The strategy blogosphere is today a shadow of its former self but it once had a lot of vibrant, cutting edge debates. Some of which turned out to have been wrong. Or more accurately saw a tree of significance but missed the forest. 1/

Take for example in the mid 00’s the “Superempowered Individual” a concept fueled by examples of Kaczynski, the Anthrax letters and others using growing inter connectivity of media and other networks to scale up the havoc one person could wreck to societal disruption. 2/

I was part of that debate. So was @johnrobb and @Aelkus Thomas PM Barnett, the 4GW school, folks on @smallwars forums and so on. There was some meat there as terrorists and other non-state actors were discovering new ways to accrue leverage, often tactical but at times strategic

What we all missed, though it must be said @johnrobb hit closer than everyone else, was that the real superempowered threat was going to come from social media networks (networks ppl understood mainly as human ones like AQ mostly or cyber ones in network centric theory)

We underestimated until the 2009 teens that social media would become like a mutant, growing, apocalyptic toxic dumpster fire that would be weaponized for major political disruption. Yes ppl caught on later but not in say 2005 despite seeing what happened to Usenet forums

I’m curious what we are all missing right now.

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