코로나바이러스, 동기적 실패 그리고 지구적 국면 전환

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Coronavirus, synchronous failure and the global phase-shift
코로나바이러스, 동기적 실패 그리고 지구적 국면 전환

Nafeez Ahmed

요약

코로나 바이러스는 중국에 관한 것이 아니라 우리의 세계 시스템의 구조에 관한 것입니다.
the coronavirus is not just about China — but about the structure of our very global system.

코로나 바이러스의 가장 치명적인 영향은 바이러스 자체부터가 아니라, 인간 시스템이 바이러스에 반응하는 방식에 의한 것이 될 것입니다.
The most devastating impact of the coronavirus might well be not from the virus but from the way human systems respond to it.

코로나 바이러스의 사회적 영향을 평가하기 위한 유용한 분석틀은 Thomas Homer-Dixon이 주도한 '동기적 실패' 개념이 될 것입니다. Thomas Homer-Dixon은 글로벌 시스템의 밀접하게 결합된 특성이 “다중 스트레스 요인”이 상호 작용하여, 더 큰 시스템 간 위기"를 일으킬 수 있는 “동시적 변화”을 생성 할 수 있음을 보여주었습니다. ".
그리고 그것은 차례로 "여러 시스템 경계를 넘어 전 세계적 규모로 빠르게 전파할 수 있습니다."
글로벌 시스템은 현재 여러 동시적 위기에 처해 있습니다. 에너지, 경제 및 환경 위기가 서로 교차작용하여 사회, 정치 및 문화 시스템과의 불안정을 증폭시키는 피드백 루프( 반작용 기제)를 형성했습니다.


A useful framework for assessing the societal impacts of the coronavirus would be the ‘synchronous failure’ concept led by Thomas Homer-Dixon, who has shown how the tightly-coupled nature of global systems means that “multiple stressors” can interact to create “simultaneous shifts” which can then generate “a far larger intersystemic crisis.” That in turn can then “rapidly propagate across multiple system boundaries to the global scale.”
The global system is currently on the brink of multiple simultaneous crises. Intersecting energy, economic and environmental crises have formed destabilizing amplifying feedback loops with social, political and cultural systems.



3.3 The risk of cascading failures

Homer-Dixon’s synchronous failure framing provides a compelling way to understand the first side. His study also recognizes the centrality of the global energy system to its heightened vulnerability to synchronous failure. The potentially destabilizing impact of the coronavirus can be assessed in this context.
Homer-Dixon and his team point out the following:

“Only enormous inputs of inexpensive high-quality energy can create and sustain the unprecedented connectivity and complexity of human civilization, including the connectivity described here among this civilization’s diverse component systems. As a provisional hypothesis, therefore, it seems reasonable to propose that the global energy system helps to synchronize these systems’ behavior and to stimulate simultaneous crises within and across them. Other factors such as global trade and transport systems, the Internet, and simultaneous scarcity of multiple resources may also play synchronizing roles, but these factors themselves depend on, and are therefore significantly derivative of, massive flows of energy.”

A global financial correction, in short, was long overdue — and the system was largely running on debt-fumes.
So the coronavirus has hit the global system at a point when its energy-economic vulnerability is extremely high. The most immediate impact has been on global financial markets, which have seen massive volatility in the stock market. The OECD has warned that the rate of global economic growth could be cut by half, while several major economies such as Japan and the Eurozone, could slide into recession.

But the economic impacts are going to go far beyond the stock market and surface measures such as GDP. Whereas the Finnish report had warned that we may see a resurgence of oil prices due to rising demand against worsening supply constraints due to the uneconomical nature of production in the US shale and Saudi sectors, it also pointed out that this might not happen. The coronavirus has almost certainly averted an oil price shock.

China’s output has stalled dramatically, providing a clear-cut example of how massive containment measures have, in turn, curtailed economic activity. As the scale of the coronavirus outbreak begins to become clearer in the US, Europe and UK, containment measures will further dramatically impact economic activity as businesses close and precautionary measures are pursued by firms. We can expect domestic output to drop significantly over the next six months at least.

This means that with the economic demand pressure on the global energy system temporarily alleviated, oil prices will stay low. This, however, will continue to pose a major problem for US shale oil and gas producers which are experiencing haemorrhaging profits due to large rocketing extraction and operating costs, and massive debt expansion to finance their activities.

With oil prices staying low, the shale sector could find itself unable to break even or service debts. Meanwhile, with escalating US government expenditures on domestic emergency containment measures in response to the public health crisis, there will be a question of how long the US system can finance both government and oil industry debt before it hits an irreversible crisis-point. Given that the growth in US shale is underpinning global economic growth, as the new Finnish government report observes, any oil sector crisis here will have a global impact that would propagate across the world economy.

