Musique 2012

Clear, illuminating, musetrfal as always. However, sometimes clarity involves too much simplification. Power diffusion for example is misleading; it disguises the fact that power increasingly emerge from multiple new sources instead of migrating from a power center. Power comes from both control of resources (information, for example, on how to blow up a building or manipulate public opinion gained by an individual, a group etc.) and exploiting the expanding vulnerabilities of actors of all kinds created by the information age and interdependence. One type of power is balanced by anther but the two are totally unrelated in their genesis. One focus should be the balance of power between states and societies in general and on a global scale. That would determine how states act and what what kind of power they can wield if any. I like the idea of nonpolarity : if power is too diffused then there is no more power to speak of. Like in nature, power comes from the concentration of energy in higher density than under ordinary conditions. We may be moving into the ago of flattened field of power distribution and hence new civilizations. The role of the state as public administrator may be completely transformed because, for one thing, the public is no longer bounded by national borders. We may have multiple virtual nations on earth that require totally different administrative structures founded on totally different basis than nation-states. We may even have IBM’s Watson type of machines as our leaders, whose competence we can depend on and who we don’t have to worry about becoming corrupt. We wouldn’t have the political impasse in reducing the national debt as we are having now we may even not have the concept of national debt any more.We may need an entire new set of concepts and theories to discuss politics to replace what we have now, including the concept of soft power.