98. Twelve-stepping Chaos

[Lars Peter Nissen] (0:15 - 1:41)

Emerson Tan is the sort of guy you want around when things go pear-shaped beyond belief.

Unusual situations call for unusual skill sets and Emerson has that for sure. He's been part of my professional network for a long time and I have always deeply valued his wild, clear-eyed and humorous perspective on the worst case scenario and the end of the world. It's a real pleasure to be able to share Emerson's perspective and wisdom with you as listeners of Trumanitarian.

It was a fun and deep conversation, also a little bit scary sometimes. I hope you'll enjoy it and that you will share it once you have listened to it. Most importantly, as always, enjoy the conversation.

Emerson Tan, welcome to Trumanitarian.

[Emerson Tan] (1:42 - 1:42)

Hello.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (1:44 - 1:52)

Emerson, I really struggle with knowing exactly how to introduce you to the listeners. So why don't you do it yourself? Who are you?

[Emerson Tan] (1:53 - 3:11)

Okay, so my name is Emerson Tan. I have had multiple careers that have run in parallel over the years. 20 odd years in humanitarian aid as a volunteer for MapAction, as a contractor, as a staff member for a variety of different organizations.

I got my career start in computer hacking and computer security some 30 plus, no 35, a long time ago before computer crime was even a thing. And from there I worked in a variety of different areas including various national security related things and in the commercial sector. And also in the tech development sector.

And now I founded a fintech firm which builds payment technologies for the developing world, low infrastructure environments and post-conflict, post-disaster type environments. So we really are looking at resilience engineering in a very fundamental kind of level.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (3:11 - 3:16)

So in other words, sometime in the last millennium you started out as a white hat hacker?

[Emerson Tan] (3:16 - 4:02)

No, I started out as a kid who needed to get to resources that were not available and I couldn't afford. So, you know, if you can't afford it and you really need it, you steal it. And I started out in an era before computer crime even was a crime.

You used to be prosecuted for theft of telephone service and theft of electricity, which is absolutely ludicrous called I got kicked out of university a couple of times for hacking. And if you want to read about some of the places that I've worked in, there is actually a book by an author called Nicole Perlroth.

"This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends" and there's a whole chapter there about a place that I used to work.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (4:02 - 4:04)

How did the humanitarian bit enter the piece?

[Emerson Tan] (4:04 - 4:50)

Well, so a family friend was one of the original volunteers at MapAction and he got given the job of building all their field IT systems. I didn't like camping at the time. I didn't like roughing it.

And I said, you know what, but because it's an NGO, because they're good, I will understand the business. And that means I will do all the training and the rest of it. And then once I understand the business, then I can build the systems that are actually required to support the business.

In this case, the business is producing maps in the field. And then by the end of that whole process, the leaders of the MapAction turned around and said, well, you've built all this stuff. We have no idea how to run it.

You're the only one who knows how to run it. So I guess you're going to have to come on mission with us.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (4:50 - 5:13)

And that's when you then became operationally involved with MapAction. And one thing that really struck me was that as we were preparing for this conversation, you said, you know, I worked in the intelligence community for a while, and now I work in the humanitarian sector. And really, the difference between a war and a flooding is six foot of water.

[Emerson Tan] (5:13 - 7:29)

It's literally six foot of water. Like, the difference between a cyber warfare attack and a flooding disaster is literally like, it's a meter of water. Because if you think about it, a lot of the problems that come from infrastructure failure are very much of the same sort of practical effect.

There's no power. There is no telecommunications. You also have, in the present environment, many of the same problems in that you now have an information warfare problem.

So you now have misinformation from a variety of bad actors whose principal aim is not so much to inflict direct harms, but is to essentially impede the response to induce chaos. Because from a strategic sense, that chaos weakens your opponent, makes them look more incompetent, makes them look politically weak. And it is a very low cost, low effort type of attack, which you can run effectively in the background of normal operations without triggering a military response.

So you see it now everywhere. You see it in the response to the hurricanes in the United States. It turns out that Russian botnets have been amplifying bad information and misinformation about the floods in Spain.

And so what we now have is an information environment, which essentially now is a battlefield. And that has real knock on effects in terms of the response, because now your ability to respond is now actually now impeded by a very angry, misinformed, potentially a riotous population who is looking for aid, looking for help, but at the same time is also being systematically fed disinformation with a view to inducing chaos.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (7:30 - 7:45)

As a community of practice, I think we have picked up on this issue around dis- and misinformation. And of course, we're all really worried about the role that AI can play in this. Some people describe AI as having lowered the cost of producing bullshit to zero.

