More often the chief weapons of peasants are to turn to large landowners for protection, and/or to increase their passivity and indifference to the success of a regime. Revolutions usually aim at a transformation of regime, or at restoration with modification, not at sociopolitical collapse. A new hierarchy is always implicit in the alliance between intellectuals and peasants.

#JosephTainter #TheCollapseOfComplexSocieties

@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.

@rysiek @bob @TheGibson

#complexity #JevonsParadox #Software #JosephTainter #Collapse