I

I first came across Frederick Scott Oliver,in a passage that still resonates from a 1955 lecture of T.S. Eliot:

But it should also be obvious to everyone from his personal experience, that there is no formula for infallible prediction; that everything we do will have some unforeseen consequences; that often our best justified ventures end in disaster, and that sometimes our most irrational blunders have the most happy results; that every reform leads to new abuses which could not have been predicted but which do not necessarily justify us in saying that the reform should not have been carried out; that we must constantly adapt ourselves to the new and unexpected; and that we move always, if not in the dark, in a twilight, with imperfect vision, constantly mistaking one object for another, imagining distant obstacles where none exist, and unaware of some fatal menace close at hand.

Does this all mean futility or what we called at that time, the quietism of despair? Not so, Eliot immediately adds: “This is Frederick Scott Oliver’s Endless Adventure.”

II

Even though his language is dated and some opinions rebarbative, Oliver’s The Endless Adventure, published as three volumes in the 1930s, is so contemporary as to make one weep. The book is out of print, so here’s a sampler of quotes::

• “Without bringing all the Christian virtues into this discussion, it is enough to say that a positive and strict veracity is impossible for the politician. For truthfulness even forbids you to allow the person you are dealing with to deceive himself.”
• “…like water can’t be kept out of most things, so too morals can’t be kept out of human affairs. But it is an external factor not inward gyroscope.”
• “For surprising accidents and sudden changes are the rule of politics. It is not often that the circumstances of the world will let a statesman have his head. The situation into which he comes so confident of victory may be transformed in a single revolution of the globe. Thereupon all the schemes that he has framed so carefully for the service of his country will vanish hurriedly like ghosts at cock-crow. He will be forced at once to devise a new plan fit for the occasion, and he will be lucky if he produces one that does not involve a sacrifice of this consistency.”
• “The wisest government must make mistakes; nay, sometimes when it has acted with most wisdom it affords the easiest target for plausible misconstruction.”
• “The student of politics will not make a beginning till he has realized that in this art there are antinomies everywhere, and that it is no shame to a politician, or to the man who writes about him, if the opinions he utters are often in conflict one with another. The politician or the writer who succeeds in proving his life-long consistency is less an object of admiration than of derision.”
• “Phenomena of this sort, phenomena in a continual flux, will not submit themselves to the methods of a land surveyor.”
• “Politicians, like soldiers, are often obliged to guess at the motives, intentions, and movements of the enemy. As they often guess wrongly, their own tactics are apt to appear purposeless and foolish, or altogether evil and malevolent, to a later generation which looks wonderingly, after ‘the fog of war’ has lifted, at the hooks and bends of an ancient controversy. . . .If actors themselves saw less clearly than we do, it is partly because there are now far fewer things to be seen. Much has long ago fallen through the sieves of memory and written records, while the historian, of set purpose, has eliminated much of what remained.”

III

Oliver defends politics specifically against university specialists (another contemporary resonance), and his comments about economics and economists ring true to this reader. Oliver does not defend all politicians: “It was in plain truth only a quack cure-all at which a cabinet of ignorant shirkers had snatched in its perplexity,” he writes.

Fortunately, Oliver takes us further than that. He also talks about political imponderables and chance, as well as inexperience and difficulty, as if they were the churn in that watercourse—the thalweg—at the lowest part of the valley along which we cross and whose waters we ford.

For an excellent introduction to a Taiwanese drama series–humor, mystery, investigation, a bit of horror, top-tier acting and chemistry–click the link below:

https://ww1.dramacool9.ac/oh-no-here-comes-trouble-2023/

I can’t recommend the twelve episodes (with subtitles) highly enough.

In the Guardian’s online Bookmarks today, the science fiction author, M. John Harrison, answers the following question:

How do you feel about the emergence of AI?
I’d separate the thing itself from the boosterism around it. We’re at a familiar point on the curve when it comes to the overenthusiastic selling of new scientific ideas, where one discovery or tech variant is going to solve all our problems. I’d say wait and see. Meanwhile I’ll be plotting to outwrite it; I want to be the first human being to imitate ChatGPT perfectly. I bet you it’s already got mimickable traits.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/may/20/m-john-harrison-i-want-to-be-the-first-human-to-imitate-chatgpt-wish-i-was-here?utm_term=6469c17386bac9427580944744a8948a&utm_campaign=Bookmarks&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=bookmarks_email

I very much like the last part of that answer. A neat turning of the tables while cleverly not classic oneupmanship.

