Re: [FRIAM] Global Slum: Digital Narrative and the New Urbanism (fwd)
These guys are so down on scenario planning, they might enjoy http://www.gbn.com, or Peter Schwartz's The Art of the Long View from 1991. Regardless of what you think of the technique, the notion that it is only used in current military and security circles is not supportable. Richard Lowenberg wrote: Of interest to those on this list posting about 'cities', may be this, from Paul Miller, aka DJ Spookie, to another list. Excuse his narrow formatting. Also of possible interest is Anthony Townsend's (of the Institute for the Future) telecom-cities list and web site: http://cities.iftf.net rl -- Forwarded message -- Date: Sun, 5 Aug 2007 21:52:10 -0400 From: Paul D. Miller [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [iDC] Global Slum: Digital Narrative and the New Urbanism Hey people - this is a rather interesting article I picked up a little while ago. I'm a big Mike City of Quartz Davis fan, so hey... I just thought it might provide some food for thought to several of the threads going on the list. About half the world's population will be in cities within the next couple of decades, and the way this drives alot of issues - immigration, friction points like water, oil, and of course, religion - into direct collision, is pretty intriguing. The original term ghetto after all comes from the venerable Venetian Republic. Look what that started! The ghetto is a state of mind I guess... Paul Baghdad 2025 The Pentagon Solution to a Planet of Slums By Nick Turse In our world, the Pentagon and the national security bureaucracy have largely taken possession of the future. In an exchange in 2002, journalist Ron Suskind reported a senior adviser to President Bush telling him: that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality� We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.' Slowly, step by step, the present White House has found itself forced back into at least the vicinity of the reality-based community. This week we may, in fact, get to hear one of the last of this President's great Iraqi fictions. The same cannot be said of the Pentagon and the Intelligence Community (IC). They have settled into the future and taken it in hand in a business-like, if somewhat lurid, way. It's the Pentagon that, in 2004, was already producing futuristic studies about a globally warmed world from Hell; it's the Pentagon's blue-skies research agency, DARPA, that regularly lets scientists and other thinkers loose to dream wildly about future possibilities (and then, of course, to create war-fighting weaponry and other equipment from those dreams). It's the National Nuclear Security Administration that is hard at work dreaming up the nature of our nuclear arsenal in 2030. Typical is the National Intelligence Council, a center of strategic thinking within the U.S. Government, reporting to the Director of Central Intelligence. In 2005, it was already expending much effort to create fictional scenarios for 2010, 2015, and 2020. Someone I know recently attended workshops the Council's long-range assessment unit organized, trying to look at the threats after next -- and this time they were deep into the 2020s. The future -- whether imagined as utopian or dystopian -- was, not so long ago, the province of dreamers, or actual writers of fiction, or madmen and cranks, or reformers and journalists, or even wanna-be war-fighters, but not so regularly of actual war-fighters, or secretaries of defense, or presidents. In our time, the Pentagon and the IC have quite literally become the fantasy-based community. And yet, strangely enough, the urge of our top policy-makers (and allied academics and scientists) to spend their time in relatively distant futures has been little explored or considered by others. A couple of things can be said about this near compulsion. First, it's largely confined to the arts of war. There is no equivalent in our government when it comes to health care or education, retirement or housing. No well-funded government think-tanks and lousy-with-loot research organizations are ready to let anyone loose dreaming about our planet's endangered environment, for instance. The future -- the only one our government seems truly to care about -- is most distinctly not good for you. It's a totally weaponized, grimly dystopian health hazard for the planet. Of course, future fictions are notorious for their wrong-headedness. All you have to do is check out old utopian or dystopian fiction,
Re: [FRIAM] Global Slum: Digital Narrative and the New Urbanism (fwd)
