While cleaning the blog today, I stumbled upon this unfinished post from a year ago. I don’t want to kick off a Robb-Barnett debate, but I did want to share these observations.

It was all prompted when Robb summed up his perspective in one of his classicly succinct comments:

Guys like Barnett have a vision for what “should” happen. They point to events and suggest alternative ways to approach them. My approach is more what “is” happening. I point to events that support the trend. In my approach, “should” doesn’t factor into my analysis.

This is why I get so much enjoyment from balancing Robb and Barnett against each other. Robb throws out events that reflect the trends he argues are driving events. Barnett throws out events that reflect the trends he believes will drive events. More and more I have noticed Barnett referring to his vocation as “the vision guy,” which by definition means that he is talks and thinks about things that aren’t here yet. PNM was a diagnosis of geopolitics, the closest Barnett got to focusing on what is. Perhaps for this reason, Robb had pretty positive comments about PNM. Ever since PNM, Barnett has been pushing the vision and looking forward, forward, forward (as shown in BFA). Not surprisingly, BFA inspired a great deal of criticism from Robb.

An interesting issue is this is that what will be depends upon what is… but it will be affected by what we wish the future might be.

All of this ought vs. is talk makes me think of Hume. If one cannot derive ought from is, then periodic friction between the two men’s perspectives is inevitible. Barnett’s thinking often brings in a moral element (we ought to shrink the Gap), while Robb’s thinking is descriptive (interactively complex infrastructure networks are vulnerable to system disruptions). Of course, Barnett also engages in descriptive work, and (to flog a carcus that ceased to resemble a horse ages ago) it is in this area that the two men’s work is most complementary.