http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/zkp/scenario.txt

from: morgan.garwood@thing.nyc.ny.us
date: january 1996


On Scenario Planning


the best place to begin is by asking "What Are The Right 
Questions?",  how do we go about looking at these phenomena, 
what mental frames  do we use to understand them ? As you know, 
there are many types of  "net intellectual" out there, with 
many competing agendas. For instance,  there is GBN, or Global 
Business Network (Peter Schwartz, Peter  Drucker, Laurie 
Anderson, SUN Microsystems, etc. all rolled into one)  which 
exists to bring Net Brains and Business Brains and Government  
Brains all together. But, really, in whose inerest do they 
operate ? This  is the "Cooperative/Synergistic" model for the 
new era we are entering...  large groupings of very different 
but immensely talented and intelligent people who will get 
together and do "thought jams" on a  subject for you for a fee 
of $35,000 dollars a year. This model is based  on the old SRI 
(Standard Research Institute) structure (also like the old  
RAND corporation), but updated with better tools, and made more  
Groovy. They are big fans of Scenaio Planning, and Wired made a 
fuss  over them and their New World scenarios for the future. 
We might begin  by taking those scenarios as they described 
them and using those as  starting points for our ideas (!).
	The other model is the old school Dialectical/Synthetic 
which  dominated the first part of the century in the "Free 
West/Red East"  tensions, and is now reformulating itself in 
the "Jihad vs. McWorld"  faith/feeling vs. reason/technology 
splits. You see, these constucts can  contain each other, 
because the GBN Grooviness is the celebrity zone of  McWorld... 
we don't exactly know what the Mullahs think about all of  
this. Then we have that sector that is 
Paranoid/Dangerous/Weird,  which ranges from global mafias, 
Scientologists, arms brokers, former  KGB operatives u.s.w., 
who live in a permanent psychology of Cold War.  Under that we 
have "Decomposing World", places like Rwanda, which  seem 
beyond repair (for a while, a loooong while), and off to the 
side  someplace we have Enclave/Fortress world, like entire 
clans of rich  Indian industrialists that live in fortified 
high-rise buildings utilizing  high-tech security.
	There are also big money migrations, like mega-rich 
Chinese getting  out of Hong Kong before it reverts to China, 
fleeing one Enclave/Fortress  world, and joining up with 
McWorld in America and Canada. Of course  Internet, and 
Internet culture are thoroughly involved in "meme  brokering", 
allowing meme-filtration, meme-hybridization, meme- 
horticulture etc. to accelerate toward phenomenal growth and  
phenomenal instability at the same time. This is the 
mental/cultural  equivalent of the Cambrian Explosion in 
genetics, and for some it will be  a Boschian (as in 
Hieronymous Bosch) moment (medieval worldview on  acid), for 
others it will be Eco-Intensive (Terence McKenna, Rupert  
Sheldrake, et al.stone age worldview on acid)..for others it 
will be the  age of the Borgias (Machiavelli on acid) and for 
others, a perpetual  childhood (Mickey Mouse on acid).  
	Seething with life, like a primordial ocean filled with 
everything  eating everything else while something else is 
eating it, parasites boring  holes through flesh of predators 
while smaller parasites are boring  holes through the larger 
parasites, and viruses are boring holes through  viruses, with 
the DNA itself fighting it out for dominance within the  
nucleus of the cell! (Darwin on Acid!) Hey Hey, My My, Virtual 
Reality  Markup Language is on the way... in the long run it's 
ALL about  bandwidth. 

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