There is a lot to be said for the inevitability of a complex system’s collapse, starting from the second law of thermodynamics, going through the costs of rising complexity usually purchased at the expense of system stability, and ending with the crucial point where a system’s capacity to adapt to a changing environment fizzles out precisely because of the need for stability. This inevitability seems to hold true for all kinds of complex systems, from bio-ecologies, to organizational models and societies. Couple of fascinating posts on this:
In his The Collapse of Complex Business Models, Clay Shirky makes an interesting argument on the future of the current business model of media production. Basing on Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, and using as an example TV companies, Shirky argues that the active participants of complex systems are at the end simply unable to integrate a new rule-set into the complex structure of the system, therefore causing the at first paradoxical situation where ‘the most powerful/connected/etc’ are the least capable of innovating to survive. As a media company how do you compete with content such as Charlie bit my finger when your content production costs are astronomical by comparison, and you cannot afford to lower them if you want to remain in existence as an organisation? The answer is – you can’t. Which comes a long way in explaining Murdoch’s desperate attempts to shore up the defenses and patch up the walls of his crumbling empire.
John Robb’s The Simplification of Complex Societies takes that argument to the complexity of the present global society, and unsurprisingly concludes that collapse is imminent, albeit with the caveat that there is a way out, as pointed by China’s successful transition from Maoist barbarity by allowing totally unregulated innovation at its societal periphery (arguably the largest and most successful peasant revolution in human history). While predicting the imminent collapse of capitalism is a hobby century-and-a-half old, there is a lot to be said about the growing layers of complexity involved in international governance, financial and otherwise. Plenty to ponder.
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