A bad sector is a region of storage media that can no longer store data reliably. Some are “soft” — caused by repairable logical errors. Some are “hard” — rooted in irreparable physical damage. A storage drive has to avoid and detour around its bad sectors until too many accumulate. This makes bad sectors a good symbol for “bad neighbourhoods” and their effects in many different social and technical systems.

Rerouting around bad sectors is the cheap move, and it works. Your storage drive marks the bad region unusable and writes elsewhere. Nothing appears to break. No notification comes to you. The disk goes on reporting itself healthy, but if the damage goes on spreading, eventually the drive has to be replaced, or everything that’s stored on it will be lost.

That is the failure mode this blog is about — in software, in institutions, in cities. Not the dramatic crash, but the orderly, well-managed routing-around that lets a problem go unfixed, probably for a long time. Maybe too long and too late to correct for when it counts. Avoidance can be a good way to cope for a while, but at some point, especially if there’s no warning indicator, it’s a dangerous form of denial if the problem is growing.

Modern solid-state drives work by embracing the inevitable process of decay, but the principle holds — when the bad blocks start to dominate, it’s time to leave the neighbourhood. You’ll have to dump e-cycle that drive. Of course, abandonment or disposal are not good or even possible options in many systems, especially human ones. Sometimes repair, renewal, rebuilding, or recycling are possible and the better path. Often, a proactive maintenance effort will keep things in adequate (if not perfect) working order.

Everything’s Connected.

In The World Is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman made the somewhat obvious point that a globalized, networked, or “flat” world is so interconnected that everything in it affects everything else, including the “bad sectors” that the flow of people and goods route around, if they can. Eventually that won’t be possible anymore:

…because in a flat world, if you don’t visit a bad neighborhood, it might visit you.

Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat (2005), concluding chapter

The line at the top of this site is a popular, loose adaptation of Friedman and far more certain than he was, back in 2005. Twenty-plus years later, his hesitation seems almost short-sighted.

Friedman’s point was about being a good global citizen in the more “developed” (and supposedly privileged) parts of the world that can choose and afford to ignore or avoid the unstable areas. Today we often hear references to a “rules-based international order” with a backward-looking nostalgia. Too much ignoring feeds instability that eventually reaches places where high-functioning systems marked by trust and security have been taken for granted. Today that message feels not only obvious but maybe too late.

Denial is not a Solution.

I’m not a fan of Friedman; I’ve read little of his writing beyond the occasional New York Times column in the 2000s, but he was right about this. It is the old proverb about chickens coming home to roost — Robert Southey put it in its modern form in 1810: “Curses are like young chickens, they always come home to roost.” Malcolm X gave it its sharpest and probably most infamous historical use in December 1963, in reaction to the Kennedy assassination.

I like “what comes around, goes around” as a general principle about cities, urban neighbourhoods, and really all systems — and I like the attitude of welcoming the things that have been excluded and may be difficult to confront as problems, because there are no obvious or easy solutions for them.

Everything is somewhere between “Bad” and “Good.”

In bigger cities, I prefer the mixed and in-between areas where no one is quite sure whether things are going up or down: the places outsiders reflexively lump in with all the perceived “bad neighbourhoods.” Those are always the most interesting and vital communities, the ones where small changes often have great impact, for good and ill. They’re places of predation and opportunity for slumlords, gentrifiers, artists, musicians, and dropouts. There are always interesting people in them, and many of those people are often trying to make their neighbourhood better without any illusions about the difficulty.

When problems are flushed out, clear and undeniable, you have to deal with them — far better than staying stuck and pretending things work well enough when they don’t. Inside successful institutions, established systems, and “good” neighbourhoods, the rot is hard to name. Not hard to see, if you look — just hard to say out loud, and harder still to get anyone to act on.

Negative Feedback is Good for Durable Systems.

The feedback that isn’t taken, the warning that goes ignored, the maintenance deferred one more quarter, the failure swept quietly under the rug: these are chronic mistakes wherever a peak has been reached, and nobody wants to admit that things can only slide from there.

That kind of inattention is peculiar to human systems, from software to societies. We are not proactive about security, maintenance, or anything else that gets filed under “technical debt.” (Or simply “debt.”)