William Gibson is one of those hollow writers that doesn't grasp his subject while none the less having the insight to choose interesting subjects and write ripping good tales about them. This recent blog post is an example of this.

... he introduced me to several new ideas (mainly the "netwar" paradigm of warfare, which is genuinely a new paradigm in the Kuhnian sense, and which I'll return to in a later post). I came away feeling highly optimistic about, of all things, the US military..."asymmetric conflict with amorphous networks of terrorists, who repurpose civilian technologies to terrible ends" was going to be where it was at from now on...

In the days after 9-11 I often took comfort in thinking of this man and the ideas he represented... I surprised friends by saying that I believed the US military's intelligentsia already understood the true nature of the conflict better than the enemy did.

One actually has to be something of a specialist, today, to even begin to grasp quite how fantastically, how baroquely and at once brutally fucked the situation of the United States has since been made to be.

What Gibson doesn't understand is that netwar isn't just about bullets. It's also about bucks and ballots, and all sides are playing. Like many dilettantes Gibson fails to understand netwar and is unable to grasp what it is like when everyone is fighting everyone else. It isn't just the US military against a rag-tag group of terrorists, it is US society against terrorists and their supporters in national governments and international institutions as well as those in the US who profit from damage to the current administration. While terrorists can be inflicted with "terrible ends" many of the opponents in national governments, international institutions and domestic opposition must be thwarted more subtly and in the end employed to aid the larger effort, subverted and repurposed rather than destroyed.

Netwar is never over, it isn't an exceptional condition that has a discrete start and end point. It has been going on for years on a global scale and will continue for the forseeable future. How you land after an engagement is as important as the engagement itself since you will be attacked again. This affects decisions about how to deal with immediate threats and can seem to a casual observer to be incomprehensibly far from optimnal.

Knowing how netwar works doesn't help much with understanding any particular netwar since information is the heart of it and those outside the loop have very litlle information. It's another aspect of the Knowledge Problem.

Anyone who claims to have sufficient grasp of this complex situation to sum it up as Gibson does is a pawn blissfully ignorant of circumstances... or else a player spewing trash to confuse enemies, but I doubt that since Gibson has never given any indication of being insightful. I think it's merely commercial speech intended to signal allegiance to the cohort that pays his bills.

» Just Ducky from Crumb Trail
A new M&M rant, Quack Science, whinges about the way misinformation from environmental advocacy distorts society and leads to poor decision making. A main factor contributing to doubt about dire predictions of ecological doom is that the claims are so......[read more]
Tracked: October 21, 2004 02:58 PM