(((Basically, it's because it's too easy for people who aren't in
armies to find out what's going on and intervene. Kinda lendsan exciting new 21st-century validity to the ancient doctrines of SNAFU.)))"Any complex historical situation has structural, interventionist/strategic and chaotic dimensions. What is new,
and what makes analysis so difficult, is that their relative weight, and how they shape each other, is changing.
"My hunch is that interventionist power politics are losing weight, whereas processes that are too complex to control are gaining. I don't mean that power politics ceases to exist or that there are no more state-sponsored wars (well, those would be pretty dumb things to say right now), but that even hard-core military interventions quickly get bogged down in chaotic situations where the occupying army quickly becomes one of many actors
scrambling along, rather than successfully imposing its own long-term strategy. Iraq, of course, is the prime case for this argument.
"The reason for this change in the composition of complex historical processes is, I presume, that the number of actors has grown massively. Not the least due to the fact that large-scale coordination does no longer require a difficult to manage, expensive apparatus, but can be done on the fly, cheaply through open networks of communication and transport.
"So, we have a lot of actors, each following their own strategy, which can, in some way or the other, influence the course of events. Of course, not all actors have the same amount of resources at their disposal – power differentials still exists.
" However, in a situation of asymmetric warfare this might less important that it used to. Or, perhaps more precisely, this is precisely what contributes to feeding complex, hard-to-control
processes in the first place. The number of actors has grown that are powerful enough to disturb the establishment of order without being powerful enough to establish order themselves."
Felix
—http://felix.openflows.org— out now:
*|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006
*|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005
