Four reconsiderations

–Many, including myself, argue that, when it come to contemporary critical infrastructures, there is need to manage latent vulnerabilities before they become manifest. The example is a set of cross-infrastructure interconnectivities that are invisible to those responsible until a disaster makes them all too evident.

There are however two other features associated with latency than require their own attention: dormancy and delay. The latent vulnerabilities, while inactive, may be gestating or altering. In addition, the length of delay in managing latency ahead must also be important to the identifying and achieving, or not, error avoidance.

–While it is common to use “control” and “manage” interchangeably, I’ve tried to make a point about that infrastructure operators seek to manage precisely because they can’t control. That is, they increase their process options as away of keeping output variance low and stable, given they can’t control a widening input variability.

But it also seems important to distinguish “manage because you can’t control” from “control that is ever about to slip away or disappear.” How so?

The more you have to lose, the less you can take for granted. That leaves us somewhere between “Though to/hold on in any case means taking less and less/for granted…” and “to lose/again and again is to have more/and more to lose…” (Amy Clampitt from her “A Hermit Thrush” and Mark Strand from his “To Begin”). What to do? Elizabeth Bishop suggests in “One Art”: “Then practice losing farther, losing faster”.

–“Why don’t some things scale easily? Scaling up our collective response to climate change has been notoriously difficult because people neither agree on problem definitions nor solutions; because the effects of climate change and mitigation efforts translate into different real-world experiments depending on location; and because different constituencies in the global political economy don’t agree on how to value what. Any site where scaling is made to look easy should thus raise red flags about a likely lack of comprehension or inclusiveness of perspectives.” (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03063127211048945)

–Globalization, marketization and commodification have indeed become lay path dependencies. But the answer to What-Happens-Next in path dependencies can only be, well, more path dependence. The more helpful point here is that different path dependencies when cast as scenarios are also represented via different and more-or-less granularity.