“ Resistance movements are governed by the same dynamic as the open-source software community, as described by Eric Raymond in “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” Innovations are developed rapidly by self-managed individuals, independently — stigmergically — and then those innovations that prove themselves useful are rapidly adopted by the entire network. In hierarchies, the inefficiencies of organizations are multiples of all the individual inefficiencies of their members; in networks, they’re contained and bypassed as the innovations of the most efficient are adopted universally with zero transaction costs. That’s what “Fourth Generation Warfare” is: asymmetric warfare governed by the developmental ethos of Linux. […] The generals in the giant bureaucracies are always busy fighting the last war. The TSA bureaucrats expend tens of thousands of committee man-hours to make sure nobody can ever hijack a plane again, or hide explosives in their shoes, or smuggle in explosives in shampoo bottles — stuff that Al Qaeda would never try twice anyway, because they turn on a dime to come up with the next thing the TSA bureaucrats haven’t thought of yet. […] We see hierarchical institutions challenged, and soundly beaten, on every side by the new network culture.
— Kevin Carson, The Network Revolution Versus the State and Its Allies (via Mike Gogulski)
