Clay Shirky fascinates me because he thinks about the world within the context of thinking that has gone before him. In his recent post, The Collapse of Complex Business Models he references Joseph Tainter’s 1988 book called The Collapse of Complex Societies.

Shirky is able to take Tainter’s work, on how several societies (such as the Romans and Mayans) arrived at a remarkable level of sophistication only to suddenly collapse, and apply those lessons to media’s plight today. The media industry being the complex, sophisticated system on the verge of collapse that is under his examination.

Tainter’s argument, as introduced by Shirky, follows that, as a direct result of complexity and sophistication, we see systems fall because the elite at the top are unable to see a different path. Shirky points to how this plays out in the business models of mass media, where the elite cannot foresee a scenario where users don’t pay for what they consumer. Spelled out, Shirky says big media’s argument for who pays for what would sound something like this:

“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”

The ecosystem of our planet is perhaps trapped in the same dire circumstances, where the burden of change drives our collapse. But in the less frightening scenario of what happens to old media, Shirky champions ingenuity by saying:

“But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.”

I highly recommend reading the full article, The Collapse of Complex Business Models by Clay Shirky.