Where do you turn, when you no longer believe that the way of living we grew up taking for granted can be sustained?
#JosephTainter (author of 1988 classic 'The Collapse of Complex Societies') and #GailTverberg (actuary and founder of 'Our Finite World') will be joining #SurvivingTheFuture alumni #IvanIdso to share possible answers at Minneapolis' Degrowth Summit on Sat Oct 25th, 11:30-15:30 CDT.
Register for FREE livestream by ticking "Join Virtually" at:
www.tinyurl.com/degrowthsummit
This article is available free for a limited time via #BulletinOfTheAtomicScientists
“Fragile, impermanent things”: #JosephTainter on what makes #civilizations fall
" #Collapse occurs, he argues, when the costs of #complexity are greater than its returns to society. Complex societies are problem-solving organizations, and when the costs of coping with crises are too great, they fail."
#civilisation #tippingPoints #civilization #climatecrisis #DoomsdayClock
@mathew Software and software development tools are tools and methods for managing complexity.
Or, paraphrased: Software makes complexity cheaper.
And as William Stanley Jevons noted, if you make something cheaper, you induce a demand for more of that thing.
Software complexity is a constraint budget. And so long as we're making complexity cheaper, that budget is relaxed, and the amount of complexity increases. Up to the point that it's no longer tractable, at which point a new equilibrium point is reached.
Or, in the alternative, if you follow the logic of Joseph Tainter, until the capacity to sustain that complexity itself degrades or is perturbed beyond its capacity to recovery, and the whole house of cards collapses.
#complexity #JevonsParadox #Software #JosephTainter #Collapse
Shaun Chamberlin
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