#eric berlow

Hate is a system

Samantha Field has this to say about the Orlando attack: Believing that I don’t have the right to exist exactly as I am is hatred. Fighting against my civil rights is hatred… Referring to my existence as an abomination— which has happened to me multiple times over the last few days– is hatred. She goes on: …saying that anger and disgust and revulsion were on par with murder seemed so…

  A few weeks ago, I stumbled across an article that linked the application of adaptive cycles from ecology to finance.

In addition to its financial utility, I found that many of the ecological principles found in adaptive cycles could also be applied to competitive market environments:

(Edited Excerpt)

In an adaptive cycle, early growth is rapid as individuals of many species companies arrive in a newly opened space and seek to exploit a plethora of vacant ecological niches market segments. Connections are initially simple and sparse, but over time many interconnections and mutual dependencies develop.

  The system therefore increases in both 'wealth' and connectedness, as flows of energy and materials capital become larger and more complex. Biological Overall 'wealth' confers the potential for novelty innovation, allowing the system to adapt in disparate directions as circumstances warrant.

  Connectedness permits increasing stability, through the development of negative feedback loops, which help to regulate conditions conducive to life sustainability.

  As time passes, rapid growth gives way to conservation. Inter-dependencies become highly specialized and self-regulation becomes fine-tuned and sophisticated. Efficiency is maximized as niches are fully occupied, and flows of energy capital and nutrients resources are tightly controlled by the existing biota market leaders. This represents the end of the growth phase. 

Relatively few opportunities are left for newcomers or novel strategies, hence diversity stabilizes or declines. The system is 'rich,' but becomes more rigid, and therefore less resilient in the face of potential shocks, which can propagate rapidly through a highly inter-connected system with smaller margins for error than it had in its generalist phase. An increasingly brittle ecosystem market becomes, in Holling's words, "an accident waiting to happen".

  When something does push the ecosystem market outside of the boundaries it can tolerate, the long growth phase can morph into a rapid and chaotic release and reorganization phase, where nutrients capital and energy resource stores previously tied up can suddenly be liberated. This can be associated with a considerable loss of complexity, but also with much greater potential for generalist strategies and for novelty innovation.

  I found it uncanny how easily the narrative of an adaptive cycle could apply to the emergence, stability, collapse, and rebirth of an industry. 

It happens in nature, and it happens in our markets.

I think it’s time we recognize the cycle, and as innovators, develop a model that tracks industrial progress through each stage, in an effort to preemptively generate novel strategies in the anticipation of collapse.