I will not replicate all that is at www.oss.net and to a much lesser extent, www.earth-intelligence.net, but do want to recognize a handful of extraordinary individuals by isolating their especially meritorious contributiions to the long-running debate about national intelligence reform and re-invention.
In this address, Bruce examined the future of cyber war and cyber security. Mr. Schneier explored the current debate on the threat of cyber war, asking whether or not the threat had been over-stated. He then explored the range of attacks that have taken place, including the Latvian DOS attack and the Stuxnet worm. The address concluded with an exploration of the future of international treaties on cyber war.
Phi Beta Iota: This is utterly brilliant stuff, a historical contribution. A power struggle between military and police over cyber-security, in US military won–this has consequences. The weak aspect is the proponency for treaties among states–states are but one of the eight tribes, any “treaty” environment that does not adapt to the reality of eight tribes and hybrid networks is not serious.
Good ideas come from bad ideas, but only if there are enough of them
Ideas hate conference rooms, particularly conference rooms where there is a history of criticism, personal attacks or boredom
Ideas occur when dissimilar universes collide
Ideas often strive to meet expectations. If people expect them to appear, they do
Ideas fear experts, but they adore beginner's mind. A little awareness is a good thing
Ideas come in spurts, until you get frightened. Willie Nelson wrote three of his biggest hits in one week
Ideas come from trouble
Ideas come from our ego, and they do their best when they're generous and selfless
Ideas come from nature
Sometimes ideas come from fear (usually in movies) but often they come from confidence
Useful ideas come from being awake, alert enough to actually notice
Though sometimes ideas sneak in when we're asleep and too numb to be afraid
Ideas come out of the corner of the eye, or in the shower, when we're not trying
Mediocre ideas enjoy copying what happens to be working right this minute
Bigger ideas leapfrog the mediocre ones
Ideas don't need a passport, and often cross borders (of all kinds) with impunity
An idea must come from somewhere, because if it merely stays where it is and doesn't join us here, it's hidden. And hidden ideas don't ship, have no influence, no intersection with the market. They die, alone.
The Simpson-Bowles Deficit Commission will be reporting out its results in early December. We can expect that it will focus on domestic spending, especially entitlements, including Social Security. By the time the dust settles, it is quite likely that the Pentagon — really the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex — will get a free ride for the reasons predicted by President Eisenhower in his farewell address.
Given the short attention span of the mainstream media, we can expect the Commission's recommendations will be examined as if they are current news, devoid of historical context. But the question of context — specifically, as it relates to how the spending behaviour of the US government managed to destabilize the improving trend in budget balances of the late 1990s (due in large part to the huge and growing surpluses of the Social Security Trust Fund in the 1990s as well as the effects of the economic expansion) — is central to any rational determination of whether the enactment of Simpson-Bowles' recommendations will make things better or worse. Given the gravity of our economic situation, this kind of omission would simply compound the ongoing American Tragedy.
A letter to a community organizer and networker overwhelmed by the potential impact of global crises on his community.
Dear John,
You might consider something I'm thinking of calling crisis-fatigue. Like battle fatigue or compassion fatigue. I think its main ingredient is ambiguity-fatigue. It is exhausting to continually contemplate potentially massive threats from a place of radical uncertainty littered with certainties that blink on and off…
How does one respond to this in anything approaching a sane way? I struggle with this all the time. At least a few things have become obvious to me. These strategies are remarkably consistent with what you'd expect the requisites would be for living in a complex, chaotic, unpredictable system:
1) Let go of outcome. Since we're not in charge (and never really were), admit that what happens is much bigger than any of us. It seems we need to be willing to die, willing for everyone around us to suffer, willing to fail at every attempt to make the world better or to understand or to be understood, or to even grow and learn from all this. Let it all go. (I do not mean that we should expect, encourage or welcome such undesirable outcomes. I mean we can want or envision positive outcomes even as we appreciate the fullness of life with or without them. Honoring our desires without being controlled by them clarifies our minds and frees us to be fully present. I know of few forces more powerfully benign than passionate engagement without attachment.)
2) Come to terms with our own intrinsic participation in Whatever Happens. Not only are we not in control, we're not un-involved. Our role in Whatever Happens isn't something we can escape. (One consolation is we aren't alone. Everyone and everything is co-creating Whatever Happens.) This is hard for us to come to terms with because it looks so much like the guilt-based responsibility upon which our society is based (“Everything is not my fault!”); but it is a totally different thing.