–But there is that narrative discrepancy, namely: to mimic ChatGPT perfectly. Current research indicates large language models, including ChatGPT, produce unexpected mistakes: “LLMs exhibit unpredictable failure modes,” a recent comparison study phrased it.

Now, to err is human and we commit all manner of mistakes. So in that sense a mistaken ChatGPT is already mimicking and mimicked by humans

–But it’s Harrison’s “perfectly” that should stop us.

Perfectly with respect to what? Perfectly with respect to how a black box large data algorithm gets the answer wrong? Well, that can’t be for at least two reasons. First, all the stuff about our brain having 86 billion neurons and being vastly more complex than said algorithm. Second, black box means black box when it matters, right now: We just don’t know how the current mistake came about–albeit LLM developers have the same remedy: more training of the LLMs.

–Harrison, though, is onto something very important, I think: What’s better than humans mimicking ChatGPT perfectly?

It would be humans managing (not just designing) a ChatGPT that reliably avoids mistakes it can’t otherwise prevent. That is, ChatGPT is managed in real time so as to correct unavoidable mistakes of its own making before answer delivery. The effect of management is that it, the LLM, does this correction just in time even with the current level of training. Now that wouldn’t be science fiction!

Source

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2305.00050

Every habitable part of the earth, in our time, has been discovered, surveyed, and divided up among nations. . .The age of the finite world has begun. . . .

The effects are already immense. An entirely new, excessive, and immediate interdependence between regions and events is the already perceptible consequence of this great fact. Henceforth we must see all political phenomena in the light of this new situation in the world; every one of them occurs either in obedience or in resistance to the effects of this definitive limitation and ever closer mutual dependence of human actions. The habits, ambitions, and loyalties formed in the course of earlier history do not cease to exist but being insensibly transferred into quite differently constructed surroundings, they there lose their meaning and become causes of error and fruitless striving. . . .

Henceforward every action will be re-echoed by many unforeseen interests on all sides; it will produce a chain of immediate events confused reverberations in a closed space. The effects of effects, which were formerly imperceptible or negligible in relation to the length of a human life and to the radius of action of any human power, are now felt almost instantly at any distance; they return immediately to their causes, and only die away in the unpredictable. The expectations of the predictor are always disappointed, and that in a matter of months or a very few years.

In a few weeks, the most remote circumstances can change friend into foe, foe into ally, victory into defeat. No economic reasoning is possible. The greatest experts are wrong; paradox reigns.

There is no prudence, wisdom, or genius that is not quickly baffled by such complexity, for there is no more duration, continuity, or recognizable causality in this universe of multiple relations and contacts. Prudence, wisdom, and genius can be identified only by a series of successes; once accident and disorder are predominant, an expert or inspired game is in no way different from a game of chance; the finest gifts miscarry.

Hence the new politics are to the old what the short-term calculations of a stock market gambler the nervous spurts of speculation on the floor of the exchange, the sudden fluctuations and reverses, the uncertain profits and losses are to the old patriarchal economy, the slow, careful accumulation of a patrimony. . . . The long-pursued schemes and profound thought of a Machiavelli or a Richelieu would today have no more reliability and value than a “stock market tip.”

https://archive.org/stream/outlookforintell013551mbp/outlookforintell013551mbp_djvu.txt

Our challenge is to push Valéry’s truth further by finding the positive in the nine decades of complexity since then and now ahead.

I

We know that, when it comes to livestock grazing (and browsing), many herders (and shepherds) depend on water supplies, road transportation, market facilities and telecommunications. Think of the latter as part of their backbone or lifeline infrastructures.

What added purchase then for pastoralist development is to be had when focusing analysis from the very start on the interconnections between herders (broadly writ) and these infrastructures?

The quick answer: When we shift to focusing on the interconnections between their system and the infrastructures pastoralists relied upon, policy and management implications differ considerably compared to the current focus that begins with the pastoralist system instead.

Framework summary

The three principal elements of the framework are summarized here and based in previous research on large interconnected infrastructures. Each element will be treated separately in the sections that follow.