[Emerson Tan] (7:46 - 7:46)

Yes, that's correct.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (7:46 - 7:49)

And so you can really inundate the whole playing field with false narratives.

[Emerson Tan] (7:50 - 8:05)

You can flood the field with false narratives. I mean, there's a real reluctance in the humanitarian community to name names and actually call out bad actors. And I think that that actually is a critical weakness that we actually need to get over politically.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (8:05 - 8:46)

So I would say so far so good. This analysis I fully share. I think we have heard it from a number of corners.

I think ICRC, for example, have been really good at putting out some material around mis- and disinformation. What I really want to get at is this very interesting parallel experience you have of working with cyber warfare and cyber security in the intelligence environment and in the humanitarian crisis that you have responded to. What do those two experiences tell you about the strategies that work effectively in the aftermath of a cyber attack or a flooding?

[Emerson Tan] (8:46 - 9:29)

So one of the things that I think is very, very key to thinking about all of these things is that anticipatory action is everything. So as we think about how we build our systems that undergird our everyday lives and indeed the everyday lives of everybody else around the world, we now need to start thinking about building for a world that doesn't exist yet, but is coming into view.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (9:31 - 9:31)

And what do you mean by that?

So the last time there was this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was the Middle Meocene. At that point in time, it was so hot that there were river turtles at the same latitude as Berlin in Germany, that they were the size of a large serving plate. So these are tropical animals.

This is a tropical environment. It's a world with very little seasonal ice at the North Pole and only some permanent ice at the South Pole. It's a world that's dramatically warmer and it is a world without humans, because that was, you know, millions of years ago, right?

So before we had evolved, before our food species had evolved, that world is in train. In other words, there is nothing we could do today, even if we cut our emissions to zero, to stop that warming that is in train. And what that means is that the systems that we build today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, have to be engineered for a world that is far more climatically chaotic.

But climate chaos also feeds into conflict and war, because the borders that we have drawn as humans over the last, you know, I don't know, two or three thousand years, correspond to a climate and a world that no, will not exist in the future. So those borders, you know, it's all a contribution to essentially migration and conflict. So what we're talking about is now building systems that are resilient and resistant to both those chaotic climatic conditions and the social chaos that comes and conflict that comes as a result of that.

So we fucked up royally and we're going to live in a radically different world.

Correct.

We need to design for that world.

Correct.

What are some of the design principles we should follow?

So as we go about thinking about this, we really need to think about the brittleness of the systems that we have built to date. So an example would be like, let's take the mobile phone network, right? So the mobile phone network is, you know, it's very dependent.

It has involves base stations, handsets and backhaul connectivity and backbone networks and so on and so forth. But undergirding that is mains power. Undergirding that is the integrity of those base stations that transmit together, the message passing centers and the messaging centers and so on as the service centers and so on and so forth.

All that is to say that if any of those links in the chain fail, then your handset becomes radically less useful. What the question might then become is, well, what actually is the lowest atomic level, i.e. the lowest sort of like unit that you can reliably hold, right? And how do you get that to function in an environment where the infrastructure has been smashed out from underneath you because something has failed somewhere?

You know, it's too hot, it's too wet, you know, or some malignant actor somewhere has wrecked the software. And then you might find yourself in a situation where it's like, well, OK, do we now need to start thinking about things like mesh networks? Do we now need to start thinking about things like, you know, having like localized meshing so that, OK, so you might not be able to call, you know, like your cousin in Australia, but you can still call other people in the same city, in the same city block inside your building.

This type of thinking about, you know, structured resilience so that it's not perfect service, but it is better than nothing service and a sort of like graceful degradation. The world, the world of the future looks like an Alfa Romeo. Anyone who's had an Alfa Romeo knows that they are a joy to drive when they work.

They are amazing cars. But the key is when it works, because, you know, sometimes they'll break down in unexpected and puzzling, baffling fashion. No idea.

And when they break, they spend weeks or months in the garage and you've got absolutely no idea when they're going to come back, because who knows when there's going to be spare parts. But when they work, they work great. And that's very much what the world of the future is likely to look like in the next like 20 to 30 years, is that you have a world of extraordinarily high performance when things actually work.

But when you have very frequent natural disaster, when you have very frequent bouts of either high grade or low grade interstate conflict, which results in network degradation or service degradation or really serious problems with things like power and water, which are sort of on the border of like war slash not war, then you end up with a world where essentially it's like you still need to be able to function. You still need to be able to buy milk at the store.

