Peter Jenkins

ISA 2012 Annual Convention

I will be presenting a paper entitled, "Wikileaks and Reputation for Resolve" at the 2012 Annual Convention of the International Studies Association in San Diego which will be from April 1 - 4. The theme of the Convention is "Power, Principles and Participation in the Global Information Age". In addition to presenting my paper on Wikileaks, I will also be Chairing a panel on Social Media and Political Activism and acting as discussant for two other panels on Radicalism and Revolution in the Information Age and the Politics of Wikileaks. I am sure that there will be some fascinating conversations about the Arab Spring, Julian Assange, the networked fourth estate, and the issue of whether governments such as the US have circumvented constitutional free speech protections by enlisting the aid of businesses such as PayPal and Amazon that provided the infrastructure for Wikileaks to function. 

My PhD dissertation discussed the use of virtual worlds as a new game theoretic model for the role of reputation in international law and relations, so my paper on Wikileaks and Reputation for Resolve stems from some of the concepts in my dissertation concerning reputation, particularly as it relates to the final stage in Bartle main player sequence in the model, which is non-deterministic (i.e. chaos driven), pluralistic, and realist/instrumentalist. One of the challenges in the Wikileaks paper is to integrate the transparency of the networked fourth estate with the non-deterministic opacity of the final stage in the Bartle player sequence in the game theoretic model. I intend to do this in the paper by demonstrating that one of the effects of Wikileaks will be to undermine the Weberian "iron cage" of path dependency produced by institutionalism, thus producing a reduction in emphasis on waging wars for the purpose of maintaining reputation for resolve. Therefore, although the rationale for reputation for resolve should theoretically at least be bolstered in a transparent environment where past actions are a reliable indicator of future behavior, the networked fourth estate facilitated by Wikileaks will result in an erosion of the path dependency of the military-industrial complex that is necessary for reputation for resolve to have traction. The expected conclusion of the paper is that this will result in reputation for resolve eventually becoming obsolete.

 

Dissolution of the EU?

When finalizing my PhD dissertation for my Oral Defense last May, (which was successful btw), I removed some parts which were potentially too controversial for the formal setting of the Doctoral Examining Committee. I recently looked over some of these out-takes and one, in particular, strikes me as worthy of a blog mention, in view of the recent heating up of the financial crisis in the EU and the downgrading of the US debt instruments.

This piece involves a scenario, originally conceived of as a hypothetical thought experiment, where the Russian Federation declines to provide the EU with oil and natural gas, diverting it to the People's Republic of China instead through a newly opened pipeline. Faced with this calamity, as well as general mounting economic pressures, the EU is forced to dissolve. This in turn creates a chain reaction which causes the western or Slavic part of the RF to join with the eastern European countries such as Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine, and Belarus, implementing Solzhenitsyn's call for a unified Slavic state. Western Europe (including Germany) and Great Britain form a separate union of their own, based on a combination of technological savvy and the moderate socialism of "The Third Way". Far-eastern regions contained within the RF on the border with PRC, such as Amur and Khabarovsk, join the PRC which needs the extra land mass to accommodate its huge population (legitimizing some existing illegal PRC settlements of RF territory). Some of the current Islamic regions contained within the RF, such as Dagestan and Chechnya, join former Soviet Republics such as Azerbaijan and Georgia. To compensate for the loss of its petro assets in these regions, the RF renews its efforts to establish an expanded Exclusive Economic Zone in the resource-rich Arctic, based on the contours of its northern contintental shelf.

One might consider this redolent of Giuseppe Mazzini's mid-19th century Revolutionary Nationalism, in that it would involve a re-shaping of borders and allegiances according to national identity and avocation, e.g. the RF as a Northern-facing Slavic petro state, the EU reverting to a small pre-war core of industrialized states, Chechnya and Dagestan joining the Arab spring etc. Mazzini was sufficiently prescient in the mid-19th century to forsee the eventual emergence of the push towards complete transparency in diplomatic negotiations (i.e. WikiLeaks). Furthermore, the current pan-Arab awakening has been considered by some to be more equivalent to the democratic nationalist uprisings in Europe in 1848 than to the revolt against the Soviet Union in 1989-91, so it is possible that we are entering a period of Revolutionary Nationalism a la Mazzini which would have profound consequences for the emerging new world order of the 21st century. Although the 1848 uprisings were unfortunately hijacked by dictators and strongmen such as Bismarck, modern 21st century social network technology, that facilitiates the transparency and mobilization necessary for democratic movements to flourish, will hopefully produce a different result. 

Osama is Dead!

I haven't posted to this blog since December 5, 2009, for two reasons: 1) I have been busy finishing my PhD dissertation on game theory and international law (it is now complete - my Oral Defence is on May 4th) and 2) the Dec. 5, 2009 post referred to three predictions for 2010 that I had made in a 2004 paper that I published in the Journal of Internet Law, and until today one of them still remained unresolved - the fate of Osama Bin Laden. Two of the three predictions for 2010 that I made in 2004 proved to be 100% true, i.e. that the war in Iraq would officially end (it did on August 31, 2010) and that three-dimensional virtual replicas of earth would end up being controlled by private corporations (see Google Earth 3D sketch-ups for example). The third prediction, concerning Osama has proven to be almost true - I predicted that he would be captured, tried and executed by the end of 2010, and in fact what has transpired today is that he has been captured and killed by US Navy Seals operating in a raid on a compound near Islamabad, Pakistan. I will count this prediction as about 90% right, since 4 months give or take in a long term 6 year prediction is really quite insignificant (equivalent to a margin of error of only about 5%). The trial part, of course, didn't occur and I should have forseen that given Osama's desire for martyrdom, but the upshot of my prediction was that the US would kill him by the end of 2010, and I was only 4 months off in that regard, which is quite amazing considering my prediction was made in early 2004 (a time when Facebook was just a student phenomenon limited to the Harvard campus and it was first revealed by the CIA that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq). 

So Congratulations to President Obama and the team of intelligence experts and military personnel who have finally tracked down and eliminated this deadly adversary. One may well wonder why the Pakistani government, which undoubtedly knew of Osama's whereabouts since he only was 80 km from Islamabad, suddenly decided to cooperate with the US - one can speculate perhaps that it is directly or indirectly related to the pan-Arab revolutions occurring in the last few months. There is an interesting piece by Anne Applebaum on the fact that those Arab revolutions are more similar to the failed European movements of 1848, than to the successful rebellion against the Soviet yoke in 1989. This leads one to some speculation on whether the death of Osama Bin Laden actually represents the beginning of the winding up of the war on terrorism, or on the other hand, just a shifting of it to different theatres.

 

Predictions for 2010

Unlike Igor Panarin, who predicts that in 2010 the US will disintegrate into six separate pieces that will fall under the influence of or be aligned with China, Russia, Japan, Canada, Mexico and the EU, I don't have anything spectacular to predict. In fact, I don't actually have anything new to predict that I haven't previously predicted. My predictions for 2010 were made on the record in my 2004 article entitled "The Virtual World as a Company Town" that has since become somewhat of a widely-cited minor classic, being one of the first scholarly papers ever written on the subject of the laws of virtual worlds. My predictions for 2010 in my 2004 article were three-fold:

1. The war in Iraq will end. (President Obama announced in February of 2009 that this misguided war will officially end on August 31, 2010, and the US is on track to fulfilling this goal.)

2. Osama Bin Laden will be captured, tried and executed. (The Intrade Prediction markets peg the chances of his capture by June 30, 2010 as about 14%, so this still leaves time for a speedy trial and summary execution a la Saddam, especially if the proceedings are held in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia. The diversion of US troops from Iraq to Afghanistan may assist in locating and finally capturing him.)

3. A three-dimensional virtual replica of the earth will end up being controlled by private corporations, which will attempt to treat virtual public spaces as corporate ones where freedom of speech is restricted, raising the company town issue in the article. (Microsoft and Google have already created these replicas for many of the major urban centres so the rest of the earth can't be far behind. Furthermore, I bet that it would be extremely difficult to take out an ad or otherwise express oneself in those spaces if the speech involved criticizing the applicable host company.)

Rather good for predictions made in 2004! I eagerly await to see what 2010 actually brings, especially concerning #2, because this will have key repercussions for the situation in Pakistan. As far as Panarin is concerned, much as the hidden nationalist zealot in me secretly wishes for Canada to become a nuclear superpower by assuming control of the Minutemen Silos in the Central US, I think that his predictions are basically fiction. In fact, he has already been proven wrong about one of them, i.e. that the US dollar would collapse in November, 2009.

 

BITs and Bytes - 2009

My article Virtual Worlds as a New Game Theoretic Model for International Law: The Case of Bilateral Investment Treaties was published in the April, 2009 issue of the University of Edinburgh's Script-ed. I had originally presented the  outline of this article at the GikIII Workshop in September, 2008 at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford, where I received some valuable input and encouragement. Btw, the photograph on the cover of the journal is very intriguing. I was speculating if it has some connection to the name of the protagonist in the cult classic British 1960's television series, The Prisoner, starring the recently deceased Patrick McGoohan given that the first part of my article discusses the Prisoner's Dilemma. In any event, the photo is an interesting riff on the "I am not a number, I am a free man!" theme from the series.

The article is on the same topic as my currently in-progress PhD dissertation. I will be presenting and discussing the first chapter with other doctoral candidates from around the globe at the ATLAS Agora symposium at the London School of Economics in June and July this summer. I am very excited about participating in the LSE symposium and being able to absorb and explore some cutting edge ideas in the area of law and economics. 

BITs and Bytes

Peter S Jenkins Gikiii Presentation Sept
From: PeterSJenkins, 11 minutes ago

Here is the presentation I gave at GikIII at the Oxford Internet Institute last week. It was a wonderful experience. Not only did I receive some positive feedback and helpful comments on my paper, but I also gleaned some fascinating information from Lillian Edwards about a recent Google patent for collecting personal information about various characteristics and behaviors of players inside virtual worlds. This coincides very opportunely with a new paper I am writing on the semantic web and artificial intelligence. I also had the privilege of having dinner with Anders Sandberg, who is Nick Bostrom's colleague at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, and discussing with him some fascinating ideas surrounding game theory and the anthropic principle. I can appreciate now how Nick Bostrom was inspired to develop the ancestor simulation argument in Oxford, where the breadth and depth of history is so spectacularly present at every step.

Peter S Jenkins Gikiii Presentation Sept

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OMW to Oxford!

The Oxford Radcliffe Building is also in Second Life! (Yes, the conference will be at the real Oxford, not the simulated one). The program for GikIII looks fascinating. I am in the first group of speakers on the first day, but I will be able to deliver a rousing high energy performance since I am arriving in the U.K. a couple of days earlier and the jet lag will have disappeared by then. Maybe some brisk punting along the River Cherwell beforehand?

GikIII & Rad Cam

In September, I am presenting a paper entitled Virtual Worlds as a New Game Theoretic Model for International Law - the Case of Bilateral Investment Treaties at GikIII at the Oxford Internet Institute. I am really excited about this conference and the opportunity to present my paper on game theory. The program looks extremely cutting edge and I will probably be able to chat with luminaries such as John Zittrain and Ian Brown, and maybe I will even be able to finally connect in person with Nick Bostrom, who is at the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute.

About 3 years ago when Nick's work inspired me to write my paper on historical simulations, I cut out this picture of the Oxford Radcliffe Camera building from the travel section of the Globe & Mail and put it on the wall in my study next to my computer, so my exercise in visualization actually worked! (According to J.R.R. Tolkien, the building resembles Sauron's temple to Morgoth!) 

Attending Two Conferences Simultaneously

I don't know if anyone has ever done this before - probably not. On May 9th and 10th, I will be attending two conferences simultaneously. One is the Osgoode Hall Law School Graduate Students Conference, "Quo Vadis, Constitution?"(meatspace location - downtown Toronto) and the other is William Bainbridge's conference (virtual world location - World of Warcraft, Earthen Ring US Server, Ogrimmar). An interesting experiment in multi-tasking, n'est-ce pas? I can see some interesting cross-overs with the Jus in Bello, Jus Ad Bellum discussion.

Convergence of the Real and the Virtual Conference

A meme is definitely being propagated here  ...  evidently, I was needlessly concerned that the paper I presented at the Breaking the Magic Circle Conference at the University of Tampere on April 10, 2008 was too off-the-wall .... now there is a conference being held inside World of Warcraft on the same topic! Granted, it's with a scientific as opposed to a political-economy approach, but it still feels good that I apparently share some of my intuitions with an esteemed individual such as William Bainbridge of the National Science Foundation. I have created a Priest character named Apophenius, specifically for the occasion.