DeviantGlobal: One of the hippest Twitter pages on the planet

The only reason I don't call DeviantGlobalization ("Dispatches from the global civil war") -- DeviantGlobal for short -- the hippest Twitter page on the planet is that I haven't seen every Twitter page on the planet. But this one is very hip so I am honored to learn that the author of the page is now following Pundita.

It's a lie, cooked up by a backbencher who fancies himself a great enemy of mine, that I am given to outrageous tangents to scare away readers I don't think are sufficiently intelligent to read my blog. I am not a snob; true I don't like cherry pickers but that's not saying the same, and anyhow anyone who would dress up as Kaiser Wilhelm for a costume party in Georgetown is himself too much of a snob to appreciate why I would spend, say, four months on this blog writing about swine flu.

However, I admit to a weakness for bloggers and news hounds who've identified important trends that fly under the radar of the mainstream media, including mainstream blogosphere. Several such people are futurists. Attempts to predict what the future will look like are dancing on the knife's edge of data analysis so I have great respect for people who routinely attempt the feat; even if I don't agree with their interpretations of their notes from the front I pay attention to their dispatches.

I don't know whether the DeviantGlobal Twitterer is a futurist but a glance through one page of tweets (see below) is enough to clue that the poster is on the lookout for data that indicate one of the most important trends of this young century. The trend is that the trappings of centralized state power are being greatly undermined by true anarchism, and that right now the most visible sign of this is what Nils Gilman and others following the trend call deviant or 'black' (as in black market) globalization.

See this essay at Understood Backwards, a smart blog with a very ambitious goal to combat truthiness, for a crash course on the true meaning of anarchism and the state's reaction to it. (Smart so far; the blog is only six months old. The fun of the blog is that it's the creation of unstuffy Oxford-educated historians.)

So while criminality is the defining characteristic of people who twist modern globalized business practices to nefarious ends, deviant globalization's greatest significance is that it represents a more serious challenge to nationalism than organized counter-nationalist movements (e.g., George Soros's faux anarchist Open Society) or simple transnational organized crime, which is as old as caravans and illicit goods and usually works hand-in-glove with the state.

The counter-trend, also very important to watch, is the state's attempts to fight deviant globalization (thus, the 'civil war') because while the operation might succeed the worry is that the patient -- democracy -- will die.

The counter-counter trend is so diffuse that at a cursory glance it can't survive the coming apocalyptic war between the deviant globalists and the centralized nation-states once they really gang up. But in the manner of weeds springing up through cracks in pavement 'the Vernacular' -- in its broadest meaning, the power of expression that evolves naturally through the preferences of many -- is always with us; no totalitarian regime and no number of criminals can snuff it out. The stand of Alejo Garza Tamez against drug cartel enforcers less than a month ago, which has already made him a folk hero in northern Mexico, is ample reminder of that.

The enduring power of the Vernacular is nourished by the sentiment once expressed by the Indian mystery wrapped in an enigma, Sathya Sai Baba, when asked why God didn't seem to love everyone the same.

The king of one-liners shot back, "God loves everyone equally but some He likes better than others."

The vast majority of humanity shares the sentiment. Yes yes we must have compassion for those with weak character but we all know we'd rather have great strength of character at our side when the chips are down.

A century from today who will recount the stories of today's mobsters, terrorists, and corrupt politicians? Who will remember their names? But the names of men such Alejo Garza Tamez, Rick Rescorla, and Tukaram Omble will not be forgotten and the accounts of their final noble act will pass into legend.

So, too, for true visionaries; eventually people separate the chaff from the grain. In this era democracy has been made into a prison for the mind by politicized thinking rigidly enforced by the state and the mechanisms of lawmaking and government administration. The few philosophers who can think outside political solutions are reminiscent of the human survivors tip-toeing past warring dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.

Yet the ideas and practical solutions of the American Paul Glover, who can visualize a healthy, capitalistic democratic nation with highly decentralized power, are sowing the seeds of the next great social revolution. And none of the machinations by political factions to hijack his ideas will stand against the torrent of change once more people see past the dust kicked up by politics.

But for now, at this moment in our era, what is most clearly seen is ruthlessness on a fast march, as this sampling of tweets at DeviantGlobal evinces:

threatfusion TF News: Nigeria militants claim major oil pipeline attack http://bit.ly/f64DK2
about 18 hours ago via Threatfusion Retweeted by deviantglobal and 1 other

Shortage Of Rare Earth Metals Exacerbated By Smuggling: http://bit.ly/dRlozw
about 23 hours ago via bitly

Beware those pundit-esque predictions... RT @evgenymorozov Forget about the gas wars this winter; it will all be about the DDoS wars...
6:52 AM Dec 6th via web

[Pundita note: DDoS = Distributed Denial of Service]

evgenymorozov "Next to money & guns, the 3rd largest North American export is the U.S. idealist, who turns up in every theater of the world" Ivan Illich
3:00 PM Dec 5th via web Retweeted by deviantglobal and 14 others

[Pundita note: Illich, who once graced me with the mother of all bear hugs, died before multiculturalism, Canada's "great gift to the world" became another North American export. See the 2008 Pundita post Don't Rile the Natives or What do Canada and Chechnya have in common? for background. So it's not only the Americans.]

washingtonpost Pirates hijack cargo ship with 25 people off India http://wapo.st/hjqKmE
11:03 PM Dec 5th via twitterfeed Retweeted by deviantglobal and 22 others

The Wikileak of the future: your search history, made "radically transparent" - http://bit.ly/icwXuh
6:27 AM Dec 6th via bitly

nils_gilman South Africa's deadly new craze: Whoonga, a narcotic made from stolen antiretroviral drugs: http://j.mp/gEmB5o
1:51 PM Dec 5th via Twitter for iPhone Retweeted by deviantglobal

