The Cascadia subduction zone is the most dangerous fault on the west coast, running seven hundred miles from California’s Cape Mendocino to the middle of British Columbia. Unlike the noisy faults of California, this one saves its energy, unleashing individual, massive quakes every two hundred to nine hundred years. The most recent event was in 1700 and the average over the last 18,000 years has been a quake about every two hundred fifty years.

Projections show that another event like the historic full fault slips of the past will take out pretty much everything west of I-5 in Oregon and Washington.

Oregon Quake & Tsunami

I’ve been looking for something that would illustrate what will happen to major coastal cities. There are long, fairly boring simulations and plenty of videos with people yelling in Japanese, but nothing that quickly conveys what might happen here.

The San Juan de Fuca plate has been sliding beneath the North American plate at a rate of 4cm for 317 years. Oregon and Washington are going to lunge westward forty feet in a matter of four or five minutes, sinking three to six feet in the process. Predictions are all over the board as far as tsunami height but the 1700 wave in Japan reached fifteen feet.

I tend to focus on things that are global rather than local and incremental rather than situational, but I keep coming back to this. It’s enormous, it’s inevitable, but since we don’t get periodic education the way California does the area doesn’t even have appropriate building codes.

I have been writing on attention conservation for the last four years, having first heard of the concept within Bruce Sterling’s Viridian Design Notes. Sterling used this term as a label for an initial few lines of summary on each note, basically negative information regarding the content, permitting those who would not be interested to ‘conserve their attention’. I use the phrase more broadly, in the sense that we are overloaded by media, overloaded by data, and overloaded by a world that is about to change dramatically.

Part of my personal attention conservation this year has been an effort to take the time I used to spend on short, reactive social media – like Twitter – and redirect it into more weighty reading. I just finished the National Defense University’s Convergence: Illicit Networks and National Security in the Age of Globalization, and I strongly recommend this tome for anyone seeking to better understand the nature of conflict between hierarchies and networks.

The book focuses on transnational phenomenon – weakened, failed, or captured states, and the dynamic with organized crime, insurgency, and terrorism. Chapter 5, entitled Fixers, Super-Fixers, and Shadow Facilitators, names applied to various network nodes with high betweenness, was the most interesting in terms of parallels in online conflicts.

If you are a warlord in a South America or West African nation you have local resources – drug production or extractive industries, which you can tax. Someone has to move the product internationally, someone has to clean the funds up, and someone has to return finished products – typically small scale conflict weaponry.

Online conflicts are similar. There are donation collection efforts by political groups in both the real and virtual world which are used for illicit purposes. Online payment card/bank fraud is the #1 earner, spam distribution and digital currency mining are activities which are both in some sense extractive, and botnet rentals are a curious hybrid, where the heavy duty weaponry is a revenue source rather than an expense for the operator.

The fixers and facilitators in the real world provide flags of convenience for ships and similar legitimate cover for aircraft. Legitimacy online is less of a concern than security and in the case of bad actors the flag(s) of convenience are domain registrars which protect the privacy of the owner, VPN providers that do not log their customers’ activities, and hosting providers in jurisdictions that are disinterested in legal paperwork from western nations.

Laundering proceeds is less of an issue for the online activities since the numbers are a fraction of a percent of the amounts seen in real world states with drug or extractive industry problems. The recent bank troubles in Cyprus and the thirty fold spike in bitcoin value is not a one time event – as central bank instability becomes the rule and decentralized virtual currency, or more likely a basket of them, will become a more legitimate vehicle. So there are similarities, but there are equally notable differences.

Social networks in conflict exist on a continuum, from villagers mining gold in a shaky west African state, to the transnational arms dealer profiting from the procurement of weapons that keeps those villagers looking over their shoulders. Online conflicts share some aspects with real world networks, but there are radical differences due to anonymity, action at a distance, and barriers to entry involving intellectual rather than financial capital.

Now that I’ve written this short review I can see that there is some need to compare and contrast real world vs. online networks involved in conflicts.

This eye catching graphic is from a London Daily Mail article on a recent study. Researchers obtained ten million emails, anonymized them, and determined their country of origin based on IP address. I went looking for the study itself but only found a link through to a Washington Post article on the same study.

Given the outsized reach of social media, where a single popular Twitter account can provoke international outrage at some injustice, these human networks and the activist individuals embedded in them are a new force in the world which was not possible just ten years ago.

Skilled foreign policy will require more attention to these sorts of things and I expect much more attention on this in the second Quadrennial Diplomacy & Development Review, the State Depratment’s companion review to the longer running Quadrennial Defense Review.

Last fall I took a Coursera class – Social Network Analysis, but I dropped out due to the election. I’m repeating it this spring and I just found a very interesting network diagram in the text for the class.

Like human social networks, adventuresome empires have shifting alliances based on their objectives. This graph shows the progression from 1872 through 1907, as the powers of Europe converged on a classic balanced network. The two cliques in this network then fought the first of two world wars.

Europe learned its lesson from World War II. Germany was dusted off and helped upright rather than loading down the new government with the bill for Hitler’s war. They had seen first hand the kind of trouble unequally distributed economic hardship could bring and this is the reason for their focus on social programs. People who have a broad, strong safety net are much harder to radicalize when times are tough.

There has been a similar dynamic in the Mideast. Israel and Turkey warmed to each other several years ago. Syria is failing and this will squeeze out a player that had been friendly to both Iran and Russia. Egypt revolted, threw out an American backed dictator, and then promptly fell into the clutches of another. France is leading the intervention in Mali and this is an old imperial tie. When Europe’s banking sector failing lets go with a bang they will be unwilling, or perhaps simply unable to afford such activity, and that will change things across a large swath of Africa.

This stuff is a bit more technical than anything I have done on foreign affairs, but there are trade patterns, flows of money and energy, and alliances, all of which can be viewed as networks. Understanding what they do and how they evolve over time is key to being able to predict future trends.

The Foreign Policy Meta-Map is my own incomplete perspective on the people and organizations that matter in this area. I am buried in updates now and my feeling is that I’m getting between a quarter and half of the daily volume in this area. If I had nothing else to do but review the content and select some of it on whatever criteria I could do that, but I would have no time for anything else.

A method to better provide some abstraction and visualization is needed to maintain situational awareness without getting bogged down. This is not what a final system would look like, but these are the tools I had handy for a first draft.

Google Reader is a fine RSS feed manager. Clients are available for all smart phones. The web browser interface permits grouping, renaming, and otherwise facilitates management of feeds.

Bottlenose I got into during early beta and I really like how it’s coming along. The system can read Google Reader settings, as well as following Twitter lists and saved searches. There are good features for Facebook and LinkedIn, too, but this is a single user system.

Those who have followed my career for the last several years will recall that I spent some time doing things with Silobreaker. I loved the taxonomy – there is no spam in this system, and the team features were coming along nicely. If I could afford the $300/month cost I think I would run this again, but in parallel with my own work. The Silobreaker system could stand a good shot of left of center thinking and access to their results would help me to better understand the overall foreign policy discussion space.

I am not sure exactly where this exploratory knowledge engineering exercise will end up, but I am certain there will be a public face via Twitter and a Google Currents feed for tablet users. While it is easy to start something like this, you run into trouble as soon as you need revenue in order to acquire a subscription service like Silobreaker or you’re feeding a $150/month hosting habit due to growing popularity. Taking something that was free and slapping a price tag on it causes a serious perception problem. There is going to be some sort of subscription plan available right from the start. Even if there isn’t any sort of value added service, the framework for it will be in place.