Pace layering

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“Infrastructure, essential as it is, can't be justified in strictly commercial terms. The payback period for things such as transportation and communication systems is too long for standard investment.”

—Stewart Brand, Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning

In Europe you can see it in terminology, where the names of months (governance) have varied radically since 1500, but the names of signs of the Zodiac (culture) are unchanged in millennia.  Europe’s most intractable wars have been religious wars.

Stewart Brands concept of pace layering explains the resilience of a complex system and its resistance to shocks by the metaphor of “layers” of the system that operate at different scales and at different rates of change. Reminiscent of the end-to-end principle, Brand describes systems in terms of layers. The most basic describes the most universal, fundamental, difficult-to-fiddle-with engineering of the system, on which all other levels depend. For the internet that is its packet-switching basic layer; for a society it may be chemistry, physics, and biology. The essential way everything is wired. Brand calls this “nature”. To change this is profoundly difficult — any change you make can fundamentally break any layer that depends on it — so any changes that do happen very slowly and deliberately.

The topmost level, “fashion” is ephemeral, random, dynamic, fluctuating, noisy — in the sense of “loud” and in the sense of “obscuring signal” — but even this can effect the adjacent layers if persistent through time.

The intermediate layers (from the bottom up culture, governance, infrastructure, commerce) are increasingly localised, flexible, changeable, and their constituencies increasingly fluid and hard to pin down. Nature affects a species, Culture affects a people, governance a nation, infrastructure a city, business a market and fashion whoever likes it. The fastest layers are the most innovative:the slowest are the most stable

So to understand how deep and persistent a system effect is and how fixable it is, consider the level are which it presents. A local gang conflict can fix easily, a religious grievance won't.

This is a good on the paradigm. It's not just how deeply buried the assumption, but it's layer.