Brittle Cities Are Easily Broken

“If there’s another major attack, people will leave the city in droves.”

Andrew, a colleague of mine in New York City, was sitting in his office in a building not far from Grand Central. It was October 2001, and I’d phoned him from Canada to discuss some business. But our conversation quickly turned to the city’s fevered mood. After the attack on the World Trade Center and a string of anthrax letters, New York’s normally thickskinned inhabitants were near their tipping point.

Of course, another attack never occurred, so we’ll never know just how close New Yorkers came to the leaving the city en masse. But Andrew clearly thought that the psychological pressure on the city’s people had reached a critical threshold.

The Matrix of Our Troubles

The risk of massive network collapse is not just a problem for power generation. Our agricultural, financial, and computer networks, to name just three, are also vulnerable. This vulnerability has many sources, but these networks’ structure and their tight coupling seem to be particularly critical. These aren’t problems with technology in general—rather, they’re problems with the particular kinds of technologies we’ve chosen and how we’ve decided to use them.

We Need a Forest of Tongues

We should be concerned about the loss of the world’s cultural diversity for the same practical reasons that we’re concerned about the loss of the world’s biodiversity. Our global society will be less resilient and more vulnerable without one, just as without the other.