Simultaneously, global supply chains are going to feel the strain as the impact of China’s unprecedented containment efforts slowly unfold. US ports are bracing for cargo volumes to drop by 20 percent or more in the first quarter of 2020. Other Asian producers such as South Korea are also cutting back. Overall global manufacturing supply chains for electronics, chemicals, food, tobacco, beverages and so on will take a significant hit for several months at least. All sorts of things from cars to toys will end up facing production bottlenecks. This will take some time to saturate into industrial activity in Western societies, but it will do. Institutions like the OECD do not factor such impacts into their assessments of GDP. Therefore, its forecast of potential GDP decline is likely also conservative.

Dependence on China for ingredients in drugs including antibiotics also puts the production of some 150 types of drug at risk. As China’s production capability slows due to the coronavirus, this could damage the medical product supply chain.

The prospect of business closures due to the outbreak could perhaps be the biggest wildcard, leading to unpredictable societal disruptions in public services— food supply chains might become strained if companies are forced to close on a large scale, or operate on reduced staffing, for a prolonged period due to the virus becoming endemic. However, much of the real risk here comes not from supply chains, but the self-fulfilling prophecy of panic-buying, leading to empty-shelves and disruptions in availability of key food items. At worst, managing that sort of disruption could see national security agencies step in to maintain public order and keep the show on the road until things settle down.

Politically, we may see extreme nationalist groups exploiting the crisis to justify calls to close borders; and at worst this would coincide with increased hate crimes and discrimination against Chinese and Asian people. Coronavirus may also stoke anti-government resentment, particular if more extensive measures such as city-wide lockdowns are put in place if the crisis escalates particularly badly, and particularly if the crisis lasts for several months during which vulnerable people end up facing the worst impacts of an economic downturn.

Each of these factors could end up driving other unexpected behaviours and processes in the other areas. That could lead to the simultaneous escalation of crises whose complexity could overwhelm the overall capacity of systems to respond effectively. When this happens, it often leads to a process of state-militarization, where political systems tend to become ‘harder’ in order to contain the fall-out.

So while coronavirus is not going to lead to the collapse of civilization, it will make things worse in a context in which industrial civilization is already on the decline. It will create a huge disruption to industrial activity that will probably last the year, and generate long-lasting changes in societal organization. This could trigger a ‘synchronous failure’ of the kind which occurred in 2008. In a similar fashion, the multiple stressors that have already built up prior to the outbreak could interact, leading to global systems to experience another breakdown.

Meanwhile, however, as this system slides deeper into the release phase, it will also open up further opportunities for reorganization. To fully appreciate the other, renewal side of this phase shift we need to recall the extent to which the crisis is rooted in prevailing industrial structures.


4.1 The industrial origins of the coronavirus

In January, a team of US scientists published a paper warning that climate change would intensify the spread of zoonotic diseases. There are as many as 600,000 species of mammal virus circulating in wildlife which could potentially spread to humans, but which are largely undetected. The combination of climate change and land use changes driven by industrial expansion is creating geographic range shifts in wildlife which can produce “novel species assemblages and opportunities for viral sharing between previously isolated species. In some cases, this will inevitably facilitate spillover into humans — a possible mechanistic link between global environmental change and emerging zoonotic disease.”
Even if we manage to keep global average temperatures below 2°C, mammal species will end up gathering in high elevations across biodiversity hotspots which coincide with areas of with dense populations in Asia and Africa. This will lead to a higher risk of novel virus sharing in coming decades, particular from the species that has been identified as the original source of the coronavirus:

“Because of their unique dispersal capacity, bats account for the majority of novel viral sharing, and are likely to share viruses along evolutionary pathways that could facilitate future emergence in humans.”

Which, in short, means that if we think the coronavirus is bad now, our unsustainable climate trajectory is setting us up for a future of both vector-borne and zoonotic pandemics that could make the coronavirus pale in comparison.


