Complexity Basics — Part III: The Increase in Socioevolutionary Complexity
The increase of social, media and technological complexity in socioevolution
Table Of Contents
1. Let’s start with the obvious
2. The explosion of social, media and technological complexity in the modern era (since ca. 1750)
2.a. Heuristic Model 1: Social formations which vary according to different primary differentiations
↳ Simple hunter-gatherer societies with segmentary differentiation
↳ Pre-modern societies with stratified differentiation
↳ Modern society with its differentiation of several function systems
↳ Next society (according to the German sociologist Dirk Baecker)
2.b. Heuristic Model 2: Leading media causing media, information, and complexity catastrophes
3. Conclusion
The starting point for this mini-series on complexity basics were two questions about the relationship between VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) challenges and Business Process Management (BPM).
In this third part of this series, we focus on question 2, which asks whether referring to complexity in general and VUCA in particular isn’t rather trivial, given that our species has always lived in complex environments.
In short, are complexity / VUCA actually nothing new under the sun?
1. Let’s start with the obvious
Homo sapiens has always had to deal with ecological contexts and a cellular-neural infrastructure whose complexities have been overwhelming:
- The biosphere, with all its animal-plant interactions, has long been poorly understood, and even today there is no consensus about the complexity and stability of ecological networks.
- Pathogens weren’t understood until the pioneers of microbiology, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, in the 19th century. Prior to that time, humans were in a constant battle of life and death with microbes — and we were almost always on the losing side.
- The body of an adult 70 kg reference man is made up of ca. 30 trillion human cells and approximately 38 trillion bacteria living in the gastrointestinal tract, etc.
- It is estimated that the human brain consists on average of ca. 100 billion neurons and as many as 1,000 trillion synapses.
In brief, against this background, it can be said that overwhelming complexity, with VUCA emphasizing only some aspects such as volatility, uncertainty, etc. of that complexity (see part II), has been humanity’s constant companion.
And we have often responded with simplifications such as references to gods, demons, spirits, and divine punishment, or the miasma theory, for example, that have abstracted away all low-level complexity, but can now be seen as more or less helpless illusions of control.
In this context, it’s interesting to note that the Western tradition regards human beings not only as indivisible containers (in-dividuals) but also considers them as constituent parts of social containers such as families, organizations or societies.
However, neither in-dividuals nor organizations or society as a whole are able to process the above-mentioned complexities in real time. Instead, any of these systems would immediately collapse if confronted with them directly — in the sense of overwhelming environmental, i.e., ecological, cellular and neural complexity kills.
If you are interested in how we can replace this container/whole-parts perspective that has prevailed in the West from ancient Greece to the present, read this introductory series on social complexity.
Yet this VUCA triviality is only one side of the complexity coin. If we take a look at the other side — the social, media and technological side — the picture changes.
2. The explosion of social, media and technological complexity in the modern era (since ca. 1750)
To understand the social, media and technological evolution of our species, we could explore various contexts in A History of the World (edited by Harvard University Press and publisher Ch. Beck), a current six-volume history of our interconnected world in a global historical framework.
But to keep things manageable in this post, let’s refer instead to two heuristic models from the field of sociological systems theory, namely the Bielefeld School of Niklas Luhmann and others.
2.a. Heuristic Model 1: Social formations which vary according to different primary differentiations
Following Niklas Luhmann, we can distinguish the following social formations with the corresponding principles of primary differentiation:
Simple hunter-gatherer societies with segmentary differentiation and the following characteristics
- The segments consist of (extended) families, bands, clans, etc., each of which ensures its own survival.
- The segments are of the same kind / rank and have no central political authority.
- Nonverbal and in particular oral close interactions are the predominant form of communication to coordinate behavior.
Note: In this context, it is worth mentioning the mystery of Göbekli Tepe, because it is amazing that a multitude of hunter-gatherers were capable of such a monumental architecture. In other words, the logistical complexity involved exceeds anything we commonly associate with prehistoric humans!
Pre-modern societies with stratified differentiation (from the early advanced civilizations to the European estates society of the early modern period)
- This social formation is stratified according to the social status or rank of its members. Or to be more precise, there are estates, strata, castes or classes that have different rights, duties and opportunities.
This also leads to a vertical hierarchy, including the formation of a central political power. - Nonverbal and in particular oral close interactions are still the predominant form of communication to coordinate behavior.
However, in the centuries following the invention of the printing press, the millennial primacy of nonverbal-oral close interactions, especially in Europe, was increasingly eroded by tele-media (books, letters, newspapers, magazines, etc.).
Modern society with its differentiation of several function systems since about 1750
- Modern function systems (politics, science, mass media, economy, medicine, etc.) are emergent specialized subsystems within society, each with its own societal function and internal rationality (including programs, theories, methods, discourses, etc.).
- The simultaneous reduction and increase of social complexity: Processes of subdifferentiation reduce social complexity, but function systems also increase the complexity and dynamics of society, as each subsystem develops its own code, medium, and program to communicate and coordinate with other subsystems.
- Functional differentiation creates problems of inclusion and exclusion, as not all individuals can participate equally in all subsystems, and some are even marginalized or disadvantaged by the respective system logic.
Note: This can sometimes include spillover effects of exclusion across function systems, such as: no job — no health insurance — no housing, etc.. - Tele-media, primarily digital nowadays, dominate and have replaced the historically predominant a-technical close interactions based on nonverbality and orality.
- Functional differentiation is accompanied by a veritable explosion of related organizations. For example, Statista estimates that there were over 333.34 million companies worldwide in 2021!
