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“The winds from east to west have changed, and the winds from the west are now warmer. Winter doesn’t last long anymore. And this year, there wasn’t even any winter. We live in constant summer.”
Libya, it seems, was like a cork in Africa, and when the United States and NATO toppled the Libyan dictator—but did not put troops on the ground to help secure a new order—they essentially uncorked Africa, creating a massive funnel to the Mediterranean coast.
The less lucky find work in Dakar or Libya or Algeria or Mauritania, and the least lucky get marooned somewhere along the way—caught in the humiliating twilight of having left home and gained nothing and having nothing to return to. This is creating more and more tempting recruiting targets for jihadist groups such as Boko Haram, which can offer a few hundred dollars a month—a king’s ransom when you are living on two dollars a day.
One reason they have so many children is that the offspring are a safety net for aging parents. But the boys are all leaving and the edge is getting even closer. Which means they are losing the only thing they were rich in: a deep sense of community. Here, you grow up with your family, parents look after children and children then look after parents, and everyone eats and lives together.
the whole 2016 Paris U.N. climate conference was about how to avoid a two-degree rise in the global average temperature since the Industrial Revolution … and Senegal is already there.
to make the long trek from the (mild) World of Disorder—Niger—through the (wild) World of Disorder—Libya—in hopes of catching some of kind of boat into the World of Order—Europe.
climate change and population growth act as amplifiers; interethnic and tribal conflicts are the political by-product, and WhatsApp provides both an alluring picture of where things might be better—Europe—and a cheap tool for hopping a migration caravan to get there.
noted David Miliband, president of the International Rescue Committee, which oversees relief operations in more than thirty war-affected countries, more people in the world today are “fleeing a conflict” at a time when wars between nations “are at a record low.”
That is because we now have nearly thirty civil wars under way in weak states that are “unable to meet the basic needs of citizens or contain civil war,” a sign of states cracking from inside under the pressure of the age of accelerations.
In recent years, Israel has been flooded with some sixty thousand illegal immigrants, mostly from Eritrea and Sudan.
On June 20, 2016, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), which tracks forced displacement worldwide based on data from governments, partner agencies, and UNHCR’s own reporting, issued a report stating that a total of 65.3 million people were displaced at the end of 2015, compared with 59.5 million just twelve months earlier. At the end of 2013, that number had stood at 51.2 million, and a decade ago at 37.5 million. Moreover, the report said the situation was likely to worsen further. Globally, 1 in every 122 humans is now either a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum. If this
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That is, both technology and globalization today are empowering “political makers,” who want to remake autocratic societies into more consensual ones, and “political breakers,” who want bring down governments in order to impose some religious or ideological tyranny, even though they may lack any ability to govern effectively.
It is never easy, under the best of conditions, for inhabitants of a country to reconstitute it as a going concern after it has collapsed, but it may be even more difficult in the age of accelerations.
There is mounting evidence that social networks make it much easier to go from imposed order to revolution than to go from revolution to some kind of new sustainable, consensual order.
all over the world we now see people creating unprecedented levels of “freedom from—freedom from dictators, but also freedom from micromanaging bosses, from networks forcing us to watch commercials, and freedom from the neighborhood stores, freedom from the local banker, freedom from hotel chains.”
There are growing swaths of the world today where people have secured their freedom from, but failed yet to build the freedom to.
“ ‘Freedom from’ happens quickly, violently, and dramatically,” notes Seidman. “ ‘Freedom to’ takes time.
Social media is good for collective sharing, but not always so great for collective building; good for collective destruction, but maybe not so good for collective construction; fantastic for generating a flash mob, but not so good at generating a flash consensus on a party platform or a constitution.
When “freedom from” outstrips “freedom to,” amplified actors in the grip of destructive ideas “will cause more harm and destruction, unless they become inspired and enlisted in constructive human endeavors,” he argued. “They will be like inmates on the loose.”
“I once said, ‘If you want to liberate a society, all you need is the Internet.’ I was wrong. I said those words back in 2011, when a Facebook page I anonymously created helped spark the Egyptian revolution. The Arab Spring revealed social media’s greatest potential, but it also exposed its greatest shortcomings. The same tool that united us to topple dictators eventually tore us apart.”
Social media, he noted, “only amplified” the polarization “by facilitating the spread of misinformation, rumors, echo chambers, and hate speech.
“it became clear to me that while it’s true that polarization is primarily driven by our human behavior, social media shapes this behavior and magnifies its impact. Say you want to say something that is not based on a fact, pick a fight, or ignore someone that you don’t like. These are all natural human impulses, but because of technology, acting on these impulses is only one click away.”
