1. The language of risk is now so naturalized that it seems the obvious anchor point of analysis, as in: “Ok, the first thing we have to do is assess the risks of flooding here. . .”

No. The first thing you do is to identify the boundaries of the flood system you are talking about as it is actually managed and then the standards of reliability to which it is being managed (namely, the events must be precluded or avoided by way of management) and from which follow the specific risks to be managed to meet that standard. (Note a standard doesn’t eliminate risks but instead identifies the risks that have to be managed in order to meet the standard.)

2. Economists, engineers and system modelers with whom I’m familiar tend to conceptualize interconnected critical infrastructure systems (ICISs) along the lines that Garret Hardin did 50 years ago for what he called the Tragedy of the Commons (“imagine a pasture open to all”).

In our case, imagine an ICIS open to all manner of vulnerability and complex interconnectivity. Our research insists that this too is precisely what you cannot assume empirically or conceptually. Rather, another anchor point is that these systems are far more differentiated than they are alike when it comes to “interconnectivities” by virtue of their different configurations and shifts from one configuration to another.

3. Just as a major work of art is always in excess of a single interpretation, the major management of a critical infrastructure is in excess of its technology. And “excess” is exactly the word, as its use here is antithetical to any claim that “excess capacity undermines technological and economic efficiency.”

4. Real-time infrastructure management requires very, very smart people, and ones who are decidedly not automated ciphers that need only know the difference between two prices in order to act rationally. What is irrational are those leaps from macro-design to micro-operations or back that ignore, when not altogether dismissing, the unique knowledge bases and learning of the reliability professionals that anchor operations in between.

If the US Civil War over southern separatism is our guide to any forthcoming break-up, most state constitutions will remain in place as governing documents, while any interstate confederation would most probably be modeled on parts of the current US Constitution—though with the significant changes.

Constitution-making in the Confederacy witnessed not just further entrenchment of unconscionable chattel slavery, but also the first Department of Justice, a national citizenship requirement for voting, no functioning supreme court, a six-year term limit for president, civil service reform, strictures against protective tariffs, a district court structure, disavowal of the Monroe Doctrine, and provisions for a presidential item veto, executive budget, and no recess appointments.

Am I recommending all that? No.

What I am doing is asking this question: How else are we to get a parallel version of this range of substantive change without breaking up the country? (And those appalled by any reference to the Confederacy might want to remember that four states—Vermont, Texas, California and Hawaii—opted to give up their sovereignty to join the Union. So why is the reverse out of the question?)

The immediate decline in security and economic growth that comes with the break-up means priority would have to be to keeping the control rooms of our critical infrastructures in hospitals, energy, water, telecommunications, transportation, and public safety operating as reliably as possible. These systems frequently cross current state borders, and the challenge will be to continue inter-regional collaboration for their operation until alternatives—if needed and on the fly—are devised.

Principal sources

My Confederacy material draws from: (1) W.B. Yearns (1960), The Confederate Congress, University of Georgia Press: Athens, GA; R. Bensel (1990), Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK: Chapter 3; P. Van Riper and H. Scheiber (1959), “The Confederate Civil Service,” The Journal of Southern History, 25(4): 448-470; C.R. Lee (1963), The Confederate Constitutions, Greenwood Press Publishers: Westport, CN; and E. Thomas (1979), The Confederate Nation: 1861-1865, Harper & Row: New York, NY.

–Yes, earthquakes with unimaginable impacts are predicted all the time. So too are other disasters and doing so is no more oxymoronic than “thinking the unthinkable.”

There is also the predictably unimaginable that comes with the open faucet of new categories and concepts. Think of “violent crime” as a legal category in the US that didn’t by and large exist prior to the 1970s (Sklansky 2021). “Talking about ‘political prisoners’ had become such an important political criticism that it was no longer possible to imagine it as a legal category,” concludes another (Hermann 2020).

So too hitherto-unthought-of analogies are always being used to redescribe current policy problems. Not only was Green New Deal, in its fleeting notoriety, likened to Roosevelt’s New Deal; it was also compared to the Civil Rights Movement, 19th century abolitionism, and the war economy of the Bolshevik Revolution. There should be no doubt that the Climate Emergency and responses will be compared to many other events you and I won’t imagine until those comparisons have been made.

