What Happens When the Machines Stop? Uncovering the Risk of Digital Fragility as the Achilles’ Heel of the Digital Transformation of Societies

Abstract

The digital transformation of societies has been a core concern for the information systems (IS) research community since its emergence. While most of this work has had a positive outlook, recently a stronger focus on the unintended consequences and dark side of digitalization has come to the fore. This paper contributes to this emerging stream of research by zooming in on a heretofore unrecognized question with potentially catastrophic consequences: What happens to our increasingly digitalized societies when a pro-longed blackout causes a large fraction of digital systems and services to stop working for an extended period of time? To answer this motivating question, we conducted two system dynamics-based simulation experiments to tease out how different degrees of digitalization in a society would affect the resilience of the food system in the face of two different, extreme but plausible prolonged blackout scenarios. We find that a high degree of digitalization has a strong significant negative impact on food system resilience in the investigated scenarios. In the discussion of our findings, we conceptualize “the risk of digital fragility” as the underlying driver of the observed results. Moving forward, we suggest seven mitigation strategies for the risk of digital fragility as fruitful avenues for future research.