John Robb: Understanding Pathogenic Behavior
03 Economy, Blog Wisdom, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Sense-Making, Military
Within human social and economic systems, pathogenic behavior is spreading. This is particularly true among powerful, successful, and wealthy people (finance, economics, politics, etc.) in the developed world. What specifically do I mean by pathogenic? An ever greater number of these people are adopting behaviors that are actively hostile to the human systems we rely upon. They actually think it is OK to put these systems at risk for personal benefit. This is very dangerous. Given the massive amounts of network, technological, and financial leverage that's currently available to these people, even a single bad actor can wreak global havoc like never before (as in, they could cause an economic collapse that's so severe that it could kill more people than every war we've ever had to date, combined).
So, why is this happening and how can we prevent it? This has been a tough section of the book I'm currently writing. Fortunately, I think I'm starting to unravel it. Here we go. In order to understand why some bad actors are willing to do grievous harm to the complex systems they rely upon, we need to visit the cutting edge of microbiology. Let's start that exploration with a look at an amazing article by Brett Finlay in the Scientific American called, “Stopping Infections: The Art of Bacteriological Warfare.”
Good, Neutral, and Bad Bacteria
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Google Effect: Signs of Intelligence in the UK
Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government
‘Google Effect' Raised Bar for Spies to ‘Produce Secret Intelligence': Ex-UK Intelligence Chief
The rise of the web and Google means that spies in the UK need to work really hard to produce genuinely secret intelligence, former director of the country's intelligence agency has said.
Former chief of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) Sir David Pepper pointed out that “the Google effect” of so much information being readily available online had “very substantially” raised the “threshold for producing intelligence” for MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.
“Nobody wants the easy stuff anymore and there is no point spending effort and money collecting it,” the Telegraph quoted Sir David, as saying.
“Many of the sort of things for which (officials) once would have turned to the intelligence agencies are now readily available to them online,” he added.
Sir David said that with the help of technologies like Google Maps and Streeview anyone could now see photographic detail of far away countries, which hitherto would have been available only through secret and highly sophisticated national satellites.
“Intelligence producers have had to become very sensitive to this phenomenon and very careful not to put effort into producing intelligence that purports to be secret which is in fact not secret at all,” he added.
Tip of the Hat to AFIO.
Phi Beta Iota: Evidently the British have not yet realized that intelligence is about decision-support outputs rather than secret inputs, but at least they have a clue with respect to open sources. In another related article, AFIO points to Congress asking the US secret intelligence community to focus on domestic targets–marijuana growing on federal lands is evidently a major threat to national security, along with the majority of the US population that supports its legalization. Evidently corruption and idiocy in Congress complement each other. Meanwhile, CIA–with the explicit abdication of moral or intellectual leadership from the DNI– fights the Open Source Agency with every dirty trick it can muster including outright lies to Congress and the media. All this means is that the US Government will remain very expensively stupid, while other countries advance the M4IS aspect of the craft of intelligence.
See Also:
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Reality Sandwich: Three Consciousness Cattle Prods
Cultural Intelligence
American Materialism: The Elephant in the Middle of the Room
Our money issues are merely symptomatic. At issue is our collective karma about right use of power, which gets expressed through the way we use our resources.
Material wealth is not the origin of our power as a nation. But we think it is. That is the problem.
The Unsung Intelligence of Life's Web
The recent passing of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs elicited a host of public tributes attesting to his genius and highlighted how much we revere our gadgets and our smart communications technology. But it got me thinking about how we appraise our own engineering acumen in comparison with the engineering acumen of Nature.
Saturday's global rally in over 600 towns and cities worldwide was a momentous event. A month ago, the Occupy Wall Street movement managed to pierce the veil of the matrix. The puncture has now become an unsealable rip in the fabric of Empire. Gas is escaping rapidly from the balloon.
We are seeing the inception of a global insurrection that will not end until the dominant system is overthrown and replaced through a planetary metamorphosis.
. . . .
The technical genius of humanity needs to be redirected from creating state-of-the-art video games and stock trading programs to strengthening natural resilience, building self-sufficient local communities that grow their own food, and launching social technologies that support collaborative decision-making and nonviolent communication.
Phi Beta Iota: All three of these contributions are remarkable and merit a full reading.
Howard Rheingold: Crap Detection & Critical Thinking
04 Education, Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process, Movies
YouTube Library
Howard Rheingold on essential media literacies [6:09]
Howard Rheingold on Crap Detection (Part 1) [9:59]
Creating a Critical Society – Howard Rheingold on Crap Detection (Part 2) [4:49]
Determining Site Credibility – Howard Rheingold on Crap Detection (Part 3)
TED: Howard Rheingold: The new power of collaboration (19:34)
Selected Books on Thinking by Howard Rheingold
Net Smart: How to Thrive Online (Forthcoming March 2012)
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (2002)
Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology (1986)
Howard Rheingold Short Pieces
Howard Rheingold: 10 Online Tools for Better Focus
Howard Rheingold: Mindfulness for Executives
Howard Rheingold: Finding Credible Social Information & Crap Detection
Howard Rheinigold: Cultivating a Personal Learning Network
Howard Rheingold: News Filters for the Future – Technical Services or Human Networks?
Howard Rheingold: Infotention Skills + Citizen Intel RECAP
Worth a Look: Pierre Levy Interviewed by Howard Rheingold on Collective Intelligence
A slice of life in my virtual community
Below the Line: Full Text Article and More Links
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Theophilis Goodyear: The “Teflon” Argument – Open-Source Government Can Launch a New Scientific Age with Multinational Open-Source Science Projects
Cultural Intelligence, Government
The “Teflon” Argument: Open-Source Government Can Launch a New Scientific Age by Facilitating International Cooperation on Open-Source Science Projects
The potential uses for open-source collaborations are limited only by human creativity and ingenuity.
In other words, Open-Source Intelligence is open-ended! No one can possibly predict the upward limits of benefits that can come from it. Clearly governance is just one use for collaborative networks of Applied, Collaborative Open-Source Human Intelligence.
Open-source governance should be thought of as the key to opening the door to all of the other open-source possibilities: medical research, education, basic science, and solving other technological problems: advancing science by sharing every new piece of the puzzle with other researchers. It could lead to major discoveries.
Seth Godin: Independence & subjugation
Blog Wisdom, Cultural Intelligence
Tribal management often involves power struggles. One thing that's been shown again and again–subjugating another tribe, taking it over–it almost never works. It can take hundreds of years before the two tribes get into sync, if ever.
On the other hand, granting independence to a rising tribe, letting them go–this is harder to swallow but it generally leads to a quick and beneficial relationship between the two new groups.
When Atari was struggling after it was acquired by Warner, many top programmers left, some to start companies like Activision. Activision, ironically, was one of the bright spots for Atari after that. The passion and creativity of the nascent group was exactly what the original group needed.
Or consider the excellent relationship that the UK has with both the United States and India. In both cases, the wars of independence weren't as nearly brutal or as drawn out as they could have been.
While conventional views of power and authority seem to indicate that you should co-opt and capture other tribes, you can often achieve more by freeing your own people to maximize their vision alongside yours.
