4 ms·
> Only complexity, Tainter argues, provides an explanation that applies in every instance of collapse. We go about our lives, addressing problems as they arise.
by newsbinator 6y ago
> Only complexity, Tainter argues, provides an explanation that applies in every instance of collapse. We go about our lives, addressing problems as they arise. Complexity builds and builds, usually incrementally, without anyone noticing how brittle it has all become. Then some little push arrives, and the society begins to fracture. The result is a “rapid, significant loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity.” In human terms, that means central governments disintegrating and empires fracturing into “small, petty states,” often in conflict with one another. Trade routes seize up, and cities are abandoned. Literacy falls off, technological knowledge is lost and populations decline sharply. “The world,” Tainter writes, “perceptibly shrinks, and over the horizon lies the unknown.”
- Retric 6y agoComplexity is a poor measurement for collapse as world population has grown vastly over time. A city reaching 1+ million people went from the center of an empire to something unremarkable. It’s the “seemingly inexorable trend toward higher levels of complexity, specialization and sociopolitical control.” How many Americans let alone people in other countries know where San Jose for example is and roughly how big it is?
- srum 6y agoI don't. I've been away so long that I may go wrong and lose my way
- helen___keller 6y agoComplexity in this case is less of a measure and more of a foundational definition: There exists a such thing as "complexity" that requires a certain level of upkeep, and if that upkeep surpasses the value gained from the complexity than the society is prone to a sudden loss of complexity when some kind of stress is imposed on society. It's pretty straightforward but gives us very little predictions because it's so abstract.
- Retric 6y agoThe issue is complexity doesn’t have a uniform cost over time. As farming became more efficient complex societies could support more overhead. Egypt was such an ideal location for growing and transporting food 4,000 years ago, but limitations changed over time. So as you point out it’s not complexity that matters it’s a more complex and hard to quantify equation that includes complexity and several other terms. Further, societal collapse currently looks very different. Multiple countries experienced a collapse after a civil war, but they don’t fall in the same way Rome or even older civilizations did.
- Nasrudith 6y agoYeah - to be frank whenever I hear complexity cited I can't help but think the whole meme-thesis is really a proud and intellectually lazy freak out - the world is too complex for them to understand without effort so rather than try to improve their understanding insist that because they personally don't understand it that it has to be fundamentally bad or wrong in some way. That sort of anti-intellectualism can be seen in marketing quite a bit with "natural" products, "localism" as a fear of logistics. Not the sole factor of course but certainly plays a role (someone may just like freshness for instance). Not to mention complexity is peripheral to stability even in something relatively simple compared to a nation like electrical grids. They both gain resilence from interconnection and be taken down by them in chain reactions and there is a difference in complexity from say adding in a distributed series for reserve power, redundant power lines and say playing Enron with their "death star" fraud. It is kind of a silly metric to try to play oracle with as a proxy.
- solotronics 6y agoThis reminds me of systems engineering and designing around recovering from inevitable failures.