Guilt-based responsibility is part of the linear cause-and-effect worldview. (“Who's responsible/ guilty/ blameworthy?” is the social equivalent of the scientists' question, “What's the cause?”) But blame can't fathom the complexity of What Happens in a living/chaotic system. Phenomena arise from the whole, from the system itself. Those who stand by when events happen are creating a context for those events to unfold in the way they do — even when they are miles away obliviously watching a sitcom. Even inanimate objects are participants: Roads are participating in the death of pollinators (by replacing trees and meadows, by enabling the transport of pesticides, by contributing to ozone depletion). Everything participates. It is pointless to point. The route to better conditions is through increased awareness of the whole, and a more radically expansive sense of all our roles. This includes the previous item — letting go — because co-creation means we're not in charge of outcomes, we're just vitally important participants in influencing them.
3) Look for positive possibilities and ways to partner them into greater probability. Meg Wheatley and David Spangler taught me about living in a world of possibilities. We could say, inspired by the poet Muriel Rukeyser, that the universe is made of possibilities, not atoms. They are everywhere. They are everything. Some say God (or the devil) is in the details. I say God (and the devil) are in the possibilities. Every moment is filled with them. Although we don't get to control how they turn out, they are very responsive to our actions, our beliefs, our caring. That is the edge of co-creativity where Life resides most vividly.
Phi Beta Iota: We respectfully urge one and all to contribute to the non-profit Co-Intelligence Institute. Tom Atlee is as close as we come to a Founding Father for a prosperous world at peace, beginning here in the USA.
Tom Atlee recently described the game changing potential of the Interactive Voter Choice System in the following terms:
“The participatory social-networking capacity of the Interactive Voter Choice System shifts voters' allegiance and attention from parties, ideologies, and political categories to the actual policies they want to see implemented. The system then helps them ally with others who want to see those policies implemented, regardless of their diverse political beliefs or reasons for favoring those policies. In the process, IVCS gives rise to an empowering, collectively intelligent, evolving, self-organizing political ecosystem which can enable citizens to do the following:
clarify and push for policies they want, creating their own personal “platforms”
network with others to form coalitions or ad hoc lobbying groups to push preferred policies
field candidates outside of the party system to promote the policies they want
create new political parties
work within existing parties to shape their platforms and performance
hold elected representatives accountable for their performance on favored policies
create parallel “shadow government” structures and policies
take over political parties and dissolve them and, through all of the above, to
ultimately move our politics beyond party politics and ideologies altogether.
“Imagine a politics where one hardly ever hears ‘liberal' or ‘conservative' or even ‘transpartisan', but only discussion of the issues. Imagine a politics where grassroots organizing is finally on a level playing field — or even favorable playing field — with the big money players. Imagine the already-surveyed popular preferences — like single payer health care and ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — readily becoming the official policy of our government.”I honestly think IVCS is one of the most important emerging forms of political leverage we have available. Of course it can only do its job if it is well-funded for software development, viral promotion, and political strategizing so it can launch with strong popular appeal, participation, and well-thought-out security safeguards to prevent its marginalization, subversion or co-optation. If that happens soon enough, the chances are extremely high that it will have a decisive positive impact on the critical watershed 2012 election and every election after that. It could be a total game-changer.”
When I read Tom's article, my immediate reaction was that he had explained IVCS and its game changing potential in the most compelling terms that have been written on the subject. So I shared the article with a number of people who have expressed interest in IVCS. Their enthusiastic response was that they got the big picture, but were still unclear about how IVCS actually works. They asked for a clear explanation of how it enables voters, not political parties or special interests, to determine the outcomes of elections. How can voters use the system to run and elect their own candidates? I have written this post to answer these questions.
Humble Beginnings
Sheer frustration caused the idea for IVCS to pop into my head in 2004 during a campaign event for Howard Dean during his presidential primary bid. While milling around with his supporters waiting for Dean to start a nationwide conference call, I realized that his campaign slogan “You have the power” didn't jibe with the powerless role supporters like myself were relegated to playing at the event.
The way it was structured made it impossible for me to do what I came to do, which was to pressure Dean to remain true to his initial opposition to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, an issue I felt he had begun to waffle on. I also wanted to see if I could get other supporters to join me in pressing Dean not to renege on his opposition to the war.
The absence of any way for me to press my concern, and rally other anti-war supporters, hit home to me a political fact that I had not fully appreciated before. It is that in U.S. politics, electoral candidates conduct their campaigns on a “take it or leave it” basis. I had been coming to this conclusion gradually over time, but attending Dean's event and seeing how much he and his modus operandi had changed since the first rally I had attended in the summer of 2003 brought it home in a very forceful and depressing way.
