Lately I’ve been taking advantage of the theories of Peter Pogany, Kojin Karatani, and Peter Turchin to show how nonsensical recent political events make a sort of systemic sense in the context of limits to growth and how different interest groups are likely to react to those. We can certainly explore that causal background. However, my intention here is more to open up a discussion of how might we respond to such events in a manner that constructively promotes the goals of 2R. Such responses will likely look different for those (such as this author) who are US-based, and others who are based internationally.
As a first draft notion, my perspective as a network engineer is that “single points of failure” represent bad design, if the goal is resiliency. Too many global networks, it appears, have allowed themselves to flow through a rather notorious single point of failure. How to cure? Reroute as many networks as possible to make that single “node” redundant and unnecessary. I invite create thinking from as many different perspectives as possible on how that might work out in practice.
I really appreciate the systems lens being brought here—especially the idea of re-routing around single points of failure. That feels both practically wise and metaphorically rich.
At the same time, I want to gently poke at the phrase “the only way…” Not to disagree per se, but to wonder aloud: What happens to our imagination when we frame resiliency as a purely structural or strategic issue?
From a relational view, resiliency isn’t just a matter of networks and nodes—it’s also about the quality of connection within and between those nodes. How much trust, reciprocity, and responsiveness flows through them? How much capacity is there to hold tension, difference, grief—even betrayal—without collapse?
So maybe part of the “rerouting” isn’t just infrastructural, but also relational: cultivating distributed resilience not just through redundancy, but through deeper relational integrity. Curious what others see here
This works just fine with respect to my underlying IT networking metaphor. Not every point-to-point link is equivalent to every other point-to-point link. Noise, cost, reliability, throughput, etc. are just some of the differentiators. Routing protocols factor these sorts of things in. With respect to human relationship, high-trust bonds are generally worth more than casual or purely transactional relationships.
Apart from underlying metaphors, my generally recommended process to navigate the metacrisis is to improve both the quality and the quantity of trusted relationships in all available directions. If previously trusted links prove suddenly unreliable, grow new links in new patterns. The overall system should become more resilient that way.
Thanks, Geoff—yes, I do have some thoughts, though I’d hesitate to frame them as solutions in the usual sense. Relational resilience isn’t something you can download, diagram, or declare in a manifesto. It’s more like sourdough than software: alive, slow, finicky, shaped by the air and hands around it.
Some of what I’ve seen work: spaces where disagreement doesn’t instantly trigger defection. Where trust is earned not by ideology, but by how folks show up when things get messy. Where feedback loops include not just information, but emotion, history, and care.
These aren’t glamorous systems. They’re mostly compost heaps with good boundaries and decent snacks. But they grow things—slowly, strangely, beautifully.
Still, that’s just one slice of my view. I’d love to hear from others—what have you seen that helps cultivate relational strength, especially across difference?
It appears the world economy may be a self-healing system which is adapting to the sudden unreliability of the US as a global financial hub. This very macro-level phenomenon can likely be found in much more localized systems of other types (environmental, social, cultural) as well. Nature, in general, abhors single points of failure.
Quick question @RobertBunge — do you follow Michel Bauwens, who has written a lot on Pogany, Karatani and others, including on the P2P Foundation wiki?
Yes. Bauwens put me onto to both Pogany and Karatani. Those two filled some gaps that needed filling for sense-making about politics, economics and other matters. I share Bauwens’s interest in long duration civilization models.