4.2 Adaptation

코로나 바이러스는 궁극적으로 산업 문명의 고유한 시스템 취약성뿐만 아니라 근본적인 패러다임의 한계에 대한 교훈입니다. 이것은 인간의 본능에 대한 특정 이론인 Homo-Economicus에 대한 신고전주의적 관점 즉 인간은 서로 경쟁하여 끝없는 소비와 생산을 통해 물질적 자아 만족을 극대화하는 분절된 단위라는 것을 전제한 패러다임입니다.
그 패러다임과 그 가치는 종으로서 우리의 여정에서 지금까지 우리를 데려 왔지만, 그것들은 오래 동안 그 유용성을 넘어서 존재해 왔고 이제는 우리 사회와 종으로서의 생존을 훼손하려 하고 있습니다.
The coronavirus outbreak is, ultimately, a lesson in not just the inherent systemic fragilities in industrial civilization, but also the limits of its underlying paradigm. This is a paradigm premised on a specific theory of human nature, the neoclassical view of Homo-Economicus, human beings as dislocated units which compete with each other to maximise their material self-gratification through endless consumption and production. That paradigm and its values have brought us so far in our journey as a species, but they have long outlasted their usefulness and now threaten to undermine our societies, and even our survival as a species.

코로나 바이러스를 극복하는 것은 사회적 복원력을 구축하는 것일뿐만 아니라, 협력, 동정심, 관대함 및 친절의 가치를 배우고 이러한 가치를 제도화하는 시스템을 구축하는 것을 배우는 연습이 될 것입니다. 그러한 윤리적 가치는 단순한 인간 구성물, 사회화의 산물이 아니라는 것을 인식해야합니다.
그것들은 진화적이고 적응적인 기능을 가진 개인과 조직의 행동 패턴을 반영하는 인지 범주입니다. 지구적 국면 전환에서 이러한 가치를 구조에 통합하지 못하는 시스템은 결국 소멸할 것입니다.
Getting through coronavirus will be an exercise not just in building societal resilience, but relearning the values of cooperation, compassion, generosity and kindness, and building systems which institutionalize these values. It is high time to recognize that such ethical values are not simply human constructs, products of socialization. They are cognitive categories which reflect patterns of behaviour in individuals and organizations that have an evolutionary, adaptive function. In the global phase shift, systems which fail to incorporate these values into their structures will eventually die.

사람들에게 제공해야 할 수 있는 전부가 겁에 질리고, 가능한 한 많은 보급품을 쫓아 다니며 축적하고, 스스로를 보호하기 위해 지하 뱅크로 내려가 숨는다면, 당신 자신이 문제의 일부입니다.
If all you have to offer people is to be frightened, to run and horde as many supplies as they can, and bunker down to protect themselves, you’re part of the problem.

이 순간이 현재 의미하는 바를 전체 맥락에서 숙고하기 위해 잠시 멈추는 사람에게는 앞에 놓여있는 진정한 길이 명확해집니다. 그러나 그것은 당신의 정신에 대한 즉각적인 조건반사적 두려움과 욕망을 넘어서서, 생명의 웹에서 필수적인 결절점인 사람으로서 당신 스스로 생각하고 보고 존재할 것을 요구합니다.
The real way forward is obvious to anyone who pauses for a moment to reflect on what this present moment really means, in its full context, but that requires stepping beyond the immediate reactionary fears and desires of your psyche and allowing yourself to think, see and presence as a person who is an integral node in the web of life.

그것은 다음과 같은 것들 입니다:
여러 부문에 걸친 공동체가 함께 협력하고, 새로운 협동 프로세스를 구축하고, 자원을 공유하고, 취약한 이웃 및 친구를 보살피고, 궁극적으로 집단 지능이 제공하는 공익 전략 개발에 대한 서로의 지원을 제공하는 데 앞장서야 합니다.
공공 부문에서 설득력있는 전략의 한 예로서 경제학자 Steve Keen 교수가 금융 위기를 관리를 위한 '현대판 희년'을 주장한 것을 적극 추천합니다.
That is as follows: for communities across multiple sectors to take the initiative in working together, building new cooperative processes, sharing resources, looking out for our vulnerable neighbours and friends, and ultimately providing each other support in developing public interest strategies informed by collective intelligence. As one example of a compelling strategy in the public sector, I strongly recommend economist Professor Steve Keen’s call for a ‘modern jubilee’ to manage financial risks.



https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/coronavirus-synchronous-failure-and-the-global-phase-shift-3f00d4552940

Synchronous Failure: The Emerging Causal Architecture of Global Crisis

https://homerdixon.com/synchronous-failure-the-emerging-causal-architecture-of-global-crisis/


A Modern Jubilee as a cure to the financial ills of the Coronavirus
https://www.patreon.com/posts/modern-jubilee-34537282

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참고 글
울리히 벡, risk society - a new modernity
http://m.cafe.daum.net/nowonenglish/8ltk/297?svc=cafeapp

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https://youtu.be/S5Xt6fcEclY