The Story of Morgan Hill
Bruce Person has a nice short article on how Morgan Hill coped with being forcibly firewalled from the internet.
In short, they did well because of embedded resiliency – public/private partnerships coupled with actually useful government services focused on other threats – fire, floods, earthquakes and riots.
TweetBombs as Social Engineering
SingularityHub describes the potential of Twitter to direct the actions of millions (or even billions) of voluntary zombies (a la a flashmob). The idea is interesting, and one I’ve written about before, but Keith Kleiner gets lost in issues of scale.
Mass mobilization is unlikely. What is 10x more interesting is what small group ad-hoc groups can accomplish, particularly with better software to make the process more efficient.
Scrip!
CNN has a pretty long article on the topic. BerkShares, Ithaca Hours have the focus:
But creating a local currency isn’t easy. First, there are the start-up costs. Witt’s group spent $250,000 in grant money to create the BerkShares. There are costs associated with designing a currency, printing costs, the costs of educating residents and businesses. And maintaining the whole program is expensive. Witt estimates Newark could spend about $1 million in implementing a local currency.
Sterling’s ‘White Fungus’
Excellent read about a 20-something-on life in a post-education-bubble-Orlovian world impacted by climate, financial, and energy crises. (Link is to the teaser, whole thing is in Beyond.
LOL: Pirates as Part of a Grand Jihadi Conspiracy
Look, Walid’s a nice guy but this is a laughable caricature of institutional legacy thinking:
Here is why: these so-called Somali pirates are strategically different from their historical predecessors in the Caribbean, or from their contemporary colleagues in archipelagoes around the world. They aren’t a vast collection of individual thugs, acting as bands replicating what successful sea gangs have accomplished for centuries before them. They are too many, operating from extremely long shores, all using similar methods, and are backed from hinterland forces.
They may seem like pirates as they seize ships and negotiate for the ransom. But these water thugs actually belong to a wider chess game. The grand ensemble of the army of little boats is in fact part of a regional Jihadi apparatus being deployed in the Horn of Africa and beyond. The Jihadi grand circle building in the region is not limited to the pirates but involves hostile forces from the mid-Red Sea to East Africa. The Somali pirates are merely one facet of this grand circle.
This is nothing more than a maritime Jihad striking at the Western/international lifeline on high seas to bring about a change in balance of power.
(Emphasis mine.)