were completed.  Unlike option a however, these campaigns forsook sophisticated, complex endeavors in favor of direct kinetic operations meant to destroy old social networks in order to leave room for the new, desirable social framework — desirable to the paranoid regimes initiating these endeavors.  

Filed in Timeline Candidates