Tag: complexity

The Elephant Rope Protocol

Ted

December 18, 2025

There is a story, or perhaps not a story, but a parable that has metastasized through the motivational slopstream. It goes like this. A man walks through a field in India and sees a herd of giant elephants standing docilely, each tied to a small stake with a single thin, frayed rope.

“Why don’t they break free?” he asks an old villager sitting nearby.

“When they were small, we tied them with this exact rope,” the villager replies, smiling. “They struggled, but couldn’t break free.”

“Now, they’ve given up. They’re convinced it’s pointless,” he adds.

The pop reading of the story ends with self-liberation on a monthly installment plan. Maybe a little yoga is added to lubricate the transaction. Visualize freedom! Break your chains! Unleash your potential! Chataranga! Breathe!

But the trap is not in the rope or your lack of self-belief.

A Sacrifice

The young elephant tugs. Once. Twice. A thousand times. The rope does not yield. And so the elephant learns the shape of its prison. It adjusts to the contours of the possible and stops pulling. The trap is shut.

The young elephant’s world is a phase space, a map of all possible states. Initially, the free and untethered state is a point in that space. Each failed tug reinforces a basin of attraction around the tethered state, deepening it until it becomes a black hole from which no behavior can escape. A new geometry of elephant becoming, a coherent 9-to-5 gig.

This is why effort often accelerates entrapment. “Work hard” is often a curse in the perverse thermodynamics of doomed systems. Additional energy input does not alter the state, but merely deepens the grooves of the existing basin of attraction. Perversely, the system’s struggle works for the rope in a ritual sacrifice of kinetic energy to the god of path dependency.

“Try harder” is the rope’s most ingenious command. With each hard pull, the rope becomes a topological deformity in the elephant’s reality. It hardens into a cosmic fact, becoming an axiom of external conditions. By the time the elephant is mature, the true constraint is metaphysical.

The rope becomes a script etched into schema by ritual repetition. It evolves from a boundary of will to a sacrament of failure, and from there to a condition of the real. And it gets worse. The elephant watches as other elephants also fail to free themselves. It internalizes their failures too, in a strange loop of failure.

Once the script is internalized, the rope becomes a symbiont, an essential part of the elephant’s identity. The system co-evolves with its constraint. The elephant develops muscles suited to swaying and builds a psychology of patience rather than revolt. The constraint is now necessary for the system’s coherence. To remove it is to kill the elephant-as-is. The rope is now a vital organ.

When this process is complete, the system stops carrying the rope. It carries the belief of it, more real than reality itself. The repetition of this metaphysical enclosure sculpts the real. Which, as an aside, is why metaphysics is never taught in school. You might see the ropes.

A Haunting

All systems are ghost stories. Minds, institutions, and civilizations all fossilize into their own rituals of constraint. Small decisions ossify, cell by cell, into landscape. Your deviant impulse crystallizes into a habit. Before you know it, the habit accretes into infrastructure. And infrastructure, well, it inherits itself until we start calling it Fate. The first step off the beaten path is heresy. Ten thousand steps, and you have a new highway. A million steps is a civilization of ossified choices.

The young elephant’s resistance is path-dependent. Each attempt follows the same vector of linear effort against a nonlinear prison. The elephant applies force linearly because it’s the obvious thing to do. This is the tragedy of reformism, therapy culture, and incrementalism. They all assume proportional response, but complex environments punish incremental thinking.

Each failed rope pull activates a double-bind feedback loop: the physical resistance confirms the belief, the belief stifles future testing, and the lack of testing sanctifies the belief. The loop closes, fuses, and becomes an Ouroboros of constraint, digesting its own tail until only the digested shape of the belief remains.

Once in place, systems enforce path dependency through a relentless drive for internal coherence, the eternal return of the ontology of an HR training module. Every new rule, norm, or ritual must be made consistent with the old rope-logic. Inconsistencies like the thought of freedom are systematically rejected until they become incomprehensible. The system’s immune system attacks them as metaphysical pathogens.

The violence of coherence. The system’s drive for internal consistency hunts down the ghostly memory of freedom as cognitive dissonance and exterminates it. Heretical thoughts are labeled unrealistic, “not how we do things here,” and burned at the stake of practicality.

The drive to coherence only increases with scale. The larger and more complex the system, the more violently it rejects deviation, because any coherence debt becomes existential. Large complex systems cannot afford novelty. This is why all empires rot, while startups mutate and sometimes survive.

Over time, the elephant has not only normalized the rope, but any alternatives to it have been explained away as unthinkable deviations. The system no longer recognizes the state of being untethered as a valid alternative. Being free is incoherent.

Most systems do not evolve. They congeal. Over time, they develop patterns, norms, and assumptions. Little orthodoxies. Every innocent routine a scaffold for the next. These slowly petrify into a liturgy of the inevitable, until any deviation is unthinkable. Sure, the system might pretend otherwise. The corporate campus might be carefully crafted to resemble the work, health, and safety committee’s fantasy of what a teen-nerd playground might look like. It matters not.

The rope persists as a ghost story, a memory etched into the system’s protocols. The institution, the mind, the civilization, is haunted by the phantom sensation of a constraint that may no longer physically exist. It performs rituals to appease the ghost and avoids actions that would offend it. The past haunts the present, dictating behavior from the grave of dead possibilities.

There is more. What if, by accident, the elephant were to free itself? The system is now untethered. But even if the rope were removed, the system does not return to its prior state. The elephant would still stand there, entirely in thrall to its past states. The curse of hysteresis. The memory of deformation, and the mockery of redemption. Hysteresis means that even a successful escape carries the phase space deformation forward, shaping future action. This is why, after each burning Bastille, there comes a Napoleon.

The material rope can rot away, but the black hole in phase space remains. Suddenly freed from the rope, the system staggers into a new, vast, and terrifying attractor state of catatonic liberty. The elephant stands in an open field, untethered and paralyzed, muscles atrophied for swaying, mind wired for the comforting strain of the rope. Freedom, when it finally comes, is unrecognizable. Like falling upwards into a terrifying abyss of meaningless possibility.

A Gnosis

Nabokov once said – was it in Pale Fire? – that “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common people don’t want to know that.”

The same applies to minds, systems, and civilizations. Most of their lives are badly written novels, ghost-authored by internalized trauma and repetition above the ever-present abyss. The trap is the syntax you wrap around the event. The three sacred dogmas.

The Dogma of Repetition

That history is an asymptote. A machine of discrete trials inching towards nothing. A lobotomized god throwing dice into the void for eternity. That after each throw, the trials reset. That failures can teach.

But the universe is non-ergodic. Some errors are terminal. Complex systems do not forgive early miscalibration but amplify it. Some ropes, once learned, are never questioned again. That applies to childhood, institutions, states, and civilizations. The elephant does not get to re-tug the rope at thirty. Systems do not get to rewind to their birth.

An ergodic system allows you to average over time; it lets you flip a coin and then flip it again. A non-ergodic system is one where you get one, maybe two, real shots before the probability space collapses forever. The elephant’s childhood is a non-ergodic process. A system that congeals is one that has exited the ergodic realm. Its history, its stabilized attractor basin, becomes its only possible future. This is why regret is a rational emotion in non-ergodic systems. There is no sampling of alternative states across time. There is only this time, this rope, forever.

The Dogma of Determinism

The vulgar mechanistic hallucination that past causes dictate future effects. That systems are Newtonian. Predictable, measurable, and reducible to first causes. That the world is Laplace’s clock. Wound, sealed, and sealed again. Oh, the dream of rewinding the clock.

But complexity is not additive. It is emergent and alchemical. Its ghost leaks between the gears. The map is not the territory, and the territory is always flooded, and always on fire.

Determinism naively sees the future as a mechanism fixed by the gears of the past. Path dependence sees the future as constrained by what has already been destroyed. Determinism is about causation. Path dependence is about absence. Determinism chains you to a single future. Path dependence chains you to the narrowing corridor of all your past surrenders. And chaos? If you’re lucky, it lets you move along a probability distribution of attractors, strung along like salted watering holes in an infinite desert.

Contra Laplace, this is not a clockwork universe but a slot machine where the house always wins, and you can never learn the rules.

The Dogma of Analysis

The beloved hallucination of academia. The critical gaze. The narcissistic delusion that by dissecting a system into synthetically discrete components, one can derive a predictive formula of its becoming. That to randomly spray-paint DOWN WITH POWER with a crude stencil is to defeat any system.

But the more you dissect, the less you grasp. The clean analysis of the critical gazers fails because it treats systems as decomposable when their causal power emerges from networks of relations, feedback, and timing. In other words, analysis removes the very thing that does the work. The system seems to be the clock parts, neatly strewn across the table by the analyst-deconstructor, but it is not. It is the ghost in the machine, the thing that should not be.

