The two leading thinkers on swarming and network warfare, Arquilla and Ronfeldt, argue that we should be seeing the emergence of something like a planetary consciousness. Instead the combination of Islamicist global insurgency and America's response has led to a competition between planetary minds. Arquilla and Ronfeldt think this is a new form of politics, which they call noöpolitik.
This reminds me of Robert Wright's extraordinary book Nonzero (2000), which sees all of human history tending towards ever-greater species-wide interconnection. I read it as the war on terror took off, and thought, hm, maybe we're seeing two enormous lobes of the global brain beginning to divide.
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