It's been almost 6 months since I left to study in a new country, traveling to a broken city at the edge of the world to unravel the secrets of the human mind. In the meantime, I've decided to start blogging about some of my favorite topics: technology, power, and the systems upon which both depend and are used. I've entitled this blog "Practical Supervillainy" for reasons that will become obvious.
As stated in John Robb's "Brave New War" and his "Global Guerrillas" blog, modern technologies empower individuals and small groups to conductive extremely disruptive attacks on systems most of the developed world depends on. The other side to this is development of technologies allowing more resilient, disruption-resistant infrastructure. I'll be discussing these, but also the rapid growth of "alternative economies" and failures of existing ones.
I'm an engineer interested in the performance of systems, including political and economic ones. To understand a thing is to know how it might be destroyed. After all, you can't improve a design if you don't know what the failings and strengths of it are. There are countless blogs on failings of economic and political systems, as well as countless tech blogs. What I'm going to bring to the table is my perspective on how the human mind uses society and technology as tools and weapons for its own ends, even subconsciously. It's hardwired into all of us, to use for good or evil. I'm going to post my own thoughts and scenarios, based on my reading of neuroscience, history, politics, and technology.
The potential for supervillainy has never been greater, whether from individuals or states (or individuals in states). I'm going to cover some of the more practical manners, the hows and whys of how machinery from gadgets to bureaucracies could be used, abused, and countered. My inner science fiction geek will definitely enjoy this, and hopefully, you will too.
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