With the swine/avian flu pandemic already at 5/6 on the CDC danger scale, we may all soon find out (following Mexico's lead) what it means to endure a national emergency that cancels all public gatherings, closes borders, stops people from going to work, and creates massive service/product disruptions. In short: severe disconnection.
Here are some quotes/links to two briefs I wrote just before the pandemic (built on concepts pioneered in Brave New War). It's useful to see it as part of a larger and increasingly common pattern of massive global shocks. This path inevitably leads to a more resilient design for the global system: one populated by resilient communities (a societal design that makes telecommuting the standard for global knowledge work).
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Scale invariance is a requirement for societal resilience. It is also something anyone seriously thinking about the topic of resilience must be familiar with. Here's why. Our global system is composed of intermeshed and tightly coupled networks. These interlinked networks enable our system to be efficient and relatively robust against random shocks. However, large shocks can overwhelm this type of network design, causing it to either act erratically (turbulence) or break apart (into smaller clusters via cascades of failure). We saw systemic turbulence in action via the recent brush with a global financial meltdown in September 2008 and we are seeing it currently with erratic swings in markets, trade, and other forms of economic activity. Examples of network failures that result in disconnected clusters are seen with every black-out in the electricity network. A pandemic would be a mix of the two, intentional clustering (quarantines) and high turbulence.
From the brief: Resilient Communities and Scale Invariance
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This is interesting from the perspective of societal decision making. Improvements in robustness and increasing returns over the short to medium terms, drives society (from common wisdom to academic doctrines) to assume that our situation will/can only get better and better. This experience has also led to the assumption that radical increases in connectivity (Internet, financial integration, etc.) will only accelerate this process of betterment. However, network analysis indicates that these massive increases in connectivity have made the possibility of an extinction event (cataclysmic Black Swan) much, much higher than in the past. Therefore, assumptions that we will eventually progress (something we have to assume), should be moderated by the fact that our future may be increasingly (more frequently) punctuated by periods of and extreme and prolonged system failure. In that regard, the connectivity we have in this Century makes it truly unique in all of history, and therefore any comparisons to historical experience should be used with extreme caution.