Curious Christian

Reflections on culture, nature, and spirituality from a Christian perspective

The New Pacifism?

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Matt Stone

2009-10-22

I am finally getting stuck into my second hand copy of “Future Shock”. It’s amazing how prescient Alvin Toffler was on some things, and it’s amazing to think what that implies, given the theories he based his projections on.

This evening I was reviewing Toffler’s 1994 interview with New Scientist, where he spoke of war and anti-war.

The basic argument is that as new civilizations emerge they bring with them new forms of warfare and new forms of warfare emerge, new forms of peacefare are required.

The Industrial Revolution did not simply industrialize the economy, it industrialized warfare. The machine age gave us the machine gun. Societies organized around mass-production, culminated in nuclear weapons, the ultimate in mass destruction. We argue that to the degree that knowledge is in fact becoming central to the new economy, it is also becoming central to the new form of war. The US Air Force has just bought 300,000 personal computers. There will be more computers in the armies of the world than there will be guns. Just as in the economy you need skilled workers, you need skilled soldiers.

It’s got me thinking back to my recent posts on the robotization of warfare, as well as viral warfare, military hacking and other stuff. What’s the peacefare equivalent that’s set to emerge, or presumably, has already begun emerging? Youtube activism and flash mobs are already emerging as alternatives to mass demonstrations, but what may happen when robotization really kicks in over the next decade. Got me thinking now.

Tags Peace, Technology

9 responses to “The New Pacifism?”

Steve Hayes

2009-10-22

It got me thinking about the guy who got arrested for Twittering about the cops in recent demonastrations in Pittsburgh.
It’s 35 years since I read Toffler’s book — should I read it again?

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Danny

2009-10-22

As war becomes more robotic, we must become more human.

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Matt Stone

2009-10-22

Steve, yes the Twitter incident is a case in point. I expect the propoganda war will become more sophisticated too.
There’s nothing too surprising in Toffler’s book 40 years down the track, but that’s the most surprising part. He was reasonably accurate in predicting infoglut, mass customization, neotribal instability, devaluation of friendship (need I mention Facebook?) and identify construction expressed through consumer purchases, things we now take for granted.
So its his reasoning I find interesting. It suggests more and more emphasis on simplifying life as coping strategy (I say this while I am personally in the process of offloading many excess material goods and collected research which is cluttering my life). It suggests that, as building technology improves, that the building industry will eventually enter a phase of mass customization also, ending suburban homogeneity (as a property manager I find this very interesting also).
Given this, I ask, have you read “Simple Church” yet? I think we can expect more and more pressure towards sophisticated simplification.

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Matt Stone

2009-10-22

Danny – well said!

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Matt Stone

2009-10-23

Steve, further to the above, in 1999 Ray Kurzweil wrote a book called, “The Age of Spiritual Machines” in which he made the claim, “it is reasonable to estimate that a $1000 personal computer will match the computing speed and capacity of the human brain by around the year 2020”. He calculated this as being around 1 petaflop (1 x 10^15). Well, a $US100 million computer achieved 1 petaflop, 1 quadrillion calculations per second, late last year. See http://tiny.cc/xYMDd
And, as of June this year “US military crazytech agency DARPA has issued a challenge to the IT community: do you think it’s possible to build a petaflop supercomputer that fits in a single air-cooled 19 inch cabinet and requires no more than 57 kilowatts of power? One which requires no special programming skills to use?” http://tiny.cc/UUjCj
Though there is some fuzziness on the question of whether a petaflop is human equivalent or just a sizable chunk of it, it is clear that the boudaries are already being pushed.

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SeandBlogonaut

2009-10-23

I was thinking that we will see a wave of botnetting as it becomes cheaper and cheaper. It’s relatively inexpensive to shut down lobby groups, non-profits.

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Steve Hayes

2009-10-25

Matt,
No, i haven’t read “Simple Church” yet — does it tell me anything I need to know?
This morning we’ll be going to church in Mamelodi. It’s pretty minimalist.

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Matt Stone

2009-10-25

Well, true to its name the message of Simple Church is simple. We need CLARITY(about what we think mature discipleship looks like and what our process for getting there looks like), we need MOVEMENT (through the process stages and that means creating transitional opportunities), we need ALIGNMENT (of ministry programs to the discipleship process, lest we waste valueable energy) and we need FOCUS (which may mean killing off ministries that are tactically good but strategically misaligned). The authors contend that many ministries we invest our energy in add unnecessarily complexity to church, that we should focus on what is more essential.

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Matt Stone

2009-10-30

“…the building industry will eventually enter a phase of mass customization…”
Since quoting this the other week I have since learned that some are now researching how the 3D fax may be utilized in the building industry. There’s talk of a 3D fax that can handle concrete, enabling houses to be constructed within two weeks. Huge implications for the third world. The digitalization of construction may not be so far off.

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