[p2p-research] dangers of connectivity

[Andy Robinson]

A few questions...

Wouldn't the increase in extreme events with big effects be as likely to
produce extreme positive effects as extreme negative effects?  Remembering
that the negative ones are not necessarily negative from the perspective of
the perpetrator (e.g. 911), so the two are not distinguishable as
categories, only by ethical judgements.  Extreme positive events might be
things like the collapse of eastern European Stalinism, protest eruptions
such as the recent unrest in Greece, sudden breakthroughs in science or
other kinds of scholarship (for instance, finding a cure for AIDS or
cancer), a sudden switch in forms of life towards sustainability, etc.
...  (just noticed one of the comments I hadn't read says the same thing)

Another point:  since the disruptive/transformative effects of "black swan"
events are due largely to their effects (911 itself changed nothing, it was
the US reaction that caused global shifts; financial crises such as the
Asian, Russian, Mexican, Enron and DotCom crises only reverberate the way
they do because of their impact on "business confidence", i.e. because they
scare other stockbrokers/investors into selling), wouldn't the growing
frequency of such events lessen their impact?  This certainly seems true of
terrorism, i.e., one terror attack can have a huge impact only when no
attacks are normally happening - there seems to be a lot more hysteria about
terrorism in Britain today post-7/7, than in the 1980s when IRA attacks were
almost routine - we don't even hear in the west about the latest events in
contexts of endemic insurgency such as Kashmir, Chechnya and northeast
India, or even of each suicide bombing in Iraq - the growing frequency at
certain sites makes the event "normal".  The same effect is suggested in the
sociology of deviance, i.e., that frequency of deviance reduces its deviant
character and "shock value".  The dynamics of "newsworthiness" would also be
crucial here, i.e., newsworthiness decreases with the frequency of events,
and as newsworthiness decreases, so does the likelihood of drastic
responses.

bw
Andy
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