These guys are so down on scenario planning, they might enjoy http://www.gbn.com, or Peter Schwartz's The Art of the Long View from 1991. Regardless of what you think of the technique, the notion that it is only used in current military and security circles is not supportable. Carl, Not sure I understand your comment. I do know that Peter and others at GBN have long been advising, consulting and referred to by groups within various branches of military and intelligence planning. Peter was even the early author (when at SRI) of a screenplay that became the basis for the feature film War Games. The limitations of individual people, mind-sets, intentions, and vested-interests, among numerous other factors, tend to affect the outcomes of Scenario Planning or any other complex decision-making process, as is evident in the article I forwarded. Richard Richard Lowenberg P.O.Box 8001, Santa Fe, NM 87504 505-989-9110, 505-603-5200 cell [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.radlab.com New Mexico Broadband Initiative www.1st-mile.com/newmexico FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Global Slum: Digital Narrative and the New Urbanism (fwd)
I certainly understand and agree with Carl's concerns as expressed in the article he included in his email. The use by the Pentagon of modeling and IT programs for present and future urban battles is rather scary. This is a moral question; should complexity/chaos/ABM expert lend their knowledge and skills to promote such warfare? I think not. The UN currently does confront serious peacekeeping issues in such poor mega-urban areas such as Port-au-Prince, Haiti and in other failed states where its peacekeeping troops are involved. However, this is morally different than a world power using IT applied complexity to consolidate its hegemony or extend its empire. Each expert must make a moral choice on this issue and it might be useful to develop consensus based guidelines on this issue (without any evident or smelly flatulence!). As climate change and global warming create urban migration, these problems will become more pressing than ever. cheers Paul ** Get a sneak peek of the all-new AOL at http://discover.aol.com/memed/aolcom30tour FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Global Slum: Digital Narrative and the New Urbanism (fwd)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The UN currently does confront serious peacekeeping issues in such poor mega-urban areas such as Port-au-Prince, Haiti and in other failed states where its peacekeeping troops are involved. However, this is morally different than a world power using IT applied complexity to consolidate its hegemony or extend its empire. Yeah, some can't bear to call their efforts the consolidation of hegemony, so they call it peacekeeping. Different strokes for different folks.. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Global Slum: Digital Narrative and the New Urbanism (fwd)
Glen E. P. Ropella wrote: If we had access to perfect information, there'd be no need for morality. Why? Having perfect information says nothing about the distribution of power. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Global Slum: Digital Narrative and the New Urbanism (fwd)
I've been getting enough mail on my comment that I feel I should clarify the meaning: Scenario planning has been around for quite awhile, the military/government uses of it are but a small fraction of its overall use, it is *not* so far as I can tell a sales tool for new weapons systems, it is simply a way of putting together coherent and contrasting stories about possible futures in the absence of available broad prediction capabilities. It is not about choosing a 'best' scenario, but in understanding what policy choices alternative scenarios may present. As such, to increase the contrast, alternative scenarios may look extreme or fantastic to the outsider. The motivation for my comment on the articles was that I felt the authors of the articles had misunderstood both the method and its application. I have no problem with the method's employment in any domain, so long as it is applicable and done well. That said, please don't consider me an advocate; it's just another available tool (which does not have any necessary IT or applied complexity component, though now that you got me to think about it). Carl [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I certainly understand and agree with Carl's concerns as expressed in the article he included in his email. The use by the Pentagon of modeling and IT programs for present and future urban battles is rather scary. This is a moral question; should complexity/chaos/ABM expert lend their knowledge and skills to promote such warfare? I think not. The UN currently does confront serious peacekeeping issues in such poor mega-urban areas such as Port-au-Prince, Haiti and in other failed states where its peacekeeping troops are involved. However, this is morally different than a world power using IT applied complexity to consolidate its hegemony or extend its empire. Each expert must make a moral choice on this issue and it might be useful to develop consensus based guidelines on this issue (without any evident or smelly flatulence!). As climate change and global warming create urban migration, these problems will become more pressing than ever. cheers Paul Get a sneak peek of the all-new AOL.com http://discover.aol.com/memed/aolcom30tour/?ncid=AOLAOF0002000982. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