Another gr8 article by @MishaGlenny on Russian state-mafia ties - Russia's form of globalization is almost 100% deviant
http://bit.ly/gIqGGx
2:01 PM Dec 5th via Twitter for iPhone

Mexican drug gangs 'spread to every region of US' http://bbc.in/gtSVI5
7:13 AM Dec 5th via bitly

The broader context for the assault on the Complexo do Alemão: http://econ.st/g9uHFm 7:09 AM Dec 5th via bitly

Kidnap a kid, meth him out, turn him into a cross-border killer: http://lat.ms/gVblBZ
7:07 AM Dec 5th via bitly

Early Deviant Globalization: Irish Banditry in Southern Africa, 1880-1899 - http://amzn.to/dSjeR8
6:22 AM Dec 5th via bitly

The Tuareg domain of the Sahara: a "Terror Zone" - or "a chequer-board of mining and oil prospecting concessions"? http://bit.ly/hJPOqw
6:04 AM Dec 5th via bitly

Illicit flows are always bidirectional: criminal syndicates estimated to smuggle $18-39 billion a year from US to Mex.: http://bit.ly/hwXkBc
3:06 PM Dec 4th via bitly

German tarantula dealer busted for shipping hundreds of endangered spiders worldwide by mail: http://bit.ly/e1PLDx
3:02 PM Dec 4th via bitly

@johnrobb - Taibbi's Griftopia, Gerlach's Extremely Violent Societies, and, naturally, Gilman's Deviant Globalization
9:21 AM Dec 4th via web

23-Year-Old Russian Hacker Was Responsible for One-Third of Global Spam http://gaw.kr/f1HDyT
4:33 PM Dec 3rd via bitly

"The favelas have a different law, a different economy, and their own defense forces": http://bit.ly/dRbN84
via @johnrobb 8:35 AM Dec 3rd via bitly

The good news, however, is that the Vernacular is irrepressible.

The Halloween Post: Ghost Nations and the shape of the early 21st Century

NowhereVille tourist spot, Tajikistan

This passage from the (U.K.) Guardian's report on the Yemen cargo bomb plot sent me scurrying back to Nils Gilman's recent writings on deviant globalization and the 'hollowed out' state:

Travelling to the impoverished tribal areas [in Yemen] earlier this year, the Guardian's Ghaith Abdul-Ahad found al-Qaida was able to exploit the local traditions of hospitality, profound poverty, deep distrust of [President Ali Abdullah Saleh] and the ambivalence of the Yemeni government itself. Jihadist leaders had been released from prison on the understanding that they helped with the government's battles with Shia rebels in the north and not confront Sana'a [the capital city of Yemen] directly.

Saleh is also fending off secessionists in the south of the country and many observers believe that, among the many threats to his power, AQAP is the least of his worries.

If you stack this situation against Mexico, Pakistan, Nigeria, Thailand and several other nations, it's getting harder to tell many countries, apart, isn't it?

No matter how different the society, no matter how much or little economic progress, nature abhors a vacuum: wherever the state isn't strongly represented (the 'hollowing out' phenomenon) today's bad guys -- whether criminals or terrorists or insurgents or all the above -- have become skilled at quickly making themselves at home and creating a kind of ghost nation.

This situation is also present in India, which is expected to be the next big Asian Financial Tiger. But a big swath of India is controlled by the maoist Naxalites, who are gangsters, terrorists, and insurgents all rolled into one. Of course this swath is not near a big city. They rule out in the boonies, where the Indian bureaucrats and military don't have a presence to speak of.

Even in the United States, the Sonora Desert National Monument in Arizona is so overrun with Mexican drug gangs that the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has warned Americans not to enter the park. The gangs have hollowed out a little ghost nation for themselves right inside the USA.

Last I heard, which I think was back in the summer, the embattled sheriff in the region was so desperate that he held a press conference during which he begged the federal government to send in at least 3,000 troops. He said that he and his deputies were completely outgunned and outmanned.

There are many causes and conditions for this ghost-nation phenomenon, as one can intuit from Nils Gilman's May 2010 The Meaning of Deviant Globalization, June 2010 The Collapse of Communism and the Rise of Deviant Globalization, and his link to a video of Riz Khan's really fun talk [Trench Humor Alert] on Black Market Sanctions Busting and his own speech this year on deviant globalization, which I've linked to before on this blog.

No small part of the phenomenon is the lid coming off when authoritarian regimes go broke. Mr Gurdjieff said about 80 years ago that there were tribes in Central Asia that the West had never heard of. I recalled that remark a few years ago while I was plowing through posts at the Ghosts of Alexander: Conflict and Society in Central Asia.

I snapped, "Yes, and we're having to learn about every one those tribes now, aren't we?"

With al Qaeda as our travel guide to quaint locations around the world, those of us who closely follow the war (and have developed an envious resentment of those who don't bother) must know where to find Tajikistan on a map. Only those of us who suffer as we do can understand what was so funny about Christian's title for one GOA post, Is Tajikistan the next Tajikistan?

At least he's getting a vacation from the doings in glorious downtown Dushanbe because he's grading papers.

Where was I?

Oh yes. The collapse of the Soviet Empire. With hindsight, why did we let that happen? We should have rushed in during 1985 with the standard World Bank-IMF packages and kept the Kremlin afloat. Instead, we have tribes nobody ever heard of running around in their Land Rovers with their satphones, setting up ghost nations wherever the state is not looking, collecting taxes at gunpoint from the villagers, and making bombs that they ship to us via FedEx.

Happy Halloween.