You still need to be able to perform your day to day life. And so the question is, how do you build systems that enable you to keep doing that, but at the same time, you know, like have enough resiliency built into them that they can cope for fairly long periods of time without some of these underlying services?

And I should say before we proceed, Alfo Romero, if you're listening, we can easily edit this episode against a corporate sponsorship for Trumanitarian. Okay, so what you're saying is we have some lethal vulnerabilities in our flashy tech. And I get the point that we need to start engineering, maybe mesh networks, engineering in a way so that it is less binary on or off.

Where do you see this sort of happening already? Do you see best practices in this field?

I don't think we've even barely started. It's one of these things that. So primarily, one of the problems here is actually political in so much as that once you acknowledge that this type of practice is necessary, then you are left with the very uncomfortable question of, well, what are you going to do?

But what two questions, actually, what are you going to do to stop it getting worse? Why didn't you stop it when you knew that things were going to get this bad? And those two questions are extraordinarily politically toxic.

I mean, you only have to look at the election of Donald Trump in the United States and the Republican Party, who are ardent climate deniers, to actually realize the truth of that. People would far rather hark backwards to a perceived nostalgic age where everything was doing just fine than actually confront reality.

So we are in a situation where our current technological architecture is not fit for the future.

Correct. I think that's correct.

We have a governance system at national and international level that struggles to really address the uncomfortable questions that you have just mentioned. And I guess my next question then is, you have sort of outlined some of the elements of what best practices look like in building back better or engineering for a world we've never seen before. What does it look on the social organization side of things?

What kind of political or social structures do we need to build to be able to govern this world?

That's actually a really good question. It's one that I'm not a social scientist and it's not one that I really have a set of good answers for. I mean, one of the things that is very, very clear, though, is that the existing systems that we have in place, which privilege the interests of the rich world over the majority of people on the planet and also the planet's ecosystem, is clearly not working out well and may well result in a really unsustainable state, especially given that you now have a really odd state of affairs where, with the advent of things like cyber warfare, with the advent of things like effectively being able to, dare I say, 3D print pathogens and things like this, you're actually really talking about the democratization of weapons of mass destruction, right? And now you bring that down below a certain threshold and you now present people with existential threats to their actual very existence. You face a world where, essentially, all the conventional mechanisms of control don't really work anymore, and so there needs to be a new compact, really, one that actually takes the interests of those people into account.

That's a pretty fucking dark vision. I'm just going to get a whiskey for us. Yeah, okay.

If you want.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. How do I turn this? Okay.

It's one of America's better products.

Exactly.

But yes, I mean, it is really actually quite a dark vision. It's quite a dark prospect.

And do you think that maybe you get this binary in your thinking or this dark in your thinking because of your experience in the intelligence sector?

No, no, it's because I have a combination of ADHD, a little bit of autism, and I definitely have some depressive tendencies.

Okay.

You know, I mean, a lot of PTSD over the years from everything from seeing too much death and destruction on humanitarian operations, and then having to think through the very, very darkest consequences of what, at the time, was an extraordinarily new – well, it still is – a new branch of warfare. Right. You know.

Well, we poured a whiskey.

Yeah, that seems to be a good idea.

That might help us soften the edges and get into a slightly more positive space.

I mean, what's kind of interesting to me is that clearly there is a lot of grassroots organization going on that we actually, in the center, do not see.

So what you're saying is, on one side, we spoke about the tech, tech that's vulnerable because if you break one link of the chain, the whole thing doesn't work. And in a sense, we have a slightly – in a sense, we have a parallel situation when it comes to our social organization that we, if we take the humanitarian sector that we both know quite well, we have a quite centralized sector with big bureaucracies that are vulnerable to the sort of breakdowns that we have just spoken about. And so, you see an alternative emerging?

Is that what you're saying?

Well, I think what we see now, these days, is that we see a lot of self-organization, a lot of mutual aid, a lot of spontaneous organization.

Emergence.

Yeah, exactly. Emergent organizations that actually come and that are almost entirely technologically mediated. Right?

So, you know, you see the emergence of things like, you know, mutual aid efforts after the hurricanes and the like, where everybody gets on WhatsApp, you know, huge WhatsApp groups and the rest of it, huge fundraising and the rest of it. It's all ad hoc, you know, ad hoc organization and the rest of it. But the key thing here is that it's all technologically mediated.