The Apostasy of Action

There is another elephant. One that sheds before the rope coagulates into capture. An anti-elephant, if you will. It has no center, no sacred rope. It survives by making a sacrament of uncertainty. Its core axiom is “This is probably wrong.”

The anti-elephant is a systemic heretic. It understands that survival is fidelity to the rate of change. Its core process is controlled shedding. It is a snake that sheds its skin before it can harden into a sarcophagus.

Some systems encode autonomy in their marrow. Von Moltke’s principle of auftragstaktik does not rope you to a path. You are given the end, and the method is yours to conjure. It is an antidote to the trap, a system that trains for deviation, not path dependency.

There are other ways too. Shifting forms that stable systems mistake for cancer. The forced mutation of biology under existential stress; the shadow economies that flourish in the cracks of over-optimized empires; the strange architecture of Kowloon Walled City; the pirate/guerrilla network, a ghost with a thousand temporary heads. These are systems that propagate in a perpetual, unsanctioned becoming.

Prigogine was right. Entropy is the only true attractor. The only honest god. The destroyer of structure and the possibility creator.

Stability is death in drag.

In deterministic chaos, systems are exquisitely sensitive to initial conditions. Early in a system’s life, it exists in a modality where small perturbations can radically alter outcomes. The elephant’s first tugs were in a chaotic regime, where any slight difference in angle, timing, or fury could have broken the stake. This is the system’s Lyapunov horizon.

This horizon defines how far into the future perturbations matter. Training, habit, and optimisation shorten that horizon until the future becomes predictable and dead. Ironically, learning and optimization reduce chaos by damping sensitivity, therefore sanding away all the edges that could someday cut a new rope. This stabilization feels like progress, but is actually the elimination of alternative futures. The world is flattened from a chaotic, responsive landscape into a path-dependent frieze.

Learning is often the process by which systems murder their own sensitivity. The elephant-as-system is first trained into the limit cycle of docile swaying with the rope, and then into a fixed point of catatonic acceptance. The “way out” requires re-injecting chaos, a perturbation so fundamental it shatters the attractor. Not a pull, but a deliberate embrace of incoherence, a love letter to the abyss. A destruction of identity, legibility, and trust.

Systems that worship their ropes suffocate in their own inertia. Those few that survive do so by burning themselves and sacramentally destroying their assumptions. State destruction instead of reversal. Liberation from the Elephant Rope Protocol is a constant mutation; a ritual immolation of axioms. Very few elephants ever walk away. Most systems die still worshipping the rope.

As Pelevin would say, elephants are a dream dreamt by ropes.

The Art of Hiding Pebbles

Ted

January 8, 2025

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The Art of Hiding Pebbles (Juggernaut XL v8)

Here’s how hope dies: first as a promise and then as a compliance report. A reformer gets elected to fix a nation’s broken system. Vox populi vox dei and all that. Change you can believe in! Once “in power,” the reformer discovers the throne is mostly theatre. The new team’s earnest efforts drown in bureaucracy – endless task groups and committees, piling plans and proposals, all eager to help, yet nothing moves. The old state machine grinds on, indifferent. An invisible windowpane somehow stops positive change from happening, as if a shadowy system existed beyond and beneath the visible levers of power. The result? Not reform, but more of the same – only heavier, slower, worse. We promised less of x and more of y; we delivered x+2=y. You know the story. Many such cases.

After a while, if you’re of the noticer persuasion, you start noticing this fascinating paradox repeating itself, and you start wondering. Is there some system you’re missing in all of this? Some complex machine hidden deep in the edifice of government. Suppose you assume this obscure, shadowy system is somewhere there, blocking reform. Where do you begin looking for it? The default route is to ask the experts. They will surely know. But, you say, the experts live in an echo chamber of faulty assumptions, longstanding biases, and manipulated data. Science denier, are you anon?

Alternatively, you could work from first principles. The deductive option is to disassemble the obscure system into its components and figure out their functionality and role in the larger whole. As much as you’d like deconstructing things, it would not do, as you don’t have access to the obscure system apart from your observation and pattern recognition skills. Induction, then. You can infer the system’s purpose and general functionality from observing its impacts. Watch the shadows it casts, the ripples in reality.

Sometimes, this would be enough. But, as we discussed in The Naked King Spell, the purpose of a system is what it does. Therefore, if a system seeks to hide, it must first hide its true actions – its purpose leaks through them. In other words, what if this system wears a mask? Determining what a system is actually doing can often be challenging, particularly if it obfuscates its operations to appear as something else entirely. The system might purposely generate synthetic shadows to convince you these are not the droids you seek. Again, many such cases.

You can overcome this problem by focusing on the other end of the equation and examining how the system feeds itself, that is, on its energy source. A system’s energy source determines its internal structure and interactions with the external environment. Obscuring actions is relatively easy – muddy the waters and the trail vanishes. Hiding the energy source is more complicated because it must, by definition, exist outside the system, leaving a trace as it interfaces with the system’s logistics.

For example, if you’re observing a system that gets its energy from livestock – say, cattle – that system will likely have organized itself for optimal control over the pastoral lifecycle. It cannot be otherwise because cattle is that system’s most precious resource. You can then safely deduce you’re dealing with a pastoral nomad society with all the cultural, economic, and political implications that follow.

Similarly, a system that gets its energy from agriculture will organize and act differently from a system feeding itself on industrial production. An agricultural society’s most precious resource is land, and it would, therefore, organize the entirety of its cultural, economic, and political protocols around control over the lifecycle of land. Not so for an industrial society, which has to organize itself around the capitalization, production, distribution and consumption of assembly line output at scale.

Alternatively, suppose the primary energy source of a system comes from government subsidies or government agency contracts. In that case, that system will structure itself to control and maximize energy input from the government acting as its energy source. Now consider a mafia network fed by racketeering and drugs. This system will optimize itself to control territorial monopolies and manipulate fear and loyalty among its operators and victims. Its routines will revolve around securing supply chains, silencing threats, and evading law enforcement – every action aligned with sustaining its energy source.

A system’s source of energy reveals its structure and goals. Cattle? You’ve got nomadic Männerbünde. Land? Farmers and feudalism. Factories? Assembly line labor, capital accumulation, and consumerism. State subsidies? Extension of parasitic bureaucracy. Racketeering and drugs? Mafia.

You don’t need to trace how the system spends all its energy; you only need to understand its energy source. A system’s energy source reveals its objectives and operational methods, what it wants to control, and what it has to affect in its environment. Therefore, identifying a system’s primary energy source allows you to determine the vector along which it aims to control its environment. This, in turn, will allow you to understand what the system actually does.

Energy defines purpose. Purpose defines control. Control defines action.

Power

In simple systems – a warband, for instance – power is acclamation. An Achilles, Agamemnon, or Odysseus rises as chief. His power is a function of the warband’s will, performed continuously by its actions. Imagine the warband as a network of actors whose agency is necessary for generating and performing that power. Various technologies are also part of the network performing it. When the warband tames horses or invents the chariot – as an anon Sintashta warband once did – they dramatically extend the scale of its raids. The warband now extracts tribute from a vast area, and the chieftain’s wealth grows; people now say that his power has grown to extend over the vast tribute area.

In systems, power is not force. Confusing the two is a common mistake. Force is the applied effect of power, not its cause. Take the warband chief: his power isn’t in breaking skulls but in the band acting as though his word breaks skulls. Imagine the anon Sintashta band that invented chariots. Its chief’s power wasn’t in the chariots and their speed – these are just the vectors along which his power is applied as a force. His power is in the raiders, blacksmiths, horses, and chariots aligned as a network applying force against the farmers who must pay tribute. And yes, as long as the farmers pay their tribute, they also perform the network of power.

The chief’s power has always been an afterglow of the warband’s (the network’s) dynamic performance of a specific set of routines across the scale of the network’s surface. The more intricate, complex, and synchronized these routines, the more pervasive and stable the power seems. When the warband stops performing it, the chief loses his power. A new chief is elected and now sits in his place. What happened to the old chief’s power? It seemed so vast and impressive when he wielded it. How did it disappear? These are the wrong questions to ask, as the power never resided with a specific chief in the first place.

Power is a network phenomenon – an effect of the warband’s routines, maneuvers, and alignment. To understand the power, you must understand the dynamics of the network that generates it. From the network’s perspective, what we perceive as power is a function of a series of maneuvers and mundane routines enacted by the network’s actors. The phenomenon we call power is the effect of that consistent and ongoing performance, not its cause. Yet, we commonly attribute to it causal properties. When the warband network is aligned perfectly, we say its chief has power. One can even observe how that power is wielded, generating the impression of causality. The chief issues an order, and it is executed. Someone, somewhere, experiences the force of the chief’s power and has to either resist or yield to it.

