Molecules into chromosomes, bacteria into cells, cells into bodies, people into states — the same trade every time, and it holds only while the larger thing serves the smaller. Ours has quietly stopped, for seven reasons that require nobody to be acting in bad faith.
I build software. That is the job, and the rest of this site is about it. But the reason I organise the work the way I do rests on an argument that has nothing to do with software, and I would rather set it out properly than leave it as a slogan on a landing page.
Here is the claim the whole series runs on, stated first so you can decide early whether to argue with it.
Complexity has only ever increased through one move, and it is a trade. Things that could survive on their own give up part of that independence and get capability back in return — and the arrangement holds exactly as long as the larger thing genuinely serves the smaller. Molecules into chromosomes, bacteria into cells, cells into bodies, people into tribes, towns, firms and states. The same trade, at every scale, every time.
That is not a metaphor I am borrowing from biology to make an argument about organisations sound grand. It is a documented pattern with a literature, and the reason it is worth your time is what it implies about now: the arrangement we are currently inside has stopped holding up its end. The load on the individual keeps rising and the institutions built to absorb it are, for reasons that are well studied and require nobody to be acting in bad faith, getting worse at absorbing it.
This part establishes the pattern and diagnoses the failure. It is the historical one, and deliberately the least exciting of the three — if the groundwork does not hold, the two that follow are not worth reading.
If the claim is that complexity increases through a repeated trade, the first thing to establish is that the repetition is real rather than a pattern I am projecting onto the record.
This is exactly the question John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry set out to answer in 1995. Rather than treat evolution as a smooth accumulation of small changes, they went looking for the discontinuities — the points where the unit of evolution itself changed — and catalogued them as the major transitions[1]. What they found was that these events share a signature: entities that had been replicating independently end up replicating only as part of a larger whole. Independent molecules become chromosomes. Free-living cells become organelles. Single cells become bodies. Individuals become colonies. The pattern is not my reading of the record; identifying it as a recurring form is the work those authors did.
The mechanism of one of those transitions is worth seeing up close, because it shows the trade being struck rather than merely described. In 1967 Lynn Margulis argued something then considered eccentric: that mitochondria are the descendants of free-living bacteria, absorbed and retained rather than evolved in place[2]. The evidence she assembled was that they keep their own DNA, replicate on their own schedule, and are wrapped in a double membrane consistent with having been engulfed. She was right, and it is now textbook. Which means your cells are the settlement of a merger — and the absorbed party still carries the paperwork.
And it is worth knowing what that particular trade bought, because it tells you these events are not incremental. Nick Lane's argument[3] is that the merger solved an energy problem, not an information one: by internalising the machinery that generates power across a membrane, the resulting cell could support orders of magnitude more gene expression than a bacterium of the same size. His conclusion is that this is why complex life exists at all and why it appears to have happened exactly once. The trade did not make a slightly better cell. It made a different order of thing possible.
Now the cost, which is the half that gets skipped. A mitochondrion cannot leave. A liver cell cannot resume being a free-living organism; it has given up reproducing on its own account permanently.
And the trade has a failure mode that gives away its terms. Cancer is a cell that has resumed replicating on its own account at the expense of the body it belongs to. The reason that matters for this argument is not the imagery — it is that the failure is recognisable across every multicellular lineage, which tells you the arrangement is not a settled historical fact but something being actively held in place. A transition is not an event that happened. It is a bargain under continuous enforcement, and that is the property to carry into everything that follows.
If human organisations are the same trade running in a different medium, then something must decide where one organisation ends and the open world begins. Economics answered this a long time ago, and the answer is more useful than it first appears.
Ronald Coase asked a question in 1937 that sounds naïve and is not: if markets allocate resources efficiently, why does so much economic activity happen inside firms, where no prices operate and someone simply gives instructions[4]? His move was to notice that using a market is not free — finding a counterparty, negotiating, drawing up the contract, enforcing it, all cost something. Once you price those, the boundary of a firm falls out: an activity moves inside when coordinating it internally is cheaper than transacting for it outside. Oliver Williamson spent a career turning that into a full account of which activities land on which side of the line[5].
What that gives us is not a fact about companies but a lever. An organisation is not a natural kind or a moral entity. It is a boundary drawn by a cost comparison — which means it is not fixed, and it moves whenever the costs move. Hold onto that. It is the reason any of this is live rather than academic, because coordination costs have just moved further and faster than at any point in my working life.
There is a second constraint, and it is about us rather than about markets. Herbert Simon's work on bounded rationality[6] established that people do not optimise, because optimising requires information and attention nobody has; we satisfice instead, taking the first option that clears a threshold. Robin Dunbar approached the same ceiling from primatology[7], correlating neocortex size against group size across species and arguing there is a limit on how many relationships a brain like ours can actually hold.
Put those next to Coase and you get the honest description of what an organisation is for. Every organisation ever built is a workaround for a cognitive limit, priced by transaction costs — a way of getting more done than the people inside it could individually track. Which is precisely why it matters what happens when the amount to be tracked grows faster than the workaround.
An organisation is a boundary drawn where internal coordination is cheaper than external transacting. It moves when those costs move — and coordination costs have just moved further, and faster, than at any point in my working life.
