Complexity is the enemy of Populism

Dan Hon on Melon Husk’s exit from the US Government:

The kind of person who says that you can rebuild social security in 3 months is the kind of person who also says, “twitter is easy, I can do it in a weekend”. It is a fundamental misapprehension of the scope of the problem and complexity that the thing (“social security”, or more accurately, “the things the social security administration does”) addresses and is charged with dealing with. “Twitter” does not reduce down to “microblogging”. Not anymore.

Musk has run into the classic populist’s trap of assuming things are simple, assuring people things are simple, pushing ahead as if things were simple. And then getting horribly mired in complexity. (One might make an interesting comparison here with Tesla and self-driving cars. It’s an easy problem to solve in a controlled environment, and a fiendishly intractable one in the messy reality of our streets.)

Simplicity is an often seductive lie. Think of all those “the five habits of highly successful founders” style articles that infested Medium and are now creeping like a fungal infection through Substack. They sell an attractive simplicity — I can do these few things and be successful – and abstract away a whole bunch of complexity, like the role of both timing and luck in success, for example.

Failure to manage complexity

But it becomes even more attractive when the complexity of life is being badly handled by governments. The globalisation of the past 20 years or so was an incredibly effective network of systems that allowed the creation of our modern digital economy – but it’s also fiendishly complicated and so very fragile. It was unintentionally disrupted by the pandemic, and so we unexpectedly found ourselves starting to care about previously niche issues like supply chains. And now it’s being threatened by an orange-hued populist who has sold the people who were hurt by the complexity of the globalised world on a simple solution. Tariffs will not work. That much is obvious. It will only make the lives of the people who voted for them worse.

But, fundamentally, this door has been opened by previous governments doing the easy bit – reaping the rewards of globalisation – without doing the really hard bit – insulating their populations from the worst consequences of it. These two ideas are constantly in tension: the benefits of complexity, the attractions of simplicity. There are ways of handling that healthily. Putting the phone away and walking in the woods for a few hours is a great way of finding a break, through simplifying and focusing your attention for short periods, before returning to the messy complexity of digital life.

The unhealthy way is in pretending to ourselves that there are simple solutions to complex problems. Should we ban phones in schools? Well, it would seem an easy solution to the issue of digital distraction. But there are many benefits to our young people having phones, too. Maybe we should think more about what apps we provide them with access to, and how much time we allow them to spend on them, as we navigate towards a healthy balance of benefits and risks.

Manage complexity to inoculate against populist simplicity

When we manage complexity well, simplicity is less attractive. Nobody seriously wants to go back to landline phones because smartphones offer us much greater benefits. They are massively more complex than landlines, but most of that complexity is both invisible to us, abstracted away by good design, and doesn’t make our lives manifestly worse. This is the idea, and what made the iPhone the most successful consumer product ever.

To push back the populist surge, governments need to do two things:

• successfully manage complex situations to the benefit of the populace
• communicate this, while resisting the urge to pretend solutions are simple

You need both. Either one on their own will not be enough — although the former is more important than the latter. Such a shame, then, that most have concentrated on the latter – and that’s why we’re in the global situation we’re in.

In the end, populist fail because, as Musk has discovered, their simple solution will not and cannot work. The lies that got them in power will not sustain them in power, as reality will eventually assert itself. And reality is complex.

The catastrophic interconnectedness of things

Nearly six years ago, I sat through a talk – while liveblogging it – that opened my eyes to this.

As Indy Johar said:

Perhaps we’re coming to the end of a system of thinking. For hundreds of years, we’ve seen the world in terms of objects – by separating things and defining them. Now the interconnectedness of things has become visible and, in some cases, catastrophic.

Today’s populism is a desperate attempt to turn back the clock, to impose an imaginary simplicity on a fundamentally complex reality. It will fail. The only question is: How much damage will it do in the meantime?