Shirky's myth of complexity
David Weinberger,
Joho the Blog,
Apr 05, 2010
David Weinberger points to Clay Shirky's popularization of Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies. The idea is that societies increase wealth-production by increasing complexity. They solve problems, for example, by adding new rules, not dropping old rules. But at a certain point, complexity becomes a burden. But at that point, even though adding complexity only makes matters worse, there is no mechanism that allows the system to become less complex, because each part is inextricably connected with the rest. "The whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change."
There are shades of Kuhnian paradigm shifts here. For people enmeshed in the complex system, it becomes simply impossible to envision the less complex alternative. For example, "we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don't know how to do that." And we see this in education, as well. There is a system for producing and delivering educational content, and it seems impossible for those enmeshed in this system to see that it could be done in any other way.
P.S. How this becomes Shirky's myth is interesting (cf. the discussions about credit we've been having off and on - notice Shirky won't take credit but Weinberger gives it to him, and vice versa, that's how it works)).
There are shades of Kuhnian paradigm shifts here. For people enmeshed in the complex system, it becomes simply impossible to envision the less complex alternative. For example, "we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don't know how to do that." And we see this in education, as well. There is a system for producing and delivering educational content, and it seems impossible for those enmeshed in this system to see that it could be done in any other way.
P.S. How this becomes Shirky's myth is interesting (cf. the discussions about credit we've been having off and on - notice Shirky won't take credit but Weinberger gives it to him, and vice versa, that's how it works)).
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