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  1. Interesting. That would certainly help explain the curiously abrupt, almost viral spread of patriarchy: remove the female networking community by killing the older female leaders, then raping and abusing the younger female generation. Reminds me a bit, in a sickeningly stomach-turning way, of my thoughts regarding male rape of women at the end of this review of Vagina: A New Biography.

  2. I was talking more about what was in Rule of Mars. What I was finding was that in some cases, people engaged in developing (what they believe to be) counterinsurgency strategies are fully aware of the effectivenes of these node-based emergent network communities. The implications are kind of obvious (if a touch paranoid!) from there.

  3. Sounds cool, Jonathan; I may have to look up 5GW at some point. I’m a bit confused, though: are you discussing this nodal/community-oriented perspective in relation to Blood Rites or Rule of Mars? To be perfectly honest, I did not find Blood Rites convincing.

    Either way, thanks for commenting! :)

  4. I think I brought up something similar to these observations while talking with you one day. I had been parallel-reading Grace Lee Boggs’s memoirs, and a book on ‘Fifth Generation Warfare.’ Essentially, 5GW focusses on emergent behaviors of groups — where there is no central enemy, no single fulcrum point. Basically, it is 4GW — asymmetric or ‘guerilla’ warfare — writ onto a culture. The goal is, like all Clausewitzian war, to impose one’s will upon the enemy. 5GW accomplishes this by weaponizing the culture. This is a severe oversimplification, and there are nuances there (and 5GW itself is still heatedly debated.)

    However, it struck me that the two books I was reading were saying much the same thing, just with different perspectives and intentions. Grace Lee Boggs spoke of the need for a community to expand as a network, that the most critical — not ‘important’ but critical — people were not the leaders, not the followers, not the producers or the consumers but the people who became nodes in the community’s network. It was the people who brought all these people together who could make or break a community. With goals and the right people talking to the other right people, a community would develop its own emergent behavior in becoming whole, healthy, and sustainable. The most well-connected nodes in those networks thus became critical to the development of that network, albeit not the end-all of the network.

    I don’t think I’m the first person to notice this. One of the goals of 5GW is to identify those network nodes and remove or suborn them.

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