On Politics
Hmm. For several years now, politics has given off an almost purely negative vibe. While processing lots of media (social and legacy), I find myself annoyed/irritated by stupidity in the political realm. Corollary: Nothing in that realm excites me or makes me hopeful for the future. This is in stark contrast to the stuff I work on, on-the-ground reality, resiliency, technology, etc.
The Dropout Economy
Reihan Salam. It’s a fun, short read, but snippets anyway:
It’s important to keep in mind that behavior that seems irrational from a middle-class perspective is perfectly rational in the face of straitened circumstances.
Look at the projections of fiscal doom emanating from the federal government, and consider the possibility that things could prove both worse and better. Worse because the jobless recovery we all expect could be severe enough to starve the New Deal social programs on which we base our life plans. Better because the millennial generation could prove to be more resilient and creative than its predecessors, abandoning old, familiar and broken institutions in favor of new, strange and flourishing ones.
Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells. As industrial agriculture sputters under the strain of the spiraling costs of water, gasoline and fertilizer, networks of farmers using sophisticated techniques that combine cutting-edge green technologies with ancient Mayan know-how build an alternative food-distribution system. Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias.
Rather than warehouse their children in factory schools invented to instill obedience in the future mill workers of America, bourgeois rebels will educate their kids in virtual schools tailored to different learning styles. Whereas only 1.5 million children were homeschooled in 2007, we can expect the number to explode in future years as distance education blows past the traditional variety in cost and quality. The cultural battle lines of our time, with red America pitted against blue, will be scrambled as Buddhist vegan militia members and evangelical anarchist squatters trade tips on how to build self-sufficient vertical farms from scrap-heap materials. To avoid the tax man, dozens if not hundreds of strongly encrypted digital currencies and barter schemes will crop up, leaving an underresourced IRS to play whack-a-mole with savvy libertarian “hacktivists.”
Just go read it.
Is Warfare Already Virtual?
The disaggregation of the public and warfare, coupled with what Pete Singer says, could have, for all intents and purposes, turned warfare virtual:
The drone war is documented, downloaded, accessible for everyone. You can see the videos on YouTube. It’s turning war for some into a form of entertainment. The soldiers call that “war porn.” We can see more but experience less.
The Massacre of Scholarship in Texas
Social conservatives (a paradoxical term at best) have destroyed the credibility of textbooks in Texas. Here is a great list summarizing the picking and choosing to suit a particular ideological agenda. The live blogging of the hearings is both hilarious, and mind boggling in its irresponsible stupidity. If these are not amended in May, teachers and students will be retarded by corrupt educational materials and curriculum for a decade.
If this isn’t a clarion call for reforming school systems, I don’t know what is. Growing costs, shrinking budgets, and now the product is infinitely less useful than it was? Start with the textbook system (electronic publishing offers a way to bypass the fat embedded in McGraw-Hill etc) and then shift to online learning (a single stroke can end the wasted cash flow on physical infrastructure and materials while simultaneously welcoming all to a world-class education).
Chirol On Militias
Couple things on the topic of this post (basically exploring a way to nicely unwind the state).
- Not militias. Private military corporations. More precisely, Chirol’s put together a framework on how to set about the regulation of domestic PMCs.
- If you’re assuming the level of PMC activity that’s implicit in this argument, the state has, for all intents and purposes of security anyway, collapsed. Whatever power it enjoys is focused on regulating the unwinding of the state (my chapter in Threats in the Age of Obama was on that very topic).
- Forsake the national border. Defending it is an expensive waste of time. Focus should be on mitigating the fact that the map melted.
- If you take this to its logical conclusion, you end up with what I talked about here (nation-states as PMC market distortions), and here (private insurgencies).