A curious asymmetry, analytically and normatively, in disaster management

I

Let’s look at the implications of that curious asymmetry in the analysis of socio-technical disasters, past and future.

If you start analysis by elucidating the genesis of a disaster, then how far back in history do you go in the diagnoses of causes to be ameliorated? There’s no closure rule, or at least like the one in place after the disaster. Then there’s urgency and a clarity about what needs to be done by way of immediate emergency response and initial service restoration. Even longer-term recovery funds can increase–never again!–until the hype fades. All the while, causal explanations of past disasters continue and compete, are incomplete or open-ended, and rarely fade away entirely.

What’s at issue, I think, is much more than the fact that ex post analysis of the past ends up more a search for ultimate causes while ex ante analysis of measures to prevent the next disaster focuses on proximate causes.

Say we readily agree our economic systems get us into some, or many, of socio-technical disasters. But the very same infrastructures that need to be restored immediately, if only for mass care, after the disaster–energy, water, transportation, telecommunications–are those that undergird these economic systems up to and now through the emergency. How else do you stabilize post-disaster conditions, even if the aspirations are to recover to new normals economically different? Improvising with what’s at hand is necessary, whether or not alternative futures are out of reach.

II

This asymmetrical nature of socio-technical infrastructures, at least under emergency conditions, is under-acknowledged normatively. For example, it’s easy to document the harms done by digital surveillance of border controls (just tap in a Google search). Less cited are the real-time upsides of digitalization for those seeking to cross the borders:

. . . .social media platforms also become dynamic infrastructures which actively mediate global migration. It performs three key functions. First, it fosters individual digital resilience. Migrants use encrypted or anonymous apps to evade law enforcement, navigate dangerous terrains, and plan clandestine departures. They share their journeys through videos and posts, and make public documentation, including pleas for help or evidence of abuse, to support their asylum claims and attract attention to their lived experiences (Leurs & Smets, 2018). Second, social media creates and strengthens online diasporic communities (Díaz de León, 2022). Platforms such as Facebook, WeChat, and Telegram maintain interpersonal ties and develop support networks for both practical assistance and affective support (Gillespie et al., 2018). Third, social media platforms offer real-time updates on shelters, routes, smugglers, and visa policies (Lõrincz & Németh, 2022). This user-driven information ecosystem allows for decentralized but immediate decision-making. The reputation of migration intermediaries, once relied on offline word-of-mouth, has been fostered by online reviews.

(accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-025-00519-y

It’s difficult for me to imagine that for these people, digital infrastructure will be of less normative use in whatever new normals they achieve, however economically different the latter are.