So you see this bubbling away. I mean, but again, you've got this sort of like strange, you've got this sort of like strange dichotomy where you've got all of this sort of like social organization that's bubbling away. It's all technologically mediated.

But the minute that you smash out the technologies, right, and stuff doesn't work and the rest of it, everybody is atomized and effectively isolated. And what you kind of need, what we now need to start doing is start building things that enable us to bridge that gap so that you have a world where, okay, this big centralized systems may or may not function particularly well, but there is enough on the, there is enough residual social capital locally and the means exist to organize, you know, organize locally and organize regionally in such a way that you can actually build a much more resilient sort of like cellular type organism.

And we see this in Ukraine, I would argue.

Yeah, Ukraine is definitely an example.

We see this in Sudan with the emergency rooms.

Yes.

I think my main question is, what are the assets, the capabilities that we as disaster managers, as humanitarians, whatever you want to call it, as edge case cowboys, whatever you want to call it, what are the assets and the capabilities that we need to foster and put in place to enable this emergence, to help it scale more and faster?

So I would look at, so this is going to sound very, very strange in the left field, but I would actually take an example of an organization like Bellingcat. So Bellingcat is an open source intelligence organization, right? They take open source, you know, data sources and the like, and you, you know, and from those open source, you know, data sources, you know, you get everything from, you know, like how is the war in Ukraine going on the battlefield based on like drone footage and camera footage that's released on like, I don't know, the site, the health site formerly known as Twitter or whatever, right?

So interesting thing about Bellingcat is that Bellingcat actually publish actually how they do everything. There's actually a manual, like you can read that manual, you can read that manual. It will tell you it's very long.

It's kind of nerdy and complicated, but you know, it does exist. So if you want to, and if you are so inclined, you can read it, you can do it and you can do it on your own or you can do it with your friends, without your friends, you know, and then let you actually do it yourself.

So how would, how would taking some of the principles that govern Bellingcat and, and applying that more specifically in disaster management space, what does that look like?

So one of the things that we need to do is that we actually need to disseminate expertise, experience, and also stories. So, you know, like there's a significant element of storytelling in here, right? Because it's like, well, okay, how did you know, like, how did you, how did you achieve X, Y, Z, right?

Well, it's not just a dry old manual, right? It's a, it's a, it's, it's a, you know, like, it's an experience. Here is our learning curve.

Here is our learning experience. This is how we did it. You know, and the fascinating thing is that we're used to doing this in this really fucking dry, dry, dry way, right?

You know, like we produce all these thick reports and the rest of it. And, you know, they're, they're, if you need a tranquilizer to go to sleep and the rest of it, I highly recommend, like, highly recommend things like the sphere standards or, you know, like any one of a series of ODI publications, like, because that shit will put you to sleep far more effectively than a Zoppa clone.

And it tends to be precisely wrong for the next disaster.

Correct. So instead, I would say that actually we need to infuse these folks, the active, you know, the people who are active, the ones who are actually organizing. And like, we need to both engage with them, but we also need to feed them like our experience and expertise and like little bite-sized chunks and not in giant reports that put people to sleep.

So what is that, TikTok?

I don't know. Let's find out.

Right. Hasn't been done yet. I don't know.

You know, I mean, but it's very, very clear that, like, it's very, very clear that, you know, like people under the age of 30 learn in a very, very different way to the way that, you know, like, that I might or you might, right? You know?

Yeah.

It's like, how do you, how do you engage them? How do you engage? Very often, a lot of these people who are actually involved in this organizing at a very, very low, at a very low cellular level, they're actually quite young, especially in the global South. Right. And some of them are really young.

Yeah.

It's funny you mentioned Bellingcat, because when I try to think through these things, one of the things I use is AA, so Alcoholics Anonymous, which has a book that outlines the 12 steps to kick addiction. And that's about it. Yeah.

There's no central AA office, there's no AA plaza, but there are hundreds of thousands of little groups where people have meetings.

Yep. And they do it all in their own way, because it's like, you literally have, like, here's a book that says, like, this is a 12 steps. But how you actually do that, it's kind of up to you.

Yeah. So what are the 12 steps of disaster management? I don't think we can find the answer here, but I think that's what we need to look for.

Yeah. We need to actually think about, like, okay, if we boil it all down, if we really boil it down, like, you know, okay, well, what do you, how do you build a, how do you build community resilience in such a way that it's like, okay, here it is, pretty simple, you know, like, we trust you guys that you're smart enough and organized and, you know, that you're smart enough and you can organize yourselves in your own context.

