A crash course in changing the world.
"Complex, connected societies are more resilient than simple ones - up to a point. During the east African droughts of the early 1990s, I saw at first hand what anthropologists and economists have long predicted: those people who had the fewest trading partners were hit hardest. Connectivity provided people with insurance: the wider the geographical area they could draw food from, the less they were hurt by a regional famine.
But beyond a certain level, connectivity becomes a hazard. The longer and more complex the lines of communication and the more dependent we become on production and business elsewhere, the greater the potential for disruption. This is one of the lessons of the banking crisis. Impoverished mortagage defaulters in the United States - the butterfly’s wing over the Atlantic - almost broke the global economy. If the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano - by no means a monster - keeps retching it could, in these fragile times, produce the same effect.
We have several such vulnerabilities. The most catastrophic would be an unexpected coronal mass ejection - a solar storm - which causes a surge of direct current down our electricity grids, taking out the transformers. It could happen in seconds; the damage and collapse would take years to reverse, if we ever recovered. We would soon become aware of our dependence on electricity: an asset which, like oxygen, we notice only when it fails."
I have watched the videos on Ushahidi. I have also read about it and I can see it being an incredibly powerful tool of communication. It has proven to be so (Haiti being the most striking example of success) I can see it being used for so many emergency situations here in the Philippines; for those whose abodes are blown away in the next typhoon and need a shelter for the night, for those floating in a flooded city, needing a paddle for their raft, for those hoards of privileged potential volunteers who want to offer their resources in times of need...
...but how can we connect in the event of a solar storm?
"the damage and collapse would take years to reverse..." and, meanwhile, what would we do?
Meanwhile, somewhere in Manila, we would be crying out for electric fans to help us through the humid days...
Meanwhile, somewhere in Brussels, we would be trapped in a tram with no electric door way out...
Meanwhile, somewhere in Jakarta we would be frantically punching the keys on our phones, willing the screen to read 'Message received'...
Meanwhile, somewhere in Brighton, we would be lighting candles on the pier and listening to acoustic guitar...
now that wouldn't be so bad, would it?
But for how long?...........
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