John Lennon once sang that life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans. The same feeling hit home, to me and seemingly to many others, in the aftermath of 11 September. In the moment, we were paralysed: unable to spend enough time to understand something which was simply changing our lives, unable even to think enough about what to do next.
And it is not a question of waiting for things to return to normal. We have been overloaded by an event that, in terms of media exposure, has been the biggest of all time. Against such an information monster of the type which tends to become more and more concentrated around single events and issues we feel unable to elaborate a rational response. This is true both at a personal and a system level. And these are to me all parts of the problem which 11 September presents to us.
The dark side of the network society
It has been a huge tragedy with enormous humanitarian and economic consequences. But what has transformed the event into a sort of black hole absorbing all global energy is that we the Universe, the media, people - have discovered all of a sudden a reality which is terrible and unknown. The most terrible part must be the empty space where the World Trade Center a name which made it the very symbol of globalisation once stood.
Behind this empty space is the unknown. The unknown is the enemy and this is because of, first, the way its organisation works and moves, and second, the way its military targets are chosen and the damage is produced. I will argue that both these features are by-products of the would-be Network Society in fact, the dark side of the Network Society. And they both require us to add software, governance, police, security, rights and accountability to a virtual world which is getting real in a very dramatic way.
A new vulnerability
The real difference that Ground Zero has produced is that we are now facing an entirely new war and an entirely new enemy.
Western society has, since the Cuba crisis, never felt so vulnerable, so insecure in its ostensible military superiority. This change has been not only drastic but also so instantaneous that we still need to adjust to the situation. For there has never been in history a superpower like the United States of America. And never did mankind experience a society as advanced as the one we have lived in over the last century. Suddenly, they both appear fragile.
It is now clear that it is technically possible that a well planned and executed attack can come close to destroying the centre of the world. This, something unimaginable in earlier eras, is a real change. It is not only that we continue to have widening divides and ancient political injustices, which keep feeding desperation and the desire for revenge. The difference is that an old desire of revenge may in essence be the same, but can now be used to kill everybody. We used to think that there is us and them, and that these two categories are separated. Instead, they are incredibly close to each other. And this brings home the scale of our vulnerability which seems to have grown alongside our technological might.
The networked enemy
The unknown is the new enemy because, first, it is using the Net to multiply its power and efficiency in using (scarce) resources to achieve its goals.
We have been saying for years in management classes that the Internet is not only about technology: it is about organisation and human interaction. We have also argued that the Internet could be used to challenge the mighty and change the distribution of power.
Now, we have a dramatic example of both these propositions. After all, how does the enemy work? Invisible. Placeless and everywhere. Very quick to group together in order to attack, and to disappear the second afterwards. In short, networked. Just like the Internet.
Never in history has the military supremacy of a single country been so big as in the last decade. Now, somebody has changed the rules of the game, by introducing the elements of flexibility and surprise.
A chain of destruction
The unknown is the enemy also because of its use of connectivity to inflict maximum damage.
Its method is not to maximise the destructive potential of the weapons employed, but rather to use against us our own weapons.
For years our greatest fear was the destructive power of atomic bombs. This attacks logic was totally different. The terrorists only weapons were apparently a small knife, and surprise. Their method, then, was to hit hard at a certain vital point of the system in order to ignite a chain reaction with hugely devastating consequences.
The knife was supposed to enable them to take control of an airplane; the airplane was supposed to give them the possibility to hit the Towers; the crash was apparently supposed to produce the fire; the fire to make the Towers collapse, killing everybody inside; the collapse was then supposed to be transmitted to the financial markets. At the beginning of the process there is only a small knife but at the end a disaster which has come close to destroying the very centre of the Network Society. And the consequences could have been even worse.
In search of a strategy
Against such a background two immediate objectives are urgent: first, to make the enemy less likely to inflict hurt; and second, to reduce the potential damage that would be generated by any such action in the future. In short, global police and global risk assessment.
The first objective requires that we institutionalise the intelligence capabilities to challenge terrorism at a global level.
A permanent taskforce is needed because terrorism (or at least the danger of it) will never be totally extinguished. This means an international police force able to move (just like its enemy) across borders quickly and efficiently. An information-based organisation able to prevent terrorists actions and fight back. A body which will combine some features of the Police (small scale actions within friendly countries), the Secret Service (intelligence), and the Army (actions in countries which decide to shelter terrorists). And which will act upon a political mandate, and within a framework of international rights, which it is the responsibility of the international community to create.
The second objective has to do with the structural vulnerability of complex systems, and is even more difficult.
The complexity of the system we have created is bound up with progress, technological advancement and connectivity. The way through is to make risk assessment systematic at the social level. This is an intellectual challenge which requires a qualitative upgrade of our current analytical tools. Then, once we clear such a scientific hurdle, we must act on the most delicate points of the technological, financial and media infrastructure. This means avoiding too much concentration of information, and creating circuit breakers which can be activated when specific crises take place.
Out of darkness, global governance
Both these objectives imply the globalisation of political decision-making processes and democratic accountability. Neither will be sustainable unless we develop at world level a framework of laws, policy-making processes, rights of countries, peoples, individuals. And, for their enforcement, credible institutions which, by definition, means those which, in specific circumstances, take priority over national sovereignty.
The same John Lennon (who himself fell by violence in the streets of New York) once invited us to imagine a world that could live as one. I would not find it strange if just as freedom of trade was the beginning of the political project we call European Union the need to fight a new war may turn out to be the unexpected beginning of another, long-awaited political project: one we may tentatively name world governance.
