Connections & Dependencies

We know we live in a richly interconnected world, and we have maps of some of the kinds of interconnections and dependencies involved -- we can trace the path from power plants across the grid to a wall socket, and from the wall socket to fridge or PC -- but there exists no map of our interconnections and dependencies which crosses the Cartesian divide between matter and mind, explaining among other things how rumors of wars can become wars, or rumors of bank runs can become bank runs. And yet that map, the purely notional, cross-disciplinary map of our global and psychic interconnectedness, is the one we need, because it is the map of the reality in which we live.

Umberto Eco, in his The Search for the Perfect Language, has explained the pitfalls of searches for encyclopedic visions of this sort, but the visions themselves remain compelling. I hope this DoubleQuotes pair will illuminate that compulsion. Barabasi's very general observation that it is all interconnected translates easily enough to communications, energy, and distribution networks that can be studied quantitatively -- but it comes as something of a shock to read MI5's aphorism suggesting the speed with which our dependencies might plunge us into anarchy.

I suspect that one reason for the shock has to do with the capacity of the human mind and emotions to radicalize any network in which they serve as nodes -- adding not just a qualitative (and hence hard to quantify) element to the mix, but also a switching system that moves at "the speed of thought"... Maps of financial routing networks, for instance, which omit the human component can give us, in the imagery of an earlier DoubleQuotes, "much-changed caterpillars" -- but it's the arrival of the human factor that can add panic to the mix, and perhaps take us from civil society to anarchy in those (supposed) four days...