Cyberspace and Resilience the Challenge of the Complexity Surge
网络空间与韧性:社会复杂性激增的挑战
Résumé
The development of the cyberspace has lead to the emergence of new modes of social and economic interaction. Extremely powerful digital actors have emerged, while many legacy organizations are falling into obsolescence. New forms of governmental action are developed with tighter connections to citizens. The importance of the transformation that information technologies have triggered cannot be underestimated. But what is more problematic and not so well understood is the speed of the digital transformation. Why is it so rapid and what will be the consequences of such a sudden disruption?
A historical perspective on the development of information technologies reveals that they coincide with surges in the complexity of societies. Better capacities to process information often allow to overcome new complexity challenges. Today the global environmental change is probably one of the most complex challenges that humanity faces. The contemporaneity of both transformations, digital and environmental, is therefore probably no accident.
The cyberspace has become the place through which most of the flows of both tangible and intangible exchanges, both local and global, are orchestrated. Its role, which is already essential, will grow in the future to cope with more pressing threats, such as resources shortage, environmental impat or pandemic control. International cooperation to maintain a secure and trustable infrastructure is of paramount importance.
We consider how information processing capacities have developed with complexity through historical examples, and illustrate how the cyberspace relates with the present complexity surge, allowing to envision new governance means to cope with it. But at the same time, the resulting concentration of power in the cyberspace and its increasing vulnerabilities constitute serious threats, which require the development of a more balanced system with effective international norms.