The warband may grow to tens of thousands of warriors, making us marvel at the power of its chieftain. Perhaps now he is dressed in royal garments, wields a scepter, and wears a crown. Surely, the crown and scepter are where the power resides. After all, when the chieftain dies, we put the crown on the new chief; long live the chief!

But then, drop this “powerful” chief into enemy territory with his crown and scepter. What is he now? A victim in funny clothes. Like Delaroche’s painting of Napoleon at St. Helena, the ruler of Europe reduced to a sad man in an out-of-place uniform, forlorn on an ocean rock. How confusing when the mighty fall. Wasn’t he powerful?

Paul Delaroche, *Napoleon at St Helena*, 1855 (fragment)

The confusion is in the causative flow of agency – the chief never had power; rather, power had him. It seems counterintuitive that the seemingly causative source of power is, in fact, the effect of a long chain of relations that have to be continuously aligned, upheld, and performed. Power is the effect of that long network chain performing it, not the cause.

As an aside, this is why oppressive states love atomized individuals and fear and suppress independent networks – the latter can exercise power, while the former cannot. Contrary to appearances, individualism is a totalitarian state’s favorite ideology for the masses. Yes, anon, be all you can be, but don’t think about organizing a sovereign männerbund, church, commune, labor union, religion, or militia. Those are all bad for you. Your extended family and clan are bad for you as well – they oppress you, you see. Be yourself, be free! So much freedom is to be had when you abandon all these tools of oppression! Anyways.

The network-generated power principle scales in complex systems. The modern state operates no differently with its labyrinth of systems and routines. Here, too, power flows from the network of bureaucrats, filing protocols, intranet switches, three-letter agencies, drab brutalist buildings, and countless alignment subroutines. These actors perform state power, weaving it from mundane interactions and alignments. Networks within networks, actors upon actors, an ephemeral field guiding the visible hand. Do you understand the reformer’s confusion?

In a warband, the power-generating network is pretty clear – warriors, raids, tribute, feasts, long live the chief. Simple. But scale it up, and clarity dissolves. In large systems, scale adds efficiency and complexity up to a point, after which the system has to choose whether to retain adaptability or keep scaling up with efficiency. State bureaucracies rely on a government’s budget – seemingly bottomless until it isn’t – and always opt for the least efficient mode of complexity, which diffuses and abstracts the power-generating network. A warband’s chain of actions is short – kill, take, divide, repeat. The modern state’s chain is labyrinthine, stretched across countless systems, actors, and subroutines. Each piece performs a fragment of the whole, and no single actor sees the entire picture.

From the reformer’s perspective, sitting at the “command center” of the system, its subroutine chains are so abstracted and obfuscated as to appear self-perpetuating. The reformer seems to rule, appoint people at all key departments, sign things, and issue executive orders but is, in fact, a function of the very machine they are supposed to reform. The reformer’s power is a function of the network they aim to dismantle – a contradiction from the start. In turn, the network has no interest in its undoing and resists the reformer at every step. It absorbs, redirects, and stalls, ensuring that reform dies before it begins. Sounds familiar?

The Art of Hiding Pebbles

People imagine the deep state as an omniscient shadow bureaucracy – unelected, unsupervised, corrupt, all-seeing, and surgically competent. The esoteric alphabet agency from a Jason Bourne film. This shadowy, all-powerful enemy is a beloved trope of all serious conspiracy theories. We’re resisting a 5000-year-old death cult anon, the final red pill! This is such a comforting story – it helps order the chaos and noise of reality into a neat victim narrative with heroic individualist overtones. There’s nothing you can do, but now you’re one of the few who know about these things.

However, there is nothing deep about a bureaucrat. Have you not seen one? Bureaucracies are neither deep nor competent; they are inertia-bound self-reproducing machines focused on their own expansion while growing less and less efficient over time. Like a tapeworm. Left unchecked, a bureaucracy invariably drags down the system it is supposed to serve into a Red Queen Trap.

When communism fell in Eastern Europe, the formal state structures of the entire oppressive apparatus remained. The following day, department names were changed, seals were swapped, and red stars were painted over. The bureaucrats were still there, yet their power was gone. Why? Again, because power doesn’t live in people, titles, desks, or badges. It lives in network alignment – the chains of routines, actors, and energy flows that generate it. Once that alignment fractures, yesterday’s power structure becomes a row of imposing brutalist buildings housing sex shops, with its top operatives peddling hair loss treatments in late-night infomercials.

There is no deep state; there is deep power.

Chesterton once noted that a wise man hides his pebbles on the beach, among countless others. Deep power follows the same principle. There is no deep state; there are networks performing their routines while concealing their actions and, to the extent that they can, their energy sources. Where would you hide a network of profound influence? In plain sight, among a thousand mundane ones. Within the complex edifice of the modern state, these networks are like a pebble hidden on a pebble beach.

Take the tax office – everyone’s favorite bureaucracy. On the surface, it shuffles papers and collects revenue. Beneath that, its routines generate energy to feed a broader network – the state. Now imagine another vastly smaller network, hidden across tax offices, forestry departments, alphabet agencies, universities, corporations, and opposition parties while skimming off their revenue energy feed. Its survival depends on appearing as unremarkable as a beach pebble. It thrives because it blends in.

Obfuscation is not just a simple tactic; it is the network’s primary survival mechanism. Networks that generate deep power obfuscate their actions and hide their energy sources in complexity, bureaucracy, or layers of plausible deniability. Depending on their environment, they can be expected to dedicate resources to generating the synthetic shadows I mentioned earlier. These shadows are designed not just to mislead but to exhaust your ability to discern reality.

How did Nabokov put it?

“A shadow of a waxwing slain / by the false azure in the windowpane.”

Another benefit of synthetic shadow-casting is that when deep networks apply force, the source of that force is always obscure: an unknown perpetrator, a synthetic terror group, or a lone gunman. Sad! If you understand this, you see why the reformer’s attacks against the visible structure of the state rarely achieve meaningful results. The visible structure is camouflage for the networks generating deep power. Deep power networks are the reformer’s primary target. However, striking the networks is only possible after identifying their energy source and disrupting the flows that sustain it. Even then, the reformer must focus on disrupting the networks’ routines and alignment.

And so, the reformer swings at shadows. If they’re smart, they quickly realize it’s easier – and safer – that way. The deep power network hides dispersed behind innocent office doors, audit reports, and coffee-stained memos, with closely aligned force just an arm away. Lean too close, and you’ll feel the false azure’s breath on your neck. So many such cases.

So, how do you fight a deep power network? Usually, you don’t because you’re not part of a network generating enough power. But, if you have the network to back you up, there are two primary ways of dealing with it. The Stalin way: clear almost every pebble from the beach and seed it with new pebbles. That way, no matter how well camouflaged and distributed the deep power network is, enough of its nodes get misaligned to disrupt it. Alternatively, the FDR way: build another, much larger pebble beach and route all energy flows to it. That way, the deep power network’s energy sources, routines, and alignment are disrupted at once by the alignment of a much more extensive network.

Both options are very costly. The first leads to direct network confrontation, weakening the system or tearing it apart. The second buries the system under new burdens, leaving it no options but to seek new energy in expansion. Rome tried both. Sulla put in place the first, buying the system a generation of peace followed by two more civil wars. Octavian put in place the second, condemning the system to expand in search of new energy until it could not – and collapsed irreversibly. In the end, no matter the method, a new pebble joins the beach, and the game begins anew.

Moritur et Ridet

Ted

September 29, 2024

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Let’s speculate for a bit. One day, a future AI historian will be asked to describe the state of human civilization circa 2024, at the end of history, in one line. Being a clever and witty AI, our future historian will no doubt trawl through the memetic detritus of our time in search of the perfect one-liner to capture the essence of the zeitgeist. Among the petabytes of Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, and X banalities, the AI might stumble on this obscure memetic artifact: a phone camera photo of a sign hastily printed on standard A4 paper, folded in half, and casually taped to the front panel of a vending machine. Its message reads, “The light inside has broken but I still work.”

“What an excellent summary of their times!” our future AI historian might say. A vending machine in all its varieties, from snacks and drinks to the jukebox, is the quintessential sacred totemic object of end-of-history consumer society. It is the magical stand-in for the missing vendor, lubricating impersonal acts of spontaneous neurotic consumption. A little guilty pleasure for the suffering soul. A quick fix for the void inside. But! The light inside has broken. There is no ghost in this machine, so sorry. Many such cases!

This is where the unknown author of our one-liner comes to the rescue. A first-person declaration from the machine itself. Glorious! It starts by informing us coldly that something has broken, confirming what we already see. The cold facts cannot be wished away anymore. Yes, the light inside is kaput. It is so over. But then, it follows with the punch: it may not look like it, but things still work. We are so back! Consumption is still possible, but one has to get used to the minor inconvenience of the missing light.