The first element has two parts. Different types of base-level interconnectivity exist between the infrastructures and the pastoralist system. Think of the base as “normal operations.” Then there are the points at or phases during which the types and configurations of interconnectivity shift. Think of the abrupt event or incident that disrupts normal operations.

The second element is the criticality of real-time operational behavior involving system control variables, which are shared or overlapping at times between different infrastructures.

Think of a system control variable as actionable features of an infrastructure or system—e.g. pumping rates and flows of water, frequency bands for cellphone signals and reception, real-time adjustments in grazing/browsing intensities (including off-take). Such control variables are used to adjust the condition or state of the infrastructure/system as operational requirements of the task environment change. Obvious example: Land fallowed now for uses later. Sometimes, however, the control variables of different systems intersect, with important consequences.

Third and last, all of this is managed to systemwide performance standards that can and do shift as changes in interconnectivity configurations and control variables occur. Before, the borehole owner couldn’t preclude grazing by herders nearby or from afar; now the owner can by means of a fenced ranch.

In focusing on shifts in interconnectivities and performance standards, the framework highlights the strategically important role of inter-system improvisations with respect to changes in shared or overlapping system variables. Think of those bush markets emerging ad hoc to connect the livestock of the herders and outside buyers or consumers of that livestock during Covid lockdowns. Now turn to each element in more detail.

Base-level interconnections

What are the baseline interconnectivities against which to gauge subsequent shifts in the links between the pastoralist system and the relied-upon infrastructures?

With pastoralism systems being as diverse as they are, there can be and is no one baseline worldwide.

Not only are base-level interconnectivities context-specific, the notion of a stable baseline is called into question when the operative context is and has been dynamic. This isn’t just because of the disequilibrium ecology of drylands. Fifty years of inter-group conflict, worsening recurrent droughts and their changing path dependencies mean it’s ludicrous for a socio-technical ideal to serve as any kind of baseline to compare against. Added to which are the induced changes from intervening forces like those of markets, crop agriculture and state interventions over the last half century.

Ironically, this means the really-existing baseline for such systems is the shifts in interconnectivity, in our case with respect to water, routes and communications. The framework focus on shifts is even more salient for these cases,

That said, given the numbers of different pastoralist systems across the globe, there must be some whose “normal operations” includes predictable herder mobility, herd movements and grazing itineraries, more or less familiar as before. Even these baseline operations or distinct temporal/spatial patterns are interrupted from time to time by sudden events (indeed that is part of normal herder operations). To the extent that shifts in interconnectivity happen in these cases as well, the framework is also relevant.

Types, configurations, and shifts of inter-infrastructural connections

Just what are the different types and configurations of interconnectivity that shift?

By way of an example, the supply of camel milk for marketing may look like a serial sequence from camel to end-consumer, but a closer look reveals mediated, pooled and reciprocal interconnectivities as well.

There may be a focal cooperative that mediates collection and other activities in between. Reciprocities (bi-directional interconnectivity) are evident among cooperative members or women sellers along the road when they mutually assist each other. Their milk is pooled at the plant in order to be processed and then marketed. A sense of this mix of sequential, mediated, reciprocal and pooled is capture in Michele Nori’s description of camel milk marketing (CCM) in Isiolo (2023),

Milk produced under these [pastoralist] systems reaches Isiolo through sophisticated supply networks supported by rural collectors and motor-bike transporters (boda boda). These community networks exist and operate in a variety of forms and patterns, and they reconfigure as conditions vary. At the heart of the networks, there are few companies based in Isiolo town, managed by women and characterised by different ethnic configurations, market management and institutional arrangements. A significant number of the women members of the CMM companies are members of camel keeping families. . .We describe now the Isiolo model through the lens of the largest CMM operating company, Anolei. It is quite popular amongst research and development agencies, and we will assess then the other existing networks based on their differences with respect to it. The Anolei cooperative started its activities in the late 1990s (few hundred litres a day) as a self- help women group of (mostly) Garre and Somali women who had recently come to reside in Isiolo (Adjuran and Degodya clans). It was formalised as a cooperative in 2010, also to facilitate access to international support and financing; counts in 2021 found about 90 members, although the figure of active operators changes from one season to another.

https://doi.org/10.1186/s13570-022-00265-1

What’s so important, you ask, about the shifting mix of different types of interconnectivities–note also the importance of roads and vehicles–and their configurations?

