Fleming believed that progress has pure limits. Things develop to maturity—children into adults, saplings into bushes, startups into full-fledged firms—however progress past that time is, in his phrases, a “pathology” and an “affliction.” The larger and extra productive an economy will get, he argued, the extra sources it must burn to take care of its personal infrastructure. It turns into much less and fewer environment friendly at protecting anybody particular person clothed, fed, and sheltered. He referred to as this the “intensification paradox”: The more durable everybody works to make the GDP line level up, the more durable everybody has to work to make the GDP line level up. Inevitably, Fleming believed, progress will flip to degrowth, intensification to deintensification. These are issues to organize for, plan for, and the way in which to do this is with the lacking metric: resilience.

Fleming affords a number of definitions of resilience, the briefest of which is “the ability of a system to cope with shock.” He describes two sorts: preventive resilience, which helps you preserve an current state despite shocks, and recovery-elastic resilience, which helps you adapt shortly to a brand new post-shock state. Growth will not assist you with resilience, Fleming argues. Only neighborhood will. He’s massive on the “informal economy”—assume Craigslist and Buy Nothing, not Amazon. People serving to folks.

So I started to think about, in my hypocritical coronary heart, an analytics platform that may measure resilience in these phrases. As progress shot too excessive, notifications would fireplace off to your cellphone: Slow down! Stop promoting! Instead of income, it might measure relationships fashioned, barters fulfilled, merchandise loaned and reused. It would mirror all kinds of non-transactional actions that make an organization resilient: Is the gross sales staff doing sufficient yoga? Are the workplace canines getting sufficient pets? In the analytics assembly, we’d ask questions like “Is the product cheap enough for everyone?” I even tried to sketch out a resilience funnel, the place the juice that drips down is folks checking in on their neighbors. It was an fascinating train, however what I ended up imagining was principally HR software program for Burning Man, which, nicely, I’m undecided that is the world I wish to dwell in both. If you provide you with an excellent resilience funnel, let me know. Such a product would carry out very badly within the market (assuming you may even measure that).

The elementary drawback is that the stuff that creates resilience will not ever present up within the analytics. Let’s say you have been constructing a chat app. If folks chat extra utilizing your app, that is good, proper? That’s neighborhood! But the actually good quantity, from a resilience perspective, is how usually they put down the app and meet up in particular person to hash issues out. Because that can result in somebody coming by the home with lasagna when another person has Covid, or somebody giving somebody’s child an outdated acoustic guitar from the attic in trade for, I do not know, a beehive. Whole Earth stuff. You know the way it works.

All of this considerably responsible operating round led me again to the best reply: I am unable to measure resilience. I imply, certain, I may wing a bunch of obscure, summary stats and make pronouncements. God is aware of I’ve completed lots of that earlier than. But there isn’t any metric, actually, that may seize it. Which means I’ve to speak to strangers, politely, about issues they’re attempting to resolve.

I hate this conclusion. I wish to push out content material and see traces transfer and make no extra small speak. I need my freaking charts. That’s why I like tech. Benchmarks, CPU speeds, laborious drive sizes, bandwidth, customers, level releases, income. I really like when the quantity goes up. It’s virtually unattainable to think about a world the place it would not. Or moderately it was.

This article seems within the November 2023 challenge. Subscribe now.