Here are some excerpts from another Mike Davis article. This one raises the idea of the network form as the architecture of resistance to Empire. The excerpt is from The Pentagon as Global Slumlord (located on the tomdispatch.com site). As usual w/ Mike Davis's writings, the whole thing is very much worth reading, but here's one section I thought was especially relevant to this blog:



'More recently, a leading Air Force theorist has made similar points in the Aerospace Power Journal. "Rapid urbanization in developing countries," writes Captain Troy Thomas in the spring 2002 issue, "results in a battlespace environment that is decreasingly knowable since it is increasingly unplanned."



'Thomas contrasts modern, "hierarchical" urban cores, whose centralized infrastructures are easily crippled by either air strikes (Belgrade) or terrorist attacks (Manhattan), with the sprawling slum peripheries of the Third World, organized by "informal, decentralized subsystems, "where no blueprints exist, and points of leverage in the system are not readily discernable." Using the "sea of urban squalor" that surrounds Pakistan's Karachi as an example, Thomas portrays the staggering challenge of "asymmetric combat" within "non-nodal, non-hierarchical" urban terrains against "clan-based" militias propelled by "desperation and anger." He cites the sprawling slums of Lagos, Nigeria, and Kinshasa in the Congo as other potential nightmare battlefields.'



(The entire article is available here: Slumlords Aerospace Power in Urban Fights)



Cities are networks. Here's how Thomas describes the urban terrain:



"One can understand cities as a set of interrelated elements interacting as whole cities interdependent with the environment- cities are not islands. Rather, they are connected to a surrounding mixed terrain or rural setting through permeable boundaries and LOCs [lines of communication - jd], a fact having much significance to urban airpower strategies, operations, and tactics. With a systemic perspective, airmen should better orient their thinking to relationships and patterns of activity rather than static objects or individual events in time and space." [good advice anywhere - jd]



In his article, it's clear that Thomas's "nonnodal" terrain is really a kind of terrain that does not present the kind of targets that aircraft can hit (e.g., a microwave tower). That is, the terrain isn't really "nonnodal", rather, the nodes just aren't visible. City networks may have a granularity that is not visible from 30,000 or 10,000 or even 1,000 feet -- the nodes are too small or informal to be visible at that distance. Instead, the communications system nodes might consist of walkie-talkies or low-power radio, easily concealed and highly mobile.



"A systems approach recognizes that complex, interacting urban factors, including the relationships of human activity, intersect at key nodes. The more decentralized and unconventional the enemy, the more difficulty in discerning the nodes. The problem is compounded in the sprawling peripheries. The dynamic complexity of cities often means that relationships between cause and effect are difficult to discern and that the effects of aerospace power may be delayed in time."



Under "primitive city" conditions w/ "unconventional forces", air power attempts to achieve "indirect effects".



"Warfare in a primitive city against an unconventional force, however, is more the domain of ground forces conducting tactical engagements. Aerospace power can achieve operational effects here as well, but indirectly, through cumulative attacks on key relationships (such as movement patterns, personal exchanges, and fluid assembly areas). "



"Indirect effects flow out of direct attacks but are delayed in time or removed in space. These effects are more difficult to predict, given the highly complex nature of the connections between subsystems and threats. One can also achieve operational effects indirectly as the result of cumulative tactical effects. One may need to use this approach in primitive cities against unconventional enemies due to the lack of knowledge about subsystems. As previously asserted, both the system and the threat exist outside government control and may actually be nonnodal, featuring unpredictable, inconspicuous relationships." (Thomas)

This column is referenced in a blog post from August, 2003. Here's the column in full:



Lights out!



Last week's (August 12, 2003) power blackout that hit eight U.S. states and Canada on the surface looks to be a power line failure in Ohio. The failure cascaded from there, affecting millions of people, and costing the stressed economy upwards of $6 billion. But the chain, or rather, the web of causality -- what really caused the problem -- stretches much farther than that.