The point is less one of identifying specific or “characteristic” configurations than focusing on the variably and visible shifts as an indicator of significant operational changes, inter-infrastructurally. The shifts may be occurring at the same time, not just over time, in the pastoralist systems. One thinks of the prolonged drought instigating multiple coterminous shifts. But it is important to recognize that technology and regulation also are major inducers (e.g., pasteurization requirements for wide-scale milk marketing).

Shared or overlapping control variables of different systems

For our purposes, two or more system control variables can at times overlap or be shared.

Consider first non-pastoralist examples. Because they share the same waterway, clearing a river passage for onward navigation and re-opening the adjacent port for onward shipments offloaded there are important to both. Overlap of system variables can also be problematic. Firefighters setting their firebreaks under more accessible rights-of-way, which are the same rights-of-way created for electricity transmission lines, can create conflict between backfires needed by the firefighters and the voltage and flow paths along the transmission lines.

You see exactly the same tension in pastoralist examples. Transhumant herds and herders moving across the borders of adjacent countries has been depicted as real-time herd requirements overlapping with real-time national security concerns. Real-time grazing or browsing of agricultural stubble along with the dung of livestock can be depicted as sharing the same control variables for herders and farmers.

The problem is that the former is sometimes portrayed as net-negative (at least from a longstanding nation state perspective), while the latter is sometimes thought to be net-positive (yes there are invasions from both sides, but on whole some farmers and some herders concerned are said in the literature to mutually benefit).

But the framework suggests that there may be a great deal of improvisational behavior–on-site bargaining or context-specific arrangements–going on at the borders of the farm and/or of the country. More this negotiation goes largely unrecorded. This can include even formal activities like periodically renting out different pastures as a kind of shifting boundary work.

This is important because a major function of these ad hoc, time- and site-specific arrangements is to make the duality of stationary borders and mobile herders unavoidable in pastoralist policy and management. Unrecorded they may be, but unavoidable they are. Rather than pastoralism offering up the prospect of a borderless world, the policy and management relevance of that duality can only increase.

Why? Because the two-sided tension is also found in many other cases of overlapping or shared system control variables. These cases go well beyond sedentarization examples of conflicting land uses. Other examples range from more benign livestock scarification and dispersal of tree seeds (but whose trees to manage?), through herders’ riverine crop production (but whose water to be managed?) and young herders in school while not herding (but what does the child more harm?) to outright land enclosures that entail “incursions” by the dispossessed.

It then should be no surprise that terms like “resource scarcity,” “elite capture” and “green grabs,” let alone other terms like “conflicts,” fall short in depicting the conditions under which systemwide control variables of two or more systems are made to overlap, rendered shared, or are to be improvised around by one or more of the parties involved. Indeed, the latter concepts enable you to reframe some “conflicts” differently, even more positively, e.g., an ongoing spatial confrontation of herders and farmers can serve as a useful buffer zone against (further) peri-urbanization or worse in some cases.

Shifts in system performance standards

If research on large-scale socio-technical systems is our guide, there is no one performance standard for large-scale critical infrastructures. The precluded event standard for livestock ranching regimes–the ability exclude others from grazing–is not the same as the avoided events standard–herders seek to avoid but can’t preclude shortages or closure in infrastructures they depend upon, e.g., water supplies.

There is, however, another relevant and very major systemwide performance standard identified from more recent infrastructure research: the provision and utilization of requisite variety, particularly but not exclusively during disaster and response.

The demand for requisite variety is familiar to experienced infrastructure professionals, including pastoralists: the need to increase real-time options, strategies and resources so as to better match the requirements of unpredictable or uncontrollable conditions.

Requisite variety is the principle that it takes some complexity to manage complexity. If a problem has many variables and can assume a diversity of different conditions or states, it takes a variety of management options to address this complexity. Uncontrollable/unpredicted changes in system inputs have to be transform into a smaller range of managed states.

