Greater Democracy: Getting Inside al Qaeda’s Innovation Cycle

January 26, 2005

Getting Inside al Qaeda’s Innovation Cycle

In business, if one company can get inside its competitor's innovation cycle, the more nimble will kill off the slower. The same is true in politics. The fact of the matter is that al Qaeda has gotten inside the West’s social contract, organizational, and conflict strategy innovation cycles. Naturally, al Qaeda is thus experiencing more success than we should wish.

The so-called developed Western nations will be less able to deal successfully with terrorism until they can get inside the terrorsists' innovation cycles: political, organizational and technological.

The West, as political and cultural organizations, must, therefore, come to grips with some hard problems. I see seven difficult challenges as long as the West clings to old industrial era organizational models that:

1] Are trapped in many year depreciation cycles when the innovation cycle is measured in months;

2] Are unable to leverage direct citizen engagement and interactions at the edges, such as I propose in my note on “Security is Development”;

3] Centralized hub and spoke architectures that must be globally upgraded at large capital costs. For example, Frankston writes "He with the most infrastructure loses."

4] Depend upon wires and the obsolete notion that, as David Reed writes, RF Photons interfere with each other in the ether, to justify a property model of spectrum management. In the end, we will adopt open spectrum as it is more efficient, flattens the value chain, and is more hospitable to democratic principals of inclusion and equality. A move to Open Spectrum would also help starve the beast of al Qaeda propaganda engine.

5] Try to tightly bind content with transport, as this leads to anti-democratic and anti free market walled garden monopolies;

6] Cannot take advantage of the move from algorithmic devices to heuristic devices: dumb 1930s era radio architectures to cognitive 21st century radios. The power of cooperative gain from collective behaviors at the edges will give cognitive device users substantial competitive advantages. This transition will also help restore real power to the democratic process

7] Are only able to see the citizens as one dimensional "consumers" to be manipulated like Pavlovian dogs with "broadcast media". The revolution that is rapidly emerging is that citizens around the world are demanding to be treated respectfully as multi dimensional creators/producers of content [Apple iLife, blogs, podcasting, vidcasting, VoIP, 2nd Life, etc], distributors and consumers. What is the iPod Photo?

One of the West’s biggest new opportunities is to provide distribution for all the creative products of the citizens of the world. This in effect gives the citizens of the world back their voices, their place at the table. The West would gain by considering that communications is at the root of all human activities and thus significant changes in our communications modalities are likely to have deep implications for our cultures. What happens if communications becomes something we do, rather than merely rent if we can afford to?

These seven problem areas make it clear why the West having difficulty coming to grips with the problem of distributed terrorism by non-state actors. This will remain the state of affairs until the West can get inside the terrorists’ innovation cycle. On the other hand, the West could free itself from these intractable problems by inventing a new, post broadcast social and political contract. It is perhaps the best way to get inside al Qaeda’s innovation cycle. It may be the only way to start winning again. It may be the best way to drain the swamp that breeds the plague spreading mosquitoes.

Notes:

The industrial broadcast era had attributes that forcefully shaped Western culture and politics for over 100 years. They were:

1] Very capital intensive means of production and distribution;

2] Production and Distribution were located in the center – hub and spokes architecture;

3] The then available technologies did NOT enable dynamic feed back [conversations];

4] Intellectual property was to be controlled and made as exclusive, secrete, and walled off by regulations, as possible;

5] There were few owners/participants in the production and distribution segments which led to elites;

6] Citizens were only seen as limited and one dimensional consumers.

The digital revolution, starting with spreadsheets, has turned this old industrial paradigm upside down and inside out:

1] Production and Distribution of digital content is now low cost and getting ever closer to free.

2] The action is now taking place at the edges of the network – Internet architecture. See for example: blogs, podcasts, bittorent, 2nd Life, VoIP, Apple’s iLife [FREE with all Mac computers];

3] Dynamic Feedback, in the form of many to many conversations, is becoming the driver [Dean Campaign is an early example];

4] Intellectual property is becoming ever more open, distributed, and seen as creating competitive advantage through cooperative gain from collective action as the edges. IBM is making good business on this model and using it to whack Microsoft in their crown jewels.

5] There are now orders of magnitudes more owners/participants at the edges and the number is growing exponentially;

6] Citizens are reclaiming their full, multi-dimensional humanity as creators, distributors and consumers.

If you doubt this, just ask a friend, significant other or child if they like being treated as voiceless targets of TV Advertainment – kept in the dark and fed b_llsh_t.

If the West wants to resume its winning ways, it needs to embrace this revolution in the form of new and dynamic social and political contracts. Otherwise, it remains too vulnerable to terrorist innovations. The choice is ours.