Re: <nettime> Managing complexity?

The elegant idea of "current global disorder results from a failure to manage complexity" is the mirror image of the idea of 'order in chaos', which ties increasing complexity and the emergence of the disorder together. Thus it also calls for the manageability of complexity, no matter how high is its complexity while it means time to time the unmanageability problem will rise, for those, whoever they are, organizes societies globally or global societal order. This latter is a 'class point of view', of the organizer class.

For complexity and chaos theories emergence of the disorder is about boundary conditions and emergence phenomena. For Gramsci, it is the time of molecular changes, when old is dying yet the new can't be born. For Bogdanov it is the type of crisis. Indeed as Joseph, you say it might be about a complex system and its environment, two complex systems encounter. Or as a result of the internal activities, differentiation of parts, of one complex system.

There is an ongoing debate within systems and complexity thinkers' community today which is about "what went wrong?". Prestigious systems and complexity thinkers call for going back to the roots and original sources to discover what went wrong or missed so that the unified science, the most general general systems theory, promised by Bertalanffy or Boulding's vision of GST, or Cyberneticıans failed.

As for Castell's suggestion about Russia and lack of PC-industry, it implies that the Internet (the network) is the emergence phenomena. So it is the noosphere getting flesh and blood (software and hardware). I think there is a grain of truth in what Castell suggest. In this article (http://www.systema-journal.org/article/view/406/357) David Rousseau et. al. argue why the GST failed and describe what a genuinely universal GST would look like. Funny enough, he is describing the first chapter of Bogdanov's Tektology, the Russian version first ever emerged GST. See: https://snuproject.wordpress.com/2019/02/26/alexander-bogdanov-not-ludwig-von-bertalanffy-is-the-founder-of-the-new-world-outlook-and-it-is-not-systemology-it-is-tektology/

Best,

Orsan

On Sun, 31 Mar 2019 at 13:54, Joseph Rabie <joe@overmydeadbody.org> wrote:

I have not been following this thread, so please excuse me if I repeat something already said.

Brian, I do not agree with your definition of complexity (as below) as a form of disorder coming from malfunctioning entities.

Complexity, in my view, is a natural phenomena caused by the multiple interactions that occur between different systems that collide with each other, by the fact that they operate autonomously (and not necessarily competitively) within the same body: whether it be our own, society, the world...

As an urbanist, this is certainly the case of cities. As a "simple", physical example, look at all the utility networks (water, gas, electricity, telephone, optic fibre, sewage, drainage...) operating under our pavements. They do not compete, but when one sees the same pavement being dug up over and over again, one sees the difficulty of organising their coexistence.

Joe.

Le 30 mars 2019 à 21:19, Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com> a écrit :

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?

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