Google, Hezbollah and Taliban

The three words that stand out in the popular Silicon Valley lexicon are "Risk", "Disrupt" and "Change". Almost all high-tech aficionados love to talk about entrepreneurs taking "risks" to "disrupt" the existing technologies, products, markets and systems to bring about fundamental "change" in how we live, work and play. The search giant Google is often cited as epitomizing risk-taking, disruption and change.

Some serious observers and writers are now taking this discussion a step further into the realm of violent insurgent groups such as the Hezbollah and the Taliban and how they are becoming a powerful disruptive force for geopolitical change.

Author Joshua Cooper Ramo, in his book "Age of Unthinkable" talks about how Hezbollah has become a powerful disruptive force in the Middle East. In a recent commentary, Ramo says, "...in my dealings with Hezbollah over the years as a journalist, I had found myself fascinated by their capacity for innovation, even in the pursuit of shocking ends. Their obsession with finding better ways to fight under the pressure of Israeli attack was astonishing. In 2006, for instance, fewer than 500 Hezbollah fighters had frustrated a 30,000-man Israeli attack."

Talking about Fouad, Hezbollah's Chief Technology Officer, Ramo writes in his book, "Fouad reminded me of friends of mine who had started Internet companies or people I knew managing gigantic hedge funds. This was the generation that had built the Web into something useful and revolutionary, that had assembled huge and unregulatable financial firms churning out billions in profits while creating trillions of dollars of risk. These people see destabilization of the existing order as not only necessary but inevitable. You don’t dare draw an equivalency between the crimes of Hezbollah and the innovations of Google, but you can see in each the workings of a powerful energy. These hot cells of innovation draw the very best minds of a generation: math geniuses to hedge funds, computer savants to tech startups and, well, “Our e-mail is flooded with CVs,” Fouad told me."

Then Ramo wonders out loud if the established order in the US can take on these new insurgents. He says, "When I thought of these rebels I knew in the context of other friends of mine, such as the suits working in the National Security Council or the U.S. Army or Time Warner, I realized that there was no chance those conservative places could compete. They were locked in a vision of the world that was out of date. As a perplexed Alan Greenspan confessed to Congress about his own thinking in 2008: “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by the fact.” The congressman questioning him asked, “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right. It was not working?” Greenspan replied, “Absolutely. Precisely. You know that’s precisely the reason I was shocked. Because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”

Recently, Texas Rep. Pete Sessions encouraged House Republicans to see the Taliban as a model for "how to disrupt and change" the control of Washington by the entrenched Democrats in both the executive and legislative branches of the US government. Here's how he is quoted by Los Angeles Times:

Insurgency we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban. And that is that they went about systematically understanding how to disrupt and change a person's entire processes. And these Taliban -- I'm not trying to say the Republican Party is the Taliban -- no, that's not what we're saying. I'm saying an example of how you go about is to change a person from their messaging to their operations to their front line message. And we need to understand that insurgency may be required when the other side, the House leadership, does not follow the same commands, which we entered the game with.

I think insurgency is a mindset and an attitude that we're going to have to search for and find ways to get our message out and to be prepared to see things for what they are, rather than trying to do something about them, I think what's happened is that the line was drawn in the sand.... We either work together, or we're going to find a way to get our message out.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the world is witnessing the start of a dramatic change in the international order. As Ramo puts it:

What we face isn’t one single shift like the end of World War II or a financial crisis, so much as an avalanche of change. We are entering, in short, a revolutionary age. On the one hand, this revolution is creating unprecedented disruption. But it is also creating new fortunes, new power and fresh hope. Revolutions, after all, don’t produce only losers. They also produce a new cast of historical champions. If we are living in the Age of the Unthinkable now — when surprise and unimagined danger confronts us on many fronts — we are not living in the age of the unexplainable.

To master this new world, it is important for us to learn from the revolutionaries. Whether we see them as the good guys or the bad guys, they do understand the new laws of power in this new world.

Related Links:

Congressman Pete Sessions on Emulating Taliban

Learning how to navigate 'Age of Unthinkable'

Social Media Bring Happiness, Pose Risks

Of the two recent studies making headlines this week, one brings good news and the other warns of grave risks.