So the trade is real, and organisations are the human form of it. The claim I made at the top was that our current one has stopped serving the units. This is where I have to make that good, and it is where writing like this usually goes wrong.
The tempting move is to explain the frustrating parts of institutional life by supposing somebody arranged them. I think that is a mistake — not because it is impolite, but because it explains less. Each mechanism below produces institutional decay with everyone behaving exactly as their position gives them reason to, which makes the decay predictable rather than conspiratorial. Read them as a sequence: each one describes a different way the organism's side of the bargain quietly gets deprioritised.
Read together, these are seven independent routes to the same destination. The units' interests are diffuse and go unorganised; the referee is captured; the agents optimise for themselves; the information asymmetry hides it; the effort flows into capture; the arrangement locks in; and what remains legible to the institution is a simplified shadow of the people inside it.
That is what an institution looks like when it is still extracting faithfully and has quietly stopped returning. Not malice — arithmetic.
Put those together and you have most of what people are gesturing at when they say the system is rigged. The outcome they are describing is real. The mechanism is ordinary.
I find the ordinary version far more useful, because it is actionable. A conspiracy has to be exposed, and exposure is somebody else's job. An incentive structure can be rebuilt — and knowing which of these seven you are up against tells you what a replacement would actually have to do differently to avoid inheriting the same decay.
None of this requires anyone to be hiding anything. It only requires that people inside a system respond to the incentives that system gives them — which is the one thing you can always count on them to do.
Institutions absorbing complexity is the entire point of them, so the question is whether the absorption is keeping pace. Two results say it is not, and they attack the problem from opposite ends.
Joseph Tainter approached it as an economist looking at collapses[17]. His observation was that complexity is a strategy: societies add administrative layers, specialists and infrastructure because doing so solves problems. But each addition returns less than the one before, while costing at least as much — so the return on complexity declines even as the investment keeps rising. Past a point a society is paying more for its problem-solving apparatus than the apparatus returns. His reading of several historical collapses is that they were that arithmetic running out, not a single catastrophe. Which means the institutional strain in §3 is not an anomaly of our era; it is the expected late behaviour of any long-running complexity strategy.
Herbert Simon called the other half in 1971, before most people had felt it: a wealth of information produces a poverty of attention[18]. His point was that once information is abundant, it stops being the constraint — the constraint becomes the capacity to attend to it, and any system that keeps optimising for producing more information is optimising for the wrong resource.
Now put them side by side, because together they describe a squeeze rather than two separate problems. The legal, financial, medical and administrative surface a person is expected to navigate keeps expanding — that is Simon's side. The institutions built to absorb that load are returning less per unit of effort — that is Tainter's. And §3 explains why they are not going to volunteer a correction.
Both halves of the bargain are under pressure at once. The cell is being asked to handle more; the organism is less able to take it on. That is the condition, and it is the thing Part 2 responds to.
Three things this argument does not say, because each is a conclusion a reader could reasonably jump to and none of them follows.
It does not say things are getting worse. By most measures they are not, and the institutions under discussion are a large part of why. The claim is about a widening gap between load and absorption, which is compatible with almost everything having improved.
It does not say these institutions should be torn down. Olson's own finding cuts both ways: the coalitions that rigidify a society are usually the ones that won something worth keeping. A replacement that cannot hold what they hold is not a replacement.
It does not say any of this is new. Every citation here predates the current moment, most by decades. What is new is not the diagnosis — it is that the cost of coordination, the thing Coase showed draws every organisational boundary, has just moved sharply for the first time in a century. That is Part 2.
What this part does claim is narrow and, I think, hard to argue with. There is a recurring bargain between a unit and the larger thing it belongs to. It holds only while the larger thing genuinely serves the smaller, and it is enforced continuously or not at all. It decays through documented mechanisms that need no bad actors. And ours is under strain from both directions at once.
One last thing, because it is the door into Part 2. The choice is not only between markets and states. Elinor Ostrom spent a career documenting institutions that were neither[19] — commons governed by their own users, some running for centuries, with rules the participants wrote and enforced themselves. She won a Nobel for showing that the standard prediction of the tragedy of the commons is not what actually happens when users can communicate and sanction each other. Whatever else that establishes, it establishes that the space of workable arrangements is much larger than the two we spend our time arguing about — which is the space Part 2 is building in.
Part 2 takes up the opening the last paragraph leaves. If organisational boundaries are set by coordination costs, and those costs have just moved further than at any point in a century, then the question is what becomes buildable that was not — and whether the thing that becomes buildable can be made to hold up the side of the bargain that our current institutions have stopped holding.
Part 3 asks what such a thing would owe the people inside it, and what they would get.
I would rather be argued with than agreed with here. If §3 is where you think this goes wrong, that is the most interesting place to push.
Written in order and best read that way. Part 3 is being written; I am not putting a date on it.
The pattern, why organisations exist at all, and the seven documented mechanisms by which our version stopped holding up its end.
The first transition whose participants can read the terms — and the kind of structure that could take the other side of the bargain.
Near term and long. Who benefits and how, and the far view — entities unbound from a location or a market, moving through the underlying structures the way fish move through a reef.
Everything cited is a published work; where a claim is mine rather than a cited author's, the text says so.