The Art of Shipwrecking: The Information Society and the Rise of Exaptive Resilience

We argue that the epistemological, ontological, locality and social structure of the world have undergone radical changes over the last decades. The greatest riddle of the information age is whether we can domesticate the “unstable chaos” to “productive anarchy.” We argue that this results in the appreciation of the creative use of the “we do not know that we know” type of knowledge that we conceptualize as exaptive resilience. We briefly clarify the difference between exaptation and adaptation, and we compare the concept of adaptive resilience with that of exaptive resilience. Our results will show that the effectiveness of complex systems in the information age depends on the capacity of adaptive and exaptive resilience.