Pace layering

The JC’S favourite Big Ideas™ Go Premium Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Big ideas The Devil’s Advocate Philosophy Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

“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, and deeper, than a national affiliation. Europeans are generally different, cultural from Anglo Saxons, within whom American Anglo Saxons are different from the English, who are different from the Scots, Welsh the Irish; Mediterranean Europeans are culturally different from Alpine Europeans, those from the Balkans, Slavics, Scandinavians and so on. A market which might work in Belgium or Holland might fail in the Hebrides. The boundaries between these cultures are not fixed, they merge and shift where they intersect and will gradually change, especially with immigration through time.

“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.

'Technology is not a layer but operates across the spectrum at different layers, which means you should be careful, legaltechbros, to consider where your application fits in. 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.