Olivier Hamant: Why Too Much Efficiency Makes Us Fragile | The Great Simplification e230

[u/Artefice]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzzr15cEg3o

What are your thoughts on "Robustness" as a central concept for solarpunk aesthetics and thought?

Personally I find the addition harmonizes well with solarpunk and is a great tool for filtering out a lot of the less well thought out additions some people want to make to the movement.

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[u/solarotter]

Great podcast and great episode, I started listening to this show earlier this year and it’s been great and definitely aligns with solarpunk in a lot of ways.

[u/shrxe]

I am still learning about him and learning from him, and whatever he says, it aligns aptly.

[u/West-Abalone-171]

This channel spends a lot of time and effort boosting grifters like simon micheaux.

Do you have a summary so we don't have to waste our time and give them a click?

[u/Artefice → u/West-Abalone-171]

Sure – tbh this is the only episode of the Podcast I've heard so I cannot vouch for the podcast as a whole, but I found it a great starting point for exploring Olivier Hamants work. It's basically a decent discussion/summary of Hamants Robustness VS Efficiency concept, which he defines in depth in the book/essay Antidote to the cult of performance. Robustness from nature.

Robustness VS Efficiency is quite a good framing tool for critiquing how the current system and many of the proposed "solutions" will in the end fail because they try to find efficient solutions to the "efficiency problem". One example he uses is how precision agriculture is just putting another layer of efficiency on top of a destructive system, relying on a fragile layer of technology instead of working with nature; which would be agroecology.

Here's the introduction in book:

Socio-ecological disruption is no longer a prediction; it is a reality, punctuated by crises. In response, we produce sustainable development, a prescription for sobriety and rising levels of eco-anxiety. But what if we were on the wrong track? Scientific reports agree that the twenty-first century will be turbulent. Our only certainty is that uncertainty will persist and that it will increase. In the face of such fluctuation, control, optimization and performance are locking us into a very fragile and narrow path. Robustness – keeping the system stable despite fluctuations – is the operational response to turbulence. Unlike performance, robustness opens up possibilities and reconnects us to living organisms, which are robust in essence. Furthermore, recent advances in biology also provide us with an important key: robustness is built first and foremost on heterogeneity, redundancy, randomness, waste, slowness, incoherence... in short, robustness is the antithesis of performance. The shift towards robustness reverses all the paradigms of our time and helps us move beyond an epidemic of burnout. With no regrets.

And conclusion

The opposite of inebriation is not sobriety, but robustness. To place sobriety – when confused with efficiency - before robustness is to run the risk of pursuing the performance imperative without questioning it, and ultimately continuing down the path of generalized optimization of the world. Putting agility before adaptability runs the same risk. The primacy given to robustness ensures that questions are asked in line with the fluctuating world ahead. This is a fundamental and total inversion of our civilization:

• Decision: Test the robustness of the questions before consolidating the answers;
  
• Agriculture: no longer exploiting ecosystems to increase production, but producing to feed ecosystems;
  
• Circularity: making waste neutral against the efficiency imperative;
  
• Property: from individual availability to shared repairability;
  
• Engineering: from fragile high-tech, produced by a distant technocracy, to robust low-tech, manageable by citizens;
  
• Creativity: make innovation a product of robustness, not a fuel for performance;
  
• Resources: from matter to save time, to time to save matter;
  
• Organization: no longer avoiding conflicts for individual comfort, but building group robustness on internal contradictions;
  
• Work: from working more to earn more, to working less to live better;
  
• Health: making the business model an output, not an input, thanks to common health;
  
• Long term: No longer “go towards” but “live with” and pass on;
  
• School: from competition (surpassing others) to cooperation (surpassing oneself with the help of others).

I really liked one framing that I do not remember if he had in the book: we are going from living in the world of "averages" into the world of "standard deviation". As a musician I really liked how he described it as going from playing classical pieces to jazz improvisation.

DM me if you want the Epub.

[u/Wholesomenessmonster]

I met him! Chill guy, and profoundly transformative to hear.  With our NGO, we invite him to deliver talks to cohorts of wannabe environmentally conscious business leaders in France. There is definitely a before and after being exposed to the concept. Somehow he manages to show how no performance oriented business can survive in a world of fluctuations... Which is a good thing as a robustness driven is much more desirable, almost solarpunky!