Complexity Flight
Systems reduce reality to what is processable and subsequently treat the simplification as reality.
Mechanism: Every system needs to reduce complexity in order to remain capable of action. This becomes a problem when the reduction is no longer recognised as such. James C. Scott describes how states make their citizens visible through simplification – but in doing so render invisible what cannot be categorised: local knowledge, individual situation, non-linear relationships.
Recognition indicators: Systems responding to exceptions by adjusting rules rather than examining categories. Institutions treating data as reality. Diagnoses reducing the person to their category. Languages in which the unforeseen does not appear.
Fields of occurrence: State administration (form-based reality), medicine (ICD classification as a claim on reality), AI systems (historical training data projects the past into the future), finance (risk models as reality models), media (news format shapes what counts as an event).
Recognition indicator: When a system no longer distinguishes its own simplification from reality – and when deviations are treated as system errors of reality rather than as indicators of system limits.
Academic foundations
- Seeing Like a State (1998) Yale University Press Legibility: Staaten machen Gesellschaft lesbar, zerstören dabei lokales Wissen und das, was sich nicht kategorisieren lässt
- Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) Chandler The map is not the territory: mentale Karten werden als Wirklichkeit behandelt – die Differenz zwischen Modell und Realität verschwindet
- Soziale Systeme (1984) Suhrkamp Systemkomplexität und Umweltkomplexität: Systeme müssen reduzieren, aber diese Reduktion ist keine neutrale Abbildung