The main goal of most campaigning candidates, to my way of thinking, is not to find out what their prospective constituents want them to do if they are elected, but to get them to embrace the agendas the candidates think will get them the most votes. Although they often conduct opinion polls, their objective is to use the results to figure out how to frame their targeted mixed messages to re-interpret reality for voters, and cajole disparate voting blocs into voting for them for different reasons. Campaigns are about defining and interpreting reality for voters, and “imaging” the candidates so that they appear to represent the best solution to the problematic versions of “reality” the campaigns create.
This systemic duplicity is basically a reversal of the democratic theory that elected officials should represent the people. Candidates do not seek or run on mandates from their constituents. Instead, they get voters to vote for them by manipulating their perceptions of reality and their images of the candidates themselves. Once these disingenuous candidates get into office, they can turn democratic theory upside down and claim that the voters who voted for them gave them a mandate to enact the candidates' agendas!
Phi Beta Iota: At this time and in our view, despite the strong approval that Tom Atlee voices and which we respect, the system is trying too hard to force fit pre-written scripted choices onto cards. As Harrison Owen said at a luncheon recently with the sponsors of IVCS and Phi Beta Iota, it is trying way too hard and should just give the voters the Open Space needed to create an infinite array of choices and consensus. It also does not at this time provide for displaying “true cost” information of alternative options, or for engaging the reality of having to make trade-offs if one wishes to make choices within a sustainable budget that sustains the environment. It's a start–and the best thing we've seen to date. It has a long way to go and Electoral Reform might be more fruitful (but much harder to advance); so in terms of a first step, this is, as Tom Atlee goes to great lengths to articulate, the best thing going.
Asked to name the world’s wealthiest entrepreneurs, few people would think of Eric Lefkofsky, who is 40 and keeps a deliberately low profile in his hometown of Chicago. But Mr. Lefkofsky has an impressive entrepreneurial track record, one that recently led Forbes to estimate his wealth at $750 million.
The first business Mr. Lefkofsky started, StarBelly, made tools for building Web sites; he sold it in 2000 for $240 million. He then started two companies that have since gone public — InnerWorkings, which provides printing capabilities over the Web, and Echo Global Logistics, a transportation and logistics outsourcing business he founded with a law school friend, Brad Keywell. He also founded MediaBank, which helps companies buy advertising. In each case, Mr. Lefkofsky used the power of technology and the Internet to update an industry.
And then came Groupon, the social-coupon Web site that he bankrolled and started in 2008 with Andrew Mason — a venture that has been called the fastest-growing company ever. Groupon offers its followers a deal-of-the-day coupon, sponsored by a local business, that the followers are encouraged to share with their social networks. The local business gets customers, and Groupon takes a share of the coupon proceeds — a business model that has led to talk that Groupon, still privately owned, could be worth as much as $3 billion. More recently, Mr. Lefkofsky and Mr. Keywell started an investment fund with $100 million of their earnings. It’s called Lightbank, and it invests only in early-stage technology companies that are built around social media. The following is a condensed version of a recent conversation with Mr. Lefkofsky.
The Honorable Erskine Bowles
National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform
1650 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20504
Dear Mr. Bowles:
We are writing to you and other members of the President's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform as individuals who have worked in national security affairs for decades for the Department of Defense, in the Armed Forces and for Democrats and Republicans in Congress. Our concern is the defense budget.
Similar to what your “Co-Chairs' Proposal” said last week regarding Social Security and other issues, we do not believe that defense spending should be reduced to a bargaining chip in budget negotiations at the Deficit Commission. On the other hand, we do believe that the defense budget is dangerously bloated, giving rise to serious decay in our armed forces.
Weaker forces at higher costs (discussed below) are the result of many years of exploitation of defense spending for political purposes, dereliction of oversight duties, and gross mismanagement by the Pentagon, the White House and the Congress. There has been a fundamental absence of accountability, both that required by the Constitution and that which accompanies sound management.
Phi Beta Iota: What our distinguished colleagues have not included in this letter is the fact that the US does not have a coherent reality-based strategy within which to evaluate ALL threats and provide a force structure suitable to ALL threats, nor does the US have an intelligence community able to provide any more than 4% (“at best” according to General Tony Zinni) of what we need in the way of intelligence support to policy, acquisition, and operations. At the same time, the Pentagon is committing a major crime against its own humanity by spending less than 1% of its budget on the 4% of the force that takes 80% of the casualties: the infanty, this from General Robert Scales. With all due respect, both Gates and Clapper have presided over the maintenance of the status quo; they have not changed the game for the better; and they have failed to do what needed to be done.
