I really want to encourage people to keep an eye on the writing’s of John Robb, both over at his blog, Global Guerrillas, and in his ground-breaking and extremely relevant book, Brave New War. His writing focuses on the evolving dynamics of the global geo-political system with a keen eye towards 4th generation guerrilla warfare, it’s impact on the de-legitimizing of increasingly hollow states, and the need for communities to take control of their resources to establish independence and resiliency. His work is very much in line with my own sense of where things are heading, and his writings offer a coherent framework for understanding the great shift that is happening across our system of civilization.

My own personal recommendations: assume that the state will be increasingly unable to provide the fundamental services we have come to take for granted. Energy, water, food, health care, protection. The state will continue to spread out in extended foreign military engagements; American cities will move towards increasing chaos and conflict; local communities will seize the reigns of innovation, and assume responsibility for basic services and maintenance.

I don’t expect apocalypse - and in many ways things will likely stay the same - but increasing strain will be put on state and federal budgets ($700B Failout?) and the state will grow more and more pre-occupied with defending its own demise (and continuing is conversion to a loosely fascist merger of industry and governance).

The State is dead. Long live the State!

I haven’t been posting much lately while I’m otherwise focused on shifting my career out of quality engineering management. My head has been mostly consumed with trend analysis and research that’s appropriate to my current employer, Adobe Systems, as well as to the broader technology commons. Or perhaps more accurately, I’m trying to find a path within Adobe that resonates with my own deep interest in the prevailing and emergent technologies that are quickly wiring us all together. Or I may have to find that path elsewhere.

There’s so much incredible innovation and change happening at the dawn of the new Digital Age. I’m already surfing it constantly, finding the eddies and feeling out the edges.

Unfortunately, my current job doesn’t really care about any of this and is essentially a glorified maintenance role.

Meh. Feh. Onward to better things…

Jamai Cascio, co-founder of WorldChanging.com, has a great overview of the next 30+ years and the realities of our onrushing energy collapse. A lot of what he says resonates with my own sense of things. Much of my thought lately has been towards the deployment of local stabilizing systems and the the counter-imperative to our headless globalization. Really, we as a species are at a very sobering point in our history when all of the great modern systems we’ve taken for granted are being called into question. Is our world sustainable? Will innovation and collaboration win of ideaology and greed?

Over the next forty years, we’ll see a small but measurable dieback of human population, due to starvation, disease, and war (one local nuclear war in South Asia or Middle East, scaring the hell out of everyone about nukes for another couple of generations). Much of the death will be in the advanced developing nations, such as China and India. There will be pretty significant economic slowdowns globally, and US/EU/Japan will see significant unrest. Border closings between the developed and the developing nations will likely spike, probably along with brushfire skirmishes.

The post-industrial world will see a burst of localization and “made by hand” production, but even at its worst it is more reminiscent of World War II-era restrictions than of a Mad Max-style apocalypse. In much of the developed world, limitations serve as a driver for innovation, both social and technological. It’s not a comfortable period, by any means, but the Chinese experience and the aftermath of the Middle East/South Asian nuclear exchange sobers everybody up.

Imperial overreach, economic crises, and the various global environmental and resource threats put an end to American dominance, but nobody else can step up as global hegemon. Europe is trying to deal with its own social and environmental problems, while China is struggling to avoid full-on collapse. The result isn’t so much isolationism as distractionism — the potential global players are all far too distracted by their own problems to do much overseas.

[See also this post about resilient communities by Alex Steffen for a good link roundup (I’m not really in line with his notion that localism is not enough… i think it’s the best place to start).]

Here are a couple of interesting projects/movements I just ran across. These are both great examples of how people can organize and use their collective power to modify industry.

Slow Food is a movement designed to counter fast food and hi-impact susperscaling of food production. SciFi futurist Bruce Sterling has a great write-up of Slow Food in Metropolis. From the article:

Its criteria are strict: (a) Is the product nonglobalized or, better yet, inherently nonglobalizable? (b) Is it artisanally made (so there’s no possibility of any industrial economies of scale)? (c) Is it high-quality (the consumer “wow” factor)? (d) Is it sustainably produced? (Not only is this politically pleasing, but it swiftly eliminates competition from most multinationals.) (e) Is this product likely to disappear from the planet otherwise? (Biodiversity must be served!)

Carrot Mob is another democratizing and locally-empowering group that “organizes consumers to make purchases, rewarding companies who make environmentally friendly choices”. From their website:

On Saturday, March 29th, at 1pm, come to K & D Market… and buy whatever you want. Buy a lot. We’re going to be tracking everyone’s purchases and then calculating how much revenue we brought to the store. K & D has committed to spending 22% of all the revenue we bring in on energy-saving measures identified by an SF Energy Watch audit, in order to make their store more environmentally friendly! This was the result of a bidding war, which they won, prevailing as the store most committed to environmental improvement among its competitors.

This movement of group financial empowerment is going to see a lot of traction as communities (local and networked) leverage mobile and social tools to become more organized around shared interests. FWIW, Andrea and I were discussing how groups might gather funds under political/ecological/social platforms that candidates could then pledge for (IE democratizing PAC’s). See also Larry Lessig’s newest reform project Change Congress.