The light inside has broken but I still work (unknown)

And one gets used to it.

Day after day, one gets used to missing bits of pavement on their way to the local shop, suburban trains breaking down in new and creative ways, rising crime, parts detaching from planes mid-flight, trash piling on city streets, money losing its value, pointless acts of violence, rolling power outages, potholes never getting fixed, sudden bursts of road rage, trains derailing, rising energy costs, all-smothering apathy, bursting dams, and collapsing bridges. Habituation to decline. After all, it still works.

Until it doesn’t. Just recently, the civilizational hegemon tried to build a floating pier on the beach in Gaza – an operation that 80 years ago, during a world war, would have taken them a day, maybe less. It took them 60 days this time, and the pier lasted less than two weeks. Yes. Apparently, the pier couldn’t handle the “inclement weather” of the Mediterranean summer. The only thing inclement about the Mediterranean in the summer is the tsunami of tourists drowning whole coastal towns in a putrid miasma of mystery lotions (now 30% more sustainable!), cheap beer, and the stench of aluminum-infused sunscreen. It certainly isn’t the weather.

Habituation to decline. Do you think a Roman mid-level bureaucrat-intellectual of the academic persuasion woke up one morning and exclaimed soberly to a servant, “Darling, I think the Empire may be collapsing!” Big doubt. The servants of a collapsing empire are usually the last to notice its collapse. After all, their salaries depend on not seeing it. Instead, bread prices rose every year, and the quality of everything worsened. People got used to it, adapted, and maybe stopped having avocado toast. Houses became unaffordable, so everyone got used to renting. What was the Roman version of the van life fad, one wonders? Horse cart life? The money was worth less and less, while the roads took longer and longer to repair. The Romans got used to the decay. They even adopted a fashionable new religion that taught acceptance, absolved guilt, and promised an imminent end to the nightmare and a better world forever after. Since everyone was getting poorer, and the cities were swarming with enslaved foreigners and homeless locals, it declared the poor to be blessed. Favela Chic 1.0. But that’s another story.

When the Roman machine finally stopped, the Favela Chic survivors naturally blamed divine punishment. The sins of our fathers! A contemporary, Salvian of Marseilles, wrote sometime in the 440s in his De Gubernatione Dei that Rome’s final collapse was due solely to divine punishment for her decadent love of theatre. Rome, he says, moritur et ridet. It dies and laughs! The lights are out, and the machine has stopped, so how dare they laugh? The vulgar allure of puritan morality always dominates the afterparty. It is your fault. Repent your privilege, sinner! Your very existence is a transgression. Somehow, a Favela Chic afterparty always has Nurse Ratched vibes.

But puritan morality is just a cope – a vulgar and banal way to make sense of the unfolding chaos. To hold things together just a little bit longer. The system is falling apart, repentance or not. The cracks were there all along, mostly visible too, but no one fixed them. Instead, the ruling class gorged itself on surplus energy while it was still available, while everyone else grew comfortable with the dysfunction, treating each new failure as routine, even inevitable. At first, people who wanted to fix things were ridiculed, then silenced (misinformation!), and finally disappeared. The masses became experts at surviving in a world of broken lights, patching things up just enough to keep the machine running a little longer. The civilization of cope and patch, with ever-receding horizons. Each new patch to the system’s financial, economic, political, social, and infrastructural elements lasted shorter and fixed less. Each new failure blamed on a transcendental force punishing us for our sins.

The final stage of decline was not some cataclysmic collapse, a giant wave cleansing the land, but a slow, collective numbness to the unraveling – a smothering apathy. When the vending machine finally stops working altogether, it won’t be met with shock or panic. People will stand there, blank-faced, as though nothing unexpected has happened. Afterward, a surviving Favela Chic enjoyer will proclaim a variation of moritur et ridet against those who still dare hope. It’s almost cozy in a Nurse Ratched afterparty way.

In his Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter argues that collapse occurs when the costs of maintaining complex infrastructure exceed the benefits, leading to a decline in social, economic, and institutional complexity. In other words, collapse occurs when a complex system enters the Red Queen Trap, and all energy available to it is insufficient to maintain its current level of complexity. What people experience as the profound decay of everything around them is actually a forced system-wide reduction of complexity. Faced with the Red Queen Trap, the system’s decision center invariably opts for a controlled system-wide readjustment to the reduced energy input.

Ironically, however, this reduction in complexity is matched by the deterioration of the system’s internal coherence, itself a fractal image of the complex whole. As more and more subsystems grind to a halt and are discarded, there goes internal coherence and, with it, social trust. First, social courtesy disappears, from office collegiality to greeting strangers with a smile and letting cars merge in front of you on the freeway. Then goes every other form of social trust. As trust disappears, micro transactions you used to treat as a non-negotiable aspect of the social fabric become very much negotiable. Suddenly, you realize that between the cashier, traffic police, doctors, neighbors, and politicians, you cannot trust anyone. Sartre was right all along; hell is indeed other people! There is more.

The lower the trust within a given social system, the higher its transaction costs. Paradoxically, the members of the collapsing society experience the reduction of complexity at the macro level as a dramatic rise of complexity at the micro level. Transactions whose integrity was guaranteed by the old macro system suddenly find themselves open to negotiation. Hospital care is still free, sure, but if you want it now, as opposed to sometime in the indefinite future, you need to pay under the table to the nice doctor who never stops smiling.

But let’s rewind a bit. Like all systems, societies develop complex structures in response to the obstacles they face during their initial expansion. Each complex solution leads to another in a self-reinforcing loop of growth and problem-solving. What begins as a simple social structure inevitably evolves into a sprawling network of bureaucratic institutions, rules, and procedures. At first, this complexity is a sign of strength, evidence of an expanding system capable of inventing and overcoming challenges with greater and greater sophistication.

An ascending complex society has two key characteristics: a vitalist myth of the future and the building of long-term infrastructure with meticulous attention to detail. Such a society is forward-looking and concerned with conquering space/time. The roads, aqueducts, and bridges the system builds are not just practical tools but symbols of a collective will to endure and expand. The promise of tomorrow is injected into every structure the system erects – both physical and social. The upkeep of these structures is seen as the foundation of social order and prosperity.

An ascending complex society has enough surplus energy to maintain and expand these structures. It can afford to solve problems as they arise and even invest in preventing future ones. But this surplus is finite. As each additional layer of bureaucracy, infrastructure, and procedures is added to the system, complexity increases while the energy returns on investment from that new element decrease. The further the system grows, the more energy it takes to maintain each new element.

Rising complexity requires increasingly high amounts of energy and resources for maintenance. As the returns diminish and the costs of complexity rise, societies reach a point where further investment in complexity becomes unsustainable. No more expansion. The tipping point comes when the costs of maintaining existing social and physical infrastructure outweigh the benefits of creating new system elements. Eventually, all energy the system can access goes towards supporting the internal structure of the system.

The game then shifts to holding on to what is already part of the system. We’re not into expansion anymore; we’ll be chill now. This pseudo-equilibrium may even last for a while. However, all those complex sub-structures comprising the system are subject to entropy and require more energy to maintain than the system can produce. At that point, society begins to falter, and cracks appear not just in its physical structures but in its social ones. Absent a new energy source, the system’s complexity invariably requires more energy than it can generate. Something has to give. The system discovers it is stuck in a tailspin of diminishing returns. Red Queen Trap, hello.

Collapse, then, offers the promise of a rational recalibration. Degrowth is the new growth, don’t you know? At first, it is not even framed as collapse – just a restructuring, an amalgamation of departments, an optimization of inefficient parts. We are growing in reverse, and that’s a good thing! The system opts for reducing complexity, even if this means abandoning subsystems and infrastructure that once defined its strength and the promise of a better future. However, the problem is that the decision-making center virtually never starts the reduction of complexity with itself. It usually picks subsystems on the periphery, furthest from the center, or infrastructure considered unnecessary for newly defined core functions. All in the name of efficiency and sustainable growth, of course.

I’ve described this process at length elsewhere. Internally, from the perspective of the decision-making center, this is a calculated strategic retreat. From the outside, it looks like a house of cards folding, as Mark Twain put it, “first slowly and then all at once.” Other than radical decentralization, any choice the center makes leads deeper into the Red Queen Trap. Eventually, the trap shuts, and all that remains is to subscribe to whatever du jour flavor of Favela Chic is in vogue. It was always your fault!

