John Robb

From P2P Foundation
Jump to navigation Jump to search

John Robb is the initiator of the Global Guerilla blog which monitors Open Source Warfare.

His Wikipedia bio is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Robb_(GG_theorist)


Interview

Via TechCrunch:

"Your writing has focused on three themes: global guerrillas, resilient communities, and, more recently, drone disruption. Could you give the quick nutshell summaries of each of those?

Sure. The general theme of my work is to be at the center of the information flow in the place the world is changing the fastest. I did that four times (tier 1 spec ops, the Internet, Internet Finance, blogging) in the past. I think these topics are where the change is happening fastest now:


Global guerrillas (the blog and the book, Brave New War) is about open source warfare and systems disruption. Open source warfare is a new form of guerrilla warfare that works exceedingly well in the modern, connected environment. It’s loose and highly effective. It worked in Iraq during the insurgency and in Tunisia/Egypt to topple dictators. Systems disruption is about taking sabotage to a new level. Systems disruption is how individuals and small groups can topple critical networks with very small attacks. These attacks are so successful–I have plenty of examples–they can generate returns on investment over one million to one! This area of my work has lots of fans in US special operations, the CIA, the NSA, guerrilla groups around the world.


Resilient communities is a topic where I spend most of my time. Why? There are two globally systemic threats we can’t solve. Finance and the environment. Both systems are deeply broken and they are going to do considerable damage to all of us over the next decades. The only way to get ready for that is to build networked resilient communities. Resilient Communities efficiently produce most (not all) of the food, energy, water, and products we use daily. These communities reduce our vulnerabilities to the future’s inevitable disruptions (that will damage/impoverish those that don’t transition), reduce complexity to a human scale, and improve the quality of our lives. Since these communities network with the global system, they don’t lose any of the complexity/value we enjoy in the current intellectual environment. My bet, and it is the reason I started the resilient community newsletter, is that the most successful, happiest people on the planet in twenty years will be living in resilient communities.


Drones. Robots are transforming the US military and warfare. I’m a former military pilot. I have seen first hand what drones are doing to the Air Force. Already more than half of all of the people going through pilot training end up flying drones. There are more military drones flying right now than manned planes. We’ve also seen the development of the last manned fighter (the F-35) and I doubt anybody anywhere will produce a new one. Around the world, drones are being deployed permanently (eliminating the need for soldiers) and they are being used frequently (they kill thousands). Unfortunately, this makes sense. Drones are nearly costless. They don’t generate any public push back (no US casualties) and they are much less expensive than people (no retirement/health/etc.). They can also be controlled from Washington. What makes them really scary is how fast they are becoming autonomous, smaller, and less expensive. It’s easy to envision a 10 million drone swarm pacifying a 30 m person city in 20 years time (completely controlled by just a few people at the top).


Q: A common assumption among all three, it seems, is that increasing economic and technical connectivity will lead to increasing military/political instability, which in turn will reveal the fragility of our existing infrastructure. What would you say to those who argue that this is excessively apocalyptic, and that the West’s existing society and infrastructure are already plenty robust?


There’s a simple answer to that: the financial crisis of 2008 and the EU meltdown. Another is climate change, which is another runaway train of a disaster. Why aren’t these fixable? Finance and the environment are truly global systems and there isn’t anybody at the lever.


Q: Technology and creativity are becoming increasingly crowdsourced: not just open-source software, but also Kickstarter, Thingiverse, Ushahidi, etc. Do you view these as steps in the direction of resilient communities, or do you think something qualitatively different needs to be done to get there?


Yes. I think crowd funding is the wrong term. People don’t put money into just anything. They put money and time into things they care about. As such, this is more community financing than crowd financing.


So, does community financing (via the JOBS act and other methods) make it easier to build resilient communities? Yes. Building out food, water, and energy infrastructure at the local level will require that type of financing. I think people are going to find that investing locally in these efforts is a much better way to fund a retirement than investing in broken financial products that have no intrinsic value." (http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/28/interview-john-robb/)