What do you guys think of the following argument? (Apologies in advance if it’s too technical)

TLDR: effective complexity matters, not just ideal complexity, and the current level of technological advancement likely enables horizontal structures to have a higher effective complexity than hierarchical structures

It all starts from the fact that complex problems need complex solutions (Ashby’s law of requisite variety), and societal problems are complex. Decentralized systems are more complex than centralized ones, and decentralized planning is more complex a market that is just based on price signals. This would then in theory justify decentralized governance over centralized governance and a decentralized planning economy over a market economy.

This justification is not really new. However, this justification only really considers ideal cases. In reality, just like hierarchical systems have an information bottleneck via lossy data compression as information travels upwards, horizontal systems can have an informational bottleneck through noisy raw data when people don’t communicate or coordinate effectively. These information bottlenecks essentially translate to an effectiveness of a system.

I doubt that the following is very original, but the effectiveness of an information bottleneck is essentially directly influenced by the current level of technological advancement in society. However, the effectiveness from a horizontal information bottleneck scales differently with technological advancements than the effectiveness from a hierarchical bottleneck. At low levels of technology, hierarchical systems may have a higher effective complexity, but at high levels of technology (which we are at or approaching) systems approach their ideal complexity, such that horizontal systems would have a higher effective complexity.

This is all to say that while previous anarchist or horizontal societies over the long have been defeated or replaced by more hierarchical systems due to a variety of reasons, one important reason to consider is that maybe technological advancement weren’t at the level yet to enable large scale horizontal societies. I don’t know when technology advanced sufficiently to enable large scale horizontal societies, but I’d definitely we are at that point now.

Looking forward, this also frames the development of information technologies and coordination methods as one of the most important aspects that an anarchist movement should actively try to develop. I would think that a society should to try to optimize for its current effective complexity while being forward to looking to try to continue increasing its effective complexity. So, while certain hierarchies may be temporally justified based on the level current technologies (even in some future), we should always be trying to develop technologies or methods that enable the effective complexity of horizontal structure to surpass that of their hierarchical alternatives

  • jlnanallas8OP
    1·
    4 months ago

    Thanks so much for the feedback and advice. I have a pretty strong math background but not much in systems or information theory, and these ideas (including anarchism) are relatively new to me, so I just wanted to try to communicate some initial thoughts to see if I was on some sensible track. I definitely plan on reading up on the subjects you mentioned, and trying to figure out how to use my quantitative background for good.

    For a more mathematically rigorous example, we often control high-dimensional linear systems with reduced-order models, because certain modes dominate the behavior, even though you might have a bunch of other modes that you’re neglecting

    This relates to your point of needing to actually define complexity, but a good definition (at least for this purpose) would probably consider “complex” models that can be modeled with a high degree of accuracy by a reduced order model, is not actually as complex as it seems.

    There are some incredibly complex centralized systems running around

    Sure, not all decentralized systems are more complex than all centralized systems. Not sure how to formalize this at this point, but something along the lines of if the two systems/networks have the same amount of nodes, then the decentralized one is likely to be more complex. From my basic understanding of network theory, you could probably then calculate the correlation in a centrality metric with a complexity metric for different networks.

    IMO, more important justifications are fairness, dignity, preservation of life and liberty, stability of horizontalness over time, robustness to adversarial actors—social factors come before operational factors

    Definitely agree. Was thinking that I should have clarified this.

    And just from a pragmatic perspective: “it’s more complex” is not a selling point for decentralized systems…or anything

    Agreed, just enough complexity but not too much is a fine balance and is something else that needs to be quantified

    so any mathematician interested in this stuff would basically have to conduct this portion of their research in secret

    Would be cool if like minded people whether in academia or not could collaborate on stuff like this. Obviously not much money in it, but it could be a sort of operations research that cooperative and mutual aid networks could be interested in and wouldn’t seem so adversarial

    There have been examples of horizontal societies at all levels of technological development

    Sure, I guess I was suggesting that maybe the level of technological advancement can in part determine the ease with which a horizontal society can increase in size and/or endure in time. For example, could help with developing communication tools that reduce in fighting or reduce coordination costs or could help develop defense tools to defend from larger hierarchical groups

    Much more learning to do