Our economy, when you get down to it, operates according to a set of very basic laws. I'm not talking about judges-courts-police type laws. I'm talking about the kind of laws or rules that say how the parts of a process interact with each other. The law of gravity, for example, describes how two masses attract each other. Our economy is governed by the underlying rule that a capitalist must maximize profit -- make as much money -- as possible. If a capitalist fails to maximize profit, in an open market, another capitalist will come along and do that. And since capitalism is a competitive system, the successful capitalist will drive the unsuccessful one out of business.



Understanding this simple rule explains a lot about our economy. The electrical system is no exception. Maximizing profit has driven the deregulation of the power system. With no government rules, the basic law of capitalism can freely operate. For example:



"Unregulated utility affiliates and independent power companies built power plants far from their home markets, in parts of the country where demand is high or where there are plentiful supplies of natural gas -- to produce power -- as well as regulators likely to grant the necessary permits... This put an additional strain on parts of the transmission system." (Wall Street Journal, 8/18/03)



To complicate things, in deregulated markets, power companies have an incentive to run their generators at full capacity, loading up the transmission system since electricity can't be stored. And companies can seek out whatever electricity provider is offering the cheapest price at any moment, no matter how far away. This makes the links in the network -- the power lines and substations -- even more critical in tying together the huge regional electrical grids. But stringing new transmission lines isn't as profitable as making electricity. So electricity demand is up 35% over the past 10 years; but the carrying capacity of the country's high voltage electrical lines is up only 18%, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry group. Can you hear the Final Jeopardy music swelling in the background? Or is it the theme from Jaws?



The Republicans and Democrats are falling over each other to cut taxes and regulations and transfer more money to the already rich (another way to maximize profits). Public services are privatized; and government oversight is cut back or eliminated -- let the market take care of it. The systems that we all depend on are put entirely in the hands of private capitalists. In turn, capitalists must obey the iron law that profit must be maximized. So private power companies set about cutting costs and moving money to places where the bucks are easiest to make. In the most deregulated markets, a crisis can be entirely driven by unrestrained capitalists, as in the Enron-manufactured California power crisis of 2000 - 2001.



So the conditions are set for disaster. Where and when disaster will strike exactly is impossible to predict, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to determine that something bad will happen. Like they say about complexity theory: deterministic, not predictive. The interconnected system means that local problems, given such conditions -- selfish self-interest, deregulation, aging and overloaded infrastructure -- will cascade to global failure.



In the September, 2003 Wired: "Power Up! Twenty years from now, the whole world will be sharing electricity through one grid." Welcome to the future.





Jim Davis

8/18/03

Cells have been described as networks of interacting proteins (see e.g. Vogelstein, Bert, David Lane and Arnold J. Levine. 2000. "Surfing the p53 network". Nature 408, 307 - 310 (November 16, 2000)). But the cell as a living thing -- that metabolizes, reproduces, reacts and evolves is more than the sum of its molecular parts. The network in this case is much more that its parts.



Sharon Begley's Science Journal column on April 2, 2004, Researchers Exploring 'What Is Life?' Seek To Create a Living Cell (may need a subscription or to register) describes various efforts by scientists to construct a cell that reflects the qualities of "life".



"One of the deepest mysteries in biology is how molecules that are no more alive than the tip of a pencil can form a reproducing, metabolizing, evolving organism. If you plop a droplet of any of the molecules that make up living cells (fats, amino acids, water, DNA, other organic molecules) onto a glass slide, it just sits there. No one would mistake it for a living thing. Yet when the right ingredients assemble in the right proportions, the result comes alive, as it did on Earth some 3.8 billion years ago.



"The transformation is so profound that most scientists until the 19th century believed in the theory called vitalism. This holds that living things possess a mysterious "vital spark" that endows them with life, and that life cannot be explained by mere chemistry and physics. But today, harnessing no more than thermodynamics, electromagnetism and chemistry, scientists are taking steps toward creating a living cell."