Having a diversity of resource and strategic options, including being able to assemble, improvise or invent them, is a way to match and manage problem complexity with a variety of capabilities. This is especially important when the improvisations center around overlapping or shared system control variables. Think rural people coming together to manage the vehicle transportation of water deliveries because of a sudden worsening in the drought (e.g., a major rangeland fire occurs nearby). The importance of improvisations is again highlighted when it comes to interconnected system-infrastructure operations.

But what does this tell us about interconnected pastoral systems and their relied-upon infrastructures?

For one thing, we shouldn’t be surprised by the huge diversity in organizational and network formats for addressing real-time matches between contingent task demands and contingent capabilities: associations, dedicated government agencies, designated government officers, social movements, catchment areas and planning regions, group ranches and cooperatives, conservancies, coordinators and liaisons, consortia, councils, cross-border committees, NGOs, INGOs, and more. Such diversity is what is to be expected and must be looked for, given the focus on multiple and shifting configurations of interconnectivity.

Nor is it unexpected that a premium is placed on having personal and professional contacts and relationships, since formal and ad hoc structures for organizational and network diversity can only go so far, and not far enough, when it comes to contingent requisite variety. This applies not just to the pastoralists but also to anyone in their networks. A government field officer or headquarters official can also be a mediating, focal player during the disaster and in immediate response thereafter. It is grotesquely misleading to chalk up the latter as “ethnic politics” rather than the search for requisite variety that is actually going on.

So what?

The key policy and management implications are many and deserve a separate venue. Here instead let me focus on two upshots for pastoralist development that may already be familiar to a reader but which reinforce their importance via this framework triangulation: .

(1) In framework terms, what has been called “longer-term recovery” differs in terms of its mix of shifts, configurations, control variables and performance standards, with “recovery” exhibiting:

• a lack of the logic and urgency evident in decisionmaking immediately after the system failure;
• new and emerging latent and manifest interconnections not witnessed pre-disaster or immediately after system failure (largely but not exclusively because of the introduction of new stakeholders in longer-term recovery); and
• systemwide performance standards that differ in kind or degree from those pre-disaster base-level interconnectivities. New systemwide performance standards may even be part of a “new normal” that embraces the new standards as a social benchmark.

In other words, it is easy to see why so many people say about post-disaster recovery, “All of this takes time.” From our framework perspective, it is better to say that shifting or emerging interconnectivities extend time and duration as they include new latent-to-manifest interconnections and tensions that lead invariably to “it took much more time and money than anyone thought.”

(2) In framework terms, vertical and horizontal communication between and among pastoralist systems and their relied upon infrastructures are characterized by shifts, e.g.,

• from predominantly one-directional instructions and commands in sequential dependencies in vertical communications (think governments pushing policies down the throats of pastoralists)
• to ongoing cross-talk and negotiated agreement in mediated, pooled and reciprocal communication patterns (think horizontal micro-coordination in some pastoralist movements and associations over restoration collaborations involve multiple sectors, ministries and infrastructures).

In other words, it is essential to understand when and how communication patterns follow from, rather than determine, the interconnectivity configurations. This means any temptation to impose vertical-dominant communications is to be resisted when shifting interconnectivities demand horizontally-rich communication.

Other sources

Herbert, S. and I. Birch (2022). Cross-border pastoral mobility and cross-border conflict in Africa –patterns and policy responses. XCEPT Evidence Synthesis. Birmingham, UK: GSDRC, University of
Birmingham

Krätli, S, et al (2022). Pastoralism and resilience of Food Production in the face of climate change. Background Technical Paper. Bonn: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)

Schürmann, A., J. Kleemann, M. Teucher, C. Fürst, and C. Conrad (2022). Migration in West Africa: a visual analysis of motivation, causes, and routes. Ecology and Society 27(3):16

Unks, R., M. Goldman, F. Mialhe, Y. Gunnell, and C. Hemingway (2023). Diffuse land control, shifting pastoralist institutions, and processes of accumulation in southern Kenya, The Journal of Peasant Studies

–We are so used to hearing “failure is not an option!” when it comes to saving the planet, we miss that the reality is somewhat the other way around: We manage complex critical systems as reliably as we do because the systemwide failure up ahead must be prevented. Focusing on what could happen by way of possible management to save the planet is not the same as focusing on what would have happened by way of actual management in saving critical infrastructures.

This means it’s more than of passing interest that those exhorting “failure is not an option” seem to believe we all are not trying hard enough. If we did, they want to believe, we all might have a chance to save it.

