If there are two technologies that have shaped the life I lead today, they’re jets and nets. Affordable airfare lets me go where the action is – wherever adventure beckons, necessity compels, or duty calls – without having to establish residency anywhere. And the Internet lets me do business and stay in touch no matter where I find myself.
Cheap flights and ubiquitous worldwide communications are the stuff of globalization. Ready travel lets people oppressed at home taste the joys of free society, while the Net exposes them to the ideas and customs underpinning that social order. The effect is viral, spreading liberal values and economic growth to benighted dictatorships and hopeless pits of poverty. So it’s difficult to grasp that these two innovations might also be an imminent menace to Western civilization. Yet that’s the counterintuitive thesis of UK rear admiral Chris Parry, a Falklands vet, former commander of HMS Fearless, and the British military’s go-to guy for identifying emerging threats.
During a recent briefing at the time-honored Royal United Service Institute – the oldest military think tank in the world, founded in 1831 by the Duke of Wellington – Parry imagined a future, circa 2030, in which the war on terror is still rolling along and the terrorists are winning. He describes a world so ripped up by nets and jets that sovereign nation-states like the UK are collapsing economically, politically, even physically. Then there are the people of that future, who hop from country to country and bear allegiance to none. “Globalization makes assimilation seem redundant and old-fashioned,” he noted, pointing out that, rather than dissolving into the melting pot of their host nations, immigrants are increasingly maintaining their own cultural identity. Jets and nets make this possible. “Groups of people are self-contained, going back and forth between their countries, exploiting sophisticated networks and using instant communication on phones and the Internet.” The result, Parry says, is “reverse colonization,” in which the developing world’s teeming masses conquer Western nations, as surely as the Goths sacked Rome.
It’s easy to pigeonhole Parry as an isolationist – and, indeed, much of the public response to his speech came from anti-immigration wackos who said, “We knew it all along.” But he has plenty of forward-thinking company in these ideas. According to a loose school of “fourth-generation warfare” theorists, connected, globe-trotting terrorists are a bigger threat to the world order than hostile nations are. The technological drivers of globalization have enabled stateless barbarians to seize the initiative. You can’t keep them out by blocking the border, and the harder you smash the failed states that nurture them, the more they thrive. At the first sign of weakness, these new-wave Vandals will log on to urge their diasporic compatriots to attack you on your own soil. Failing that, they’ll hop on the next flight, pick up their baggage, and sidle into Starbucks to download the latest instructions from Abu Ayyub al Masri.
Parry paints a grim picture. Still, his vision gives me an affirmative feeling about the future. If civilization is to overcome barbarism, its leaders must outthink the marauders. And the sturdy admiral’s foresight is a bold step in that direction. “An analysis of trends and drivers can only go so far,” he writes. “We also need to expect the unexpected – shocks will occur.” He’s not saying, “Kick the Arabs out of Europe”; he’s saying we need to anticipate the emergence of stateless aliens and rethink how host societies can integrate them. That’s a rare display of intellectual flexibility in a government official. Compare it with the Pentagon’s reflexive tendency to lash out when challenged (if we can’t kill bin Laden, we’ll crush Saddam) and with the Bush administration’s plaint that nobody could have expected airliner attacks, Iraqi intifadas, or crumbling levees. We’ll stop being blindsided when we grasp tomorrow’s shocks better than the bad guys do – and that’s a positive, not a negative, scenario.
Nets and jets are never a one-way street, and even Parry’s reverse colonization can reverse itself. Consider Somalia, which, for 15 years, has been a running sore of new world disorder. Jets have evacuated everyone who could buy a ticket and have flown in battalions of jihadists. As for nets, this lawless maelstrom is one of the most heavily wired regions of Africa; free of licensing, taxes, and state-owned monopolies, entrepreneurs have been building out cell capacity and Net nodes like Silicon Valley whiz kids. To complicate matters, counter-terrorist warlords said to be financed by the US recently lost the country to a loose association of Islamic militias. This makes Somalia a prime case study for the darkest nets-and-jets forecast.
And, yet, life there is calming down. The roadblocks have vanished, and the drug-chewing youngsters in their machine-gun pickups are contemplating the value of an education. Of course, even in a world of nets and jets, barbarism is still less stable than civilization.
We live in a deeply paradoxical age, and it will take serious mental agility to navigate the years to come. Capable and imaginative people, both inside and outside of barbarity, are beginning to realize this. And for every person who does, civilization gains a better chance of survival.
Email bruces@well.com.
- Bruce Sterling
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Barbarians at Gate 8
