Synchronous Failure

Synchronous Failure is a conceptual framework developed by Thomas Homer-Dixon et al. (2015) to make sense of the current condition of Polycrisis. What they notice is that the current wave of crises is not just the contingent occurence of simultaneous crises (lots of troublesome stuff just happens to be happening at the same time), but instead reveals “an emerging pattern or architecture of causation”. So, there is a structure to the crisis, an underlying causality.

The integrated framework proposed here shows how multiple stresses can interact within a single social-ecological system to cause a shift in the system’s behavior, how simultaneous shifts of this kind in several largely discrete social-ecological systems can interact to cause a far larger intersystemic crisis, and how such a larger crisis can then rapidly propagate across multiple system boundaries to the global scale. (Homer-Dixon et al. 2015)

Their framework first identifies deep causes of synchronous failure and then sketches out the crisis processes that characterize synchronous failure.

Deep Causes

Current crises are the result of three long running and causally linked trends. Each of these trends on its own aswell as all of them in conjunction make Synchronous Failure more likely.

(1) Economic Growth: The scale of human economic activity has intensified - and comes into conflict with [[ Planetary Boundaries ]]. See also Great Acceleration

(2) Increasing Interconnectivity: Our material, energy and information systems are increasingly linked and show ever tighter couplings.1

(3) Increasing Homogeneity: Human cultures, institutions, technologies are increasingly loosing diversity. This is due to the well known winner-takes-all-dynamics and oligolopolic tendencies of capitalism. Redundancy and “system slack” is thereby reduced

(2) and (3) are of course reciprocally related. “Greater connectivity facilitates homogenization while homogenization encourages greater connectivity.” (Homer-Dixon et al. 2015)

Processes of crisis

  • Long Fuse Big Bang: Slow accumulation of stress, which leads to non-linear shift in system behavior
  • Simultaneous Stresses: Simultaneous Stressors, which combine within a socio-ecological system, in either an additive or multiplicative way.
  • Ramifying Cascade: Shocks at one node in [[ tigthly coupled networks|tightly coupled network ]] spread across related nodes, producing knock-on effects far away from the original source of shock.

See also:

Sources

  • Homer-­Dixon, T. et al. (2015). Synchronous Failure: The Emerging Causal Architecture of Global Crisis

  1. The second trend is the rapidly rising density, capacity, and transmission speed of the connection carrying material, energy, and information among the components of human technological, economic, and social systems. This increased connectivity reduces the isolation of these systems’ components from each other and thereby increases the functional size of the overall systems of which they are a part. (Homer-Dixon et al. 2015)

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