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And I feel… more than a little peeky.
Watch the End of Suburbia and see how you feel
Gordon Brown, the UK’s ‘leader’ is currently floundering as we enter the years of the Perfect Storm. He has no answers, he is not proacting, he is showing clearly that he has no clue how to discuss with his nation the problems that face us all:
Military crisis
Environmental crisis
Financial crisis
Food crisis
Oil crisis
And the biggest crisis of all: These five layered and forward-feeding factors that will end the world as we know it. Watch Naomi Klein (author of No Logo; Shock Doctrine) on the choice that is currently facing Americans.
This same choice will face Europeans as the situation here quickly follows that in the US. We may not be such a suburban culture as North America, but our way of life is nevertheless still predicated on what the philosopher Derrick Jensen terms a Culture of Make Believe.
We will be faced with an End of Suburbia and social and economic change on the same scale as North America, culturally different on the surface but no less massive. The five horses of the combined emergent property known as the apocalypse, the five factors of the Perfect Storm, are now upon us. Rome is burning and we are down at the forum watching Big Brother. Just at the moment when UK Parliament is considering building Big Brother’s brain. How beautifully ironic.
Terrorism is the label for a twentieth century phenomenon. The end of real terrorism could be just around the corner. That is, terrorist organisations have begun to realise that ‘terror’ as a weapon is obsolete when fighting a globalised technological civilisation. That civilisation holds the keys to its own destruction, keys which ex-terrorists are beginning to explore:
The globalised infrastructure is vulnerable without having to engage in violence against the person, as John Robb describes. The standard theory of terrorism is that political power can be gained through targeting the population, and this has been the focus of security activity for the past century. However, political power can also be gained by directly targeting the infrastructure and materials of the globalised economy rather than the people.
The ways in which the non-terror actors could attack the nodes in the system are as numerous as the components within the system. Attacks are likely to be highly imaginative and will not come under current conceptualisations of terrorism. By focusing on terrorism states may be sleep walking into a defeat by other means. Currently, security is aimed at protecting the population from direct violent attacks, with anti-terror legislation designed for this purpose. We do not have legislation or security in place (other than standard criminal damage and arson laws) that would prevent groups from targeting the non-human aspects of the civilisation they are in opposition to. That is, the legal and social sanctions that work against the growth of terrorism will no longer work. This is critical since just a few well-coordinated attacks on our infrastructure could do more damage than terror ever has – if at all (1) – to the integrity of Western countries.
Furthermore, given the expample of the green movement in the US this new ‘non-terror threat’ could become more closely aligned with non-violent legal activism in ways that will be difficult to separate into the current terrorist and activist concepts. In the future, an organisation may make its aims of collapsing civilisation clear (see Derrick Jensen’s Endgame) and face no penalty since no threat is being made against people only against abstract systems and processes. In other words terrorism will evolve into subversion, but subversion of what hierarchies do rather than direct subversion of state power.
For example, alone and in combination any of the factors below could be involved in non-violent ‘attacks’ that attempt to cause a cascade of systems failure:
- Transport nodes
- Logistics nodes
- Energy supplies – critical nodes of national grid/pipelines etc
- Financial market disruption from within
- Spreading bird flue and other diseases
- Computer (and psychological) virus attacks
- Social contagion and hysteria, media manipulation
The way that this may be effected is set out in Robb’s description of how cascading failures occur in violent attacks, drawn from Lai and Motter (2002):
Dynamic networks and cascading failures
Static maps of a network’s connectivity (like a scale free network topology) don’t provide a true picture of an infrastructure network’s operation. Infrastructures are dynamic. There are flows of information, power, and substances constantly coursing through them. This dynamism creates a new set of vulnerabilities that can be exploited by global guerrillas. Here’s how cascading network failures occur in dynamic networks when they lose high-load nodes (the loss of even a single high-load node can result in system-wide cascading failure):
- Load redistribution. In most infrastructure networks, the loads carried by each node on the network are dynamically redistributed. If a network node is lost, due to accident or attack, the load that node carries is rapidly distributed to the other nodes on the network.
- Hi-load nodes and failure. If a high-load node is removed from the network, the loads it carries are redistributed to other nodes on the network. This increased flow causes less capable nodes to exceed their capacity. To protect these nodes from damage, many networks will automatically force the overloaded node to fail-over (shut down). In other networks, the increased congestion will cause the overloaded node to become inefficient (bog down). Regardless, the result is a series of shut-downs or slow-downs that “cascade” through the network as the excess load is pushed to the next available node. The end result is total network failure.
