THE SIMPLIFICATION OF COMPLEX SOCIETIES
If your interested in a very smart perspective on system collapse, please go read the anthropologist Joseph Tainter’s book, “The Collapse of Complex Societies” (I’ve been a big fan of his work for ages). In the book, he makes the compelling case that complex societies are, at root, very successful problem solving systems. If they weren’t, they would never have become complex in the first place. Why? Societies solve challenges by creating new rules and processes (new complexity) that are then added on to the existing system ad infinitum. More successful outcomes = more complexity.However, as noted above, problem solving comes at a cost. Each solution leaves a residue, a layer of complexity that never goes away (laws, taxes, monopolies, treaties, etc.). It builds up over time and saps the social system’s flexibility and efficiency. Eventually, ever new layer of complexity extracts more in costs than it provides in benefit (solution). At that point, according to Tainter’s analysis of ancient civilizations, the complex society collapses.
So, the question always is, why don’t these societies simplify themselves? The problem is they can’t. The techpundit Clay Shirky words this eloquently in a recent post on Tainter’s work called, “The Collapse of Complex Business Models”:
In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change. Tainter doesn’t regard the sudden de-coherence of these societies as either a tragedy or a mistake—”[U]nder a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response”, to use his pitiless phrase. Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites. When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment where it becomes suddenly and dramatically simpler, which is to say right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last remaining method of simplification.
If this is true, then the question for all of us is: is our global society an interlocking nightmare of complexity on the verge of trying to solve one crisis too many? I believe it is. When is the last time that anything big got done without more negatives, tradeoffs, corruption, or unintended consequences than it was worth?
However, there may be another away around this trap. A clue to how this is possible may be found in a recent example of a successful transition from one complex system for another. That’s the transition of China from a decrepit Communist system into a fast growing Capitalist system. It did this by growing an alternative at the periphery of the dying system, and those attempts at free enterprise grew a set of problem solving methods so quickly they are now dominant. In contrast, Russia and much of eastern Europe attempted wholesale change and emerged criminally deformed.
Of course, there are caveats to this example. China did have a model that they could copy (the US and the global market system) and a way to integrate with that larger system as their efforts grew. These efforts also had state sanction. Regardless, it does indicate that it is indeed possible to radically remake a complex society from seemingly simple bottom up efforts.*
My belief is that networked resilient communities can replicate this strategy by growing at the periphery. Given their potential for rapid problem solving, at nearly costless levels of complexity, it may be a short transition.
* However, hilariously, with this success China only jumped out of the fire and into the frying pan.
Archive for the ‘FLOWS’ Category
Each solution leaves a residue…
U.S. teens lose interest in blogging: study
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Blogging by teenagers and young adults has dropped by half over the past three years as they turn instead to texting and social networking sites such as Facebook, a new study shows.
The study released this week by the Pew Internet and American Life project also found that fewer than one in 10 teens were using Twitter, a surprising finding given overall popularity of the micro-blogging site.
According to the report, only 14 percent of teenagers who use the Internet say they kept an online journal or blog, compared with a peak of 28 percent in 2006 — and only 8 percent were using Twitter.
“It was a little bit surprising, although there are definitely explanations given the state of the technological landscape,” Pew researcher Aaron Smith told Reuters.
Smith said the report’s authors attributed the decline in blogging to the explosion of social networking sites such as Facebook, which emphasize short status updates over personal journals.
According to the study, 73 percent of teens who were online used social networking sites.
He also cited the ubiquity of cell phones. Much of the communication between young people now takes place on mobile devices, which don’t lend themselves to long-form writing.
via Reuters
Google, NSA to team up in cyberattack probe
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Internet search firm Google is finalizing a deal that would let the National Security Agency help it investigate a corporate espionage attack that may have originated in China, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.
The aim of the investigation is to better defend Google, the world’s largest Internet search company, and its users from future attacks, the Post said, citing anonymous sources with knowledge of the arrangement.
The sources said Google’s alliance with the NSA — the intelligence agency is the world’s most powerful electronic surveillance organization — would be aimed at letting them share critical information without violating Google’s policies or laws that protect the privacy of online communications.
via Reuters
‘Collaborative Futures’ Book Sprint
‘Collaborative Futures‘ is transmediale’s third ‘parcours’ publication. The book is the beginning of an open and expanding critical discussion on what collaborative methodologies within digital culture are, should or could be about …
Xerography – every man’s brainpicker – heralds the times of instant publishing. Anybody can now become both author and publisher. Take any books on any subject and custom-make your own book by simply xeroxing a chapter from this one, a chapter from that one – instant steal!
As new technologies come into play, people become less and less convinced of the importance of self expression. Teamwork succeeds private effort.
Marshall McLuhan, 1967This book was written in a collaborative Book Sprint by six core authors over a five-day period in January 2010. It was developed under the aegis of transmediale, and executed by FLOSS Manuals. The six starting authors each come from different perspectives, as are the contributors who were adding to this living body of text.
As we began the collaborative process of crafting this book on the future of collaboration, we realized we were all working from a set of assumptions, many of them shared, some of them divergent. We were talking about a specific form of collaboration, specific media of collaboration, and specific goals of collaboration. And we were talking about a specific history of collaboration, and a correspondingly specific set of futures.
To begin looking at those futures, we look back to others who have looked into the future. Marshall McLuhan’s quote above, from “The Medium is the MESSAGE” give us our first clue about all of these assumptions we are making. We are talking about media, we are talking about freedom, we are talking about technologies, and we are talking about culture. McLuhan’s prophetic utterance, several decades before the photocopier fueled the punk cut-up design aesthetic, or the profusion of home-brew zines, is still a prophecy unmet. We are still chasing it. Mainstream culture continues to consolidate around block buster films, books, and music. Copyright restrictions make it harder and harder to exercise the creative power of these reproduction tools without breaking increasingly restrictive intellectual property rights laws. But one thing is unanimously true: “Teamwork succeeds private effort.”
This is no new thing. Teamwork has succeeded private effort for as long as man was hunting and gathering food, organizing and creating culture through tribal associations, common languages, defending themselves against enemies, organizing and centralizing religions, transforming power from the tribal to the city-state to the nation-state, waging large scale warfare, building an Atomic Bomb, etc.
Teamwork is nothing new, nor is it necessarily benevolent. The key assumptions we are making in this text are that we are talking about new technologies, that technology is not necessarily computers, that digital media makes it easier to collaborate across distance, but that it also makes barriers to collaboration more apparent. We are focused on collaboration that shares similar progressive social goals. We also see a potential threshold between teamwork and collaboration, and between sharing and collaboration.
We are focused on new technologies, and in particular digital technologies. We are interested in new forms of social organization through online networks. We are excited by the possibility of digital technology to bridge distances: we had collaborators writing this book with us from many corners of the world. The proliferation of communication networks allows this, as does the invention of new tools for collaboration.
But we are quick to realize that the removal of distance makes other barriers more apparent. Distance has been the greatest impediment to collaboration; in its removal other barriers quickly rise to the fore: language, culture, politics, education, etc.
Likewise, the core of this collaboration was taking place not in cyberspace, but in meatspace. We were there, in a room in Berlin for five very intense days of brainstorming, discussion, argument, and mostly… writing. The sound of tapping keyboards filled the room. Likewise, some of the most important developments in collaboration are the opportunities for meatspace meetings that would have been much more difficult prior to the advent of social networking software. From the Howard Dean US presidential campaign, to MeetUp, to Unconferences, to even the wrongheaded right wing Tea Party demonstrations protesting universal healthcare in the U.S.A (which are, it should be mentioned, heavily sponsored by the conservative Fox News network), to even the increasing prevalence of relationships started through online dating sites, some of the most important collaborative developments that this new technology has created are taking place offline.
While we are not interested in building Atomic Bombs, we are interested in finding the Higgs Boson. The presence of collaboration is not “good” in and of itself. Science provides a particularly stark example that highlights the importance of openness. There are military employed scientists who are using teamwork to develop more and more lethal weapons. They do this in secret: under security clearances that keep certain people out, their work is classified and never published, and their work is therefore anonymous. They do not share, and they do not own their work. Contrast this with the policies set forth at CERN, the nuclear physics research facility that just powered up the Large Hadron Collider to search for the elusive Higgs Boson. At CERN all work is published for the community of science. Every publication automatically is attributed to every scientist working at the facility, even if he or she was on vacation at the time the discovery was made, because the nature of the enterprise is so inherently collaborative over such a long term: the Large Hadron Collider project was started in 1984, and only made its initial runs at the end of 2009.
These were our assumptions as we began writing this book. This was our baseline from which we hoped to expand. The collaborations we are looking at involve new technologies, but we are interested in their offline results. This technology breaks down certain boundaries, but highlights others. And while this process can be used for a wide range of goals, the goals we are interested in are goals that are rather utopian: the increase of freedom of expression, the equality of authorship across group work, and the advancement of free culture.
via Booki.cc
Sustainable Cities
Five Innovations that Will Change Cities in the Next Five Years.
via Ninja Marketing
