Resilience and friction

category: notion

Resilience and friction

In “resilience and scale” link Ben Thomson makes the point how « while the Internet provided resiliency in theory, it also dramatically reduced the costs of putting your data and applications anywhere” his point is that it led to everyone putting data in Northern Virginia aka “US-East-1“ thus effectively lowering internet resilience…

Could we say, the same applies to internet communities? While in theory one could get in touch with anyone on Earth now, internet was in the 90’s and 2000’s promoted as a unique opportunity to lower misunderstanding across regional or economic boundaries… but the opposite happened: it became easier to talk through screens with like minded people than with you neighbours effectively lowering societal resilience…

While Ben Thomson end up focusing on National Resiliency and cost, we should see that the lowest short term cost is just building “resilience debt” or more accurately “under investing in resilience” which might be perceived as friction in short term.