–So what? In answer, turn to an insight of literary critic, Christopher Ricks, drawn from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED):

‘Many adjectives in -ABLE suffix have negative counterparts in UN- prefix, and some of these are attested much earlier than their positive counterparts, the chronological difference being especially great in the case of UNTHINKABLE.’ The OED at this point withholds the dates, but here they are: unthinkable, c. 1430; thinkable, 1805.

Christopher Ricks (2021). Along Heroic Lines. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 240

The notion that some humans started with “unthinkable” is suggestive: We first confront unthinkable disasters and then think our way to making them more or less imaginable.

Current practice is we start with the worse-ever floods and earthquakes in the US and then argue that the Magnitude 9 earthquake off of the Pacific Northwest will be unimaginably worse. In this way, we end up with disproportionate contingencies and aftermaths about which we have no real causal understanding.

Let’s suppose, however, we started with disasters so indescribably catastrophic that we need to narrow our focus to something like a M9 earthquake in order even to think about the worse-ever floods and earthquakes that have happened. Here we can end up with possibilities, instead of contingencies, and impacts instead of aftermaths, about which we have some knowledge even if little causal understanding. Possibilities and impacts aren’t equivalent to risks and uncertainties, but closer nevertheless.

–Again, so what?

It’s one thing to say a catastrophe today is “the unimaginability of an alternative to the neoliberal status quo.” It is quite another thing to say this complex tangle called neoliberalism generates such contingency and side-effect as to undermine any status quo. If we are meant to suppose the absence of a status quo or status quo ante is dangerous or even catastrophic, then to paraphrase the international relations theorist, Hans Morgenthau: Excuse me, but just what status quo have the people committed themselves to?

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Sources

Hermann, L. (2020). 50 Unimaginable Criminals: The Disappearance of “Political Prisoners” in Spain and the West after 1945 (accessed online at https://ruidera.uclm.es/items/011230ff-b807-4fdc-9b14-273f83590066)

Sklansky, D.A. (2021). “An American Invention” (accessed online at https://inquest.org/an-american-invention/)

Assume that evidence can be generalized as follows: Unionized firms as compared to nonunionized firms have lower rates of productivity, employment creation and investment, other things equal. Even putting aside all the contrary evidence, we still ask: So what?

These are generalizations only. Localized scenarios in which the opposite holds are possible and counter-cases available. Considerable evidence suggests that the ‘‘union/nonunion’’ dichotomy masks great variability in collective bargaining laws and wage arrangements across countries and regions.

That variability, in turn, suggests taking a deeper look at the macro-design standpoints with respect to unions or not. What human rights, for instance, are at issue when one talks about unionization? In reviewing the literature, one quickly realizes that the rights concerned relate less to any ‘‘right to unionization’’ and more to traditional rights of collective bargaining and freedom of association.

Focusing on different rights, in turn, means the earlier starting focus on empirical generalizations about unionization and economic growth is too narrow. We should also be looking at the evidence related to economic growth and collective bargaining arrangements, both generally and specifically. We would then better understand why local conditions are so variable with respect to unions.

–Take a peek at the track record of advisers to their leaders:

• Plato and Dionysius II;
• Aristotle and Alexander the Great;
• Seneca and Nero;
• Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and Caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf;
• Petrarch and Emperor Charles IV;
• Montaigne and Henri IV;
• Descartes and Sweden’s Queen Christina;
• Leibnitz and the Dukes of Hanover;
• Voltaire and Frederick the Great;
• Diderot and Catherine the Great; and
• in case you want to add to the list, Adam Smith and the Duke of Buccleuch or Goethe and Prince Carl August, and so on through the centuries. . .
• Or if you really want to cringe, consider André Gide recommending against publishing Marcel Proust, Edward Garnett against publishing James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot against publishing George Orwell. . . .

I mean, get real: If these guys didn’t advise effectively, who are we to think we can do better? (And, puhleeese, don’t throw up Kissinger and Nixon as a working template!)

