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 Brand’s pace layering concept, which evidently he developed in a collaboration with Brian Eno, explains the resilience of a complex system, how it resists shocks and how it adapts over time by the metaphor of “layers” of which the system is comprised, and that operate at different scales and at different rates of change. It also acknowledges that such systems are not hermetically-sealed clockwork engines, but rather amorphous, boundary-less ephemeral contrivances that borrow from or depend on, other pre-existing systems with their own dependencies.

Brand, described six layers. From the bottom up: nature, culture, governance, infrastructure, commerce and fashion. To work through these, let’s take the example of a single market.

“Nature” describes the most universal, fundamental, difficult-to-fiddle-with engineering of the system, on which all other levels depend. Nature applies universally, well beyond the scope of the individual market in our example. It includes biology, chemistry, physics, meteorology, geology to the extent these determine how the participants behave, and are impacted by the behaviour of participants in the market. The market may generate changes in nature (as to life expectancy, crop yield, climate and so on) but they happen over extremely long time scales and would require concerted effort amongst many different markets. It may not change very fast, but nature is highly determinative of what a market can and cannot do.

“Culture” is the next layer. This is not biologically determined, but is nonetheless deeply wired into the behaviour and expectations of different peoples. It is wider th

“Governance”

“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.

There are resonances here with the the end-to-end principle of network architecture — Brand describes complex adaptive systems in terms of social structures successive layers. 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 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.

“Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution.  Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy.  Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.”

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.

If an issue presents as a matter of fashion but proves inexplicably resistant to change, it may be an indication that it is really operates at a deeper level.

Why don’t lawyers adopt plain English? Why don’t they adopt legal technology? If we regard as a matter of professional preference what is actually deep articulation of the agency problem, and a requirement of the power structure (the “legal paradigm” depends on punters believing what lawyers so is all tremendously complicated and difficult) — then trying to change that through peer pressure within that power structure will not work. The challenge may come at a cc deeper level, and from someone necessarily outside the paradigm, providing an imagined alternative to users of the services that those within the paradigm can’t see.

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