Returning to our vending machine, the future AI historian would probably observe that the final stage of modernity – let’s call it the global homogeneity stage – developed a profoundly religious belief in the illusion of history as an asymptote. The belief in life and history as a continuous upward trajectory. The illusion that history is the story of eternal progress. It is a typical Favela Chic telos – banal, vulgar, boring. If salvation is inevitable, it must come in the future; therefore, we are progressing towards it. The belief in time as an asymptote does not need history at all; after all, everything that happened in history is full of bad stuff we are progressing away from. The future, however, is bright! How unsurprising, then, that the advent of the global homogeneity stage was wildly celebrated as the end of history.

And since we are discussing the moderns’ utter disdain for history, did you know, dear reader, the origin of the word history? It is worth knowing the etymology of words. It derives from the Ancient Greek historia (ἱστορία), the knowledge you get from an inquiry, itself a form of the verb historein (ἱστορεῖν) – to inquire. The past, it seems, is the land of eternal inquiry. The belief in the end of history, then, signals the end of inquiry and the advent of the age of certainty. It checks out, we do indeed live in the age of consensus. The experts agree!

Undoubtedly, this is a cozy and comforting belief to have, standing in front of the extinguished light of a vending machine that is about to break as well. The ancients, however, figured out long ago that history does not operate in straight lines but in cycles. The illusion of linearity is a function of a very short and arbitrary time scale, the imagination horizons of a people without deep history. Long before our glorious global homogeneity stage, the Greeks had already mapped out three distinct scales of time: Kairos, Chronos, and Kyklos.

Kairos (καιρός) is the time of the moment, the fleeting, subjective experience of the present. It is the scale of daily human life, where you go for walks, eat avocado toast, pay your bills, and watch Netflix with friends. People do not see a collapse at this scale, only a gradual decline. “Someone tried to steal a bottle of wine from the liquor store in broad daylight today – wild, hey?” Broken lights get signposted, system issues get patched, and all problems seem manageable indefinitely with a bit of cope.

Chronos (χρόνος), in contrast, is the linear time built from the aggregate of these moments, creating the illusion of linear progression. It represents the story of a lifetime or several generations, the accumulation of decisions that create the illusion of steady progress. It was within the realm of Chronos that the moderns rooted their belief in history as an asymptote. Not without irony, Chronos is also the ancient god the Greek Olympians defeated in the Titanomachy, the god that ate his own children. His symbolic rule ended with him being thrown into Tartarus, the deepest part of Hades. People can spot a noticeable decline at this scale – “in our time, an average family could afford a house and car on one salary.”

Kyklos (κύκλος), the third scale, is where the real story of collapse plays out. It is the macro time of historical cycles, where empires rise and fall, and civilizations are born and forgotten. This is where the illusion of progress inevitably encounters the grim smile of reality. At this time scale, the energy required to sustain a complex society inevitably exceeds the available resources, forcing a reduction in complexity. At the Kyklos scale, societies experience growth, stagnation, decline, and, if they work very hard – renewal. From this perspective, the belief in history as an asymptote, so ingrained in the global homogeneity stage, is merely a short-lived delusion. The foreplay for a Favela Chic moment, so to speak.

When viewed through the lens of Kyklos, the collapse of complex systems is not an apocalyptic failure but an expected outcome. Paradoxically, however, accepting that fact can seal a society’s fate, accelerating the disintegration it seeks to prevent. For as long as a complex system retains even a sliver of energy and will, it can shift from decline to renewal by reorganizing its structure and recreating its myth of the future into a myth that fuels life and reinvention.

In Act I of his Prometheus Unbound, Shelley writes, “To hope till Hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates.” These are the words of Prometheus, chained and tortured on his rock, speaking to the Earth amid despair and suffering. There is no salvation here, no miracle on the horizon, no mystery savior to come – only hope creating the future from its own wreck, the stubborn resolve to rebuild from one’s ruins. Around a decade earlier, Goethe’s Erdgeist tells Faust, “Him I love who craves the impossible.” The message is the same – it takes defiance, not comforting cope, to build hope from your own wreck. There is no salvation in this future, only standing firm against the coming storm.

Oswald Spengler understood this. He concludes his Man and Technics with the example of a Roman soldier whose remains were found buried by volcanic ash in Pompeii. The soldier remained at his post guarding a building during the eruption of Vesuvius, his commitment to duty far stronger than the imminent death he could see approaching from afar. Such was the Roman civilization at its apogee. I imagine he was probably laughing, too. Moritur et ridet. How does this make you feel?

That soldier was clearly uninterested in frequent flyer miles or a complimentary vacation cruise for two. His total commitment seems incomprehensible and comical to a civilization built around an ersatz cult of conspicuous consumption. What was so important about that doorway in the context of an onrushing two-story high wall of hot lava? Surely, he could have saved himself and lived to serve another day. Salvation from the hot lava was just a brisk jog away. But no, he had to choose to stand there as if to spite us.

His choice wasn’t about defending a meaningless doorway or adhering to an imaginary code where superiors’ orders overcome the fear of death. He simply obstinately refused to surrender his doorway to the wall of lava. Sorry, I won’t do it. This is my doorway, there may be many like it, but this one is mine. A refusal to yield to entropy, the dying of the light, even in one’s final moments. Does this make you feel uncomfortable?

To paraphrase Dylan Thomas, fundamentally, every civilization is a constant rage against the dying of the light. You cannot optimize a civilization for safety and comfortable consumption and expect it to survive. That way inevitably leads to deceleration, disintegration, and decomposition. This is not an ideological choice but a thermodynamic one. Entropy does not care about Favela Chic delusions.

When a civilization decides mere safe consumption is enough, it dies there and then. The rest is a prolonged ritual of therapeutic survival: “The light inside has broken, but I still work” taped across the face of a decaying infrastructure – a system stripped of purpose, devouring its own borrowed time.

Ariadne’s String: The Path Between Adaptability and Efficiency

Ted

March 19, 2024

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In the labyrinth of complexity (Diffusion XL)

The great modern philosopher Mike Tyson once said, “Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the face.” Future historians will no doubt develop many theories about the initial impetus behind this profound insight, but Tyson might as well have been referring to the main predicament of complex systems: operating and surviving more or less intact in the maze of unpredictability. Any system can develop the perfect and highly optimized operation plan, with just-in-time this and agile that, but all beautiful flowcharts can, and usually do, crumble under the onslaught of reality. The drama of all systems, both simple and complex, is in the precarious balance between maintaining operational efficiency and adapting to unforeseen challenges that punch you in the face.

To begin with, surviving amidst flux over a long period demands constant transformation from all systems. However, a continuous and dynamic tension exists between a system’s adaptability, efficiency, and overall stability. Even for simple systems, too much adaptability sacrifices efficiency, and too much efficiency sacrifices adaptability. For example, an organization could optimize its supply chain for maximum just-in-time efficiency and shareholder value, only to have it crumble under a sudden and unpredictable change in geopolitics halfway across the globe. Who knows, an obscure rebel group might start sinking container ships. True story. It gets worse, though; this tension is far more challenging for complex systems due to their being, well, the opposite of simple.

Complex systems are composed of multiple distinct elements – for example, consider a modern army with its infantry, artillery, mechanized units, drones, air force, and so on. The interactions between these disparate components lead to results we cannot predict by simply analyzing each system element’s properties in isolation. For instance, examining a tank’s capabilities in isolation offers no clear insight into its operational effectiveness when supported by infantry, artillery, drone reconnaissance, and aviation.

When combined, these additional components of the larger system radically alter the tank’s capabilities and fundamentally change the nature of its engagement envelope and effectiveness on the battlefield. The introduction of aerial surveillance provides real-time data, artillery offers long-range support firepower, infantry occupies proximal space, and aviation brings a vertical dimension, together creating a system whose potential actions are vastly different and more complex than that of any single component.

In other words, each unique element allows a system to add complexity at that scale, interface with reality differently, and engage in unique and complex behaviors. The more complexity at different system scales, the more adaptable a system is in interfacing with reality at those scales. That said, if a system gets a punch to the face and is not adaptable to deal with its effects, it quickly experiences a cascading reduction of complexity and collapses.

All systems get punched in the face sooner or later. What happens with a system after the punch is where the fun begins; the system still has to maintain internal coherence and operational efficiency while simultaneously pivoting its operations to adapt to the novel external conditions. As Mike Tyson aptly pointed out, the old plan is invalid after the punch because reality has violently imposed itself on the system’s assumptions.

Let’s explore a principle of systemic efficiency and adaptability that accounts for the punches and what comes after them. I call it Ariadne’s string principle after the ancient Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.

Ariadne’s gift

The great Daedalus, legendary builder and craftsman of the ancient world, was tasked by King Minos of Crete to construct a labyrinth so complex that escape would be impossible. Once in, you were never supposed to be able to leave. On top of that, this labyrinth was to be built as a prison for the Minotaur, a creature with a man’s body and a bull’s head. Daedalus built the unique maze, the Minotaur was locked inside it, and the king put it to grim use, imposing a tribute on defeated Athens: the sacrifice of seven young men and seven young women every seven years to the Minotaur.