Ghonim sees five critical challenges facing today’s social media in the political arena: First, we don’t know how to deal with rumors. Rumors that confirm people’s biases are now believed and spread among millions of people. Second, we create our own echo chambers. We tend to only communicate with people that we agree with, and thanks to social media, we can mute, unfollow, and block everybody else. Third, online discussions quickly descend into angry mobs. All of us probably know that. It’s as if we forget that the people behind screens are actually real people and not just avatars. And
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The supernova “serves as a kind of amplifier of human behavior,” observed Richard K. Miller, president of the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. “In each successive generation, a smaller and smaller number of people is enabled to affect the lives of larger and larger numbers of other people through the
application of technology. The effects may be intentional or unintentional, and they may be beneficial or they may not. The relentless development of new technology raises the stakes on social, economic, and political consequences in each generation.”
If today’s breakers are much more empowered, they are also less easily deterred.
But the Pentagon has spent at least $75 billion on armored vehicles and tools for defeating the weapons.” You can make an IED for one hundred dollars.
As a result, groups like ISIS may depend less on command and control and more on being the inspirer, the organization that heats up the molecules through social networks and then just sits back and enjoys the show.
it. So long as the movement is intact, any success at destroying an organization is, at best, temporary and, in reality, an illusion.”
We’ve learned that while we can transplant hearts, and we can transplant boots on the ground, we cannot transplant political culture—and particularly an ethic of pluralism—where there is no topsoil of trust.
In short, we have to face two fundamental facts about geopolitics today: Fact #1: The necessary is impossible. Fact #2: The impossible is necessary.
In the Cold War, Russia effectively occupied all of Eastern Europe, suppressing not only its freedoms but also its ethnic conflicts.
No great power wants to occupy anybody. As we’ve seen, the major powers have all learned the hard way that when you occupy another country all that you win is a bill. It is much easier to import a country’s labor and natural resources—or their brainpower online—than it is to take them over.
Moreover, while we don’t have the resources to solve the problem of disorder by intervening over there, we also cannot solve the problem of disorder from over here—in the West.
“wicked problem”—many stakeholders, but no agreement on the problem definition or on the solution. And doing nothing will become increasingly unsustainable.
In May 2012—a year after the Arab awakening erupted—the United States made two financial commitments to the Arab world that each began with the numbers 1 and 3. The U.S. gave Egypt’s military regime $1.3 billion worth of tanks and fighter jets. It also gave Lebanese public school students a $13.5 million merit-based college scholarship program, putting 117 Lebanese kids through local American-style colleges that promote tolerance, gender and social equality, and critical thinking. Having visited both countries at that time, I noted in a column that the $13.5 million in full scholarships bought
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One is “for making people,” she said, “and the other is for killing people.”
The best long-term investment the American government could make to help stabilize the World of Disorder and widen the islands of decency there would be to help fund and strengthen schools and universities throughout the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America that promote American-style liberal arts and technical education.
beginning with all the basics: basic education, basic infrastructure—roads, ports, electricity, telecom, mobile banking—basic agriculture, and basic governance. The goal, said Gates, is to get these frail states to a level of stability where enough women and girls are getting educated and empowered for population growth to stabilize, where farmers can feed their families, and where you “start to get a reverse brain drain” as young people feel that they have a chance to connect to and contribute and benefit from today’s global flows by staying at home and not emigrating.
You need to deal with the small farming agriculture piece first. Today in the world, you have five hundred million farms which are less than three hectares, and those five hundred million farms [are providing] the direct living of 2.5 billion people. It means one-third of the planet lives on those small entities.” If they are wiped out by climate change and desertification, as is starting to happen all over West Africa and the Sahel region now, “you are going to have major crises
Eighty percent of the population of Niger lives off of the land. If you lose your little land, then you have lost everything.”
In the previous chapter I argued that in the age of accelerations some weak states would explode.
So no one was giving people the right diagnosis of what was happening in the world around them, and most established political parties were offering catechisms that were simply not relevant to the age of accelerations.
Into this vacuum, this empty room, stepped populists with easy answers—the Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders promised to make it all right by taking down “the Man,” and Donald Trump promised to make it all right by personally holding back the hurricane of change because he was “the Man.” Neither the center-left nor the center-right in America or Europe had the self-confidence required for the level of radical rethinking and political innovating demanded by the age of accelerations.
“We are in a situation where people don’t understand the world anymore, because it is changing so fast. And then came the migrants, and people were told that politicians had lost control of the borders. That just heightened the overall sense that control was gone.”
“Social democracy was always driven by ideas,” he said. “But the ideas have gone missing.”
It is a different approach to politics—a necessary one, I believe—and it yields a political agenda unlike anything on offer in America today.
“If we are evolving to be more like nature, we better damn well get good at it,” observed the physicist and environmentalist Amory Lovins.
Mother Nature also adapts “through social specialization,” or learned behavior. These adaptations evolve over millennia, Lovins explained to me: “Some ants go out and look for food and some stay home and take care of the young, and that enables those who look for food to cover bigger areas.
To put it in human terms, Mother Nature believes in lifelong learning; species that don’t keep learning and adapting disappear.
