Mover Mike

There's an important article in City Journal: The Coming Urban Terror by John Robb, a particularly timely piece in light of Rolling Stone magazine that came last week. In Rolling Stone, Punk Rock Fight Club, Mark Binelli writes about "a fearless hardcore crew known as FSU, with chapters across the United States....The gang has been tied to numerous acts of violence and has been accused of intimidating fans (at hard rock concerts and clubs), engaging in random beatings, even causing other deaths.

Robb writes

Most of the networks that we rely on for city life—communications, electricity, transportation, water—are overused, interdependent, and extremely complex. They developed organically as what scholars in the emerging field of network science call “scale-free networks,” which contain large hubs with a plethora of connections to smaller and more isolated local clusters. Such networks are economically efficient and resistant to random failure—but they are also extremely vulnerable to intentional disruptions

It used to be that nation-states had a monopoly on violence. Now, violence is democratic. Anyone can use it to great effect. And the networks the cities built while efficient are extremely vulnerable.

...even small attacks, costing in the low thousands of dollars to carry out, can cause tens of millions and occasionally hundreds of millions of dollars in damage.

In our cities, vulnerable as they are, gangs are growing threat, challenging governments for control. Besides the FSU written about in Rolling Stone, Robb writes about

the rise of MS-13, a rapidly expanding transnational gang with a loose organizational structure, a propensity for violence, and access to millions in illicit gains. It already has an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 members, dispersed over 31 U.S. states

Robb doesn't worry about WMDs like nuclear weapons and dirty bombs. Robb worries that biotechnology will be the weapon of choice for these gangs.

...in less than a decade, then, biotechnology will be ripe for the widespread development of weapons of mass destruction, and it fits the requirements of small-group warfare perfectly. It is small, inexpensive, and easy to manufacture in secret. Also, since dangerous biotechnology is based primarily on the manipulation of information, it will make rapid progress through the same kind of amateur tinkering that currently produces new computer viruses.

One way of fighting the gangs, writes Robb, is to decentalize; our cities, our communications and our police force. Maybe, another way is to reverse the movement to the cities and move to the country!

City Journal The Coming Urban Terror Mover Mike