When the tribute was due again, Theseus, the prince of Athens, volunteered to be one of the seven young men destined for the labyrinth, pledging to slay the monster. However, our valiant hero was not alone. The daughter of King Minos – Ariadne – who, as it happens in myths, was in love with brave Theseus, approached Daedalus, pleading with the maze builder to help the hero escape. Moved, Daedalus asked Ariadne to give our hero a ball of string. Yes.

The myth does not mention Ariadne’s initial reaction to that solution, but one can imagine it. In any case, Daedalus explained that this string was to be tied to the entrance of the labyrinth and unrolled as Theseus ventured deeper into it. As it turned out, this hack allowed our hero to navigate the maze, slay the Minotaur, and trace his steps back to freedom. Ariadne’s string is the key to this myth, so let’s unpack its role further.

Between Adaptability and Efficiency

On the face of it, the string is an absurd way of finding your way around in a labyrinth. Why not use a map? Or, absent a map, a series of “take the first right, walk straight 20 paces and turn left” instructions? All Theseus would have to do is trace his movements according to the plan and never stray from it. After all, Daedalus was the maze builder and presumably remembered its construction plan. One would expect a legendary techno-craftsman to produce some intricate contraption showing the way to Theseus. So, why the crude and simple string?

Simply put, because Theseus was about to be punched in the face.

Knowing that, Daedalus could not have given him a plan of the maze or a complicated contraption. What if Theseus loses the map, forgets the detailed instructions or the intricate contraption gets broken in his fight with the Minotaur? Ariadne’s string exemplifies the optimal balance between maximum adaptability and simple efficiency for a given system’s scale. The string doesn’t show the way forward or the maze’s layout. The string is dumb. Worse, it has nothing to do with the maze at all! It simply adapts to and interfaces with every twist and turn of the labyrinth while being highly efficient in showing Theseus only one simple thing – the path he took.

You see, adaptability is a function of a system’s ability to perform many possible simple actions more or less independently of each other. Ariadne’s string is an adaptability hack for the complexity of the labyrinth – it could interface with all possible permutations of that space. Multiple possible actions at the smallest of scales.

Efficiency, however, is a function of the ability of various system parts to work together to perform tasks at the largest possible scale. Ariadne’s string was expected to perform only one task at the scale of Theseus traversing an impossible maze, fighting a monster inside it, and getting out. The simplest of tasks at the largest of scales.

Designing a system for efficiency and adaptability is far trickier than it appears at first. Imagine a city’s transportation system designed for maximum efficiency: a network of trains and buses running on a tight schedule, minimal wait times, and optimized passenger carrying capacity. As is usually the case, such a system would be given as an example of optimal efficiency due to its just-in-time predictability and low operational costs. However, the system’s rigidity becomes apparent when a sudden, unexpected week of heavy downpours disrupts its operations.

While optimal under normal conditions, its efficiency doesn’t allow for quick adaptation to the new challenges posed by the heavy downpours. The transportation system, optimized for specific operational conditions, struggles to provide alternative routes or modes of transport that accommodate the change, leading to delays, congestion, and chaos. In other words, the system is optimized for a well-defined operational envelope, but that very optimization deprives it of the resources to quickly adapt to a dramatic change in the envelope.

Notice that if the system had a spare fleet of otherwise redundant minibuses, it could adjust to the sudden change in conditions much better. However, that same redundant fleet of minibuses – representing adaptability – will present extra costs and additional and unnecessary complexity in all ordinary conditions. There is a lesson here.

Alternatively, consider a modern tank battalion advancing in enemy territory with infantry support, acting according to doctrine as an efficient complex system. With more than a century of deployment history, tanks are shockingly efficient in interfacing with most questions the typical enemy can ask of them. Their interactions are usually short and have great finality in execution.

However, this particular enemy has deployed a swarm of dirt-cheap first-person view (FPV) drones, each armed with an armor-piercing warhead. As the swarm maneuvers at speeds exceeding 100 kilometers per hour, slamming into and destroying tank after tank, the advancing complex system has no way of interfacing with the drones. A punch to the face and a knockout. True story. What is the lesson here?

A system’s effectiveness is contingent on its ability to provide a distinct response to each environmental possibility it may encounter.

If a system cannot interface with the changing conditions in its environment, it will fail to be effective and, absent a transformation, will ultimately collapse. However, we have to remember that as long as the system keeps operating under the conditions for which it is optimized, it will be within its maximum effectiveness envelope. This is why so many highly fragile systems seem to operate just fine when viewed from the outside. This is also why the easiest way to derail a highly efficient system is to change the scale of its operational envelope. Even a slight shift in external conditions would often completely derail a highly optimized and efficient system.

The problem is that highly efficient systems lack the flexibility to adapt to new challenges. Like the transportation system discussed above, to become highly efficient, they need to remove all unnecessary complexity and redundancies, streamlining processes for optimal performance conditions. The very optimization that makes a system highly efficient prevents it from quickly adapting to change. Any highly efficient system is also highly fragile.

That is because, as I already mentioned, adaptability is a function of a system’s ability to perform multiple distinct actions at small scales. In other words, adaptability emerges when a system can interface with reality in multiple, often rare, non-optimal conditions. That fleet of minibuses is a small-scale redundancy, increasing the complexity and costs of the transportation system but allowing the system to adapt to the rare occurrence of a week-long downpour or other sudden disruptions. Similarly, installing radio frequency jammers on each armored vehicle is a small-scale redundancy, increasing the complexity and cost of a tank battalion but allowing the system to at least partially adapt to the sudden occurrence of an FPV drone swarm attack.

Highly adaptable systems, on the other hand, can interface with multiple environmental challenges but struggle with scaling up. As they grow, the costs of maintaining their complex adaptability increase to a threshold beyond which they cannot perform their actions efficiently at a given scale. In other words, past that scale threshold, the highly adaptable system has no other option but to optimize its processes for efficiency. Either that or the rising complexity costs at larger scales bring the whole system down.

Therefore, to be highly adaptable, a system has to either stay below a specific scale of operations or keep its adaptable elements small while growing in scale with a much more efficient structure and output. We will explore this dynamic further.

The time and scale trade-offs

If you think through this dynamic, you will notice that adaptability adds costly complexity here and now but may save a system in the future, while efficiency lowers costly complexity today but will doom a system in the future. This is why most systems will naturally drift towards increased efficiency at the cost of lowered adaptability. Optimizing for efficiency saves system resources here and now while optimizing for adaptability does not generate immediate effects for most systems.

That fleet of minibuses represents ongoing costs the transportation system must pay in the present, while the adaptability it provides may save the system in the future. Conversely, the efficiency of a transportation system streamlined for optimal conditions lowers its operational costs in the present but invariably renders the system more fragile to potential future shocks.

There is a time trade-off where the investment in adaptability – though burdensome with its added complexity and immediate costs – acts as insurance against future uncertainties. On the other hand, focusing on efficiency streamlines operations and reduces overhead in the short term while rendering the system brittle and unable to cope with unforeseen changes.

Again, adaptability increases your system’s costs in the present – think time, money, energy, and cognitive load – at all scales where it appears but allows your system to evolve at those scales. Efficiency saves you costs in the present – think time, money, energy, and cognitive load – but increases your system’s fragility at all scales.

In essence, adaptability buys resilience at the expense of current simplicity, while efficiency buys simplicity in the present at the cost of future vulnerability.

This is the efficiency versus adaptability trade-off represented along a time axis. However, the choice between adaptability and efficiency is also a problem of scale. There is an inherent trade-off between the number of ways a system can interface with reality and the scale at which it can coordinate these engagements.

The more complex a system’s actions, the higher the cost of performing them at a larger scale.

For example, consider the cost of deploying a hundred drone countermeasures locally in one sector of the front as opposed to hundreds of thousands across the structure of an entire army. The simpler the actions, the easier they are to perform at a large scale.

In other words, as I mentioned above, there is a scale threshold beyond which a system will be unable to perform complex actions without sacrificing the efficiency of its operations. While efficiency is about optimizing for a task at the maximum system scale, adaptability is about redundancies for rare tasks at multiple small scales.

The fundamental scale trade-off means that a complex system optimized for adaptability will have greater complexity at smaller scales, while a complex system optimized for efficiency will have lower complexity but operate at much larger scales.

We are witnessing these trade-offs today as FPV drone swarms obliterate thousands of tanks and armored vehicles on the fronts of Ukraine. FPV drones have been a known technology for more than twenty years and have been used in warfare for at least a decade, yet no modern military has fully adapted to them. So far, neither the theory of mechanized warfare nor command structures or individual tank designs can effectively interface with the complex questions asked by FPV drone swarms.

