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This is a very good article and I recommend that everyone read it. He does a good
(although incomplete job of describing complexity), but an excellent job of explaining
what it means to foreign policy and terrorism.
“Chess was the perfect metaphor during the Cold War partly because, long before the
Russian Revolution, it has been the opium of the intelligentsia. For Lenin, Trotsky,
Gorky and the exiled Bolshevik elite, it was an abiding passion. Once in power, Lenin
resolved to make it the classless pastime of the proletariat. It was a purely intellectual
recreation, at once science and art, in which chance played no part.
And then the unimaginable happened. Time moved on and the Berlin Wall came crashing
down. Initial images of celebrating East Germans toasting their new freedom with Coca-
Cola and Pepsi cans in hand made the moment even more ideologically sound. The cold
war was over and we could now focus on more mundane conflicts waged over soft
drinks.
And then the unimaginable happened. Time moved on and the Twin Towers came
crashing down. Now without a concrete antagonist America entered a new phase fighting
an ambiguous enemy—terror.
If we want to capture our current situation we could liken the U.S. as a decision maker in
a complex game of chess. In this game the chess player has many more than then normal
number of pieces, several dozen say. Furthermore, these chessmen are linked to each
other by rubber bands, so that the player cannot move just one figure alone. Also his men
and his opponent‘s men can move on their own and in accordance with rules the player
does not fully understand or about which he has mistaken assumptions. And to top things
off, some of his own and his opponent‘s men are surrounded by a fog that obscures their
identity. Unlike Soviet Russia, the opponent, whether it is Al-Qaeda, Mother Nature,
pandemics, or tainted supply lines do not, like a game of chess, simply wait for the
player to make moves. They move on their own, whether the player takes that movement
into account or not. Reality is not passive but—to some degree – active.
Models, assumptions and paradigms are changing. Phillip Bobbitt and The Princeton
Project on National Security have written the obituary for the nation-state, that it is no
longer adequate for dealing with transnational risks of terrorism, pandemic, and
financials meltdowns and needs to be re-constituted. But it‘s not only about institutions
and their constitutions; it‘s about how we think.
The thesis here is simple: fight complexity with the science of complexity and complex
systems theory. The first step is understanding how we got this way, i.e. what‘s changed
and why. The second step is understanding complexity, i.e. what is it, and how does it
change things? Then the practical will flow through: Can we use hackers to beat cyber
attacks? How can we use network theory to preserve the integrity of global trade and
survivability of critical infrastructures? How can we use self -organized criticality to
build resilience? How do we re-write the book on risk management so it is effective? We
will raise and suggest answers to such questions in this paper.”
Marke touches on the concept of the power of networks in this intriguing story:
As part of the publicity for a Steven Spielberg's 2001 film Artificial Intelligence: A.I.,
Microsoft teamed up with DreamWorks to introduce a complex, on-line game called
―The Beast. This is not a game in the sense that most of us would easily recognize. No,
it evolved from an obscure clue embedded in a movie trailer of A.I…here‘s what
happened as reported by Jane McGonagall, in her paper, This Is Not a Game': Immersive
Aesthetics and Collective Play:
The Cloudmakers group was founded on April 11, 2001 by a 24-year-old Cabel Sasser,
one of thousands of movie fans who had started to notice a series of digitally distributed
clues and that seemed to be some kind of game, but one without clear rules, objectives or
rewards. 48 hours after Sasser launched the Cloudmakers, there were 153 new members
in the group investigating these mysterious sites. When the game ended on July 24, 2001,
the Cloudmakers group had grown to 7480 members who had scribed a total of 42,209
messages. ―The Beast the name producers (Microsoft and DreamWorks) gave to the
game, estimated that more than one million people from around the world played the
game in online groups.
This was not like ―Deal or No Deal. This was pretty sophisticated stuff. Players were
charged with cracking complicated and time-consuming puzzles that variously required
programming, translating and hacking skills, obscure knowledge of literature, history
and the arts, and brute computing force. The diverse skill and knowledge base required
to solve the game's problems, as well as the magnitude of its unwieldy plot, made
cooperative groups like the Cloudmakers absolutely necessary.
According to Microsoft, ―What we quickly learned was that the Cloudmakers were a
hell of a lot smarter than we are, and that really kept us on our toes…
Here, I'll show you this. [He shows a slide entitled 'Beast Beat ', a puzzle schedule.] Now,
there's a color key here for puzzles: hard, easy, not so hard, etc. [Pointing to different
colors] These were the puzzles that would take a day, these were puzzles that would take
a week, and these puzzles they'd probably never figure out until we broke down and gave
them the answers. So we built a three month schedule around this. And finally we
released. [Pause] The Cloudmakers solved all of these puzzles on the first day.
On the day of the Sept. 11th attacks, The Cloudmakers gathered on line and, like most
Americans were shocked and angered. They wanted to do something.
"We can solve the puzzle of who the terrorists are," one member wrote. Another agreed:
"We have the means, resources, and experience to put a picture together from a vast
wealth of knowledge and personal intuition." "Let's become a resource. Utilize your
computer & analytical talents to generate leads. ―Solving problems is what we do.
What happened? They walked away, lost their confidence, lost their feeling of
empowerment. The reality of 9 -11 was that ―this is not a game. And they collectively
acknowledged they were getting in over their heads. Maybe yes…maybe no…
Paul Schumann, paschumann2009@gmail.com, http://insights-foresight.blogspot.com,
http://sites.google.com/a/schumann2020.com/paul-schumann/
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What would you do with 7,000 of some of the brightest most diverse, technological savvy
minds in the Nation – at your disposal, willing to work around the clock, at no cost, and
mobilized to focus on your crisis?”
“The environment is more complex now. As you will see in the next part of the paper,
this has implications for the assumptions and models that have worked so well for us in
the past:
These developments herald in a new age of uncertainty and complexity that require a
paradigmatic shift from industrial to information age epistemology, from what was
merely complicated to the complex.”
He ends the article with, “This paper was intended as a ‘call to arms’ about the
possibilities for harnessing complexity as well as the costs for ignoring.” That is using
complex systems to understand complex systems. “If complexity defines the problem
space then resiliency defines the solution space.” He argues for resiliency and how to
build adaptive strategies to solve today’s complex problems.