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перевод: Masters of disaster The outside isn’t going away, to be sure. We live in a world where hundred-year storms seem to occur every few years and “once in a lifetime” financial debacles come along, well, more than once in a lifetime. It is becoming unnervingly apparent that, even with the best intentions, many of our institutions and leaders are running on ideas built for a different age. First, they can’t predict the outside: Recall New York MTA head Joseph Lhota’s baffled admission that Hurricane Sandy was “worse than the worst-case scenario.” Then they can’t grasp the turbulent dynamics
2016
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Masters of disaster
The outside isn’t going away, to be sure. We live in a world where hundred-year storms seem to occur every few years and “once in a lifetime” financial debacles come along, well, more than once in a lifetime. It is becoming unnervingly apparent that, even with the best intentions, many of our institutions and leaders are running on ideas built for a different age. First, they can’t predict the outside: Recall New York MTA head Joseph Lhota’s baffled admission that Hurricane Sandy was “worse than the worst-case scenario.”
Then they can’t grasp the turbulent dynamics inside either. “The impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in the subprime market,” Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke assured Congress in 2007, “seems likely to be contained.” It makes you wonder: Can we adjust to this new order?
Big globalizing eras have snapped before — think of the steam and rail revolution of the 1880s or the Silk Road of the Tang Dynasty. They generally take nations that don’t adapt for a very unpleasant ride. But this time might be different. The dominant nation of globalization’s recent expansive phase — the United States — does have the tools to dominate the next inside phase as well. After all, the guts of almost every system on the planet, from emergency rooms in Bangladesh to databases in Poland, run on American ideas. And the very logic of success in an inside world is an instinct to build platforms like those that power firms such as Apple AAPL1.64%and Google GOOG -0.84% . This hot fusion of innovation, trust, and commerce remains, for the moment, an American near monopoly.
Under the surface
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The aesthetics of any age — the way it looks, dresses, and sounds — are, of course, a reflection of its instincts. A few bars of Mahler can evoke the wild tensions of the Viennese renaissance of 1900. In our age we can actually see the inside pushing to the fore. Consider the design of the Barclays Center in Brooklyn; critics call it the most important new building in the U.S. this year. It was conceived around a revolutionary inside-to-out gambit, with huge windows and screens that let passersby see who is singing, dunking, or practicing inside. The building marks a generational lurch as much as a structural one: Developer Bruce Ratner craftily swapped a too expensive concept by Frank Gehry, whose elegant and impenetrable façades were perhaps the best examples of the “outside is the new outside” revolution of 20 years ago, for one by the post-boomer collective firm SHoP. In the process, almost by accident, he built what may be the first great building of the Inside Age.
This shift from surface to inside in architecture follows a logic that is one of the most basic rules of network development. In the initial phase of most network growth, you can observe the spread of a thin but ever more extensive layer of connection. If you go back and examine old charts of the growth of electrical or telephone networks, this is exactly what you see: a few lines, then a few more, and eventually a thick web. But as the network expands, it hits a point where it begins to turn inward and firm up, almost like a muscle growing in strength. Think of the ties between a bunch of college freshmen in their first week or two at school, for instance: They go from knowing almost no one to connecting with hundreds of people at a very light level, learning their names and hometowns. But as time goes on, ties thicken. After a while knowing lots of new people is less interesting (and returns less value) than knowing a few people deeply.
MORE: The information economy is reaching maximum overload
Networks are the essential metaphor of our age, what assembly lines were 150 years ago. And we’ve now moved from an era of extensive network development — that “Hi, nice to meet you” phase — to something deeper, and often that means nearer and more local. This shift is being abetted by any number of practical factors: Prices of air and sea freight have inflated alongside fuel costs in recent years, for instance, putting a premium on closeness. The 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan exposed the fragility of the global supply chain, causing tech companies to rethink far-flung relationships. A renaissance of local manufacturing, driven by technology and cheaper energy from shale gas, seems to be on the horizon. GE GE -0.84% is investing $1 billion in its U.S. factories and plans to bring all domestic appliance manufacturing back to the U.S.
But there’s something else at work too: a sense that we may have gone too far, too fast, that we don’t really understand the dynamics of the systems we’ve built. Perhaps you see this in your own Facebook or Twitter feeds: friends shutting down, uneasy with so much outside exposure — a sensation even younger users are feeling. A world with no privacy — with no inside place to grow and learn and make mistakes — is a sort of self-created panopticon.
To be honest, we entered the first flush of globalization with the wrong tools. We didn’t know how to manage interconnected bank risk, couldn’t imagine the danger of asymmetrical threats like terrorism, and really believed that every time we tipped over a government in some other country, an American-style system would grow back in its place. In any revolutionary period, leaders, confronted with the radically new, usually miscalculate. How they adjust is the test that history offers to generations facing revolutionary change. It marks the distinction between the revolutionary and the reactionary temperaments, between Apple and Dell DELL , say, or between Voltaire and Edmund Burke. The right answer is to pause, and to reengineer. Think of the Council of Trent, for instance, when the Catholic Church tried to grapple with the contagion of independent knowledge in the Renaissance. Or the Corn Laws of 1815, as Britain struggled with the intense global trade that an industrial age had bred.
Champions of the inside world
Nowhere is this fast shift to the inside more dramatic than in the bellwether of our age: infotech. If the decade and a half since the first BlackBerry was marked by companies’ building smartphones and getting them into every palm on the planet, the struggle now is over what happens inside those devices: a battle fought app by app and patent by patent. It’s perhaps no surprise that the most talked-about feature of the latest Google Maps release is that it shows you, like some sort of magic trick, the insides of buildings.
If value in the first era of networking was about connecting us all together, power now emerges from what goes on inside the resulting webs. Database mining, for instance, means that each of us can be understood (often without our knowing it) from the inside of our habits: What we buy at AmazonGE -0.84% , where we check in on FourSquare, or the pictures we leave on Instagram confess hopes and needs that reveal more about our souls than hours on an analyst’s couch might.
