VIEW 1
The murmuration of the starlings
The original 35 Views of Cyber Risk was published by AXIS in 2019, the title inspired by the series of ukiyo-e prints by Hokusai, which showed many different snapshots of daily life in Japan (including the famous wave) unified through a background image of Mount Fuji. Hokusai was making the point that understanding the essence of Japan requires approaching it obliquely, not directly.
Viewing from many different angles gives a collage of perspectives on what you eventually understand to be the same thing. His series was called 36 Views of Mt Fuji. Our views of cyber risk comprised a set of only 35, one less than 36, in due deference to the master.
The sequel is called The Murmuration of the Starlings. As with the original, it is a collection of different viewpoints of the same object but with a new underlying metaphor. In a few cases, we have reframed some of the original views but the rest of the content is new. We take as our inspiration a flock of starlings on a warm autumn evening. As the birds group together in the darkening sky, the patterns they make coalesce and fragment unexpectedly. It is jittery, unstable, and hard to predict. Driven by the freedom of the individual, it is still bound into a loose unity of purpose—just like consumer trends in the modern economy.
The complexity of this behavior is created by three simple rules: go in the same direction as the group, don’t bump into anyone, and try to get to the middle.
The inherent instability comes from the balance of two opposing forces. There is the push of trying to be different and the pull of trying to belong. The starlings’ behavior has been sculpted by the historic effects of predatory attacks. Stragglers get picked off, so the best strategy is “try to be different, but not too different”. This is also good advice for a cyber security posture.
A murmuration of starlings exists in the liminal zone between group and individual. Is it a single entity or a collection of separate parts? In a paradoxical way, a murmuration is more coherent because it is fractured. It is more clearly together than if it was a monolithic whole, because the connectivity is always being reinforced by movement. This duality of group versus individual is fundamental to the understanding of cyber risk.
In all lines of insurance, we have threats—but in cyber we have threat actors. That second word pulls us out of the realm of physics into that of biology and the social sciences like psychology and behavioral economics. That’s why all the analogies in this book are drawn from biology. Living organisms give us a better lens than inanimate matter when contemplating cyber risk.
It is not intended that you start at the beginning of this book and read through it sequentially. Instead, flip the pages and let your eyes focus at random on the different elements which catch your attention—just like a murmuration of starlings.