But here it is at a really high level, like, you know, this is what you need to get through.

And you see, I think that that's one of the things that we in the humanitarian sector, in spite of all of the bureaucracy and all of the nonsense and whatever, what we do have that I think few other professional communities have is muscle memory from edge cases.

Yes.

Or deep edge case wisdom, as a previous guest said on this show. And I think we need to find those 12 steps.

Yeah. I mean, I don't know how to conduct that exercise, but one of the things that is very clear about humanitarian community is that that muscle memory exists and it persists, even though the average number of missions humanitarian does actually is about 2.5.

Really?

Yeah, it's very low. What's really fascinating to me, though, is that there are some people, a small cadre of people who've been at this for decades and they have decades of experience, like dozens and dozens and dozens of missions, you know, and they actually are the institutional muscle memory of the institutions that they actually, like, inhabit, and the turnover in that small cadre is actually quite small. It's very low, right? And there's a sort of generational, it's like a generational turnover.

[Lars Peter Nissen]

I think that there is a special skill set or way of thinking that emerges from a repeated profound loss of control.

[Emerson Tan]

Yes.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (

That's how I think about it.

And really, what we must do in order to find those 12 steps, that future paradigm for humanitarian action, for enabling the emergence that we spoke about earlier, is to get together and sort of reverse engineer it from the way we think and work. I think that there is an edge case wisdom there. Emerson, I think we have done well.

We've had a couple of whiskeys. We've actually identified the core task, namely to sort of excavate those 12 steps that lie in the experience.

[Emerson Tan]

And they might not be necessarily 12.

[Lars Peter Nissen]

No, no.

[Emerson Tan]

I mean, who knows, who knows how many, who knows how many key points?

[Lars Peter Nissen]

I think there might be eight.

[Emerson Tan]

Yeah. I mean, the really, the really key thing in my mind, at least, is that also as that expertise and thinking is disseminated, it has to be done in such a way that it can actually survive the collapse of big chunks of the system and also potentially big chunks of, dare I say it, the state for a very good reason, which is that, as I previously said, because we're moving from the Holocene climate regime to something else, whatever the fuck, hot regime, it's quite likely that centralized states in many of the places that get really, really, really too hot and too chaotic and like might not actually make it, you know, they may dissolve into something else.

And those people will get up and move. And as those people get up and move, they have to be able to take that knowledge, that way of thinking, that all of that with them. Yeah.

In some form that is portable and culturally durable.

[Lars Peter Nissen]

Emerson, I'm going to go get us another whiskey.

[Emerson Tan]

Okay.

[Lars Peter Nissen]

Well, we're just about to destroy the world. Emerson, it's been a great conversation. It's also been one where we have gone pretty dark. Yeah.

So I'm going to do something unusual. I'm going to enforce a rule with respect to your prediction. Instead of actually having you predict the end of the world within the next six months, I want you to find something really positive.

[Emerson Tan]

Okay. This is going to sound very, very strange. So the election of Donald Trump is both a is a symptom of a far wider malaise, if you like, social malaise. The rise of the movements like the Make America Great Again movement and so on and so forth are not the cause.

They are a symptom, but they are also a catalyst for chaos and change. It's effectively dropped a brick on the accelerator pedal for both chaos and change. And the threat or indeed the reality of that sort of system chaos actually hastens the emergence of newer and potentially more durable alternatives to the heavily centralized, heavily, dare I say, rich, white, North World systems and networks that exist now.

[Lars Peter Nissen]

So spin us a positive prediction for the next six months along those lines.

[Emerson Tan]

What will be interesting is the way that actually people actually respond to it, because in the absence of big systemic interventions from the system as is, what you will now see is all of this self-organization just come bubbling up, and you will see new competitors. You will see new forms of action. You will see new forms of coping mechanisms come from unexpected places and unexpected places that previously we have not seen.

And because we if we're crippled in our ability to actually intervene from the outside, we will be watching people as they work out how to help themselves. And then that knowledge will disseminate horizontally.

[Lars Peter Nissen]

Emerson, spend the next half year being on the lookout for these self-organizations popping up. We'll call you back in six months, and you'll have to tell us where you saw it happening.

[Emerson Tan]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, for sure. Let's hope we don't need those potassium iodide pills in the meantime.

[Lars Peter Nissen]

On that note, thank you for coming to Trumanitarian. Great conversation.

[Emerson Tan]

Thank you very much for inviting me along.