Dystopias are tropes of contaminated possibilities. Tropes about how more things go straight-out, hair-raisingly wrong, about how it’s easier to mismanage than to manage. Collapse is more certain than not; negative externalities are to be expected, positive ones no way.
Probabilities of failure cascades flip to 1.0 in record time. We must manage the planet’s resources better, but no one can expect technology to help. So much is uncertain that anything is possible, and thus–“thus”?–everything is at risk.
This—manifold anxiety, existential panic, dog-whistle alarmism—contaminates realism.
But what realism am I talking about? None of this catastrophizing includes the everyday saves of those who avoid large infrastructure failures from happening that would have happened had they not intervened. But why are these uncalculated billions and billions of saved dollars important?
Because it from this pool of real-time talent and skills and practices that society draws for operational redesign needed because of the inevitable shortfalls in new technologies, macro-plans and regulations for restoration and recovery. Needed, that is, in order to compensate for other defective possibilities that pass for realism.
Source
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/11/27/booker-winner-prophet-song/
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 