Scale giveth and complexity taketh away

The downside to scale is complexity. The next order of magnitude usually allows for ever more complicated arrangements, which yield the benefits of the new level, but also come with the natural downsides of complexity.

The downsides of complexity are a loss of:

legibility: complex systems are more difficult to understand
reliability: complex systems fail more often and are more difficult to fix
competition: fewer producers can deal with the complexity
ownership and control: we need corporations to manage/maintain it for us
freedom and independence: (due to above corporate dependency)
longevity: there are more components that can fail
reproducibility: complex systems are less predictable
responsiveness: more layers means less direct connection to ground

Wifi and bluetooth: Now we have no wires!

Take wireless, for example: what do we gain? mobility! that’s awesome.

What do we lose? security. reliability. latency.

Before the 1990s, the telephone network was analog electrical. When you called someone, you were literally closing an electrical circuit–sound converted to voltage that travels at the speed of electricity through copper wire. Talking with someone on the phone was a direct connection, with the same latency as whispering into their ear in bed. In fact, talking with someone across a dinner table had higher latency compared to talking with them on the phone.

Then we went to digital packet switched networks, which is what we have today.

Even with GHz processors and fiber-optic cables, the latency of encoding, routing, and decoding (several levels each) is not trivial. You may think it’s unnoticeable, but you don’t remember (or never knew) the intimate immediacy of an analog telephone call. This quality of the old-school phone network is lost, perhaps forever.

Multitasking: Now we can do more things at once!

What do we lose? Focus and intention.

I remember booting up the computer to do something…to write an essay, or play a game, or log onto a BBS. I approached the computer with an intention. It took 30 seconds to boot up, and then more seconds to load the program, and do-di-di-do-do-di rinnnng screech! bong bong whitenoise connected.

The whole time I’m sitting there with an intention. A thing I’m going to do, that I’m probably excited about doing, and this amazing machine is going to help me do it, and it’s going to be awesome, more awesome than I could do without the machine. Deliberately setting an intention before any activity is a known focusing technique. And it created a ritual of experiencing the computer boot up.

And then the computer runs, and you are doing exactly one thing with it. You are writing the essay, or playing the game, or online at the BBS. You only had this time with the computer, so you better make the most of it. In general you could only log into a BBS for an hour each day…and the majority of that bandwidth was used by downloads (9600 bps is about 1kB/s, or about 3.6MB/hour).

Now we have computing with 1000x more power, and we can do as many things as we want, even though we can still only do one thing at a time.

Always-on connectivity: Now we can always be online!

What do we lose? Boundaries and solitude.

Video conferencing: Now we can work completely remote!

What do we lose? Physicality and propinquity.

And so on.

Not backwards to a cruder past

I use all of the above technologies on a daily basis. I’m not saying they are a net negative, or that we should stop using them. I’m pointing out that, contrary to common implicit beliefs, higher tech levels are almost never of uniformly higher quality. As in all things, there are tradeoffs.

This is why the Amish are extremely conservative in adopting new technology. And I am increasingly sympathetic to that approach. You don’t know how it will affect you until you use it for some time, and if you scale it out to your whole population, you will become dependent on it.

But now we do have these technologies, and have spent great investment to make them ubiquitous and convenient. Now we just have to deal with the emergent negatives. Like even if you ride your open-source bicycle to work, you still have to risk a traffic accident with a car.

But forwards to a simpler future

Technology is not a one-way street.

We can accommodate wires in our products and bicycles on our streets. We can make simpler software. We can encourage offline technology in third places.

And there are many other ways to reclaim technology to serve humans instead of the other way around.