Modern militaries are systems optimized for efficiency in the present at vast scales – maneuver warfare, capturing territory, and access denial. Meanwhile, drone swarms pose a question of complexity at multiple small scales – exactly where modern militaries are highly efficient and cannot adapt quickly.

Again, as a system’s actions become more complex in adapting to potential environmental changes, its capacity to coordinate them effectively and scale up diminishes. A company might be very efficient in producing a limited number of complex widgets, but scaling up production would increase costs beyond the threshold at which it can make them efficiently. This trade-off presents a critical challenge for any system navigating between complex objectives and maintaining the ability to operate at a larger scale.

For example, consider the operational differences between special forces and conventional army units. Special forces perform highly complex tasks, such as covert surveillance, infiltration, sabotage, and engaging valuable enemy targets. These tasks involve constantly evolving and sophisticated technologies, highly specialized skills, precision, and adaptability. The complexity of special forces acts as a hard-coded limit on their size and scale of operations in maintaining coordination and effectiveness.

Conversely, conventional armies are designed and trained to engage in large-scale operations such as capturing territory and access denial. While these operations require coordination and discipline, they rely on the repetitive execution of much simpler tasks performed across large units, enabling them to achieve objectives on a grander scale.

The same dynamic can be observed in the contrast between startups and multinational corporations. Startups thrive on rapid innovation, fast feedback loops, iteration, and agility, focusing on developing new products or services. They are systems optimized for maximum adaptability at multiple small scales. Each of their elements is usually highly complex and adaptable to dynamically shifting operational envelopes.

For example, think of the ambiguity of startup position descriptions. Founders and their first employees must work across the entire operational envelope of the system – from sales to coding and management. Talk about extreme complexity at small scales. Their focus on adaptability and innovation requires flexibility and rapid decision-making that cannot be maintained as the organization grows.

As startups scale up into larger enterprises, the complexity of their operations invariably must decrease to standardize processes and achieve economies of scale. Startups buy the ability to operate at larger scales by reducing their complexity at those scales. Over time, the efficiency drift I mentioned above becomes inevitable for most former startups. They optimize for efficiency to unlock economies of scale while simultaneously curtailing adaptability.

This is why, while multinational corporations are present at global scales, they seriously struggle to innovate at the same speed and creativity as startups. It is much cheaper for a large corporation to buy startups than to maintain costly adaptability. The time and scale trade-offs to coordinating complex actions are unavoidable.

Ariadne’s string principle

Now, let’s return to Daedalus’ gift to Ariadne. The string has the optimal complexity required to interface with the labyrinth and the optimal efficiency to allow Theseus to retrace his steps. Daedalus’ genius lies in matching the complexity of the maze – that is, the questions it might ask of Theseus – and reframing the task of finding a way out as a simple problem of retracing steps. He addresses the time and scale trade-offs between adaptability and efficiency by focusing on performing the simplest and most efficient action in the present while matching the complexity scale of the maze. This is what Ariadne’s string principle is all about.

For maximum efficiency in its environment, a system must simplify its present actions while aligning with or exceeding its environment’s complexity at the corresponding scales.

Put differently, Ariadne’s string principle requires a system to perform two, at first sight, divergent maneuvers dynamically.

A system must streamline operations in the present while ensuring they match or exceed the complexity of the realities they may interface with.

Moreover, what represents optimal efficiency at a given scale of external complexity today will probably not work well tomorrow. Adaptability is future-oriented, and the principle demands that potential future operational envelopes be accounted for in efficiency calculations at all scales. After all, Ariadne’s gift to Theseus wouldn’t be any good for him if it didn’t account for a potential punch to the face.

Ariadne’s string principle dictates that a complex system must incorporate evolutionary adaptation across its elements by allowing continuous parallel small-scale experimentation at all scales where it interfaces with external conditions. In practice, this means that a complex system such as a corporation must allow its units interfacing with external conditions to undergo continuous evolutionary adaptations at their corresponding scales. Crucially, for this experimentation to benefit the whole system, successful adaptations achieved by these units must be communicated and replicated across the system.

Stability

However, there is a catch. Within simpler systems, with more or less streamlined operations, successful adaptations in one element can be replicated across the system without much instability. Think startups pivoting to a new direction. Their small size, the flat, networked structure of their organization, and the complexity of their units allow them to adjust to evolutionary adaptations quickly.

Not so with complex systems, which are usually structured hierarchically with a distinct center of control and coordination and elements optimized for efficiency. Hierarchies are very poor at dynamically augmenting their structure and operations in response to a change in external conditions. This is why evolutionary adaptability and experimentation at smaller scales increase instability within complex systems over time.

External conditions invariably change dynamically (think FPV drones), and to match the changing complexity of their operational envelope at various scales, a complex system’s internal structure has to evolve at a similar or faster speed. What good is an otherwise effective tank brigade if it cannot evolve and adapt at the same speed and complexity as the FPV drones attacking it? Remember – Ariadne’s string principle requires the system to match or exceed the complexity of its environment at the scales it interfaces with it. The problem lies in the adaptation sync.

Complex systems usually struggle to sync the adaptation pace of their constituent elements, causing instability over time.

This is why successful complex systems must ensure all their elements continuously engage with and adapt to external conditions at various scales while communicating and replicating successful adaptation strategies. The faster successful evolutionary adaptations can be transmitted and replicated across a complex system, the better it adapts to changing conditions and the more stable it is. This is why high command, senior management, and C-suite executives should always be fully involved at the same scales as their frontline units. Their participation only speeds up the percolation of successful adaptations across the complex system.

Consider this dynamic in practice. After more than two years of incessant FPV drone warfare, most frontline units on either side of the war in Ukraine have fully or partially adapted to the immediate danger of FPV drone attacks. These are usually small-scale, locally improvised adaptations of varying complexity – from shields welded to the tank to amateur radio jammers. However, these successful local adaptations have not been replicated by all elements of the complex systems of the opposing armies.

For such an adaptation to occur, the internal structures of both armies would have to evolve at the same pace and align with the complexity scales of conditions on the front. Senior commanders would have to reframe operational plans around the danger of FPV drones, and the successful adaptations of frontline units – from evolving structure to new technologies and tactics – would have to be replicated across all elements of each army. This poses a profound structural challenge to the current stability of these systems.

In fact, a certain kind of complex system, whether an army, a corporation, a university, or an authoritarian state, might prioritize an arbitrary internal stability state optimized for a given macro efficiency scale over adaptability at multiple smaller scales. In practice, these types of systems would consciously opt to avoid evolutionary adaptations at multiple small scales, choosing to maintain the arbitrary stability of their current structures and operational modes at a given macro scale. At what cost, you might ask? What a good question!

In a vacuum, such systems would quickly collapse from the internal build-up of entropy caused by the exponentially rising costs of non-adaptation to external conditions. In reality, such systems pay the rising costs of arbitrary stability by increasing resource consumption. As simple as that.

An army would throw more people into the grinder – the war in Ukraine is a grotesque illustration of that. An authoritarian state would expropriate as much as it can from its subjects. Many such cases! A corporation would eat up all investor cash and bank debt it can access while appearing as stable as a rock from the outside. The market favorite!

As long as a complex system can access additional energy sources, it can afford to opt for an arbitrary present stability state of optimized efficiency. This allows the system to optimize its operations for efficiency at a given macro scale while paying the costs of mal-adaptation at smaller scales. In other words, access to unlimited resources allows the system to ignore the future (adaptability), focusing on an arbitrary present it has optimized for (efficiency).

However, when additional energy sources dry up, such a system has to abandon stability and start its adventures searching for Ariadne’s string. It’s either that or a punch to the face and a knockout.

Practices of Late Stage Managerial Mysticism

Ted

February 2, 2024

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A rare depiction of the Executive Meeting ritual, colorized (Leonardo Diffusion XL)

Here are some of the occult practices of Late Stage Managerial Mysticism, as narrated to me in a dream by an initiate.

– Spell casting. There are many spells, but among the most popular, the ‘Agile’ spell summons profits, the ‘Diversity’ spell solves staffing, and the ‘Pivot’ spell wards off failure.

– Invoking the ‘Brainstorming’ ritual. This is done with multi-colored Post-it notes. The ceremony is used to bind one or several innovation spirits to the area of an average meeting room or four cubicles, whichever is smaller.

– Performing the sacred dance of ‘Networking.’ The dance is used to find and open loot boxes with ‘Opportunity’ manna.

– Chanting the ‘Customer-Centric’ mantra. It is believed to bring +10 in loyalty harvests when performed daily.

