Just a quick placeholder note for a thought I'd like to explore later. The empowerment of the individual through technology is an interesting topic--it's frequently referred to as 'superempowerment'. One effect superempowerment has is to reduce the minimum number of members a community needs to be viable at its level of existence. For instance, a company of a type that may have previously required thousands of employees to function may now, through networking and automation, be able to thrive with just tens of employees.
This concept also applies to nations. In decades past, small groups of individuals could not effectively threaten nations. If a lone, disconnected bomber had sunk the Lusitania, for instance, the US would not have taken any action remotely as precipitous as entering into WWI. It required aggression on the scale of nations to get other nations to act.
Nowadays, by comparison, ten guys with assault rifles, grenades, and Blackberries can spark an international crisis. Granted, the Mumbai shooters were not alone--but they certainly didn't have anything resembling the might of a nation behind them.
I'm going over this stuff as background. Here's the point: I think superempowerment not only reduces the personnel requirements for any given community action, it may also necessitate smaller communities to survive. To go for the obvious parellel, the previous generation of conflict was the age of the dinosaur; power was derived from mass--masses of people, masses of money. Empowerment came from joining up to form larger groups. The fact that larger groups make bigger targets was irrelevant, because large groups could only be threatened by other such large groups.
As the dynamic changes, it may become wise to break away from our large groups for our own self-protection. Networks such as Hezbollah have already discovered this; it's why they've adopted a cell structure--no matter how much power you bring to bear on one cell, damage does not spread to other cells.
This concept also applies to nations. In decades past, small groups of individuals could not effectively threaten nations. If a lone, disconnected bomber had sunk the Lusitania, for instance, the US would not have taken any action remotely as precipitous as entering into WWI. It required aggression on the scale of nations to get other nations to act.
Nowadays, by comparison, ten guys with assault rifles, grenades, and Blackberries can spark an international crisis. Granted, the Mumbai shooters were not alone--but they certainly didn't have anything resembling the might of a nation behind them.
I'm going over this stuff as background. Here's the point: I think superempowerment not only reduces the personnel requirements for any given community action, it may also necessitate smaller communities to survive. To go for the obvious parellel, the previous generation of conflict was the age of the dinosaur; power was derived from mass--masses of people, masses of money. Empowerment came from joining up to form larger groups. The fact that larger groups make bigger targets was irrelevant, because large groups could only be threatened by other such large groups.
As the dynamic changes, it may become wise to break away from our large groups for our own self-protection. Networks such as Hezbollah have already discovered this; it's why they've adopted a cell structure--no matter how much power you bring to bear on one cell, damage does not spread to other cells.