Homer-Dixon’s Synchronous Failure Framing

Discussion

Nafeez Ahmed:

"Homer-Dixon’s synchronous failure framing provides a compelling way to understand the first side. His study also recognizes the centrality of the global energy system to its heightened vulnerability to synchronous failure. The potentially destabilizing impact of the coronavirus can be assessed in this context.

Homer-Dixon and his team point out the following:

- “Only enormous inputs of inexpensive high-quality energy can create and sustain the unprecedented connectivity and complexity of human civilization, including the connectivity described here among this civilization’s diverse component systems. As a provisional hypothesis, therefore, it seems reasonable to propose that the global energy system helps to synchronize these systems’ behavior and to stimulate simultaneous crises within and across them. Other factors such as global trade and transport systems, the Internet, and simultaneous scarcity of multiple resources may also play synchronizing roles, but these factors themselves depend on, and are therefore significantly derivative of, massive flows of energy.” (https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/coronavirus-synchronous-failure-and-the-global-phase-shift-3f00d4552940)