- Heterogeneous networks. Cascading failures only occur in heterogeneous networks where there are a few nodes that have the capacity for high-loads and many with the capacity only for low-loads. Homogeneous networks, where all the nodes handle an equal load do not suffer cascading failure. Unfortunately, all infrastructure networks are heterogeneous by design.
NOTE: Cascading failures do not cleanly apply to terrorist “social” networks. In social networks, the network nodes are people and the flow is information/knowledge/etc. When a high-load node is removed, the remaining nodes will not fail due to an increase in load. People can adapt dynamically. For example: they can prioritize the new loads they inherit which mitigates the impact of a high-load node loss to the network.
The vulnerability of dynamic networks to attacks on hi-load nodes is straight forward. However, planning attacks on these dynamic networks isn’t. Here’s how global guerrillas will plan attacks to create cascading failures within dynamic networks:
Global Guerilla Attack Planning
- High-load node identification. There is a high level of correlation between the number of connections a node has and the amount of load it carries. Additionally, many infrastructure networks (oil, gas, electricity, etc.)concentrate production of the flow that travels through the network. In these networks, high-load nodes can be identified as those nodes that are immediately downstream from production facilities. In other networks high-load nodes are the most central (communication networks).
- Connections instead of nodes. A non obvious approach to node failure is to attack the connections radiating from high-load nodes. The result of an attack on the connections between nodes will be the redistribution of the load carried by the damaged connection to the remaining connections. This will result in the failure of a high-load node when the remaining connections fail due to overloading (see diagram).
- Network suppliers. Some networks are vulnerable to undersupply (gas, electricity, and water). In these networks, an attack on a supply facility or connections from a supply facility will produce network failure as undersupplied nodes pull resources from the rest of the network (see diagram).
(1) Terrorism has never been shown to have an adverse effect on society in Western countries, apart from the direct human impact. It is a little known fact that bomb attacks tend to be associated with more people coming out onto the streets and engaging in consumerism!
If you think $/£5 a gallon is expensive for fossil-oil based fuels then wait until it hits $20 during the next 5-10 years.
Peak oil already arrived in 2006. Warnings that the capacity for global oil production is soon to drop off were wrong: it’s not soon, it’s happened and prices will now begin to rise exponentially.
Energy Watch Group is a Germany-based group of independent scientists and energy experts who this month released a report that includes nearly 100 pages of exhaustive technical analysis of every oil producing field in the world and every known and proven reserve. The report concludes that global oil production has already peaked at about 83 million barrels per day some time in 2006. They predict that global production will now fall every year, including this year, even with a quintupling of production in Canadian tar sands and new discoveries and developments elsewhere in the world. By 2020, they predict only 58 million barrels will be produced per day, and 39 million barrels per day by 2030. These predictions are made without regard for how high the price of oil goes in the meantime because their analysis is based solely on the technical limitations of oil production and its availability.
“This [the decline in oil production] will create a supply gap which can hardly be closed by growing contributions from other fossil, nuclear or alternative energy sources in this time frame. The world is at the beginning of a structural change of its economic system. This change will be triggered by declining fossil fuel supplies and will influence almost all aspects of our daily life.
Naomi Wolfe documents the similarities between the behaviour of the US state in recent years and the history of states that have succumbed to fascism. The evidence is worrying and the potential is certainly there for the unthinkable to happen again.
Wolfe’s analysis (The End of America: Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot) hardly touches on issues like the corporate kleptocracy and yet it is a powerful indictment of the shift towards to a tipping point from the far right into full-on fascism. We in Europe and other countries where the plebs are getting too smart and beginning to question and challenge state authority and power should be aware that we are following a similar techno-military route towards suppression of human values and conscience.
The War on Terror was never just an excuse for war and suppression of rights – the war on terror is a real war in which the state is preemptively targeting individuals and groups who challenge it in whatever way. The ecoterrorist and anyone else who challenges the state is a serious threat to the state – whether or not s/he uses violence.
Anyone who marshalls dissent and civil disobedience is an enemy of the state. In our increasingly fragile (see John Robb’s Brave New War) industrial-military-capitalist driven societies a group which uses words alone in order to trip-up a logistics system is as much a threat to the state as a group that uses violence or physical sabotage. Grass roots organisation is what the state wants to crush: the corporate-political globalised world will collapse if the people gain any more power, and the state will do everything it can, legal or illegal, in order to stop it.
The people of Europe need to be aware that the same is happening in our societies but due to our complacency about it never happening here again, and there being less overt organs of state power and oppression, the preparations for totalitarianism and fascism are not as obvious as in the US.
