More on Robb
Thursday, May 10, 2007 at 11:14AM Thinking further (a very good sign of John's impact, as I prefer to digest than to regurgitate), I think John was betrayed either by his ambition or his editor or maybe his agent into thinking he needed to present a full teleology (and by that, I mean, a creation-to-transcendance story in the manner of Hegel) in this book, when I don't really think he's there yet (and, quite frankly, I'm not sure a black hat can ever take you there--by definition, which is why John's criticism of my stuff was subpar for him, meaning I've seen better; I think he just included it because he felt the need to have some sort of survey, but it came off as an add-on in the book's arc--not fully formed). Therein lay all my criticism of a book I really love for the most part (more up front and in the middle).
That's really my basis for comparing Robb with Marx--for now.
(And for those who can't stomach any admiration for Marx, please avert your eyes, CAUSE I'M POLITICAL SCIENCING HEEEERE! And I get to do that, because I've got a license, and I've taught Marxism at Hah-vahd--back when there still was an evil empire).
Marx conceptualized a whole new economic era's complexities to a stunning degree, enhancing understanding of these very difficult-to-grasp processes and what they meant for society, politics--life in general. I think John's done something phenomenal here as well in terms of networks and warfare (or perhaps, better put, "conflict," since John, like me, sees little war in the future as we've known it in the past).
Marx felt compelled to run his logic to ground, and there his analysis got fantastic, as John's does for me.
I don't think John needed to go all that way in this first book, which could have stayed more purely diagnostic, like PNM, setting himself for something more prescriptive in a second book (harder, as I find out, but more fun to write, actually).
I honestly feel like John's just not there yet on prescriptions. I don't think anyone really is.
I spent Sunday through Wednesday at a high-end shipboard (Norwegian Cruise Line's Dawn ship) forum of Fortune 500 CIOs, taking Vonne along for a great time (our own state room off the back with substanital private balcony, our own table for dining, two black tie soirees, one that ended in just enough dancing to reinjure my knee (so my revisiting of my youthful romancing of my woman was painfully shortlived)). My keynote was a lot of fun, in a huge, steep, one-thousand-person theater with a fifty-foot wide (Al Gore-ish) screen show behind me that displayed the slides plus two live close-ups of me (best of all, they ran the talk on the closed-circuit ship TV non-stop the rest of the day, so I could "break down the tape" immediately upon getting out of my talk, which was cool).
Vonne and I sat in on a few workshops, and got to chat up 3 FBI agents over dinners regarding cybercrime and terrorism, and it really struck me that we're just beginning to understand the advances/tightening we need to accomplish in all these nets. Y2K was an interesting start, but just a baby step. What Steve and I are trying to do with Enterra is--in our opinion and that of the unnamed-but-famous big investors stepping up behind us--make a generational leap-frogging occur in our systemic resilience.
But even what we're doing, assuming we pull it off, is but one of several next steps for our systems, nets, and infrastructure as a whole. This will be a long and fascinating journey, and one of the most important guides we can have for that journey is a book like John's--admittedly a very black-hat, worst-casing sort of vision for warfare waged against us.
I believe that warfare will unfold, and I believe we'll handle it in stride--not casually or without losses, but "in stride" in terms of globalization's continued successful march. Remember, those hard-scrabble types in covered wagons this time are Indians and Chinese and Filipinos (all over our boat) and so on. These people are tough, they're way smart, and they don't f--king give up easily.
In contrast, our enemies are not the pick of the litter (I've met the pick of Islam's litter and they're way more talented--so much so that we're deeply incentivized to continue this Big Bang and all others to force-function their accessibility for mankind's overall benefit), plus they readily admit to themselves and to us whenever we catch them and question them (ask Marc Sageman) that they have no expectation of winning, which makes them scarier in a Robbian manner, but far more exhaustible than us. It's just money to us. It's their whole f--king ball of wax to them. So when we drop, it hurts but it does not damage. That's why their war footing (something we should never seek to approximate, because why should we symmetricize to no advantage?) is so pathetic. Watching Hamas and al Qaeda con sad women into killing themselves. I mean, really. Get inside that for a minute and tell me where that's ever won anywhere. That's not how homo sapiens won. That's how the rest of those monkeys lost. It's simply unnatural and unsustainable--as well as profoundly sick. No romanticism is possible here. Those nuts are slated for extinction--pure and simple.
John's brilliance in this book is getting us inside the natural OODA loop our enemies will have in this long war regarding our infrastructure. When his material sticks to that, it's undeniably profound. When it strays, the light flickers (like quoting that proven talent Scheurer, whose main accomplishment was . . . certainly on par with Richard Clarke's, which was . . . somewhere in the range of George Tenet's, which was . . . you see what I mean?). [Okay, John didn't quote the last two. I just like shitting on them.]
Robb's original analysis is so powerful, it didn't need that dressing, nor the unhelpful teleology, which is simultaneously too dark and too dreamily naive.
I'm not saying (as so many said of both PNM and BFA), that John should have written a shorter book. Rather, that he should have written a longer one that deeply argued the strategies and concepts he present in BNW so delphically (some sections are 2-3 paras only).
Thus, he should begin planning Vol. II immediately, using--as I did--feedback on Vol. I to fuel Vol. II, which definitely needs to flesh out all the concepts presented here, all of which are great, but because they weren't systematically stitched together, come off like one brilliant damn thing after another.
Honestly, that was the biggest problem with the book--its ordering structure. I felt lost through most of the book, wondering why I was hearing one thing after another or before something else. I could never quite tell where I was in John's thinking, and the toss-off teleological references (Those "this changes everything in the future" statements he never develops, much less backs up, because he presents only the war, not the peace, and you can't do yang with no yin) did not help. In fact, they came off like pointless boasts.
I know that's the pot calling the kettle black in some ways, but my pot works primarily in the strategic level, whereas John's forte is obviously tactics and operations. In my realm, the teleology must always be there, but in John's, it's really not required, and sometimes, like here in this first-stage primer of what I would naturally expect to be a number of books that extend the material over a career, it's actually premature.
Actually, premature is the wrong word. What John's covering here will simply morph too quickly for useful teleologies to be applied, much like IT itself. You can't do effective generational projections when the industry turns over as rapidly as IT does. I realize that John talks a lot of low-tech vis-a-vis hard infrastructure, but honestly, that stuff worries me far less than the cyber and bio, both of which are morphing right now with some serious speed. That's one of the reasons I don't do technology as a flow per se. It's just too fast and too ubiquitous. Plus, I just want it to go everywhere.
In short, John gives us vocabulary in BNW. What has to come next is grammar, not more history (or futurism) of the English language. Most futurism and strategic planning, quite honestly, is just about helping people get today, not tomorrow.
John's shown a huge talent in BNW for getting us to get today. He needs to take that further in the next book, not defend the teleology, which to me is fat on the bones he needs to stich together into a recognizable skeleton.
So skip the revolution, John, and build us the next generation.
Reader Comments (2)
Question: Due to your common complex systems thinking orientation you see yourself and John as dialectical thinkers ?
As a parenthetical aside, there are a lot of people who do have trouble separating Marx the father of Communism from Marx the Social Science methodological innovator and classical economist. He's a decent journalist too - I'm a fair piece further to the political right than are you, but I enjoyed reading 18 Brumaire
I see John's reasoning in this book as being very clearly so, but he may not.
As for a lot of people, the trick is to write only for yourself. As soon as you write for a lot of people, you become like a lot of other writers and either people don't want to read you, or--deep down--you don't want your readers.
But yes, it is a trick to remember Marx within his times.
Then again, it's impossible to understand anyone only through disapproval.
And yet, so many try.