Clay Shirky’s new article The Collapse of Complex Business Models starts with the following passage:
In 1988, Joseph Tainter wrote a chilling book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter looked at several societies that gradually arrived at a level of remarkable sophistication then suddenly collapsed: the Romans, the Lowlands Maya, the inhabitants of Chaco canyon. Every one of those groups had rich traditions, complex social structures, advanced technology, but despite their sophistication, they collapsed, impoverishing and scattering their citizens and leaving little but future archeological sites as evidence of previous greatness. Tainter asked himself whether there was some explanation common to these sudden dissolutions.
The answer he arrived at was that they hadn’t collapsed despite their cultural sophistication, they’d collapsed because of it. Subject to violent compression, Tainter’s story goes like this: a group of people, though a combination of social organization and environmental luck, finds itself with a surplus of resources. Managing this surplus makes society more complex—agriculture rewards mathematical skill, granaries require new forms of construction, and so on.
Early on, the marginal value of this complexity is positive—each additional bit of complexity more than pays for itself in improved output—but over time, the law of diminishing returns reduces the marginal value, until it disappears completely. At this point, any additional complexity is pure cost.
The article is worth reading in its entirety, as it uses this argument to explain current cultural phenomena, notably that a one-minute amateur finger-biting video has been watched by more people than the Super Bowl.
However, I’m not entirely sold on the underlying assumption that complexity inevitably leads to collapse. As Kevin Kelly explored in Out of Control, there is evidence from the natural world that the opposite may be true. Complex natural systems such as tropical ecosystem are more stable than simple systems. It is essentially complexity on the edge of chaos that keeps such complex adaptive systems stable and resilient, resistant to the simple feedback loops that can bring down “simple” engineered systems. In between simplicity and adaptive complexity, the picture is much murkier. Scientists and engineers struggled for years to create a semblance of a self-sustaining ecosystem in Biosphere 2 in rural Arizona.
The question then is whether our current economic system, from startups to global conglomerates, is closer to an organically evolved ecosystem or to Biosphere 2. Neither wholly natural nor entirely engineered, it remains to be seen whether its resilience mirrors that of natural systems. If not, rigidity combined with complexity may indeed bring about dramatic simplification. Whatever your views on that issue, Shirky’s closing advice should give us all pause: “It is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.”
