Paul Saffo: 'Networks' Are a Threat to Civilization Video Lecture | Shaping the Future: The New Western World - Personal Skills

and the hard part for government is
organizational you can really summarize
the modern condition with all the
networks in the web is that governments
are stovepipes their hierarchies yes and
their competition our networks
al-qaeda's and network terrorists or
networks the public is a network and so
you have a hierarchy trying to serve a
network and also in competition with
other now that's an interesting idea
that these sort of higher hierarchically
organized institutions are colliding
with non hierarchical you know our
greatest national security threat today
are in fact I think it's the greatest
civilization with threat is not bad guys
with bowling ball bombs and terrorists
it's networked crime yeah and you know
you can look at well or or what what if
you said the biggest threat is criminal
syndicates simply because it appears to
me as I mentioned it at our dinner the
other night that Richard Clark went on
TV to say you know there's this merger
of sort of the heroin business and the
al-qaeda business and the ideology
business and the government overthrow
business and these people are running
criminal syndicates were there running
syndicates and they're using criminal
enterprise as the sort of financing that
you know they can't go to Silicon Valley
they can't do an IPO so they use heroin
as the exaction enhancing scheme exact
same things happening in Mexico you know
the Mexican drug gangs game their power
because we took out Pablo Escobar and
they moved in on his business then we
did them the extra gift of sending him
another network so some of the most
effective networks in California are the
norteños and so Daniels the the gangs in
LA and so we busted them and instead of
putting in jail send them back to El
Salvador in Mexico where they were the
senior management consultants reorganize
oh dear so you know the great challenge
if you think about if it was hard enough
for the Pentagon an organization
designed to fight the cold war hard
enough for them to pivot and fight the
terrorists and it's going to be so much
harder time domestic about the Cold War
you know we have ships and tanks and
soldiers and they have ships and tanks
and soldiers and we have territory and
we have an army and they have turned
around laminar me but now you have a
completely asymmetric situation where
you have criminal elements and
liberation movement elements that use
criminal financing and the whole thing
becomes extremely difficult to write for
government to cope with and so we have
this sense of incompetents to government
but it's really the you know we're
fighting a sort of gigantic guerrilla
operation we're 14 years in and they're
still trying to figure out how to fight
terrorists and it's going to
transmogrify into how to fight crime
gangs and we're not even close there