The good news first: New research shows that in a social network, happiness spreads among people up to three degrees removed from one another. That means when you feel happy, a friend of a friend of a friend has a slightly higher likelihood of feeling happy too. And the more connected you are to happy people, the happier you feel.

"We get this chain reaction in happiness that I think increases the stakes in terms of us trying to shape our own moods to make sure we have a positive impact on people we know and love," explains Professor James Fowler, co-author of the study and professor of political science at the University of California in San Diego.

"We've known for some time that social relationships are the best predictor of human happiness, and this (latest study) shows that the effect is much more powerful than anyone realized," Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard told CNN. "It is sometimes said that you can't be happier than your least happy child. It is truly amazing to discover that when you replace the word 'child' with 'best friend's neighbor's uncle,' the sentence is still true."

Earlier this year, President-elect Barack Obama's campaign rewrote the rules of successful presidential election campaigning as it embraced social networking and Web 2.0 technologies to reach out to young American voters across the nation. The dramatic success of the Obama campaign in fundraising and energizing young, affluent voters and on college campuses has been quite phenomenal. Obama significantly outraised funds by at least two to one, to the tune of $750m in small contributions, and defeated the powerful Clinton Democratic machine as well as his Republican opponent John McCain.

While almost no one questions the power of social networking in transforming the lives of under-30 Americans, there are concerns being raised about the risks of social networking. As the membership of social networks and the users of social media applications such as Facebook, MySpace, and Orkut grow dramatically to hundreds of millions in the US, Europe, Asia and Latin America, it seems that this phenomenon is still in very early infancy in Pakistan. As of now, there are about 200,000 Pakistanis on Facebook, about 100,000 on Orkut, and a few thousand on MySpace. There are smaller social networks such as Naseeb.com that have a few thousand Pakistani members as well. While Naseeb.com bills itself as a Muslim social network, it seems primarily focused on match-making. Recently Naseeb has started a Pakistani job-search site as well. Pakistan's middle class is estimated to be about 25m people, larger than the population of several European countries and Australia. With such a large middle class population, only a small fraction is participating in the social networking phenomenon. The reasons cited for this minuscule participation include the lack of access to the PC and the Internet, lack of familiarity, and shyness standing in the way of appropriate public self-expression. While I acknowledge that these might be contributing factors, I believe the main factor is the lack of a socially and culturally appropriate content and welcoming environment that suits the Pakistani sensibility and taste. It is something hard to describe but it is something you know when you see it. A new social network called PakAlumni Worldwide has recently been launched to serve this exact need and to encourage Pakistanis to participate in larger numbers. It is still in its early days with about 800 members but growing rapidly. The membership includes a large number of Pakistanis living in the United States, Europe, the Middle East and various parts of Asia. The social connections made via PakAlumni can easily turn into business connections and help build support for important social causes. PakAlumni can also help bring the Pakistani diaspora together to grow closer and more prosperous and help Pakistan achieve greatness in the process while improving its civil society and image.


As to the risks involved in social media participation, a recent hoax on MySpace led to the suicide of a 13-year old girl in Missouri. Megan Meier thought she had made a new friend in cyberspace when a cute teenage boy named Josh contacted her on MySpace and began exchanging messages with her. Megan, who suffered from depression and attention deficit disorder, corresponded with Josh for more than a month before he abruptly ended their friendship, telling her he had heard she was cruel and told her "the world would be a better place without you".

Lately, IT executives in large corporations have expressed fears that employees using social networking sites may download viruses that wind up on their employer's computers or reveal information about themselves on the networking sites that compromises their employer's business secrets. To prevent such problems, some companies, including Intel, ban their workers' access to social networking sites. Not only do employees put their companies at risk, they also expose themselves to identity fraud. McAfee's list of top 12 Christmas scams this year warns that people on some social-networking sites have been receiving messages that say "You've got a new friend." When clicked, the messages downloads software that steals their financial information.

Social networks and social media applications are like any other powerful tools at our disposal. They can be extremely useful in connecting us to the world and increase our wealth and happiness, but they can also bring serious harm to the lives of young people who tend to be more open to sharing personal information with strangers or clicking on malicious links.