Screen shot 2010-04-02 at 3.45.16 PM.pngClay Shirky analyzes the TV industry in light of the premise of this book and I wonder how much of that anaysis is applicable to the publishing industry. In any event, it makes a worthwhile read. Here’s a snip from the beginning:

In 1988, Joseph Tainter wrote a chilling book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter looked at several societies that gradually arrived at a level of remarkable sophistication then suddenly collapsed: the Romans, the Lowlands Maya, the inhabitants of Chaco canyon. Every one of those groups had rich traditions, complex social structures, advanced technology, but despite their sophistication, they collapsed, impoverishing and scattering their citizens and leaving little but future archeological sites as evidence of previous greatness. Tainter asked himself whether there was some explanation common to these sudden dissolutions.

The answer he arrived at was that they hadn’t collapsed despite their cultural sophistication, they’d collapsed because of it. Subject to violent compression, Tainter’s story goes like this: a group of people, through a combination of social organization and environmental luck, finds itself with a surplus of resources. Managing this surplus makes society more complex—agriculture rewards mathematical skill, granaries require new forms of construction, and so on.

Thanks to Sherri Nichols for the link.

4 COMMENTS

  1. To say that the Romans left nothing but a few archeological remains is so completely wrong. We have the Christian religion, the Romance languages, a code of laws, the concept of a united Europe, a model for a republican government, literature, the preservation of Greek literature and science (with bonus thanks to the Arabs), and Mussolini’s horrible concept of a reborn Empire. The government may have fallen, and there was a lot lost, but much survived as well.

  2. To say nothing of the Eastern half of the Empire that endured another 600-plus centuries.

    Plus, strictly speaking, the Roman Empire did not Collapse in the same sense as the Maya and Easter Island societies, among others.

    Rome’s fall is more typical of large empires that stop growing and focus inwards into internicine conflict, which then leaves them vulnerable to external attack. Rome wasn’t split into two because it couldn’t be administered; it was split because constant civil war made it indefensible. Plus the internal balance of power favored a political solution: the two would-be Emperors decided that the certainty of a half-empire domain was a better deal tha a 50-50 shot at the whole realm.

    Complexity had nothing to do with it.
    Short-term thinking, a lot.

    Rome is too well known a society, too well understood, too documented to be explained with simple over-arching theses about complexity or anything else.

    Now, if one wants to look for a theory of Collapse that *might* have relevance to publishing (or other industries having trouble adjusting to modernity) one might look to another tome:

    Jared Diamond’s COLLAPSE looks into the Maya, Easter Islanders, and other societies that imploded because they’d outgrown their support systems and became non-viable as organized societies. An ecology-based theory, that one, and for his examples, a lot easier to buy into.

    And one that might serve as a cautionary tale to the BPHs who are mortgaging their future because they are too wedded to their existing structures to see that it is exactly those structures (and their costs) that imperil them.

    (I just heard that one of the BPHs’ reaction to ebooks includes bringing typesetting back in-house. No comment needed, right?)

  3. Toynbee is out of favor now-a-days, but I think his theory that states that when societies cannot overcome their fundamental challenge(s) they sooner or later perish as a result. I believe that was more applicable to Rome.(For US racism, deficits, militarism.)

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