The Anglosphere Challenge

James C. Bennett thinks the English-speaking nations (the anglosphere) will lead the world in the 21st century:

"The Anglosphere Challenge is a new and different look at where globalization and information technology are taking the world, and specifically the USA and the other English-speaking nations. Unlike most of these observers, Bennett believes that these forces will not create a borderless world, nor will the process of globalization lead to a homogenized world culture. Instead, Bennett argues that what is emerging is a series of distinct but overlapping globe- spanning linguistic-cultural phenomena, which he terms 'network civilizations'. (The Anglosphere, or English-speaking network civilization, is the first but by no means the last of such entities.) Within these network civilizations, cultures with strong civil societies can cross intra- civilizational boundaries with ease, widening the scope of easy interaction, particularly for smaller, entrepreneurial ventures. The task of the emerging era, then, is one of creating political forms of cooperation appropriate to these network civilizations. Bennett argues that such a form, which he terms the 'Network Commonwealth', is already emerging. Unlike national or imperial forms of organization, network commonwealths are characterized by extreme decentralization and lack of compulsory mechanisms. Network commonwealths will serve to replace the trade and defense functions once performed by large economic states. Bennett's book contains a detailed discussion of the English-speaking world and why its strong civil society, and resultant entrepreneurial market capitalism and constitutional government will likely result in the Anglosphere's retaining the lead role in the next stages of development, the multiple and simultaneous scientific-technological revolutions sometimes called the Singularity, and the emergence of the Network Commonwealth.."

Link
[via Chicago Boyz]

See also:
The Pentagon's New Map - Thomas Barnett
The Chinese Century - Moore's Lore
Fantastic Voyage : Live Long Enough to Live Forever - Ray Kurzweil, Terry Grossman

The Future of Media - 2

Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Friendster, social networks, blogs, New York Times, Googlezon, Google Grid, EPIC...

Link
Source: Robin Sloan 2004
[via SiliconBeat]

Transcript:
Robin Good
[via Loic Le Meur]

Audio:
Media online in 2014: Google Grid, GoogleZon, EPIC - Web Talk Radio

See also:
The Future of Media
Google Broadband?
The New Moore's Law
Future Vision - Vodafone

Update:
Epic 2015 - Google Blogoscoped

The Global War of the 21st Century

Global Guerrillas
"Networked organizations, infrastructure disruption, and the emerging marketplace of violence. An open notebook on the epochal war of the 21st Century."
Link
Source: Global Guerrillas

The Advent of Netwar
"The information revolution is leading to the rise of network forms of organization, with unusual implications for how societies are organized and conflicts are conducted. 'Netwar' is an emerging consequence. The term refers to societal conflict and crime, short of war, in which the antagonists are organized more as sprawling 'leaderless' networks than as tight-knit hierarchies. Many terrorists, criminals, fundamentalists, and ethno-nationalists are developing netwar capabilities. A new generation of revolutionaries and militant radicals is also emerging, with new doctrines, strategies, and technologies that support their reliance on network forms of organization."
Link
Source: RAND

Wikipedia
Terrorism
War on Terrorism

Counterinsurgency Operations - TerrorWiki
Link

Spetsnaz's First World War
Link

How can we describe this new kind of war? Let's connect the dots...

Features:
- law vs. corruption
- order vs. disorder
- civil society vs. organized crime
- accelerating change vs. static decline
- hierarchy vs. networks
- units vs. swarms
- power vs. weakness
- post-industrial tecnology vs. industrial tecnology
- globalization vs. traditional values
- creativity vs. diligence

Storyboard:
The Pentagon's New Map
Warfighting in the 21st Century – The Remote, Robotic, Robust, Size-Reduced, Virtual Reality Paradigm

Gallery:
PM Soldier
Objective Force Warrior
Future Combat Systems - Institute for Creative Technologies

Scenarios:
Scenarios - Innovation Watch
The Chinese Century - Moore's Lore
The Anglosphere Challenge
Timeline of Future Technology and Social Change
Robotic Nation - Marshall Brain
Future War Technologies of the 2030s
Future War Technologies of the 2060s

Audio:
Intelligent Defense - IT Conversations
Thomas Barnett - IT Conversations
Bruce Schneier - IT Conversations
Supernova 2004 - IT Conversations
Pop!Tech 2004 - IT Conversations
O'Reilly Emerging Tech - IT Conversations
Nanotechnology - IT Conversations
Massive Change - Radio

See also:
Terrorism - Google News
Terrorism News - Topix.net
Defense Tech
John Robb's Weblog
"If We Run Out of Batteries, This War is Screwed." - Wired
What It Takes to Win the 40-Year War - Fast Company
Schneier on Security
Singularity Watch
Belmont Club
Bruce Sterling
William Gibson
KurzweilAI.net
DARPA
Moore's Lore - Corante
Brain Waves
Responsible Nanotechnology
Army Wages War on Modern Menaces - Wired
Project for the New American Century
The Digital Pearl Harbour
The Nuclear 9/11
Human Being 2.0
Inside soviet military intelligence - Viktor Suvorov
The Future of Intelligence
Special Operations Technology

Accelerating Change 2004

"The Accelerating Change conference is a production of the nonprofit Institute for the Study of Accelerating Change (ISAC)."

"AC2004 emphasizes three main themes (Physical Space, Virtual Space, and Interface) with selections from twenty subtheme categories. We approach these themes using four concurrent dialogs (Science, Technology, Business, and Humanism) and three fundamental processes (data-guided Analysis, informed Forecasting, and agendas for Action) that lend insight and foresight to today's most relevant and powerful examples of accelerating technological change."

