[Nettime-bold] Rand on N30, 911, netwarriors... and other fashionable topics

[wade tillett <super89@bigfoot.com>]

http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1382

Networks and Netwars:
The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy
John Arquilla, David Ronfeldt (editors)

(from chapter 7...)

Netwar is nothing new as a form of conflict. What is new is the richer
informational environment, which makes the organization of civil (and
uncivil) society into networks easier, less costly, and more
efficient. The essential conditions for victory in a social netwar
conflict are also the conditions that make waging netwar possible: the
shared understanding of a situation demanding direct action. In many
ways, the victory of the Direct Action Network was implicit in the
fact that so many people understood the conflict and were willing to
act on that understanding. The streets of Seattle showed what
democracy looks like.

Editors' Postscript (Summer 2001)

Seattle was a seminal win. It sparked new netwars in the streets of
Washington (A16), Los Angeles, and in a string of other cities where
activists have persisted in their opposition to the World Trade
Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the general process
of corporate globalization. One activist has reportedly boasted that
protests could be mounted in any city around the world, at any time.

In the United States, netwar in the streets has fared badly since
Seattle. Seattle was, in many ways, unique. First, the voluminous
swarm of protesters who formed the third wave, drawn from the AFL-CIO
participants, surprised both DAN and the law enforcement authorities.
In addition, governmental authorities may have learned more from the
Battle of Seattle than the activists did. In both the Washington and
Los Angeles demonstrations, police were able to preempt or prevent
almost all the tactical maneuvers of the activists. In these
post-Seattle cases, protest organizers reverted to centralized control
of operations - including by locating some command, media, and other
functions in the same building - which made them vulnerable to
counterleadership targeting. The Battle of Seattle was won without a
field general, and without a general staff. Post-Seattle actions have
violated the key netwar principle of "leaderlessness."

Law enforcement, government authorities, and even the American Civil
Liberties Union have conducted instructive after-action analyses of
the Battle of Seattle. Exactly what lessons the AFL-CIO has drawn are
not known, but the practical result has been its withdrawal from
post-Seattle demonstrations-leaving NGO activists with less of a pool
to draw on. By way of contrast, none of the protest organizations has
rendered an after-action analysis of the strategies and tactics used
in Seattle, even though the Internet teems with eyewitness accounts.

In all forms of protracted conflict, early confrontations are seedbeds
of doctrinal innovation - on all sides. If governmental authorities
learned much from their defeat in Seattle, perhaps we should also
expect that social netwarriors will learn lessons from their defeats
in Los Angeles, Washington, and elsewhere. Indeed, the events of the
summer of 2001 in Genoa indicate that the netwarriors are learning
their own lessons - and are steadily willing to apply them in
practice.


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