(2007-08-30) Netwar Postscript

The NetWar essay has been republished with a current postscript. Today, it still seems to be an idea for the future. Traditional power politics has continued to provide the primary basis for American foreign policy in the years since 9/11 (World Trade Center).

David Brin comments

• Finally, there are many, many amid the elites who desperately do not want this new era to happen! They realize that the NooSphere is an inevitable outcome of the Enlightenment Experiment, if current trends of citizen uplift and citizen-empowerment continue. And even if the newborn is healthy, they see themselves as losers, because their privileged positions will no longer be assured. Better to reign over a grinding, insipid pyramid than to tumble into mere citizenship in a fecund, spectacular "EmergEnt property." There is a lot of momentum toward this birth. Thus, the opposition's counter-push cannot merely be obstructionist. It must be actively and radically reactionary. The clock must not simply be frozen. It must be wound backwards. To earlier modes of hierarchical control.

• No, it is not Nationalism, per se, that is driving the frantic resistance that we are currently witnessing vs. mass-human empowerment and reification. Rather, I see the Enlightenment nation state being hijacked at two levels: (1) by those alienated against the future on emotional-RomantIc terms and (2) by clades of very smart men who see their very last chance to re-institute traditional human social hierarchies (Command And Control), before it is too late.

• Ponder, if this is the agenda, then elites in all parts of the world - purportedly divided by language, nationality, religion and official dogma - might see common cause against the thing that frightens them most. The birth of multi-layered, "metazoan" humanity. In that case, they might use their apparent national and ideological differences to pit citizens against each other and raise fear levels. The surest way to prevent confident embrace of a new way of thinking. (Conspiracy Theory, Status Quo)