Researchers have constructed self-replicating vesicles that function like the cell membrane, others have gotten amino acid molecules to chain together into synthetic RNA molecules. Others have discovered that clay, of all things, "can speed up the conversion of little clusters of molecules into vesicles, making the formation of a cell membrane even easier. Inside the vesicle, the clay particles grab hold of short bits of RNA and assemble them into a long strand. Voila: a little sphere containing genetic material able to grow and copy itself." ("But now, O Lord, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand.", Isaiah 64:8)



"The missing ingredient in this cell wannabe is metabolism, but Steen Rasmussen of Los Alamos National Lab thinks he can provide it. He and Liaohai Chen of Argonne National Lab have designed a microscopic container with metabolic molecules and genes whose electrical properties drive metabolic reactions. The scientists have demonstrated experimentally that this micrometabolism can produce exactly the molecules the container is made of (so the system would be able to grow)."



Begley concludes: "If researchers manage to create living cells from scratch, their mastery of the machinery of life could blur the line between alive and not-alive. Combining the traits of artificial cells with nanotechnology, Dr. Rasmussen and colleagues wrote in a recent issue of Science [Transitions from Nonliving to Living Matter, Science 2004 303: 963-965], could produce machines that 'would literally form the basis of a living technology possessing powerful capabilities and raising important social and ethical' questions."



The network transcends even the interactions of its parts to exhibit amazing new qualities.

"New information technologies, by transforming all processes of information processing, act upon all domains of human activity, and make it possible to establish endless connections between different domains, as well as between elements and agents of such activities."



Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society 1996, 2000. p78



A change in the technology of linking leads to a change in the network. Exactly how of course depends on many things. The technology of linking (or, the means of communication and transport -- that should cover the universe of interactions between nodes shouldn't it?) has a deterministic (but not predictive) affect on the network. In the case of speeding up, cheapening (i.e. an economic metaphor for allowing more links to develop), "network behaviors" can emerge that before were impossible, or smothered, dormant, potential. That is, emergent behaviors.



A change in the technology of linking also allows a re-architecting of the network. E.g. links can be thrown across the network without going through the old hubs (gateways, filters, editors, censors).



In biological processes, the linking technology might be chemical exchanges, sound waves, electrical signals (that wd include touch in the final analysis? or if not, touch), etc. In human society, what we think of as communication and transportation technology (see the chapter Michael Stack and I did on digitalization: The Digital Advantage for more).



For language -- what is the networking technology of language? Words link in specific ways -- syntactical or grammatical rules. Some words, as I think Barabasi points out, function as super-connectors (or, if you mapped out the usage of words, they fall into a power law distribution, the signature of a network architecture). This may be trivial and irrelevant, but I suppose if the syntactical rules or grammatical rules were changed -- the means by which words link, that you would have a change, perhaps profound, in the language.



The relationship, and the nature of the relationship, between the technology of linking and the nature of the network is an analog to Marx's fundamental observation that productive relations must correspond to productive forces.

appropriating the internet for global activism from Yes! magazine:



"Nearly all activists use the Internet for e-mail and websites. But only a few have begun to harness the full power of the emerging networked world."



jd

Here's another disease-related item. This one is from Mike Davis, author of among other things City of Quartz, maybe the best book ever written about Los Angeles. The spread of disease highlights the network-ness of human relationships. Human beings are the nodes, the links are the contacts through which pathogens spread (the proximity to sneezes, sexual contacts, shared items, etc -- all mediated social connections). As Mike D.'s article shows, there is a definite class-dimension to the nature of the network.



A Deadly Plague of Slums



Here are some excerpts:



"Mass death soon may be coming to a neighborhood near you, and the Department of Homeland Security will be helpless to prevent it. The terrorist in this case will be a mutant offspring of influenza A subtype H5N1: the explosively spreading avian virus that the World Health Organization (WHO) worries will be the progenitor of a deadly global plague.



...



