Synchronous Failure

Description

Nafeez Ahmed:

"Synchronous failure happens when multiple systems fail at the same time. Such a failure can lead to systemic collapse because its scale overwhelms the capacity of institutions within it – evolved to grapple with issues on a siloed basis – to respond effectively.

The risk of global synchronous failure is already increasing due to many converging factors – the global decline of EROI, the intensification of climate change and concomitant environmental disasters, the increasing unsustainability of industrial food production, the widening polarisation between and within cultures and communities, the dangers of unregulated artificial intelligence and untamed disinformation – to name just a few.

Planetary phase shift theory tells us that these are not, however, merely ‘converging factors’, but inherently interconnected symptoms of human civilisation rapidly moving out of equilibrium with earth systems.

As this has happened, the efficacy of both prevailing industrial era technological-material systems and organisational-cultural systems is declining. These systems cannot respond to the complexity of our current moment. They do not understand it. As they are therefore becoming increasingly disrupted, the resulting political destabilisation is focusing the political sphere on how they can shore-up a system already in freefall (and, of course, they are in total denial that the system is failing).

This creates an overarching global dynamic: earth system crises destabilise the global system, leading to various shocks – whether economic, political, environmental or otherwise (or all). Our political institutions for the most part don’t recognise these systemically. Focusing on the symptoms, and as the resulting crises drive social polarisation, they tend to blame surface symptoms which tends to result in Otherisation and group demonisation.

Exclusionary forces then tend to focus thinking and action on old paradigm ideological constructs often around markers of physical identity – territory, profits, the nation, sexuality, and so on – a process that afflicts both left and right in different ways. Instead of responding to the systemic crisis, our response simply contributes to destabilising the system even more. We find ourselves caught in a global amplifying feedback loop of systemic failure."

(https://ageoftransformation.org/war-with-iran-the-planetary-phase-shift-and-global-system-paralysis/)

Discussion

Nafeez Ahmed:

"Bendell argues that the main trigger for some sort of collapse—which he defines as “an uneven ending of our normal modes of sustenance, security, pleasure, identity, meaning, and hope”—will come from accelerating failures in the global food system.

We know that it is a distinct possibility that so-called multi-breadbasket failures (when major yield reductions take place simultaneously across agricultural areas producing staple crops like rice, wheat, or maize) can be triggered by climate change—and have already happened.

As shown by American physicist Dr. Yaneer Ban Yam and his team at the New England Complex Systems Institute, in the years preceding 2011, global food price spikes linked to climate breakdown played a role in triggering the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings. And according to hydro-climatologist Dr. Peter Gleick, climate-induced drought amplified the impact of socio-political and economic mismanagement, inflicting agricultural failures in Syria. These drove mass migrations within the country, in turn laying the groundwork for sectarian tensions that spilled over into a protracted conflict.

In my own work, I found that the Syrian conflict was not just triggered by climate change, but a range of intersecting factors—Syria’s domestic crude oil production had peaked in the mid-90s, leading state revenues to hemorrhage as oil production and exports declined. When global climate chaos triggered food price spikes, the state had begun slashing domestic fuel and food subsidies, already reeling from the impact of economic mismanagement and corruption resulting in massive debt levels. And so, a large young population overwhelmed with unemployment and emboldened by decades of political repression took to the streets when they could not afford basic bread. Syria has since collapsed into ceaseless civil war.

This is a case of what Professor Thomas-Homer Dixon, University Research Chair in the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Environment, describes as “synchronous failure”—when multiple, interconnected stressors amplify over time before triggering self-reinforcing feedback loops which result in them all failing at the same time. In his book, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization, he explains how the resulting convergence of crises overwhelms disparate political, economic and administrative functions, which are not designed for such complex events."

(https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/ssefpa/v11y2019i5d10.1007_s12571-017-0693-z.html)