Yet it’s just as likely to conclude that, when it comes to managing like we do for critical infrastructure whose failure triggers widespread social dread, the planet is not that kind of system or system of systems. It’s not be managed or even manageable that way, even if there were widespread social dread triggered by the prospects of catastrophic climate breakdown and failure. Which there isn’t.

–It’s thus not surprising that those who refuse to “give whatever it takes to save the planet” justify doing so by focusing on what they know can be managed or have better chances, even while admitting the climate emergency we find ourselves. Consider one such example:

We emphasize the importance of taking political time and maintain that collective social responses to major climate impacts must center actually existing material and symbolic inequalities and place procedural and distributive justice at the heart of transformative action. This is so even where climate change will have devastating physical and social consequences.

https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article/122/1/181/319765/Taking-Political-Time-Thinking-Past-the-Emergency

Note this dissent has the merit of at least recognizing the human devastation entailed in its approach, unlike those who insist we must do whatever it takes to save the planet, full stop. Nor is the quoted passage a lone dissent. Others just as well insist the pre-eminent fact is that “doing whatever it takes” will be on the backs and in the flesh of already poor people and impoverished minorities globally (e.g., https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4416499).

–So what?

“In your plans for reform, you forget the difference between our two roles: you work only on paper which consents to anything: it is smooth and flexible and offers no obstacles either to your imagination or to your pen, whereas I, poor empress, work on human skin, which is far more prickly and sensitive,” so wrote Catherine the Great to Denis Diderot, the French Enlightener.

How has it come to pass that so many today think they are Enlighteners but act as our Empress, as if there were not alternatives?

–Let’s start with a quote:

Zambia defaulted on interest payments to some of its private lenders in November 2020 when private creditors refused to suspend debt payments. In February 2021, Zambia applied for a debt restructuring through the Common Framework, but little progress has been made on the negotiations as large private creditors, such as BlackRock, have so far refused to reach an agreement on debt relief. BlackRock, headed up by Larry Fink, is the largest of a number of bondholders who are refusing to cancel Zambia’s debt, despite lending to the country with interest rates as high as 9% (in comparison to wealthy countries like Germany, UK and USA who were given loans at 0-2% interest in the same time period) potentially making huge profits. Debt Justice estimates that BlackRock could make up to 110% profit if repaid in full. Meanwhile, Zambia is experiencing devastating impacts of the climate crisis such as flooding, extreme temperatures and droughts, which are causing significant disruption to livelihoods and severe food insecurity. Unsustainable debt levels mean the country lacks many of the resources required to address these impacts. This decade, Zambia is due to spend over four times more on debt payments than on addressing the impacts of the climate crisis.

https://debtjustice.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Debt-and-the-Climate-Crisis-Briefing-October-2022-UPDATED.pdf

It’s also been reported that only two nations, the USA and PRC, have GDPs greater than the wealth managed by BlackRock, whose recent assets have been around $10 trillion. It’s also said that the ten largest asset-management firms together manage some $44 trillion, roughly equivalent to the annual GDPs of the USA, PRC, Japan and Germany.

Now, it’s always good to check the numbers, be they for Zambia, the globe or points in between. But let’s assume the orders of magnitude are correct.

–Yes, of course, we could say that the current sovereign debt crisis could be better managed. Fair enough.

It would be more accurate to say that BlackRock could be managed for the better, because, well, BlackRock is actually being managed in ways the sovereign debt crisis can’t. (Think BlackRock’s C-suite, starting with Larry Fink.) Why then not start with BlackRock being managed differently? After all, it rose to an undisputed shareholder superpower only after the last financial crisis of 2008. Nothing is set in stone here.

–In other words, think of BlackRock as the global financial crisis currently underway and the “sovereign debt crisis” as its smoke-and-mirrors to get the rest of us to believe otherwise.

We know exactly who benefits from placing the blame on the Government of Zambia’s fiscal and monetary management, when the Global Behemoth BlackRock is managed even worse in terms of self-interest.

“The only way to speak of a cliché is with a cliché.” Christopher Ricks

I

How do I convince you that watching South Korean TV dramas of 12 or os episodes is good for you? Whenever I explain why a story about a 400-old space alien falling in love today or why it’s worth watching two actors obviously in their twenties play 17- or 18-year students—my friends stare at me.

