Day 11. Paris riots
Bob Morris @ Nov 6th 2005 17:49 - Category: Unfiled ;
The Paris riots continue. And they aren’t centrally controlled.
Although the Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, has spoken darkly of " organisation" of the riots by drugs barons or Islamist radicals, police chiefs and social workers dismiss such claims. Police intelligence experts say that almost all of the violence is coming from known gangs, with help from other local youths, some as young as 10 or 12. There can be no co-ordination between the gangs in different cités (housing estates), they say, because they detest each other as much as they detest the police.
Open Source War in France
Global Guerrillas says the spark that precipitated the riots was the government attempt to destroy the underground economies by which most of them live.
"Open source war" is Global Guerrilla John Robb’s term for the organizational structure and mode of next gen terrorists.
The decentralized, and seemingly chaotic guerrilla war in Iraq demonstrates a pattern that will likely serve as a model for next generation terrorists. This pattern shows a level of learning, activity, and success similar to what we see in the open source software community. I call this pattern the bazaar. The bazaar solves the problem: how do small, potentially antagonistic networks combine to conduct war?
The spark that took this from a riot to open source war, was the attempt by the French Interior Minister (Sarkozy) to eliminate the parallel criminal economy that provides the main means of economic advancement and status in many of these immigrant communities. This economy is particularly important given the rise of the brutally flat globalized economy, where each individual is in direct competition with everyone else in the world. A crackdown meant economic annihilation. France is clearly unable to offer any meaningful alternative economic opportunity, and these boy/men know it.
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The rush to privatize water

