Sonoma Y2K Group Meeting Aug 21st

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The next meeting of the Sonoma Valley Y2K Preparedness Group will be on Saturday, August 21st, at the Sonoma Public Library on West Napa Str. NOTE THAT THIS MEETING IS AT A DIFFERENT TIME: 11:00 AM TO 1:00 PM. As always, the meetings are free and open to the public.

The thematic focus of this meeting will be on POWER AND ENERGY ALTERNATIVES. I will attempt to summarize some of the highlights of Dan Drasin's excellent Alternative Energy workshop (which is one day of packed information). I'm open to suggestions and input from people who would like to present information in this area. There will also be time/space for consideration of more general Y2K concerns and updates. Ralph Metzner

Here are some extracts from a Y2K report prepared by planners from Naval War College. It does show the military is taking the potential threat of Y2K disruptions, particularly overseas, extremely seriously. the full report is available on the website indicated.

The Naval War College has had a research project for the past year looking at what might happen through y2k. This links to their final summary report.

http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Thinktank/6926/y2krep.h tml

Robert Waldrop http://www.justpeace.org

Conclusion #1--How You Describe Y2K Depends on From When You View It

People who describe Y2K as "different in kind" from anything humanity has ever experienced, or something that is unique, tend to look at the event from the perspective of the past century. But those who look at Y2K from the perspective of the coming century, exhibit the exact opposite tendencies: they tend to describe Y2K as only "different in degree" from the sort of system perturbations humanity will increasingly face as we become more interconnected and interdependent on a global scale. In their minds, then, Y2K is a genuine harbinger of next definitions of international instabilities or uncertainty, in effect a new type of crisis that leaves us particularly uncomfortable with its lack of a clearly identifiable "enemy" or "threat" with associated motivations.

Our bottom line (paraphrasing Rick in Casablanca): We'll always have Y2K . . ..

Conclusion #2--Y2K Moves Us From Haves-vs-Have Nots to Competents-vs-Incompetents

Success at dealing with Y2K has a lot to do with resources, and anyone who believes otherwise is painfully naive. And yet, defeating the challenge of Y2K says as much or more about one's competency than it does about one's wealth. The rich can survive Y2K just fine, but only the truly clever can thrive in Y2K, which IT competents tend to view as a sped-up market experience within the larger operational paradigm of the New Economy. The rise of "virtual tigers" such as India's software industry, Ireland's high-tech manufacturing, or Israel's Wadi Valley, tell us that it doesn't necessarily take a wealthy country to succeed in the New Economy, just a very competent one. Y2K may well serve as a microcosmic experience that drives this new reality home to many more around the planet: it's less about what you have than what you can do. For in the end, Y2K is less about vulnerability and dependency, then dealing with vulnerability and dependency. You can buy your way toward invulnerability and independency, but you can also work around vulnerabilities and dependency.

Our bottom line: Competents will thrive, while incompetents nosedive.

Conclusion #3--Y2K As A Glimpse Into the 21st Century: Divisions Become Less Vertical and More Horizontal

The 20th Century featured an unprecedented amount of human suffering and death stemming from wars, and these conflicts came to embody humanity's definition of strife--namely, state-on-state warfare. The divisions that drove these conflicts can be described as "vertical," meaning peoples were separated--from top to bottom--by political and geographic boundaries, known as state borders.

If the 20th Century was the century of inter-state war, then the 21st is going to be the century of intra-state or civil strife. Divisions of note will exist on a "horizontal" plane, or between layers of people that coexist within a single state's population. These layers will be largely defined by wealth, as they have been throughout recorded history. But increasingly, that wealth will depend on competency rather than possession of resources.

Y2K will help crystallize this coming reality by demonstrating, in one simultaneous global experience, who is good at dealing with the New Economy, globalization, the Information Revolution, etc., and who is not. And these divisions will form more within countries than between them, as borders will become increasingly less relevant markers of where success begins and failure ends. The coming century of conflict will revolve around these horizontal divisions.

Our bottom line: We have met the enemy, and they is us.

Conclusion #4--Y2K Will Demonstrate the Price of Secrecy and the Promise of Transparency

Those who are more open and transparent and share information more freely will do better with Y2K than those who hoard information, throw up firewalls, and refuse outside help. Secrecy will backfire in almost all instances, leading to misperceptions and harmful, stupidly self-fulfilling actions. Governments must be as open with their populations as possible, or suffer serious political backlashes if and when Y2K proves more significant for their countries than they had previously let on. People's fears about "invisible technology" will either be conquered or fed by how Y2K unfolds. This is a pivotal moment in human history: the first time Information Technology has threatened to bite back in a systematic way. In a very Nietzschean manner, Y2K will either "kill" us or make us stronger, and the balance of secrecy versus transparency will decide much, if not all, of that outcome.

Out bottom line: The future is transparency--get used to it!

Conclusion #5--Our Final Take on Y2K: As It Becomes Less Frightening, It Becomes More Profound

The more you accept the notion that Y2K represents the future and not some accident of the past . . . the more you see it as different in degree than in kind from the challenges we will increasingly face . . . and the more you realize that it's part and parcel of the globalized, IT-driven New Economy than some exogenous one-time disaster, then the more profoundly will Y2K loom in your psyche even as it becomes less frightening with regard to the 010100-threshold. Why? Because the more it becomes associated with the broader reality of our increasingly interconnected and interdependent world, the more inescapable it becomes. In short, you can sit out the Millennium Date Change Event and all the hoopla surrounding it, but there's no avoiding Y2K in the big-picture sense, because the skills it demands from humanity are those same skills needed for our . . . advance into the brave new world of the 21st Century.

-- Ralph Metzner (rmetzner@svn.net), August 19, 1999


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