I read Robb's book this weekend.

One thing that puzzles me greatly is Robb's lack of any sort of recommendations for offensive tactics against the GGs. All of his recommendations are defensive in nature: I think they can be summed up in two words: Increase resiliency (of our own networks). Robb seems very fatalastic about GGs, painting a picture of invincibility. He is nothing if not very imaginative. But is there a failure of imagination in this particular regard? I want to throw out two ideas about this, hoping it may get some sparks flying with some of you.

1. Incredible to me, given Robb's background and obvious habits of technogeek thought, is an absence of offensive tactical metaphors based on viruses, worms, trojans, spyware and the like. Decentralized, flat networks like GGs have their own weaknesses, which have long been exploited by hackers for fun and/or profit: They can be used to spread malicious bits of code that bring down portions of the network, turn individual nodes in the network into unaware bots that are actually working for the attacker, and unwittingly send crucial proprietary information back to the attacker. Are there useful offensive equivalents to these in fighting GGs? GGs are after all massively parrallel information processors with low and/or heterogenous intelligence at any given processing node: That low intelligence should be exploitable by malicious code, so to speak.

2. Reading chapter six closely (though the dependence is clear elsewhere in the book), I notice the importance of the media to the behavior of GGs. I'm not talking about the symbolic war here; I'm talking about the importance of the media to the offensive capabilities of GGs. The media plays a crucial role in Robb's description of GG stigmergy and communications (see pp. 123-5).

Now, this is going to sound very controversial, I know, because of the role we may normally ascribe to media--an objective and passive witness and reporter. But frankly, that role is so thoroughly under attack these days, even from many journalists, that one wonders whether it needs updating anyway. Like it or not, according to Robb's story, the media has become an active participant in warfare because of the way it behaves, by providing the means for GG stigmergy to take place. Should the media be rethinking its own values?--Are those values simply inconsistent with reality, if the media is being used as a communications network by hostile forces? I can imagine the media changing its own behavior in ways that would dampen its usefulness as a stigmergic bulletin board for GGs.

Historically speaking, the media has occasionally cooperated with government and/or industry in ways that are inconsistent with its own "passive witness" value system. In Houston, for instance, business leaders did not want any kind of unpleasant public spectacle associated with the desegregation of businesses. It was widely believed by that time that media reporting of lunch counter sit-ins and so forth simply fanned flames on both the revolutionary and reactionary sides of that struggle. A voluntary media blackout was instigated by Houston business leaders during a crucial period, and public business desegregation was implemented relatively painlessly. In other words, the media voluntarily declined to be a stigmergic bulletin board for positive feedback loops of protest and counterprotest for a specified time period.

So, the questions under 2 are:

2-a. Do journalists. bloggers and the like need to rethink their own value systems in an age where they become stigmergic bulletin boards for GGs?

2-b. Could media be recruited as offensive players at critical points to actually maliciously disrupt the system of stigmergic signs that have been established by GGs?