congestive collapse
In addition to a business-as-usual scenario, traditional scenario-based future explorations often also include a doomscenario, i.e. a future context in which everything seems to have gone terribly wrong. Threats are challenges as much as opportunities and turning them around as such can lead to breakthrough innovations.
The past weeks have seen a plethora of web headlines ventilating the fear of the internet coming to a halt due to data ‘traffic jams’ (many referring or responding to the article in Forbes), mainly caused by the explosion of high-bandwidth content such as video, VoIP-applications, etc. Some people already saw burning server rooms, economies coming to a halt, a slowdown of humanity’s progress etc. In a sense, fears of so-called ‘congestive collapse’ have been around for a long time and resurge time and again. As did stories about abundant capacity, limitless bandwidth, dark fiber à volonté etc.
Reality does show however that our dependency upon ‘the net’ has become ubiquitous, thus increasing the vulnerability of our societies, technologies, economies, ecologies, governance etc. in case something dramatic happens to it. Resilience was one of the cornerstones of the network’s design since its inception, yet for example in a global context, geographical weaknesses in terms of physical infrastructure (e.g. transatlantic cables, major hubs etc.) still form weaknesses. This is only one way in which explosive growth in demand in combination with limited availability and significant efforts required to increase it, means trouble. On the other hand, many see the marketmechanism of supply and demand also providing the solution to the problem. How they see a possible period of transition however differs.
Nevertheless, the doomsday image triggered several people to express the need to reassess infrastructural capacity needs. Several research projects into how to analyze the situation and anticipate best are being carried out.
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