Topics:

• Physical Space (Tangible Things and Networks)

• Virtual Space (Simulations and Virtual Life)

• Interface (Data, Management Systems, and Convergence)

Link

People:
Shai Agassi
Executive Board Member, SAP

Jaron Lanier
Founder, VPL Research; Advisor, National Tele-Immersion Initiative; Computer Scientist, Composer, Artist

David Brin
Physicist, Science Fiction and Nonfiction Writer

Doug Engelbart
Inventor of the Mouse; Digital Interface Legend; Founder, Bootstrap Institute

Dan Gillmor
Business and Technology Columnist, San Jose Mercury News

Helen Greiner
Co-founder and Chairman of the Board, iRobot

Steve Jurvetson
Managing Director, Draper Fisher Jurvetson

Peter Kaminski
CTO and Founder, Socialtext

Peter Norvig
Director of Search Quality, Google

Christine Peterson
Founder and Vice President, Foresight Institute

John Smart
President, ISAC

Rich Skrenta
Co-Founder and CEO, Topix.net

Gordon Bell
Project Director, MyLifeBits, Microsoft BARC

Brad Templeton
Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Will Wright
Founder, Maxis; Creator, Sim City, The Sims

Dana Blankenhorn
Technology Business Journalist and Consultant

Link

Audio:
IT Conversations

See also:
Accelerating Change 2004 - Technorati
Pop!Tech
TransVision 2004

How George Bush won the election

Jason Kottke has a great point of view:

"I don't think America is that divided. I think most of us are ill-informed in two major ways, 'conveniently' split along the lines of the two major political parties available to us. We're told we have two different choices -- you're rooting for this team or that team and the other team is the enemy -- and we believe that and organize our beliefs accordingly. There's a lot of fear and emotion involved on both sides. I can't count how many times in the last two days I've heard self-righteous 'liberals' call the entire middle of the country 'stupid'. Kerry voters, we need to get over ourselves...we're not special. We're not informed by some superior intelligence that gives us a unique insight into how the world should work. We buy into the Democratic Party/liberal/anti-conservative/fear the church crap in the same way that our 'red state' brethren buy into the Rebublican Party/conservative/anti-liberal/fear the gays bullshit.

Half the country is not stupid. We're all stupid. We're convinced several times a day to do things that aren't in our best interests. We work too hard. We're drinking, eating, medicating, and smoking ourselves into early graves. We overextend ourselves on credit. We knowingly stay in emotionally or physically abusive relationships. We let television raise our children. We're deliberately mean and nasty to people we don't like or agree with. We learn science from the Bible. We stay silent when speaking out would help someone. We fear the future. We fear death. And we're lazy about our beliefs and convictions and we let the Democratic and Republican Parties dictate the political agenda in America by pushing our emotional buttons. Red, blue, black, white, brown, yellow, purple, and retina-burning yellow-green...we all share the blame.

Speaking of, I'll tell you who's smart. Karl Rove is smart. Karl Rove knows all of the above and used it perfectly to his advantage. It's not necessarily that America as a whole validated the actions of George Bush over the past four years...it's that the Republican Party got more of their people to the polls than the Democrats did. Looking out across America, what's one of the largest groups of people with a single strongly-held set of beliefs? The evangelical Christians. They comprise a large portion of the US population and believe in God more strongly than most other groups believe in anything. The Bush camp used a coordinated campaign to speak directly to those people and put their strong belief in God in direct opposition to what the other side stood for: liberals want to kill innocent babies, allow gays to marry, and let non-Christians run the country/world. To an evangelical Christian, the fear that those things will happen is almost overwhelmingly unbearable. Based on that emotional appeal, they turned out in droves, voting for Bush in greater numbers than in 2000 and overwhelming the increased turnout on the other side of the aisle.

The Democrats, with ill-defined fears of a mishandled Iraq war, America's place in the world, personal freedoms, anti-science agenda, the economy, and Bush's general stupidity, couldn't muster the same kind of turnout. They and their supporters ran a more decentralized campaign, with blogs, 527 groups, and assorted other groups all having their own agendas. Liberals had a million slogans, initiatives, and platforms, each tailored for a different group of people. In theory, this was lauded as a fantastic idea...you could reach more people with less organization and target small groups of people with exactly the message that would appeal to each group. But it didn't work out that way. The top-down campaign with the one focused message targeted at a large group of people won out."
Link

"New America" Vs. "Old America"
"Most Europeans never took kindly to the Bush Administration's way of dividing the continent into 'Old Europe' and 'New Europe.' As luck would have it, we got our hands on a memo one of Europe's top prime ministers received from his foreign minister to help him understand what's at stake in today's U.S. presidential election."
Link
Source: The Globalist

Maps:
Election Map - New York Times
Election Map - USA Today
Election result maps - University of Michigan
Purple Haze - Boing Boing
We've gone Map Crazy! - The Big Picture
We've gone Map Crazy, part II! - The Big Picture
Research - PatrickRuffini.com
Young Americans - collision detection
Kerry in 2004 - Meetup.com
Bush in 2004 - Meetup.com

Photos:
Photos tagged with election2004 - Flickr
Photos tagged with election - Flickr
Photos tagged with electionday - Flickr
Photos tagged with vote - Flickr

Charts:
Google Zeitgeist - Election 2004
Election Watch 2004 - Technorati
Campaign Radar 2004 Summary - BlogPulse

See also:
US Election 2004 - Google News
2004 Presidential Election News - Topix.net
Back to basics - Economist
Vote USA 2004 - BBC News
Ultimately It Comes Down To Taste - Adam Rifkin
Spooks and Goblins - The J Curve
Still Missing the Big Picture About This Election - Daily Kos
The Failure of the American Experiment - kuro5hin.org
Magnanimous Defeat - BarlowFriendz
Rise of the Religious Right in the Republican Party