The Meaning Code | Manufactured Complexity Drives Centralization and Loss of Autonomy: Simplicity Begets Responsibility @TheMeaningCode | Uploaded January 2022 | Updated October 2024, 4 hours ago.
Buck Perley and Karen discuss a twitter thread about the dangers that arise within our rapidly complexifying economic eco-system, as this "complexity and the regulations that often accompanies it inherently benefit early adopters and insiders."
Here's Buck's original thread followed by the original use of the phrase "complexity is a subsidy" from Jonah Goldberg in 2016.
"Relationships do open up a lot of possibilities. Humans are tribal after all, for better and worse. But relationships don’t scale past a certain point (see “social scalability” by nick Szabo and Dunbars number). And when you get past that pt humans come up w/ compromises to scale
Those compromises are usually worth it (see civilization and tech advancement), but they also come w/ tradeoffs like centralization, trust in third parties, loss of autonomy and self-determination.
What I’m specifically referring to in the tweet is what’s pictured which is a really complex new economy developing in the web3 ecosystem and such complexity inherently benefits early adopters and insiders. We see the same w/ regulation.
Large corporations typically favor excessive regulation and lobby for it b/c they can afford to get around it, whereas it increases the cost for new entrants to compete. This is why insurance companies favored Obamacare and social media companies want more internet regulation.
So I first heard the idea formalized as that phrase by
@JonahDispatch who admits it’s not an original idea to him but really an amalgamation of a lot of political science and economic thought (cont.)
It is definitely captured well by Friedrich Hayek when he describes “The Knowledge Problem” in his essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society”.
“I, Pencil” by Leonard Reed (available at Foundation for Economic Education) is another example of this in the realm of economics.
In politics you can go all the way back to the Federalist Papers and the debates around the drafting of the Constitution. This idea informs the ideas of checks and balances and federalism."
nationalreview.com/g-file/complexity-subsidy-jonah-goldberg
Jonah Goldberg:
"The more that financial success depends on high IQ; the more demand there is for lawyers, lobbyists, and accountants; the more onerous regulations become for men-with-strong-backs to find work or for entrepreneurs to start businesses – then the more we move towards a society where the government rewards people based on their ability to navigate paperwork or fulfill quotas on a political to-do list. Complexity benefits statists because increasing complexity allows statists to claim we need more government to help people navigate through these complex times. In the process of helping, they make the government more complicated, creating new services for “fixers” of all stripes to solve problems the statists created in the first place.
The more you look around at spots where society and government intersect, the more you can see how pervasive and pernicious this dynamic is. The more rules you have, the more power you bequeath to the people well-suited to make or manipulate the rules."
Buck Perley and Karen discuss a twitter thread about the dangers that arise within our rapidly complexifying economic eco-system, as this "complexity and the regulations that often accompanies it inherently benefit early adopters and insiders."
Here's Buck's original thread followed by the original use of the phrase "complexity is a subsidy" from Jonah Goldberg in 2016.
"Relationships do open up a lot of possibilities. Humans are tribal after all, for better and worse. But relationships don’t scale past a certain point (see “social scalability” by nick Szabo and Dunbars number). And when you get past that pt humans come up w/ compromises to scale
Those compromises are usually worth it (see civilization and tech advancement), but they also come w/ tradeoffs like centralization, trust in third parties, loss of autonomy and self-determination.
What I’m specifically referring to in the tweet is what’s pictured which is a really complex new economy developing in the web3 ecosystem and such complexity inherently benefits early adopters and insiders. We see the same w/ regulation.
Large corporations typically favor excessive regulation and lobby for it b/c they can afford to get around it, whereas it increases the cost for new entrants to compete. This is why insurance companies favored Obamacare and social media companies want more internet regulation.
So I first heard the idea formalized as that phrase by
@JonahDispatch who admits it’s not an original idea to him but really an amalgamation of a lot of political science and economic thought (cont.)
It is definitely captured well by Friedrich Hayek when he describes “The Knowledge Problem” in his essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society”.
“I, Pencil” by Leonard Reed (available at Foundation for Economic Education) is another example of this in the realm of economics.
In politics you can go all the way back to the Federalist Papers and the debates around the drafting of the Constitution. This idea informs the ideas of checks and balances and federalism."
nationalreview.com/g-file/complexity-subsidy-jonah-goldberg
Jonah Goldberg:
"The more that financial success depends on high IQ; the more demand there is for lawyers, lobbyists, and accountants; the more onerous regulations become for men-with-strong-backs to find work or for entrepreneurs to start businesses – then the more we move towards a society where the government rewards people based on their ability to navigate paperwork or fulfill quotas on a political to-do list. Complexity benefits statists because increasing complexity allows statists to claim we need more government to help people navigate through these complex times. In the process of helping, they make the government more complicated, creating new services for “fixers” of all stripes to solve problems the statists created in the first place.
The more you look around at spots where society and government intersect, the more you can see how pervasive and pernicious this dynamic is. The more rules you have, the more power you bequeath to the people well-suited to make or manipulate the rules."
