Extracts from Constant Conflict /RALPH PETERS(2).

an explosion of disorienting information intruded ever further into "structures of everyday life."

In the past, information empowerment was largely a matter of insider and outsider, as elementary as the division of society into the literate and illiterate.
While superior information--often embodied in military technology--killed throughout history, its effects tended to be politically decisive but not personally intrusive (once the raping and pillaging were done).
Technology was more apt to batter down the city gates than to change the nature of the city.
The rise of the modern West broke the pattern.
Whether speaking of the dispossessions and dislocations caused in Europe through the introduction of machine-driven production or elsewhere by the great age of European imperialism, an explosion of disorienting information intruded ever further into Braudel's "structures of everyday life."
Historically, ignorance was bliss.
Today, ignorance is no longer possible, only error.

The contemporary expansion of available information is immeasurable, uncontainable, and destructive to individuals and entire cultures unable to master it.
The radical fundamentalists--the bomber in Jerusalem or Oklahoma City, the moral terrorist on the right or the dictatorial multiculturalist on the left--are all brothers and sisters, all threatened by change, terrified of the future, and alienated by information they cannot reconcile with their lives or ambitions.
They ache to return to a golden age that never existed, or to create a paradise of their own restrictive design.
They no longer understand the world, and their fear is volatile.

Information destroys traditional jobs and traditional cultures; it seduces, betrays, yet remains invulnerable.
How can you counterattack the information others have turned upon you?
There is no effective option other than competitive performance.
For those individuals and cultures that cannot join or compete with our information empire, there is only inevitable failure (of note, the internet is to the techno-capable disaffected what the United Nations is to marginal states: it offers the illusion of empowerment and community).
The attempt of the Iranian mullahs to secede from modernity has failed, although a turbaned corpse still stumbles about the neighborhood.
Information, from the internet to rock videos, will not be contained, and fundamentalism cannot control its children. Our victims volunteer.

These noncompetitive cultures, such as that of Arabo-Persian Islam or the rejectionist segment of our own population, are enraged.
Their cultures are under assault; their cherished values have proven dysfunctional, and the successful move on without them.
The laid-off blue-collar worker in America and the Taliban militiaman in Afghanistan are brothers in suffering.
to be CONTD.