RE: https://climatejustice.social/@chu/117612538012567273
In order to optimize, it is necessary to decrease variety. Resilience is a function of variety. To optimize is, necessarily, to decrease resiliency. This is, unfortunately, simply a mathematical property of reality.
It is not simply that these systems are authoritarian, it's also that they are simply less viable. Diversity is life and monoculture is death.
Reminder that before we even had internet, air traffic control got planes on and off the ground, factories made products, engineers, lawyers, doctors could all do their thing.
As technology creeps into our lives, some infrastructure becomes obsolete and skills are lost. Things our grandparents could do are a lost art for many of us (honestly, how many of us can actually start a fire or hunt for food).
Not only are basic skills lost, in the name of speed and efficiency, we hand over more and more power to a smaller and smaller handful of people who can wield enormous control over society.
A few powerful oil men can hold an entire country hostage by not supplying oil. A single corporation can shut down the operations of entire cities or airports across the country.
As we hand over more skills and more labour to machines, to an infrastructure most of can neither see nor understand, we are at the mercy of a smaller and smaller group of now immensely powerful people.
No doubt the oligarchy is fine with this, but today is but a small taste of the havoc this tiny group of people can wreak on the entirety of society.
Perhaps we need to think twice about handing all our critical infrastructure over to private corporations. Perhaps we should slow down and say "no" to higher efficiency at the cost of independence.
Perhaps being completely dependent on just a few people is a really crappy idea and bad way to run society.
Today is but a lick of the hell that is to come if we keep letting the oligarchy tell us that efficiency is everything.
This is, of course, not to say that there is a linear relationship between optimization and resilience, nor that all optimization decreases resilience at the same rate. Some optimizations have beneficial trade offs that are worth making, some optimizations in one area allow expansion of capacity in other areas.
It is rather to say that, "no optimization is free." Liberal ideology (and, perhaps, also its ancestors) has (have) taught us that all optimization is good, and this is simply not true. Every optimization comes with a price, and we should consider that price.
Consider written language, for example. We know the benefits of written language. It makes storage and transmission of ideas easier. We can store ideas over time more easily than oral cultures. Where a human used to need to be the vessel, writing freed people from that role. At the same time, writing allows toxic memes to infect people generations after the meme develops. Memes that can kill entire cultures pop up and infect people. With oral cultures, deadly memes either kill the host or the host is forced to develop an inoculation against the meme, which is then passed on when transmitting the information.
Oral vs written culture is portrayed as a linear progression from "primitive" to "advanced." But the reality is that it's a trade off, and humanity is more resilient (the variety of humanity is greater) if *both* options are taken, if oral and written cultures work together without trying to enforce one model or another.