"But a true pandemic would probably overwhelm the world long before a vaccine could be developed and produced in large quantities. The potential accelerators of a new plague are the huge slums of Asia and Africa. Concentrated poverty, indeed, is one of the most important variables in any model of how a pandemic might grow.



"The bustees of Kolkata, the chawls of Mumbai, the kampungs of Jakarta, or the katchi abadis of Karachi are, from an epidemiological standpoint, landscapes saturated in gasoline, only awaiting an errant spark like H5N1. (Twenty million or more of the deaths in 1918-19 were in poor, congested and recently famished parts of British India.)



...



"During the debt crisis of the 1980s, the IMF, backed by the Reagan and Bush administrations, forced most of the third world to downsize public employment, devalue currencies and open their domestic markets to imports. The results everywhere were an explosion of urban poverty and sharp fall-offs in public services.



"A principal target of IMF austerity programs has been urban public health. In Zaire and Ghana, for instance, "structural adjustment" meant the laying off of tens of thousands of public health workers and doctors. Similarly in Kenya and Zimbabwe, implementation of IMF demands led to huge fall-offs in healthcare coverage and spending.



...



"Thanks to global neo-liberalism, then, disease surveillance and epidemic response are weakest precisely where they are most important: in the mega-slums of Asia and Africa. That's where the brushfire of H5N1 could turn into a deadly biological firestorm.



"In that event, it would consume more than just the poor. Once a new pandemic had acquired the momentum of mass mortality in Asia it would inexorably spread to North America and Europe. It would easily climb the walls of gated communities and other fortresses of privilege.



"Here, of course, is the rub. In the past, the rich countries, with few exceptions, have shown callous indifference to the monstrous human toll of AIDs in Africa or of the two million poor children annually claimed by malaria. H5N1 may be our unexpected reward. "

Mad cow disease highlights an interesting dimension of networks (or processes, which can be viewed through the lens of network science). This was prompted after reading an interview with John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, authors of Mad Cow, USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?, from 1998(!).



Economies, or sectors of the economies, can be seen as networks of buyers and sellers. The production process is a circuit of connections between suppliers, producers and consumers. Food chains are ecological networks. In the agricultural sector, these bundles of connections all overlap.



Per the interview above, mad cow disease (MCD) became a problem when the life of the cow became a closed circuit -- farmers, to boost protein in the diet of cows (because the bovine growth hormone being injected into the cows worked best w/ a high protein diet -- chains of causality) fed chopped up, rendered cow parts to the herd, turning them into unwitting cannibals. Dead cows were fed to living cows, so the relatively rare spongy brain problem was fed back into the system, increasing the likelihood of the problem intensifying. Per Sheldon Rampton: "And that could create a closed amplification loop". AKA a positive feedback loop, like you get when you hold a microphone too close to the speaker it is connected to.



The nature of interactions in a network then can be of a positive feedback nature (not always a bad thing) or of a negative feedback nature (like the thermostat in the home -- if the temperature gets to hot, it triggers an event that causes the temperature to drop). Leaps are associated with positive feedback loops; normal development with negative feedback loops.



MCD is a confluence of technological revolution (the genetically-engineered growth hormone) and capitalism (maximization of profit demands new technology whether safe or not for humans and other living things, and requires the re-organization of production around the new technology to squeeze of the maximum profit).



Another interesting dimension of MCD is the disease itself -- MCD is caused not by a bacteria or virus, but rather by a mutant protein. It's not a living thing as such, and standard sterilization practices (including heat, irradiation and or most chemicals) cannot eradicate it, which enables the disease to survive the rigors of the rendering process by which dead cows are turned into food for live cows. Called "prions" (see "Prion Diseases" for more info), these mutant proteins somehow interact with normal proteins causing the normal ones to turn into prions. (Another kind of interaction, in this case in the network of protein interactions within the brain). The result is the disintegration of the brain; holes developing in the middle of it, hence "spongiform".