The WELL: inkwell.vue.134: Bruce Sterling 2002: The State of the Whirled

#82: exiled in viridianistan (reid) Sun 13 Jan 02 09:14

Sun, 13 Jan 2002 09:14:00 PST

Fun! Here's my own entry. Hope I got it in under the wire! http://www.well.com/user/reid/v2.html [Read entire topic]

#81: Linda Castellani (castle) Sat 12 Jan 02 18:17

Sat, 12 Jan 2002 18:17:00 PST

Thanks, Bruce! [Read entire topic]

#80: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Sat 12 Jan 02 16:18

Sat, 12 Jan 2002 16:18:00 PST

Thanks, Bruce! And thanks to all who jammed with us this go-round. [Read entire topic]

#79: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Sat 12 Jan 02 12:59

Sat, 12 Jan 2002 12:59:00 PST

Yes, it's been fun, hasn't it?

I have to leave this discussion now, as it is incumbent upon me to fly to Washington. I have to meet some people there who do not want anyone to know that I have been talking to them.

Luckily, a magazine that will also go unnamed is paying me to do this.

Someday we'll look back on all this and laugh.

This is also the last day of the Viridian Design Contest for a new logo for Enron corporation. Soon I will have to figure out who wins this contest. If you have a firm idea on the subject, send me email. To bruces@well.com

The contest: http://www.bomoco.com/Viridian/Enron/Enron.htm

Oh, and here's my new blog. http://www.infinitematrix.net

And my WELL home page. http://www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades/

And the Viridian Design site. http://www.viridiandesign.org

That ought to keep you busy. Gotta pack now. Don't be a stranger! [Read entire topic]

#78: Gail Williams (gail) Sat 12 Jan 02 11:26

Sat, 12 Jan 2002 11:26:00 PST

The Empire of Permanent Emergency.

Wow. There's rich design opportunity. Is that a logo, or a Coat of Arms? Plus a perma-crisis theme song, half-anthem, half-jingle... something peppy but inspiring, so it can be sung at baseball games and other sporting events, musically similar to the Roto-Rooter "away goes trouble down the drain" tune. All kinds of possibilities there.

And then there's the cover art for that massive, dusty unpublished treatise,

Just Not Now: Civil Dissent in the Empire of Permanent Emergency. [Read entire topic]

#77: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Fri 11 Jan 02 10:12

Fri, 11 Jan 2002 10:12:00 PST

Yeah, I've been wondering what the victory condition looks like.

We might win this. It sounds farfetched now, but it was also supposed to be impossible to have *conventional* military predominance. But the US most definitely achieved that: unrivalled, overwhelming, conventional military power, on a global scale. If you went and asked Grant or Pershing or Eisenhower or MacArthur about our situation now, they wouldn't call us victims; they'd say we were in Oz.

If guerrilla assaults were supposed to be the be-all and end-all, nobody would have invented armies. Anybody can be a terrorist and yeah, it's cheap -- but armies have profound advantages. Simple advantages, like logistics and a tax base. Unlike terrorists, generals don't have to twitch in their sleep and trade bedrooms every night. Their files are safe. There's a chain of command and a career path. There's professional esprit de corps. And compared to conspiracies, armies are huge.

Robin Hood gets a lot of admiring press, but y'know, there are still law enforcement officials in Nottingham. Robin's not around.

The US military kinda gets it about guerrillas. They can do guerrilla. It's in the doctrinal manuals for small unit engagements. If you want to hide in the mountains and ambush convoys in the dark, they'll hide in the mountains and ambush *your* convoys in the dark, only they get night-vision goggles and Kevlar body armor and satellite phones.

People always claim that the US gets bored fast, but so does everybody else. The US has outlasted a lot of enemies.

Iran was a fanatical Islamic revolutionary state back in the 1970s. They couldn't keep the fervor up. The kids born in Iran since then despise their own regime and envy the diaspora kids.

You've got to be pretty goddamn keyed up to be willing to blow yourself up at a moment's notice for decades on end. Iran might well decide that theocracy is a shuck and cave in, Soviet-style. Then what is a mujihadeen to do? At some point it gets simpler to put down the gun and get a job -- assuming you haven't ruined your society so thoroughly and utterly that there's no such thing as a job possible. And who knows, maybe at that point the Diaspora floods back in and just buys everything.

