I recently read I eat the stars by Sarah Wilson. I have had it in my to-read list for a long time, and coinciding with the great simplification interview.

https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/234-sarah-wilson

I decided to go ahead and buy the book. One of the key points of the interview is the abandonment of hope, also starting point of the book. The hope that she refers to is the green tech revolution solving all our problems.

A few weeks later, there was another episode in the great simplification with Zeke Hausfather

https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/236-zeke-hausfather

His account is almost opposite. His job is to find technical ways to offset carbon emissions. Hope is in his words and he sees progress towards that goal reinforcing that goal.

I believe it is accurate to say that most people start from a position of techno-hope similar to Zeke’s. After all, we come from many decades of techno-success so the default has been that we can figure out a way out of whatever comes in front of us.

Techno-hope framing means that while we can see the damages of the things that we do, there is a floating goal of making things better as we go along, and that whichever limits we hit, we will overcome.

For some of us that position becomes untenable. In my case it is a long held perception that there is little slack in the human system so whenever there is a perturbation the ability to return looks weaker and weaker over time.

For example, I would argue that European governments got weaker since the 2007 crisis and never recovered in terms of level of debt or services provided. Similarly, it seems like the covid pandemic produced a permanent reduction in prosperity. All of it while energy and pollution remains as strong as ever.

Let me reformulate this choice: Some people stay with technological hope, and other people abandon it. Not the goal of a better existence, just the perspective on how to get there.

Is that choice a choice?

When I think on these topics, I tend to go to ecology. I don’t know why, as I have little knowledge about it.

Here is a reformulation: Why do some species become specialised while others stay generalists? Humans choosing technology to reduce pollution is a form of specialisation. Humans choosing to become resilient and consume less makes them more generalists.

In a very narrow sense, if being the fittest was the only parameter that mattered, all species would be specialised. However “fittest” might mean to be half as good for twice the options. This is particularly true with adverse or unstable conditions. There are some advantages to be specialised though, mainly less competition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalist_and_specialist_species

A bit of speculation: species do not choose how specialist they are. They become specialised or generalised depending on the remaining participants within their scale. They do this over many generations and cannot change it short term.

Humans can though. At individual level we can definitely choose if to invest money to grow our finances or act conservatively to save. If they are privileged enough. To buy that efficient heat pump or keep gas heating and lower the temperature.

With bigger structures like companies and governments choice becomes harder. Abandon growth and your country won’t be able to compete with next door country. Abandon growth and next door company will get all the investment. More like nature where privilege almost certainly doesn’t exist for long enough to matter.

But at the same time, the countries do not have a choice if the environment requires them to be more resilient. For example more limited resources requires countries to diversify their inputs despite the competition. A company in difficulty might choose to improve their existing products and abandon a new riskier bet.

It is as if the choice is made by the environment when the system is too complex.

A second reformulation

Here is an interesting pattern: Every book I have read on degrowth or collapse is inevitably a grieving exercise. Abandoning misplaced hopes, focusing on life and grief, transcending to be ready for what comes next. Most of these books argue that collapse is not a choice and that we are facing it one way or another, so readiness is what matters.

That reminds me of … software?. Do you see any commonality? :

  • Agile
  • Conway’s law
  • Team topologies
  • DDD
  • Fred Emery organisation design principles
  • Technical debt and Cognitive debt

Agile might be a bit harder to see at first, but let me try. Agile is an attempt to give an organisational unit certain degree of agency and favour composition within a company structure. I would argue it is a step towards resilience motivated by changing requirements.

Conway’s law and Team topologies are attempts to make clearer the structure of a model in relation with the structure of a company. They are an attempt to avoid accidental complexity

Organisation design principles are a description of the interactions between the parts and the whole, favouring agile like structures within a company.

DDD is also an attempt to reduce accidental complexity using layers and communications. It is a methodology to reduce Technical and cognitive debt which is another name for accidental (unintended) complexity.

All of these concepts share a sense of restrain, of deferring further optimisation to manage the situation in a more holistic manner. It is the same line of thinking that systems design proponents follow.

I have seen this dynamic many times: A company wants to keep growing and expanding so they create more and more software to serve more functionalities. Then they reach a point where complexity becomes the main limitation. The company can choose to tackle the complexity by splitting the parts and reorganise (resilience), delegate certain aspect of their system (reduce and make it brittle) or continuing the path and adding more people with diminishing returns (specialise). They can also choose to abandon parts of the system if the environment is too adverse (death).

I speculate that this sensitivity to generalisation vs specialisation is built in in our personalities. To double down on development or settle and find resilience. Some people want to tackle the complexity no matter what, others keep specialising no matter what, and most sit somewhere in the middle.