New on the menu: Super-empowered individuals

Terrorism is a field of study with a large mob of scientists, thinkers and hacks trying to cover a lot of ground, anticipating where the next 9/11 will take place or in what dimension terrorism will expand now.

A lot of the contemporary findings are fusing together, suggesting a future of terrorism along the lines of John Robb's Global Guerillas. The speculations are, that due to globalisation, technologisation and net-centric warfare/terror, terrorism is evolving into a swarmlike, open source kind of global insurgency. As John Robb's star is rising, due to some of the novel insights he has provided, an increasing number of the mob is running in his direction. The very culmination of this new drive in the terrorism-speculations, seems to be the notion of the "super-empowered individual". This is the "Lone Wolf" in a new, techological and media-mediated hide. This is the crazy school-shooter that inflicts mass casualties and public moral panic with a handful of bullets, or the disgruntled scientist with a vialfull of disease.

So far, it is a theoretical speculation, that might not really materialise anytime soon - just like the VMD-terrorism craze in the late 1990's. But it will generate a lot of writing, no doubt. And most of them will probably end with the same conclusion: there is nothing we can do, other than build more resilient societies.