Maybe that is the victory condition: Very Nervous New World Order.

If the USA, Europe, Russia and China all agree that only rogue states shoot each other, and if they all get behind the same surveillance screen while the common enemy is an abstraction called "Terror" (rather than actual nations), well, that's a huge transformation. We might be paranoid a lot of the time and even lose the occasional city, but that's a vast geo-strategic advance over the pre-Sept 11 status quo. It would be World Peace.

Only nobody would call it that. They'd call it New War. All the militarists would all think they were just as tough-minded as they'd ever been. They'd strut and bristle just like they always had, only there would never be another Eastern Front. Never another Normandy, another Somme.

It would be the Empire of Permanent Emergency. [Read entire topic]

#76: Gail Williams (gail) Fri 11 Jan 02 09:33

Fri, 11 Jan 2002 09:33:00 PST

Good point. We spent the soviets into submission. Can't do that with enemies who don't have to purchase the usual shopping lists of government, to deal with infrastructure and social needs, who are diffuse and distributed enough to not really even need defense spending per se. Just low-budget offense and minimal coordination, if any. [Read entire topic]

#75: Mike Godwin (mnemonic) Fri 11 Jan 02 05:33

Fri, 11 Jan 2002 05:33:00 PST

Isn't the longstanding problem going to be the asymmetry between the effort it takes to cause terrorism and the effort it takes to prevent it?

Other people besides bin Laden are going to have that insight. [Read entire topic]

#74: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Thu 10 Jan 02 22:32

Thu, 10 Jan 2002 22:32:00 PST

Another alternative: assume bin Laden isn't the conceptual victor... what does the world look like in that case? [Read entire topic]

#73: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Thu 10 Jan 02 11:35

Thu, 10 Jan 2002 11:35:00 PST

People said Saddam Hussein's following was evaporating too. He's also commonly said to be sick. Maybe both things are true, but that doesn't mean that Saddam is over.

Bin Laden's t-shirt trade would boom immediately, if he could pull off another slaughter of Americans to rival September 11. He needs a tactical victory followed by a taunting, eloquent video. He needs another burst of revolutionary charisma, he needs a triumphant return from Elba. With those, he'd be big again overnight. Probably bigger than before, thanks to the psychological recoil.

Unless he's deathly sick or the cops are really good, time may be on bin Laden's side. His being alive and un-findable is an unscratchable itch. The British want Tony to go home and fix the railroads. George W. has given us the same partial, haunted victory that his Dad did.

The Mujihadeen evaporated because they realized it makes no sense to be daisy-cuttered when you don't get to shoot any Yankees. The Iraqis did it too. Lawrence of Arabia's following would have done the same thing. They discouraged fast, but they could encourage fast, too.

They were hoping to be ritually dragging dead Americans behind the jeeps, like they did in Somalia. They never had the opportunity for Soviet-Afghan style ambushes, because the US didn't offer it to them. That doesn't mean they've forgotten how to do it.

I would very much like to think that bin Laden really was deathly sick, or running critically low on charisma, and he decided to blow it all in a suicide-by-cop. He'd been at it for a decade or more, so maybe he got tired, bored or desperate. But after our best shot at him, bin Laden is alive, and so is most of his inner cadre. Even Omar is still on the loose. The downside of the American war by proxy is that the proxies are buffers for both sides. Omar is being protected by people who shaved their beards, burned their intelligence files and are waiting for the Yankees to get bored and leave.

They still have fangs. The Moodge have still got enough moxie to brazenly assault the Indian Parliament, and bring the world closer to a nuclear war than it's been since the Cuban Missile Crisis. It's hard to imagine what Pakistan would look like after an Indo-Pak nuclear war, but those hardscrabble radioactive wastelands would likely look pretty familiar, even comforting, to illiterate Afghan bandits on horseback.

So if bin Laden could do what the net.war guys call "sustainable pulsing," just create some blood-red, destabilizing major headlines once a year or so, for the next ten years, then he could still win the War on Terror. We would likely never admit the defeat, but his victory condition is pretty clear. It's an unlivable, genocidal Israel, a suppurating, Luddite Islam pockmarked with huge bombs but devoid of CNN and McDonald's, and enough oil and dope money to keep the mullahs fed. [Read entire topic]