Grant's Blog

Happy Birthday, Jill.

This is a response to one of my friend’s, James Naugle’s, commentary on the Thomas Barnett video in my last post.

For the purposes of kicking off some discussion I should say that although I get a big kick out of Barnett, we need to keep what he is saying in context. He is a visionary… by trade… he comes up with big ideas and visions of what the future ought to look like.

He kinda glosses over details… they aren’t his department. And those details can be a real pain if the operational/ tactical guys don’t handle them early.

If you want a more tactical look at things I highly recommend John Robb. His book Brave New War should be required reading for everybody in the Department of Homeland Security.

If you read the comments that John Robb and Thomas Barnett have made about one another you get the sense that they don’t exactly see eye to eye. John Robb thinks that Barnett lives in a fantasy land where everything can be fixed through greater connection. Barnett, on the other hand, thinks of Robb as the eternal pessimist who thinks the current world order will end no matter what we do. In fact, they are both right. But if you look at the line between the two you will find that they are two sides of the same coin.

Barnett sees ever increasing globalization as our salvation, bring peace and prosperity to the world. (The Leviathan and SysAdmin forces he talks about in his lecture are to get to this perfectly globalized world, something he fails to address in that quick 23 minutes.) Robb, on the other hand, sees the threats that globalization brings. He sees super-powered individuals (not in the X-Men sense but in the 9/11 hijacker sense) that can create their own foreign policy and wage war without the backing of a state.

What neither of them have focused on is how to achieve what Barnett wants while mitigating the threats that Robb foresees. In other words, what we need is resilient communities. We need communities that can absorb shocks and last through shocks. Our communities need to rely more upon simple, local systems. Electricity generation that’s done on your rooftop instead of three states away. Food that is grown at the end of the block instead of in California’s Central Valley. Communications networks that route around disturbances (the internet already does this fairly well but still relies heavily on its backbone).

When looked at in this way, the home power and slow food movements aren’t just environmentally friendly, but contribute significantly to national security. If we want to avoid the system disruptions that John Robb foresees, these movements will need to be co-opted by the mainstream and not left to wallow in the hands of environmentalists.

People seem to hate the design of this site, especially the font choice. I’m quite happy with it, but I don’t want to dissuade people from reading my site because they find it ugly. So I’m just starting to think about changing it.

The thing I like most about my design is that it’s simple and not cluttered. However, I’m thinking of adding this: