Societies and cultures are complex systems of inter-dependant interactions which structurally combine to self-dampen, and even perpetuate. They carry their own free energy and collapse into an equilibrium of minimal input and interaction. Software developers know these energy patterns and have developed management techniques of minimum discipline and barely sufficient conventions. Any enforcement of process and tools above this just adds inefficiencies and overhead to the system. Political systems follow the same patterns, high energy systems are inherently unstable.

Free Energy and The Internet

Ryan Tomaykoin an article titled, Motherhood and Apple Pie ; has an impassioned article on the state of the internet and the attempts by corporations to convert it to a unitarian structure which fits their needs. From the article;

Not only have these business radicals claimed the internet as their own but they have also somehow gained the confidence of all the worlds industry in their ability to deliver a new and sparkling internet, one no doubt capable of reproducing the complexities and flaws that plague existing mediums so as to make it feel more like home. They've brought their own principles and agendas, asserting them as obvious and correct while ignoring the wisdom we've gained and shared and gained and shared over years of collaborative practice and observation of working systems at this scale.

I think Ryan makes the mistake of assuming the internet is an indivisible unitary system . We have already seen AOL's attempt at a walled off private internet fail. Networks must talk to each other to survive. But he does point out many of the design principles that have made the internet a success.

1. Simplicity
2. Modular Design
3. Tolerance
4. Decentralization
5. Test of Independent Invention
6. Principle of Least Power
7. Simplicity

The internet was the greatest social organisation tool that 20thC technology has been able to come up with. One of the reasons for its success was it sought out the lowest technological energy to maintain itself as a complex system. As new nodes came onboard, and the internet population grew, this low free energy allowed increasing complexity to be added, removed, and swapped in ad-hoc.

As much as Usenet, IRC, Instant Messaging, Forums, collaborative websites, Orkut and even MySpaces are laughed at, they have enabled the rapid creation of new communities with varying degrees of perpetuation. Almost as soon as this tool was created, individuals were using it to increase the intimacy which often had little regard for the borders of nation-states. People marrying after meeting on the internet was met with horror in the early 1990s, it rose to hysteria in the mid-90s and by the 21stC, it was a multi-billion dollar business. Such is human progress.

The Futility Of High Energy Systems

One of my favourite software methodologists is Alistair Cockburn . He came to establish the "Crystal Method" as one of the Agile Methodologies for creating software. Cockburn had a great story of being brought into successive software projects as a consultant to enforce a process that would be efficient and maintain high quality.

In the first project he came, in suggested a whole bunch of process changes and formal steps for the developers to follow. The changes and steps were ignored if they were inconvenient, yet to his Cockburn's surprise working software was still produced. So the next project he consulted on, he made the process looser, and less restrictive. Most of his process changes were ignored again, yet the developers still produced working software at the end of the project. This went on for a couple of other projects and Cockburn came to the conclusion that humans are the determinant step in a software project.

"Human-powered" means that the focus is on achieving project success through enhancing the work of the people involved (other methodologies might be process-centric, or architecture-centric, or tool-centric, but Crystal is people-centric).

This is not to deny that there are processes that are needed to create software of acceptable quality, however the Crystal Method espouses coming up with a set of barely sufficient conventions, or the least discipline methodology. This gives the people in the project sufficient freedom to achieve as they see fit, and also doesn't hamper their innovation, productivity or their ability to adapt their process to what they need to deliver working software.

Cockburn is advocating that imposing process, and tools on a development project artificially increases the energy state of the system and requires higher inputs of energy which are wasted, rather than being spent on producing software. This higher energy can only be maintained by expensive, and constant input of energy into the system to ensure that the process/tools are adhered to. Cockburn is claiming that a high energy system is not sustainable, and produces inferior outcomes.

Political Energy Inflation

Politics is the arbitration of power in social organisation. The state has a monopoly in violence, and the dominant mechanism for coercion. This is tempered in democracies by the representatives who wield this power being answerable to an electorate, and being limited in how long that power can be used before again facing those that elected them.

Political systems are complex and are not immune to natural energy states. Political systems that require high inputs of energy to be maintained are inherently unsustainable. In the short term they can survive but can only do so with constant, and great inputs of power, coercion, intimidation and wealth. These constant inputs often destroy the state, as well as the population. As a result of this massive input of external energy to maintain the system against its natural instability, drastic inequities are a necessary condition in such political systems. This exists in monarchies, autocracies, theocracies, despots and other forms of absolute executive power.

Any political system where the state gathers new responsibilities, powers, wealth to itself in a short period should be treated with caution. The state is actually making itself more unstable by doing so. The farther the system moves away from its natural state of barely sufficient conventions or least discipline it is increasing the demands for external energy to be put into the system to maintain. This external energy is usually extracted from the population as taxes, and removal of liberties.

Complex systems thrive and are at their most adaptive when decentralised, inter-dependant and non-contiguous. As a political system collapses more power, wealth, and responsibility to itself it seeks to dominate those resources and become a unitary system. Centralisation involves entropy and disorder which has to be contained by extracting more resources to input into the system to maintain its present state. It is an ugly feedback loop that results in energy inflation, and ultimately, in state failure.

One State, One Executive, One Outcome; One Point Of Failure

Unitary systems are inferior, extract a massive cost from the system to be maintained, and are ultimately unstable systems. This is because they ignore the natural energy state of the system. In Australia we have seen a government which has expanded the amount of taxation taken from the people rapidly in under a decade. Central taxation revenue was 20.8% of GDP in 1994, by 2000 it was 26.1% . We have also seen a government that is hostile to the states in the Australian Federation, and actively removing the state's responsibility from them. We now have the Anti-Terror laws which expand the coercive power into civil liberties and the natural political rights of the people.

There is a reason Nationalist government's do not persist. One reason is that liberty and liberalism quickly remove their impositions on populations once the people remove Nationalist's from government. The other is that Nationalism is inherently unstable. It is unitary, seeks to use coercion to force adherence to social, cultural and political norms. Which in a system of least discipline are emergent values of the people, not a coerced action from the state.

The Howard Government's form of Nationalism is introducing instability, and unsustainability to the Australian Federal system. It may be maintainable in the short term, but only with the increased energy input from the federal government. This will come at the cost of increased loss of civil liberties, and increased government tax collection and expenditure to maintain the system's inflated energy state.

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