The Covid-19 pandemic highlights the risk of living in a complex inter-connected world. Contemporary market-based globalization links far flung national, regional, and local socio-economic systems into a complex mega web.
The increased fluidity of places, people, and commodities – via broadband internet services and enhanced transportation systems – minimize the frictions of geography and time; barriers that traditionally slowed the negative diffusion of external disruptions. In effect, the collapsing of the barriers of space/time have dramatically increases the incidence of systemic contagion and socioeconomic dislocations. Within the web-like global system, small and apparently inconsequential events – anywhere on the planet – can morph, scale and cascade through the network-driven and porous world system. Simple put, increased global integration minimizes systemic resiliency and heightens levels of societal risk.
Risk levels – across the globe – untenably increase alongside the unbridled growth and centrality of complex mega socio-techno systems. These techno systems are highly centralized and networked. Because of their intricate complexities, analysts call them black boxes – which means that we know what they do, but not how they do it. As such, by definition, mega-techno structures easily escape effective human control/management, and increase the possibilities of triggering unintended consequences and societal disruption. For illustrative purposes, the 2008 financial implosion fits the bill like a glove.
Luis Mumford, the well-know polymath, wrote with regards to complex technology: “Knowledge does not consist in knowing the things that you know; it consists in knowing the things you don’t know.” Clearly, the current systemic complexities are so opaque – that when disruptions and waves of uncertainty migrate through network-driven system(s) – sophisticated technological societies are reduced – because of limited knowledge – to muddling through uncharted and perilous landscapes. In an interconnected and increasingly fragile world, this is clearly unacceptable because the unintended consequences and the overarching risks are just too steep and unsustainable.
Globalization and complex technologies are looking more and more like a proverbial Pandora’s Box. The so-called benefits of unbridled neoliberal capitalistic growth are generating a perverse and unmanageable “techno-wasteland.” As the ancient Greeks used to say: “we all need our gods,” while for us – today – neoliberal economic growth is the god that failed.
Our crisis of faith in the unending benefits of economic growth bring in to question the long-term viability of mega-techno structures and the complex inter-connectivity of globalized markets. Jointly, these societal processes foster an array of negatives consequences, i.e. unfettered growth, frivolous consumption of finite resources, and long-term ecological degradation. The convergence of these market failures is manifested in fragmented and disjointed supply chains, disruptive manufacturing processes, and financial illiquidity. Their combined impacts accelerate the dangers of cascading collapse of our reining complex of socio-technical mega systems.
The current Covid-19 pandemic is the proverbial canary in the mine. A crystal ball of dire things to come, unless we collectively reject the false gods of capitalist growth and complexity. As things currently stand, we are facing a series of systemic disjuncture’s, where our existing tools fail us. And unless we make fundamental changes, which will require radical transformations, there will be no shelter from the coming storm. As the singer-poet Leonard Cohn once wrote prophetically: “We asked for signs. The signs were sent.”
One might ask: what is to be done to meaningfully address the coming crisis and its aftermath.? To paraphrase the theorist Antonio Gramsci: A crisis consists primarily in that the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born. As things stand, the United States and the international community must mobilize all available resources to combat the plague. But, also just as importantly, we must begin to think politically regarding how we will organize our post-crisis socio-technical landscape. We must, in effect, reimagine a set of radical societal arrangements that move beyond the current order of market-based complexity and establish a decentralized and democratically structured human-based system. This will not be an easy task. In order to accomplish this necessary objective, it will require a mass-based political mobilization that will reorganize and create anew our economic and institutional foundations. To fail at this crucial task, brings to mind the ominous line from Shakespeare’s play, King Lear: “Tis the time’s plague when madmen lead the blind.”
Arturo-Ignacio Sánchez, Ph.D. is an urban planner and the former chairperson of the “Newest New Yorker Committee” of Community Board 3, Queens. He has taught at Barnard College, City University of New York, Columbia University, Cornell University, New York University, Pratt Institute, and various Latin American universities.