–So what? Two things. It’s hard to imagine two words scarier in English than “designing leadership.” And we should take to heart the extensions of, “It was beyond our mental capabilities to predict Bob Dylan winning the Nobel in 2016.”

We don’t need more justification for raising taxes. The reasons have been evident for some time. You might expect me to follow with, “What’s been missing is the political will to raise these taxes.” No, it’s better to say that we’ve had too much political will insisting this, that and everything else and not enough of the details for doing so.

–Political historian, F.S. Oliver, pointed out the crux decades ago:

One of the discomforts of living in a progressive society is that new fiscal methods are constantly required in order to cover the rising expenditure. . .What weigh most, however, with Treasury officials, when they are seeking to balance a budget, are not so much considerations of abstract justice, as the knowledge that old sources [of tax revenue] will dry up if an attempt is made to draw too much from them. (my bold)

To adapt the point, what is missing are scenarios granular enough to evaluate fiscal instruments for shifting government expenditures across old and new budget categories.

–One clear mechanism for new revenues and reallocation are reductions in tax evasion and use of tax havens. Contrary to public choice theory, tax avoidance is not free-riding on those of us who pay taxes. The defect lies with those whose institutional duty is to prevent tax evasion: government and the regulators.

Principal sources

Oliver, F.S. (1930, 1931, 1935). The Endless Adventure. 3 Vols., Macmillan and Company: London

Strang, C. (1970). “What if Everyone Did That?” in Baruch Brody (ed.), Moral Rules and Particular Consequences, Prentice-Hall: Englewood Cliffs, NJ

For me, it’s not good enough to say power is primarily about A making B do something instead. Nor is it good enough to say power is about controlling the decision agenda or determining peoples’ interests without them knowing it. More, when it comes to the policy and management issues with which I am familiar, power isn’t concentrated in or dispersed through interests, full stop.

The power I am talking about lies in surprise and, since surprise is that chief feature of complexity, surprise and its power should be thought of as complex from the get-go. Better then to say the power I am talking about is the power of surprising connections.

It is thinking through the reverberations that, in my mind, connect Adorno starting an opera on Tom Sawyer, Picasso painting Buffalo Bill Cody, Sartre preparing a screenplay on Freud, Benjamin Britten facing the prospect of becoming a bandmaster (or Samuel Beckett a commercial airplane pilot), Coleridge and fellow poet Robert Southey planning an egalitarian community on shores of the Susquehanna, Goethe’s plan to clean up the streets of Venice, Kafka drafting rules for a socialist workers’ cooperative, and Abraham Lincoln and Hedy Lamarr securing their respective patents. More than “w” (as in “war”) links Walt Whitman the medical orderly, Max Weber the hospital orderly, and Ludwig Wittgenstein the dispensary porter.

The objective correlative of contingency is this power to connect differently. Where so, the great threat to addressing power is to think there is an outside to contingency: as if asking, “What is more important, power or contingency?”, and being told, “But that’s like asking which chopstick is the fork…”

I

Start with a question asked of a workshop’s invitees:

What are the challenges, practices and strategies of governing infrastructure reliability and safety in organizational networks?

In my mind, the questioning and answering take place in this way and order: What are the system boundaries of the operating infrastructure? What are the standards of reliability and safety being managed to for system-level operations? What are system risks and uncertainties that follow from managing to that standard for that system?

In the process of answering the three, I would specifically probe for the changing interconnectivity between and among latent and manifest boundaries, standards, and risks/uncertainties.

II

So what? Yes, definition and clarification of terms are needed, but not with respect to the initial ones of safety and reliability. In my recasting, it is case-specific system, boundaries, standards, risks/uncertainties and interconnections that are gasping for the same air now sucked away by struggles in better defining “reliability, safety and networks.”

Or to shift the analogy. For centuries, ancient Greek architecture has been praised for its pure forms and perfect proportions. Then came along those who did more site research, suggesting that the bare stone we see today could have been covered by all manner of rough stucco and garish paint. What too then of those forms we—myself included—have abstracted as reliability, safety and networks?