Manufacturing the Permacrisis
If the never ending crisis doesn't kill us, the failed response to it will.
When we first started talking about the global Permacrisis here in early 2020, it was unclear whether the term would gain popularity. The term or its cousins (multicrisis, polycrisis, etc.) is everywhere and has even been named the word of the year. Since the world has caught up, let’s get ahead again by digging deeper into the idea.
The Permacrisis
Let’s start with our working definition of a permacrisis. It is:
Series of crisis events (this isn’t unusual across history).
Each crisis event is complex making it difficult and time-consuming to solve (this complexity is novel).
Each event feeds into and amplifies future events (this is novel).
Based on this definition, the Permacrisis started just after the turn of the century (2001) with 9/11. Since then, we’ve had a series of crisis events that have become more severe and frequent.
Making Things Worse
As we gain experience with the Permacrisis, it has become clear that the solutions used to “solve” the Permacrisis are doing more damage than the crisis itself. These solutions are also the source of much of the damage that bleeds into and amplifies the next crisis. Why? Increasing incompetence, corruption, and weakness (a hollowing out of the nation-state by the rise of globalization and the network). For example:
9/11 led an intelligence-fueled law enforcement/special ops effort to detect and track down terrorists to prevent attacks in the future. However, the crisis also led to the following solutions that did far more harm than the original event:
The invasion of Iraq to prevent future WMD terrorism (sold to the public based on a lie).
A twenty-year, two trillion dollar nation-building effort in Afghanistan to prevent Afghanistan from being used as a haven for terrorism in the future (it failed spectacularly in 2021).
The militarization of police. This led to a fourfold increase in SWAT and a weapon-centric approach to law enforcement that we are just starting to unwind.
The financial crisis in 2008. The mountain of fraud that led to the problem went largely unpunished, from mortgage boiler rooms to investment banks selling risky investments to pension funds to financial rating agencies taking bribes. None of the people or firms involved got more than a slap on the wrist by the government. Worse, we gave them bailouts and subsidies instead.
The same has been true for our response to COVID (mandatory lockdowns and vaccines as well as excessive corporate subsidies), Jan 6th (politicized censorship), the invasion of Ukraine (a new cold war with Russia), and climate (ESG and bans) in the networked world. However, the drivers of this failure are changing.
A Loss of Trust
This inability to formulate acceptable solutions, or at a minimum, answers that do less harm than the crisis itself, has catastrophically damaged public trust in the government. Pew has been measuring trust, or the percentage of people who believe that the US government does what’s right all or most of the time, since Eisenhower. Since 9/11 and the start of the Permacrisis, trust has fallen to a rolling average of less than 20%, regardless of who is president.
It should be clear from the data that the rise of social networking and the election of Trump didn’t damage this trust; our government’s solutions to crisis events did.
This loss of trust makes it harder for the government to decide on and implement solutions. This increases dissent's intensity, breadth, and speed in response to government actions.
Social networking has weaponized this distrust. Networks are now in competition to coerce the government to adopt draconian solutions (COVID lockdowns, censorship, and war with Russia) or abandon them (lockdowns/vaccine mandates, freedom of speech, avoiding nuclear war).
Framework: Endless Surprise
Another factor made worse by the network is that we treat each new crisis as a complete surprise (despite extensive planning, wargaming, and strategizing done in preparation for similar events in the past). This has led to the following self-defeating problem-solving narratives:
No allowance for pragmatism or planned responses. This crisis is an existential threat (“people will die” or “we will collapse if we don’t act”). Fear, fear, fear. Those who disagree with efforts to solve the problem are as much of a threat as the crisis itself. Everything that can be done must be done.
No time for sound decision-making. “We must act now and don’t have time to implement anything better.” Decisions will be ad hoc and novel. Furthermore, efforts to coerce the population to implement these decisions will win over more pragmatic approaches.
No room for accountability. The leaders, experts, or bureaucrats who made decisions that led to or exacerbated the crisis will not be held accountable since the emergency was unforeseeable. Accountability also gets in the way of solving this crisis. As a result, the costs and the blame for these disasters will be public.
Networked Problem Solving
Due to declining trust in the government, we’re increasingly seeing the inchoate (rudimentary, early alpha, more likely to fail than work correctly) networked decision-making system taking center stage in crisis response.
Networked corporations. An aggressive, social AI-fueled effort to manage public discussion down to the conversational level (online) and control political outcomes. Twitter’s takeover has stalled this (in part).
Networked swarms. Sprawling, open-source networks of civilians and media/corporate/government insiders that amplifies the immediacy and scale of the threat (we saw this at work with COVID, Ukraine, etc.) and drive specific solutions.
Networked dissent. Sprawling open source networks that quickly form to oppose all centralized solutions or initiatives. This dissenting network counterbalances government, corporate, and swarm efforts.