VERY interesting: US NAVAL WAR COLLEGE CONCLUSIONS:<
geocities.com
US Naval War College
Year 2000 International Security Dimension Project Report
VIII. Some Cosmic Conclusions About Y2K
[snip]
Conclusion #1--How You Describe Y2K Depends on From When You View It
People who describe Y2K as "different in kind" from anything humanity
has ever experienced, or something that is unique, tend to look at the
event from the perspective of the past century. But those who look at
Y2K from the perspective of the coming century, exhibit the exact
opposite tendencies: they tend to describe Y2K as only "different in
degree" from the sort of system perturbations humanity will
increasingly face as we become more interconnected and interdependent
on a global scale. In their minds, then, Y2K is a genuine harbinger
of next definitions of international instabilities or uncertainty, in
effect a new type of crisis that leaves us particularly uncomfortable
with its lack of a clearly identifiable "enemy" or "threat" with
associated motivations.
Out bottom line (paraphrasing Rick in Casablanca): We'll always have
Y2K . . ..
Conclusion #2--Y2K Moves Us From Haves-vs-Have Nots to
Competents-vs-Incompetents
Success at dealing with Y2K has a lot to do with resources, and anyone
who believes otherwise is painfully naive. And yet, defeating the
challenge of Y2K says as much or more about one's competency than it
does about one's wealth. The rich can survive Y2K just fine, but only
the truly clever can thrive in Y2K, which IT competents tend to view
as a sped-up market experience within the larger operational paradigm
of the New Economy. The rise of "virtual tigers" such as India's
software industry, Ireland's high-tech manufacturing, or Israel's Wadi
Valley, tell us that it doesn't necessarily take a wealthy country to
succeed in the New Economy, just a very competent one. Y2K may well
serve as a microcosmic experience that drives this new reality home to
many more around the planet: it's less about what you have than what
you can do. For in the end, Y2K is less about vulnerability and
dependency, then dealing with vulnerability and dependency. You can
buy your way toward invulnerability and independency, but you can also
work around vulnerabilities and dependency.
Our bottom line: Competents will thrive, while incompetents nosedive.
Conclusion #3--Y2K As A Glimpse Into the 21st Century: Divisions
Become Less Vertical and More Horizontal
The 20th Century featured an unprecedented amount of human suffering
and death stemming from wars, and these conflicts came to embody
humanity's definition of strife--namely, state-on-state warfare. The
divisions that drove these conflicts can be described as "vertical,"
meaning peoples were separated--from top to bottom--by political and
geographic boundaries, known as state borders.
If the 20th Century was the century of inter-state war, then the 21st
is going to be the century of intra-state or civil strife. Divisions
of note will exist on a "horizontal" plane, or between layers of
people that coexist within a single state's population. These layers
will be largely defined by wealth, as they have been throughout
recorded history. But increasingly, that wealth will depend on
competency rather than possession of resources.
Y2K will help crystallize this coming reality by demonstrating, in one
simultaneous global experience, who is good at dealing with the New
Economy, globalization, the Information Revolution, etc., and who is
not. And these divisions will form more within countries than between
them, as borders will become increasingly less relevant markers of
where success begins and failure ends. The coming century of conflict
will revolve around these horizontal divisions.
Our bottom line: We have met the enemy, and they is us.
Conclusion #4--Y2K Will Demonstrate the Price of Secrecy and the
Promise of Transparency
Those who are more open and transparent and share information more
freely will do better with Y2K than those who hoard information, throw
up firewalls, and refuse outside help. Secrecy will backfire in
almost all instances, leading to misperceptions and harmful, stupidly
self-fulfilling actions. Governments must be as open with their
populations as possible, or suffer serious political backlashes if and
when Y2K proves more significant for their countries than they had
previously let on. People's fears about "invisible technology" will
either be conquered or fed by how Y2K unfolds. This is a pivotal
moment in human history: the first time Information Technology has
threatened to bite back in a systematic way. In a very Nietzschean
manner, Y2K will either "kill" us or make us stronger, and the balance
of secrecy versus transparency will decide much, if not all, of that
outcome.
Out bottom line: The future is transparency--get used to it!
Conclusion #5--Our Final Take on Y2K: As It Becomes Less Frightening,
It Becomes More Profound
The more you accept the notion that Y2K represents the future and not
some accident of the past . . . the more you see it as different in
degree than in kind from the challenges we will increasingly face . .
. and the more you realize that it's part and parcel of the
globalized, IT-driven New Economy than some exogenous one-time
disaster, then the more profoundly will Y2K loom in your psyche even
as it becomes less frightening with regard to the 010100-threshold.
Why? Because the more it becomes associated with the broader reality
of our increasingly interconnected and interdependent world, the more
inescapable it becomes. In short, you can sit out the Millennium Date
Change Event and all the hoopla surrounding it, but there's no
avoiding Y2K in the big-picture sense, because the skills it demands
from humanity are those same skills needed for our not-so-collective
advance into the brave new world of the 21st Century.
Out bottom line: There's no escaping Y2K.
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