Socioplastics 11824 When Endurance Hides Its Cost
A system may continue operating because people absorb costs that its official measures leave unrecorded. ResilienceMisreading identifies the gap between observable endurance and a conclusion of institutional success. During an infrastructure disruption, a city may report uninterrupted services while workers complete double shifts, residents store water at home and clinics postpone treatment. The network continues; its performance depends on burdens distributed beyond its indicator. W. Ross Ashby’s cybernetics examines regulation and adaptation. Margaret Mead’s work on learning and systems supports attention to collective change, while Lauren Berlant analyses attachments formed under compromised conditions. Their approaches help ask what a system adapts to and whose labour sustains that adjustment. Resilience can describe a valuable capacity; an account of resilience becomes more informative when it documents the work and costs through which continuity is achieved. An endurance audit could compare a public claim of resilience with staffing records, deferred repairs, household adaptations and service interruptions. The study would identify who carried extra work, which needs were postponed and what resources would reduce future burdens. People affected by the disruption could review the evidence and shape recommendations for investment and maintenance. ResilienceMisreading gives institutions a method for evaluating adaptive capacity through both outcomes and the conditions that produced them. It links public recognition of endurance with decisions about repair, resources and responsibility. The audit can help distinguish a system that learns from pressure from one that depends on unacknowledged sacrifice. The audit could include the time needed to return to ordinary service and the resources allocated to prevent the same disruption.
REFERENCES
Ashby, W.R. (1956) An Introduction to Cybernetics. London: Chapman & Hall.
Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Mead, M. (1968) ‘The Cybernetics of Cybernetics’, in von Foerster, H. et al. (eds) Purposive Systems. New York: Spartan Books.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html