Anonymous: if you flip through the earlier theses, you’ll see I rely heavily on Tainter’s work, and cite him directly earlier on.

If we look at today’s global environment we see a moderately unstable system. Our global interconnectivity has outpaced our ability to dampen excess. It is a relatively high performance system that is increasingly controlled by global markets. The old dampening functions of borders, distance, government, etc are quickly fading. The problem is that this is a system that can quickly reach for excess whenever rogue feedback is introduced. Worse, there are people actively working on ways to introduce this rogue feedback. The long-term solution to this, is to both build more stability into the system (decentralization) and to create dynamic market-places for security that will aid us in quickly dampening rogue feedback. Unfortunately, we are far from realizing that goal, since our current view of the world is based on old models.

and the entire thrust of life’s evolution on Earth has been towards greater and greater complexity

It hasn’t. See thesis #2, or Gould’s Full House. Evolution drives towards diversity, not necessarily complexity.

The collapse of greater complexity is here referring to social complexity, not necessarily biological complexity, but there’s a certain anologue here, as well: there does appear to be an asymptote of biological complexity.

Also, like Diamond, you make a great deal out of previous civilizations collapsing, but Jason, THEY KEEP COMING BACK. And they’re more complex every single time.

Not really. There have been about six autochthonous civilizations. Each one must keep on growing. All but one of them collapsed; the last one now fills up the whole world.

Very rarely has a civilization “come back.” More often, other civilizations around it carry on, continue expanding, and bring everything around to a new, higher level of complexity, until it collapses again. (In the case of Rome, see Byzantium and Ireland).

In this particular case, it’s endgame–because there are no more civilizations to carry on after this one falls, and the resources to rebuild are beyond any primitive society.

I haven’t seen you draw a distinction between types of complexity. Certainly just adding more nodes to a network won’t improve computation speeds beyond a 10-13% increase, but that’s just complexity for it’s own sake. Evolution clearly provides us with a robust complexity, because it’s been working for one hell of a long time.

Also, like Diamond, you make a great deal out of previous civilizations collapsing, but Jason, THEY KEEP COMING BACK. And they’re more complex every single time.

I just don’t see how any of this stands up to mathematical or biologial facts.

http://www.cbc.ca/cp/business/060224/b0224122.html