– Deploying the ‘Big Data’ talisman. The upper mystics use it for divination and insight into the primordial dark vortex called ‘Market Forces.’

– Periodically performing the secret dark art of ‘Change Management.’ A cursed ritual believed to rejuvenate the corporate body by sacrificing some of its parts.

– Reciting the ‘Alignment’ incantation. It is believed to mystically merge disparate departments into a unified force of incredible power.

– Seeking enlightenment through the mystic doctrine of ‘Lean Management.’ This is a path of asceticism where more is achieved by doing less, a paradox mastered only by C-suite mystics and true initiates.

– Regularly performing the ‘Team-Building’ rites. These occult rites are believed to forge unbreakable alchemic bonds between acolytes and transmute the curse of ‘Workplace Dissatisfaction’ into the blessing of ‘Workplace Harmony.’ They also work at a distance when used through the sacred Zoom portal.

– Summoning the souls of the employed into the sacred Zoom portal. The portal forces participants to engage in arcane rituals of mute and unmute, hoping to achieve the mystical state of ‘Effective Communication.’

– Summoning select members of the congregation into ‘Workshop’ covens. The faithful gather under fluorescent light to taste the secret potions of ‘Creativity’ and ‘Productivity.’ Often, these covens are used to perform the ‘Brainstorm’ ritual.

– Chanting the email addresses of the high priesthood of the corporate pantheon – the dreaded HR Business Partners. They are the guardians of the sacred texts of policies and procedures. As powerful spell casters, they are also tasked with performing the cursed ‘Change Management’ ritual.

– Establishing and attending divination rituals known as ‘Committees.’ These are believed to sometimes have the power to chart a way forward through the impenetrable fog surrounding the corporate body. Ancient heretical texts assert the dense mist is generated by the machinations of an evil demon known as ‘Inertia.’ However, enlightened HR guardians dismiss these as apocryphal.

– Convening the sacred circle known as ‘All-Hands Meeting.’ Here, upper mystics speak in tongues of their visions and achievements. It is a ritual designed to imbue the congregation with a sense of purpose, often resulting in collective trance states of confusion.

Complex systems and glitch

Ted

March 25, 2018

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The more complex and orderly the system, the more it is prone to confuse its internal states for external reality. It confuses its internal order for external one.

That is why when things glitch and get weird we see new and strange states appear. The system’s internal cohesion momentarily glitches or breaks, and we get the chance to reframe our cognitive image of reality.

That’s when we learn.

Distributed swarms, OODA loops, and stigmergy

Ted

January 8, 2018

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This is a third paper in a cycle on distributed swarms, OODA loops and stigmergy co-authored with a PhD student of mine. The paper is titled Distributed Swarming and Stigmergic Effects on ISIS Networks: OODA Loop Model, and was published in the Journal of Media and Information Warfare. This is probably the densest and most interesting paper in the series, as we analyse information warfare waged by distributed swarms in the context of network-centric warfare theory, stigmergic adaptation, and John Boyd’s work on the OODA loop concept. For me the most interesting elements of the paper involve our discussion of Von Moltke’s concept of auftragstactic in the context of maneuver warfare in the information domain.

On the use of Telegram in lone wolf attacks

Ted

January 8, 2018

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This is a paper I co-authored with two collaborators, one of which is a PhD student of mine, titled Encrypted Jihad: Investigating the Role of Telegram App in Lone Wolf Attacks in the West, and published in the Journal of Strategic Security. We examine the role played by Telegram, one of the most popular social media apps offering end-to-end encrypted communications, in the command and control [C2] operations of distributed terrorist organizations. Specifically, I was interested in illustrating how encrypted platforms such as Telegram can be used as part of a complex stigmergic communications strategy relying on memetic impact both within the distributed network and outside of it. In brief, Telegram acts as a standalone communication platform where core C2 vectors are encrypted and obfuscated from counter-terrorism efforts, while all other communication is built for maximum memetic potential, relying on stigmergic impact among otherwise unconnected nodes acting as lone wolves.

Network architecture encounters

Ted

September 6, 2017

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These are some loosely organized observations about the nature of network topologies in the wild.

In terms of both agency and information, all entities, be they singular [person], plural [clan/tribe/small company], or meta-plural [nation/empire/global corporation] are essentially stacks of various network topologies. To understand how the entities operate in space these topologies can be simplified to a set of basic characteristics. When networks are mapped and discussed, it is usually at this 2-dimensional level. However, in addition to operating in space, all entities have to perform themselves in time.

This performative aspect of networks is harder to grasp, as it involves a continuously looping process of encountering other networks and adapting to them. In the process of performative adaptation all networks experience dynamic changes to their topologies, which in turn challenge their internal coherence. This process is fractal, in that at any one moment there is a vast multiplicity of networks interacting with each other across the entire surface of their periphery [important qualification here – fully distributed networks are all periphery]. There are several important aspects to this process, which for simplicity’s sake can be reduced to an interaction of two networks and classified as follows:

1] the topology of the network we are observing [A];

2] the topology of network B, that A is in the process of encountering;

3] the nature of the encounter: positive [dynamic collaboration], negative [dynamic war], zero sum [dynamic equilibrium].

All encounters are dynamic, and can collapse into each other at any moment. All encounters are also expressed in terms of entropy – they increase or decrease it within the network. Centralized networks cannot manage entropy very well and are extremely fragile to it.

Positive encounters are self explanatory, in that they allow networks to operate in a quasi-symbiotic relationship strengthening each network. These encounters are dynamically negentropic for both networks, in that they enable both networks to increase coherence and reduce entropy.

Negative encounters can be offensive or defensive, whereby one or both [or multiple] networks attempt to undermine and/or disrupt the internal coherency of the other network/s. These encounters are by definition entropic for at least one of the networks involved [often for all], in that they dramatically increase entropy in at least one of the combatants. They can however be negentropic for some of the participants. For example, WW2 was arguably negentropic for the US and highly entropic for European states.

Zero sum encounters are interesting, in that they represent a dynamic cancelling out of networks. There is neither cooperation nor war, but a state of co-presence without an exchange of entropy in a dynamic time-space range. I believe this is a rare type of encounters, because the absence of entropy exchange can appear only if 1] there is no exchange of information or agency, or 2] the amount of agency/information exchanged is identical from both sides. Needless to say, this process cannot be easily stabilized over a long time period and either morphs into one of the other two states or the networks stop encountering each other.

The power of networks: distributed journalism, meme warfare, and collective intelligence

Ted

April 12, 2017

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These are the slides for what was perhaps my favorite lecture so far in BCM112. The lecture has three distinct parts, presented by myself and my PhD students Doug Simkin and Travis Wall. I opened by building on the previous lecture which focused on the dynamics of networked participation, and expanded on the shift from passive consumption to produsage. The modalities of this shift are elegantly illustrated by the event-frame-story structure I developed to formalize the process of news production [it applies to any content production]. The event stage is where the original footage appears – it often is user generated, raw, messy, and with indeterminate context. The frame stage provides the filter for interpreting the raw data. The story stage is what is produced after the frame has done its work. In the legacy media paradigm the event and frame stages are closed to everyone except the authority figures responsible for story production – governments, institutions, journalists, academics, intellectuals, corporate content producers. This generates an environment where authority is dominant, and authenticity is whatever authority decides – the audience is passive and in a state of pure consumption. In the distributed media paradigm the entire process is open and can be entered by anyone at any point – event, frame, or story. This generates an environment where multiple event versions, frames, and stories compete for produser attention on an equal footing.

These dynamics have profound effects on information as a tool for persuasion and frame shifting, or in other words – propaganda. In legacy media propaganda is a function of the dynamics of the paradigm: high cost of entry, high cost of failure, minimum experimentation, inherent quality filter, limited competition, cartelization with limited variation, and an inevitable stagnation.

In distributed media propaganda is memes. Here too propaganda is a function of the dynamics of the paradigm, but those are characterized by collective intelligence as the default form of participation in distributed networks. In this configuration users act as a self-coordinating swarm towards an emergent aggregate goal. The swarm has an orders of magnitude faster production time than the legacy media. This results in orders of magnitude faster feedback loops and information dissemination.

The next part of the lecture, delivered by Doug Simkin, focused on a case study of the /SG/ threads on 4chan’s /pol/ board as an illustration of an emergent distributed swarm in action. This is an excellent case study as it focuses on real-world change produced with astonishing speed in a fully distributed manner.

The final part of the lecture, delivered by Travis Wall, focused on a case study of the #draftourdaughters memetic warfare campaign, which occurred on 4chan’s /pol/ board in the days preceding the 2016 US presidential election. This case study is a potent illustration of the ability of networked swarms to leverage fast feedback loops, rapid prototyping, error discovery, and distributed coordination in highly scalable content production.