What happens when connectivity goes down?

The theory

One of my readers commented that things aren't as "black & white" as I put them in my last post on connectivity. Of course, reality is never, ever, ever, as neat as theory. I'd like to elaborate a bit more on what happens when we go from high to low connectivity, just because, from the point of view of most people, it's their idea of unmitigated disaster. A lot of connection is good, little connection is terrible.

In the first example I gave, I said the difference between a dead body and a living one is that a living body is highly connected. In that case, losing connectivity sounds like very, very bad. That is, until you realise how nightmarish would be a world if nothing could die. We couldn't eat, for a start: we animals can only eat other living things, and they must die, either before or while we eat them. So nobody would have any energy to move. There would be absolutely no space for anything new to be born, because soon all the available space would be taken up by living beings. Most changes would be impossible. It would be a crowded, stuffy, static, unchanging world. And that's exactly what tends to happen in highly connected environments where there are few ways of releasing connections. When it happens between people, this situation is called "bureaucracy"; when it happens in a forest, it's called a climax forest community, that will easily become something else as soon as something disturbs it. When it happens in a computer network, techies tend to call it "an expensive mess".

Going from high to low connectivity means that links are lost. As I explained in What's in a link?, links usually mean one or several of three things: time spent together, material flows, or information flows. If a link is broken, something is released: there's either more time or materials available (sending and receiving information also use up time). In ecosystems theory, the expressions "in collapse" and "in release phase" are often used interchangeably: an ecosystem that's losing connectivity is collapsing, but there are also plenty of resources being released that opportunists can use up. It's a necessary stage before renewal is possible.

Any time that a connection is lost, it's good to think: what is being released? It's a very common problem in an organization or group within an organization to try to keep it going even when everybody knows that it isn't doing very well and it isn't producing the results everybody hoped for. If you are involved in any group that is in this situation, it may be useful to describe the situation as resources that want to be released. What time and materials are people investing in this, that might be invested in something better if the group was disbanded?

Some people may have the attitude that it's better to do a little than nothing at all, and they may be correct. But this can be an even stronger argument for release. Some situations can be kept for long periods of time in a bad, but not bad enough state, because enough is being done to keep things going to a minimum, but not enough to get the results that are really needed. If all attempts to increase time or resources allocated to the task have failed, releasing can be the method that gets some alarm bells ringing. If the situation is really a lot worse if nobody does any work at all, somebody will notice that.

Going back to the question I asked myself on the previous post on connectivity: What effect is going to have peak oil, when transport becomes more and more costly? It's a fair bet that transport will reduce, and when those connections are lost, what is being released? Clearly, a lot of materials will stay where they were instead of zipping around the world. Instead of the rather uniform look that we have today in all the cities in the world, places will have to return to have their unique flavour. Different places will build houses with different materials, the same will go for furniture and most heavy things. Even wind turbines could be done with local materials and local techniques. Very light, expensive things will probably still trade round the world. In the old times, it was spices, in the future it will almost certainly be electronic gadgets. On the other hand, some heavy things will have to start looking very different. Cars, for example, may become something much more like boats: expensive and often highly customized. Not many people will have them, and those people will be divided among the rich and those that need it for their livelihood (imagine truckers living in their trucks).

On the other hand, if we stay just as connected when it comes to information flows, it means that all that busy time we spend trying to talk to hundreds of people will be still used up. Some people say that they expect post peak oil time to be slower and calmer, thinking it will be like pre-industrial times. I see no reason to think that. If we stay just as connected in terms of information, we'll keep rushing around madly trying to juggle a hundred things in our heads the same as before.

In my last post, I compared our possible future situation after peak oil seriously affects transport with an imaginary animal that had no proper circulatory system but had a nervous system. I said I didn't think there was such an animal. I was wrong: jellyfish don't have blood vessels, but they do have a nerve net. It helps a lot that they live in the sea, and seawater goes through all of their body and transports the oxygen and nutrients to all their cells. It's interesting that jellyfish have a rather impressive ability to regenerate, especially in their polyp form (the simplest stage of their lifecycle). I find jellyfish more interesting than most trees (that have a more complicated circulatory system but no nervous system); if my wild analogy has any use at all, future times will be more interesting than pre-industrial times. The individual cells of jellyfish are far more complex than the individual cells of trees, in fact, they have some of the most complex cells of any living creature. Maybe, and this is a wild guess, people will have to be as complex as they can be to cope with the future that's coming, and at the same time very resilient and able to re-create a human settlement starting from very little.

Wild speculations aside, it will be a good time for those that can think of a loss of a connection not so much as a loss, but as a release.

The practice

Experiment 1

If you have ever noticed anything about gardens, you'll have seen that one of the main differences between a garden an a patch of land that's been left to grow wild is that people create a lot of barriers in their gardens: walls, paths, clearly demarcated patches, seeds put carefully in some places, fertilizers and other additions to soil put selectively in some places but not others, areas that are watered and areas that aren't, weeds and insects more or less selectively eliminated. A lot of what gardeners do creates barriers and removes connectivity in the garden ecosystem.

The experiment is the following: see what happens when you don't do that. On a corner of a garden or allotment, plant seeds of your favourite flowers or vegetables all mixed up. It's more interesting if you do this under a tree. You can keep the area disconnected from the rest of the garden, but inside that area, let everything be as connected and mixed up as they like. What happens? Ideally, keep this running for two years. Do you understand better some of the things you've been told to do with certain plants? Which kinds of barriers make sense and are useful?

Experiment 2

Most of us have been told that keeping connections alive is very good. What this actually means is that many of us are overconnected.

Do this experiment to find out if you are overconnected:

1. List your usual commitments over a month, and how much time you dedicate on average to them. This should include work, family, time spent with friends, and time spent with specific hobbies or other activities you think are worthwhile.

2. Next to it, list how much time you would like to dedicate to each of them over a month, in an ideal universe where days had as many hours as you need. After this, calculate how many waking hours your ideal day would have. If it's more than 16, you know that you are overconnected.

3. Decide which ones of these connections to release, until your day only needs 16 waking hours.

Experiment 3

Are you involved in any group that is in the situation described in the theory section, still going but not really producing much results? In that case, it may be good to get all the people in the group to answer the following questions:

1. How much time and what resources are used to keep the group going?

2. What would the time and resources be used for if they weren't captured by the activities of this group?

3. What would happen if nobody did any of the things that the group does? Would it ring any alarm bells?

Then, try to decide collectively if there is a good argument to release.