But, I’m telling you, this stuff is really, really good. The acting (Kim Soo Hyun, Jun Ji Hyun, Lee Min Ho, Park Shin Hye in the above); and the music (the entire OST from Cinderella and the Four Knights; “Love is the moment” from Heirs; “Eternal love” from Healer—with the amazing Ji Chang Wook btw)

…even if, granted, there are problems with things like endings, lips syncing into a kiss, and subtitles.

So under pressure to justify all this, I’ve come up with a more complex rationale justifying my—and your—watching kdrama.

II

Kdramas, like US soap operas and Spanish TV novellas, have tropes: boy/girl loves girl/boy, second-male lead falls in love with first female lead, poor girl makes good, and a closet-full of stock characters, ranging from revenge-seekers to fate itself.

For me, it’s not the tropes that make kdrama but their clichés and how they’re assembled together. Almost every kdrama I’ve watched combines a good number of the following clichés:

The real kiss between Episodes 8 and 12 followed by the interlude of sheer happiness that just can’t last, then the break-up and the last-episode time jump, say, five years ahead; the whole concept of confessing and dating; hiccups, nose-bleeds, pinky promises & thumb seals; back hugs, comfort pats, and amnesia; night-time fireflies and anytime car chases; carrying someone piggy-back, rushing the gurney down the hospital corridor, slicing vegetables, checking the cellphone, texting and more texting; banquet rooms, hunger groans, finger cuts and pinpricks; fake rain and drinking from empty paper cups; slow-motion turns and long-motion gazes; cars U-turning on major roads, the white truck of doom hitting the car mid-intersection; foot-to-the-peddle and the vehicle accelerating into the outer lane and off screen; one-sided love, funeral wakes and karaoke singing; the guy’s shower scene (what abs!); she accidentally falling into his arms, he grabbing her wrist, she drunk, he clenching his fist and knuckles whitening, she kicking her legs up and down on the bed, he searching his trays for watches and accessories, she kicking him in the shins, he bending across her and pulling her seatbelt tight, he/she following at a distance behind her/him, and both of them slurping down hot rahmen; side-to-side, ear-to-ear whispers or her arms rigid the first time they hug; “hey!” pronounced “yah!”; did you ever know so many people who sleep with the bedroom lights on?; “fighting!,” and omigod, always the flashbacks!………..

When it finally struck me that I’d just gotten started with the above list, I realized: There are so many clichés you could think of a kdrama as one cliché after another from beginning to end. 

III

And that proposition—itself an example of Ricks’ point?—has changed how I watch TV police procedurals from the US, Europe and Scandinavia. I suspect, most like everyone, I watch the procedurals as stories with plots to be followed and solutions to guess along the way.

Now I can’t watch them without first seeing their clothesline of clichés: the segmented sequencing of slamming the office telephone down, rushing out of the station, hurrying up the steps to a house or flat, the chase, the tense interchange in the interview room.

Just as a good part of the craft in kdrama is how to freshen the clichés, so too the craft in police procedurals is in the twists to the sequencing the clichés. (Yes, the early fish-eye kisses in kdramas was so hackneyed—the woman’s eyes pop open and remain so as his lips suddenly touch hers—until, that is, you watched how Jun Ji Hyun does it in My Love from the Star.) To catch any freshening of clichés requires not only a new level of watching and thinking on the part of this viewer. The recurring clichés also drive intertextual resonance across different kdramas—connections and interconnections I hadn’t seen on first viewing. The clichés present an entirely new comfort zone to discover when watching.

So there: Watching kdrama is more complexly rewarding than my interlocutors think.

IV

Now on to equally important stuff. We’ve scheduled a layover in Taiwan so I can see tour some of the tdrama sites (my favorite song ever is Aaron Yan’s “That’s Not Me”(這不是我 on Spotify) and if you haven’t seen the tdrama, Before We Get Married, then don’t—JUST-DO-NOT—or else you’ll be addicted (you have to watch it twice, if only to get the significance to the last scene’s “Let’s have coffee”)—and speaking of “Addicted,” that amazing cdrama is unlike any other subtitled cdrama out there (go on the web to find out the backstory)—but let me stop before I get started on how jdrama differs…

To argue, as some do, that environmental movements have failed because they have not stopped the climate emergency is a significant point of departure. After all, the movements helped articulate the crisis narratives about that emergency in the first place.

