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three themes: global guerrillas, resilient communities, and, more recently, drone disruption.
"So, in other words, the tens billions we are going to spend on cybersecurity is mostly a waste of time/money. It's not only a waste of money, it's yet another example of how the US national security system is not producing real, tangible security for the people it expects to pay for it. The real solution to network vulnerability? Decentralized production. The tech is available. If the billions spent on cyber were spent on growing local production by building resilient communities, it wouldn't only make us safer it would likely ignite an economic Renaissance. "
"Contemporary capitalism, we are often told, is characterized by the relentless pursuit of efficiency. In one telling, a more efficient economy is one that gets more output out of the same amount of labor and resources. But from another perspective, a streamlined and ultra-efficient economy is one which produces more and faster in normal times, but which can only do so by cutting out the safeguards and redundancies that protect the system from catastrophic failure when things go bad. Thus the global economy becomes simultaneously more dynamic and more fragile. As Felix Salmon puts it, “as a general rule, the more efficient something is, the easier it is to break.” Both the economics and the politics of neoliberalism are turning out to be very efficient and very easy to break.
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"Today we face (but largely ignore) a major historical anomaly. From our nation’s birth all the way until the end of the Vietnam War, America's chief approach to dealing with danger -- both anticipated threats and those that took us by surprise -- was to rely upon a robust citizenry to quickly supplement, augment and reinforce the thin veneer of professionals in a relatively small peacetime warrior-protector caste. Toward this end, society relied primarily upon concepts of robustness and resilience, rather than attempting to anticipate and forestall every conceivable danger."
The Resilient Community Wiki
MiiU is a collection of all the resources and places that make personal, family, and community resilience possible. Resilience isn't only about surviving global failures, it's about building a better life for you and everyone around you.
"There’s one concept from biology that I’ve been mulling for awhile, and I think it has quite a bit to say about our current global situation.
It’s an element of the concept of “ecological succession,” the term for how ecosystems respond to disruptive change. A fundamental part of that process is the “r/K selection model,” with a little r and a big K, which is a way of thinking about the reproductive strategy that living species employ within a changing environment."
Cloud computing fails because it centralizes instead of creating resilience.
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Two factors stand out as core assumptions of a resilience approach: the future is inherently uncertain, so the system needs to be as flexible as possible; and failures happen, so the system needs to be able to identify failures early and not make things worse as a result. These may seem like common-sense notions, but today's global systems work best when everything's running smoothly and predictably. Resilient systems are optimized for rough roads with sudden turns.
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system are "too big to fail"--that is, where the failure of a single part can bring the whole thing crashing down. The alternative comes from the combination of diversity (lots of different parts), collaboration (able to work together), and decentralization (organized from the bottom-up). The result is a system that can more effectively respond to rapid changes in conditions, and including the unexpected loss of components.
A good comparison of the two models can be seen in the contrast between the current electricity grid (centralized, with limited diversity) and the "smart grid" model being debated (decentralized and highly diverse). Today's power grid is brittle, and the combination of a few local failures can make large sections collapse; a smart grid has a wide variety of inputs, from wind farms to home solar to biofuel generators, and its network is designed to handle the churn of local power sources turning on and shutting off.
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in list: Economic Crisis
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Resilience economics continues to uphold the elements of previous economic models that offer continued value: freedom and openness from capitalism at its best; equality and a safety net from socialism's intent. But it's not just another form of "mixed economy" or "social democracy." The focus is on something entirely new: decentralized diversity as a way of managing the unexpected.
Decentralized diversity (what we sometimes call the "polyculture" model) means setting the rules so that no one institution or approach to solving a problem/meeting a need ever becomes overwhelmingly dominant. This comes at a cost to efficiency, but efficiency only works when there are no bumps in the road. Redundancy works out better in times of chaos and uncertainty -- backups and alternatives and slack in the system able to counter momentary failures.
It generates less wealth than traditional capitalism would, at least when it was working well, but is far less prone to wild swings, and has an inherent safety net (what designers call "graceful failure") to cushion downturns.
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What does this all look like for everyday people? For most of us, it's actually not far off from how we lived a generation ago. We still shop for goods, although the brands are more numerous and there are far fewer "big players" -- and those that emerge tend not to last long. People still go to work, although more and more of us engage in micro-production of goods and intellectual content. And people still lose their jobs and suffer personal economic problems... but, again, there's far less risk of economic catastrophe, and some societies are even starting to experiment with a "guaranteed basic income" system.
In my work as a futurist, focusing on the intersection of environment, technology and culture, the concept of resilience has come to play a fundamental role.
The talk I gave at the Global Catastrophic Risks conference a while back is now up and online, so here's the link.
The search for efficiency and the urge to consume has set us all up like a row of dominoes - there is no buffer, no resiliency. As one problem rises it causes another. As one solution is tried it drives another problem. We all pull back and the consumer economy stalls.
in list: Economic Crisis
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