- Moreover, since the middle of the 19th century, all kinds of parameters (population growth, trade and globalization, degree of urbanization, primary energy consumption, etc.) have been exploding (for more details, see Jürgen Osterhammel (2014), The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, Princeton University Press). For instance:
Next society (according to the German sociologist Dirk Baecker)
- In this (future) social formation, operational networks based on digital technologies and artificial intelligence could replace the guiding principle of functional differentiation of modern society.
- This development, which is just taking place, has far-reaching consequences, because the social complexity, dynamics, volatility, unpredictability, etc., which accompany it, are increased immensely.
As if the explosion of social, media, and technological complexity of the transition to the next society were not enough, two other aspects are added to the mix:
- First, a center-periphery differentiation that can be built into previous social formations (except segmentary societies). That is, there is a center that is dominant and privileged, and a periphery that is dependent and marginalized.
Prominent example: the urban-rural divide. - Second, the old primary modes of differentiation (segmentation, stratification, and functional differentiation) do probably not completely disappear in the next society. Rather, they could continue, mutatis mutandis, as principles of secondary differentiation.
2.b. Heuristic Model 2: Leading media causing media, information, and complexity catastrophes
Niklas Luhmann and Dirk Baecker developed another heuristic model that describes the relationship between the information explosion caused by the introduction / primacy of a new leading medium and the primary mode of differentiation of a social formation.
Thus, we can distinguish the following relationships:
- Introduction / primacy of the oral medium -> segmentation of simple societies.
- Introduction of the written medium -> stratification of pre-modern societies (for example, in ancient Greece).
- Introduction / primacy of the print medium (newspapers, magazines, books, etc.) and later electronic media (radio, TV, film, etc.) -> functional differentiation of modern society.
- Introduction / primacy of digital media (at the moment, especially, generative artificial intelligence à la ChatGPT, Bard, etc.) -> operational networks (?) of next society.
That is, the establishment of a leading medium creates massive explosions of media forms, information and complexity (e.g. in the case of the printing press in the early modern period), which overtax the structures of the previous social formation. As a result, new societal structures emerge, leading to a new social formation with a different principle of societal primary differentiation.
In addition, we can short-circuit this heuristic model with technical evolution (here: simple tools, classical machines, non-classical platform technologies). For example, as follows:
- Simple societies
- Segmentation as the primary mode of societal differentiation
- Orality as the leading medium
- Simple tools as the leading technology - Pre-modern societies
- Stratification as the primary mode of differentiation
- Orality as the leading medium enhanced by writing (and images)
- Classical machines as the leading technology - Modern society
- Functional differentation as the primary mode of differentiation
- Print medium and early electronic media as the leading tele-media
- Steam engines, electricity, and then computers / computer networks as the leading platform technologies - Transition period / next society
- Operational networks as primary mode of differentiation
- Digital media as the leading tele-media
- Artificial Intelligence as the leading platform technology
As before with social complexity, all media and technical dams have been breaking in modernity, especially since the middle of the 19th century:
A long-term timeline of technology (in: Max Roser (2023), Technology over the long run: zoom out to see how dramatically the world can change within a lifetime, published online at OurWorldInData.org)3. Conclusion
Although complexity in general and VUCA in particular have always accompanied humanity in ecological, cellular, and neural contexts, the social, media, and technical complexity dynamics of modernity, especially since the mid-19th century, are breathtaking.
Key socioevolutionary features of these dynamics include:
- The simultaneity of decreasing and increasing social, media, and technical complexity. For example:
- Today, we need artificial intelligence to process big data.
- At the same time, the development of artificial intelligence itself is growing at a dizzying rate, leading to even larger data streams.
(2022), The brief history of artificial intelligence: The world has changed fast – what might be next?. Published online at OurWorldInData.org)- Multiple globalization trends:
- global communication networks
- global supply chains
etc. - Radical shortening of time horizons through a massive acceleration of
- technology-based communication modes,
- the rapid adoption of new media (formats) and technologies
The partly exponential growth rates in all possible areas since about 1950, i.e.:
a number of socioeconomic and earth system parameters are utilized including population, economics, water usage, food production, transportation, technology, greenhouse gases, surface temperature, and natural resource usage (Great Acceleration, in: Wikipedia 2023),
have led some observers to say that we have entered a new era: the Anthropocene.
The uncanny notion then is altogether that of a further accelerating social, media and technological evolution — without a driver, which may culminate in a technological singularity.
Is it any wonder then that conspiracy narratives, for instance, flourish, albeit as helpless and undercomplex as the panicked purchase of toilet paper in response to the coronavirus pandemic?
At least they have the psychological advantage of providing complexity-reducing illusions of control and agency — even if this does nothing to change the underlying helplessness in fact.
Be that as it may, all of those dynamics in the ecological, temporal, factual, and social dimensions also affect many of today’s organizations:
- Disruptive technologies that undermine proven business models and jobs.
- Unpredictable communication dynamics, e.g.,tweets that cause massive stock market jumps or lead to career suicide.
- All kinds of privacy and security issues (proliferation of fake news, cyber attacks, surveillance technologies, etc.).
- The rise of the anywhere organization, i.e. remote work.
etc.
What does all this mean for our initial question?
- VUCA is trivial on the one hand, since we have always had to exist in complex (ecological, cellular, and neural) environments.
- On the other hand, the abbreviation VUCA is misleading, because the umbrella term is the social, media and technical increase in complexity that has exploded since about the middle of the 19th century — so far without stopping.
Volatility, uncertainty, etc. are then only some features of this multiple increase of socioevolutionary complexity, which is anything but trivial!
Find out what this means for other acronyms like BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible), which should replace VUCA, in Part IV, the conclusion of this mini-series on the basics of complexity.
Thanks for reading and, hopefully, see you in the next post !
Author for WAITS Software und Prozessberatungsgesellschaft mbH, Cologne, Germany: Peter Bormann — October 2023.