To think this way means the emergency is occurring in part because the recommendations of environmental movements have not been adopted and implemented. Another response is that details of implementation have been woefully lacking.

Why? Because, when it comes to specifics, the planet is not and cannot be a control scenario. Here the later Foucault is spot-on:

No power goes without saying, no power, of whatever kind, is obvious or inevitable, no power warrants being taken for granted. Power has no intrinsic legitimacy. All power only ever rests on the contingency and a fragility of a history.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0967010620968345

I

It’s easy enough to take “right, center and left” and make a linear continuum: as when politics moves from the right through the center into the left.

But the straight line becomes V-shaped, when the center is stretched and pulled away from the other two ends, as when the sequence, beginning-middle-end of a story, is made to sag, like a hammock.

Think here of the time-consuming catch-up to the contingencies that come our way in medias res, rendering beginnings long gone (or always disputed) and ends further off than our stories assumed at the start.

That’s what wake-up calls do when they identify intervening crises that stretch time and space out of shape between thought-to-be beginnings and thought-to-be endings.

II

For example, the Covid-19 pandemic was reported to us by several emergency managers as “a wake-up call” with respect to the interconnectivities and vulnerabilities among water, electricity, roads and other backbone infrastructures in Oregon and Washington State. In the view of a very experienced emergency management expert, “the one thing that the pandemic is bringing out is a higher definition of how these things are interconnected and they’re not totally visible”.

Covid-19 response made clearer that backbone infrastructures, especially electricity, are “extremely dated and fragile” in the view of experienced interviewees (e.g. in Oregon). So too shortages in road staff in the aftermath of a vaccine mandate were mentioned by a state emergency manager for transportation as making it harder to undertake operations. Covid-19 responses also put a brake on infrastructure and emergency management initiatives already in the pipeline (e.g., preventative maintenance), according to multiple respondents.

The pandemic combined at the same time with other emergencies. A heat dome episode required a treatment plant’s staff not to work outside, but in so doing created Covid-19 distancing issues inside. The intersection of lockdowns and winter ice storms increased restoration times of some electrical crews, reported a state director of emergency management for energy. A vaccination mandate on city staff added uncertainty over personnel available for line services. Who gets to work at home and who gets to work in the plant also created issues.

“We struggled with working with contractors and vendors” over the vaccine mandate, said a state emergency manager for roads: “If we had a catastrophic disaster three months ago that would have been a challenge for us to work through.”

“All [Covid-19] planning happened on the fly, we were building the plane as it moved, we’d never seen anything like this,” said a state logistics manager of their early response. The interviewee added: “Covid is so unique and out of the box that we’ve developed rules and processes that we’re only going to use during Covid because they don’t make sense in any other disaster”.

In other words, the Covid-19 pandemic was a wake-up call to front-line managers about interconnectivities, but not even a rehearsal for what is also to come their way in terms of other crises (including the much-predicted catastrophe of the magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the two states’ coastline).

III

Many crises are, I submit, V-shaped, notwithstanding their linear scenarios. So what?

Minimally, it means that table-top exercises (a.k.a. rehearsals) based on beginning-middle-end crisis scenarios will inevitably be less V-shaped than needed. This is not to say the former are not useful. It is to say that the most useful table-tops are likely to be wake-up calls to more crises or different ones than thought pre-tabletop–and requiring nowNOW attention, also.

The point is that we are once again back to a key narrative discrepancy in crisis scenarios—between the stated urgency to DO SOMETHING NOW on the one side, and the stated requirement to do so safely with respect to the ends in sight on the other side—while all the time recognizing that both requirements are urged on us and underwritten by the very same unpredictability at the very same scale of analysis, the system level.

On one hand, it is argued we have to experiment even if it risks the limits of survival; on the other hand, being safe means no error should ever be the last trial. This is a discrepancy because it can’t be written off or talked out of; it has to be managed as one of the Anthropocene messes we are in. COVID wasn’t a prequel to another story with its own beginning, middle and end. That is the wake-up call!

Source: The research, from which are drawn interviewee quotes, is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant 2121528.