Planned resilience

Back in 2007, Alex Steffen—acclaimed San Diego futurist—thought that we were living at the twilight of the Industrial Era, and at the dawn of another. Fast-forward almost six years and he is being proven right, which is probably why he revisited “The Empire of Crime”—an enlightening piece where he explains that while the pillars of modernity are changing, the final structure depends on us. “All that we believe to be solid is melting into air, again. We live in a deeply networked, interconnected world, a world where the leapfrogging of technology is mingling with the annihilation of distance to produce a future which not only feels different, but runs by different rules. But more importantly, The world in which we live will no more last out our lives than the ice box, buggy whip or telegraph delivery boy outlasted theirs.Some of those rules should scare us, within reason. John Robb, in his excellent new book Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization, makes the point that it is the very nature of the systems upon which we currently depend — centralized, hierarchical, brittle and above all, closed, proprietary and secret — that makes us most vulnerable to the depredations of small bands of networked terrorists. Our industrial system is like one giant, opaque Windows operating system, just waiting for the next wave of attacks to bring it crashing down, and its very opacity is its biggest threat: “We are vulnerable because we don’t know, and our vulnerability is actually increased because we don’t know”. The only sane response to these dangers is the opposite of our current approach: it is a society-wide shift to openness, transparency and planned resilience”.