means, at some point, picking up one thread will pick up all the buttons, because everything has become connected.
Kauffman saw this emergence of a single structured entity as a metaphor for the evolution of life. But we can equally view it through a cyber lens as the mechanism behind the emergence of systemic risk. The key question is, when does this point happen?
The answer is when the ratio of buttons to threads is 0.5, in other words, very soon after 10 threads have been added to the 20 buttons. More importantly, it happens very suddenly, in a step function change. One moment you are picking up a few buttons, the next moment you are picking up the whole thing.
This sudden change—the catataxic shift — marks the point that you can no longer view the system as a set of independent elements.