Clay Shirky On The Complexity And Collapse Of Business Models
The latest transmission from Clay Shirky investigates the institutions of industry and how the role of complexity plays in a digital age.
By nature, Shirky explains, traditional business models are stuck in a history of complexity, over consumption and culturalization. With brands and businesses striving to lead the often cursory charge on innovation, a lack of simplicity and humanity renders them inflexible and disconnected with a increasingly agile population.
“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.”
Shirky smartly likens the collapse of such complex civilizations to the state of today’s profit-driven institutions and their adaptability tactics concerning paid vs. non-paid online video.
“In the future, at least some methods of producing video for the web will become as complex, with as many details to attend to, as television has today, and people will doubtless make pots of money on those forms of production. It’s tempting, at least for the people benefiting from the old complexity, to imagine that if things used to be complex, and they’re going to be complex, then everything can just stay complex in the meantime.”
Lastly, Shirky emphasizes that, from a business perspective, today’s mass devotion to access and usability must be approached less as a cost-benefit analysis and more as the structural upheaval of a heavily systematic culture.
“When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, 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.”
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