RESILIENT COMMUNITIES AND SCALE INVARIANCE

In the second installment of the excellent Terminator movie series, Arnold Schwarzenegger (playing a robust robotic Terminator able to absorb terrific damage) faced off against a superior new series of robot, the liquid metal T-1000.  In contrast to Arnold's character, this robot was resilient.  Specifically, if it was blown apart the parts were smart enough and mobile enough to reassemble themselves back into a fully functional T-1000.  What enabled the T-1000 to do this was a weak application of the concept called scale invariance.  Essentially, scale invariance means that across all scaling factors (large, medium, small, tiny, etc.), the properties that define the whole are conserved (intelligence, mobility, form, productivity, etc.).  

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.

In either case, system recovery could be catalyzed and the damage largely mitigated, if our global system was scale invariant.   Basically, this means that if we had communities that could produce at the local level many of the essential products and services currently produced at the global level, handling disconnection or buffering turbulence would be of little consequence (also, it would be much easier for us to find ways of protecting or making redundant the products/services that ONLY could be produced at the global level).  Fortunately, particularly given the substantial uptick in dynamic instability at the global level, we are seeing movement towards scale invariant resilient communities.   These communities can and would be able to operate autonomously regardless of availability, pricing, or quality of external goods/services for extended periods of time.  Unfortunately, this movement may not spread quickly enough to provide any meaningful support to those communities that are utterly dependent on the smooth functioning of the global system.