The idea that the current global disorder results from a failure to manage complexity is an elegant formulation. It offers a concise guide through a welter of contradictions, ranging from domestic political squabbles all the way to inter-state disputes, declines in corporate profit rates and ecological breakdowns. Plus, where could one find a more striking observation than that of Manuel Castells, when he says that the Soviet Union fell into terminal stagnation due to its inability to produce a personal computer industry? After all, computers bring order to large amounts of data, and personal computers extend that ordering capacity to ever larger amounts of people. Maybe a better computer (AI) could solve our present problems?
However, the surging sense of intellectual mastery brought by the phrase, "managing complexity," declines percipitously when you try to define either "management" or "complexity." The latter is vexing because the disorder comes from so many sources: faulty airplane equipment, disgruntled voters in the north of England, the harvesting of behavioral data by Internet companies, persistent trade imbalances between Germany and Southern Europe, the volatile relations of US and North Korean leaders, etc. When exactly does complexity get bloody complicated, and for whom?
Management looks easier to define, since it's just about resolving problems. But how do we even know what counts as resolution? Is Kim Jong Un his own self-contained problem or is he inseparable from nuclear proliferation, the rearmement of Japan, Iranian centrifuges, the emergence of a Chinese blue-water navy and the US "pivot to Asia"? Is all that international complexity even an issue, or is it just a distraction from the more urgent conundrums of feminism and race relations? Who decides and why does their decision matter? Is it a kind of Heisenberg uncertainty situation where a clear definition of resolution makes a full enumeration of complexity impossible, and vice versa?
Felix, I am totally curious about how one could redo, for the present conjuncture, Castells' fascinating observations about the Western countries' long search for new ways to manage complexity in the 70s and 80s. Does one first need to define a systemic order in which certain phenomena become too complex? Does one need to develop categories allowing for the identification of significant perturbations? Do the complexities also have to be sorted as to scale? Are there functional or normative criteria that could help one decide when complexity is sufficiently well managed? How could one create an anticipatory image of a new (meta)stable state? How to develop a practical approach to the spiraling chaos of the present?
best, Brian