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Shirky: The Web and How Complex Societies Collapse

Posted: Tue May 18, 2010 5:21 pm
by RJN
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/th ... ss-models/
Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. ... When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.
Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:

“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”

Re: Shirky: The Web and How Complex Societies Collapse

Posted: Fri May 21, 2010 4:38 am
by Beyond
What is it that exists that does not collapse? - NOTHING!!
The Universe and all that is in it and everything that is beyond it.
ALL will collapse at some point.
Each in its own way, as its day ends.

That is how what is - gives way to something better.

Re: Shirky: The Web and How Complex Societies Collapse

Posted: Fri May 21, 2010 8:27 am
by wonderboy
beyond wrote:What is it that exists that does not collapse? - NOTHING!!
The Universe and all that is in it and everything that is beyond it.
ALL will collapse at some point.
Each in its own way, as its day ends.

That is how what is - gives way to something better.

This reminds me of the White hole theory. A star supernovas, creating a blackhole which in turn creates an alternate universe at the other end of that black hole with all the mass from the blown up star and the surrounding nebula's etc, being sucked in and deposited in the alternate universe to create other stars planets, galaxies and other magic space stuff :), THUS, a collapsed star gives way to something better.


Paul.