*You can find all past articles of the Peak Complexity series by going to the Complexity Category page at https://cityuntangled.com/category/complexity/.
I was planning on making Part 4 of this series (https://cityuntangled.com/2026/05/24/peak-complexity-part-4/) the last one for a while. It covered potential solutions for managing complexity, along with some criticisms of social factors that add to excess complexity. This new part briefly covers the challenges of additive complexity.
Purely by chance, I ran into a Substack article by a lawyer from NYC about the same topic – without using the same terms. Multiple people in my personal circles talked about how the arbitrary addition of features is leading to issues. I realized increasingly complex systems that are not working well is one of the spirits of our times, so I thought it might be appropriate to write a brief article that points to the article by the NYC lawyer.
This is the article: https://peoplevsthemachine.substack.com/p/the-375000-drinking-fountains. It is long, and I think it is worth reading the whole article if people have time. Here is a quote:
Our system feels broken because in many ways it is broken, and the establishment hasn’t come up with good answers for fixing it. Populists on the right and on the left have tapped into public frustration using narratives that blame some combination of coastal elites, billionaires, big businesses, or immigrants. The populist narratives aren’t identical; the right and the left disagree about who the villains are. But they share an approach: name villains, promise consequences for those villains, and insist that meting out those consequences will fix things. These narratives resonate because people’s grievances are real; our institutions have failed to deliver what they promised. But populism mistakes symptoms for causes. No combination of tariffs, wealth taxes, mass deportation, or antitrust enforcement will address what’s actually producing the symptoms. The populists’ villains may get their comeuppance, but housing remains unaffordable.
The villain — the thing breaking America — isn’t a person, a party, or a conspiracy. It’s a system, a system built over decades by people making a series of individually rational decisions that added up to something no one designed and no one would build on purpose.
I’m going to call that system the Machine.
The author published a second article on July 2nd, 2026 in time for U.S. Independence Day: https://peoplevsthemachine.substack.com/p/canada-also-has-a-machine. It is a very brief article that talks about Canada. I thought it could have added some more specifics about Canada. Here’s a quote:
With neither a language barrier (at least in the Anglophone provinces) nor the differences that make the UK feel more noticeably foreign for the American visitor, Canada shows us the closest thing to what our country might look like with a multiparty parliamentary democracy, a better-designed immigration system, less expensive higher education, more widespread use of the metric system, and socialized health insurance. All of these things work reasonably well in Canada, but they’re not panaceas. The Canadian health care system has its problems, immigration is still a controversial issue, and Canada’s politics are plenty messy. Canada performs better than the United States in some areas and worse in other areas, and it demonstrates that there’s no perfect way to run a diverse federal democracy in North America. Different choices produce some different outcomes, but the overall level of friction and dysfunction is about the same.
An idea came up for me after writing Part 4: With a complex system, each person is only able to hold a limited snapshot of the system. In a hierarchical organization, which is a system, executives and managers have overall understanding of the system and can usually point people to the specific components, e.g. departments, to have their questions answered. Lower-level employees have deep knowledge of specific departments or projects within departments. They may also have an overall understanding of the system but at a shallow level.
One type of disconnect is when people who do not regularly interact with the system, e.g. customers, try to understand it or interact with it. Customers might become angry or frustrated. Or, they might bypass the organization entirely and rely on alternative sources such as social media. These are some specific examples that come to mind:
- I designed an outdoor sign about a project that clearly listed my phone number for people to contact for questions. A person took a picture of the sign and asked people on social media how to find more information. This person also shared the result from a Google search, which took the person to a random unrelated page. I happened to notice because this person posted the question on a group page I occasionally went to. I decided to not respond since responding to random social media questions is outside of my work scope. My speculation was that this person had anxiety or a lack of interest in contacting somebody over the phone. The person could have emailed me, but that would have required browsing the departmental website for my email address. The URL was listed on the sign as well. I am no longer on most social media sites, but that is another story.
- A person who was researching an organization needed some technical documents and asked people on a social media group page that is not related to the organization for the documents. I happened to have the documents, which I acquired by directly asking the subject organization. I had already eliminated my social media account, but it happened to be a page I occasionally visit without logging in. Unless I created a new social media account, there was no way for me to directly contact the person. I had no reason to go out of my way to help a person I do not know when this person could have just contacted the organization.
A difficult and subjective question facing organizations, especially governments, is, “How much communication and education are sufficient?” As organizations grow in complexity, they can try to answer specific questions by providing very narrow snapshots or by providing more comprehensive responses, which might be lengthy and overwhelming. They can also try to hold workshops, which might be poorly attended.
A more complex system takes more effort to understand. People can try to manage their efforts at understanding by turning to summaries, but the weaknesses of summaries are: 1) A summary is still a snapshot of the whole system; 2) It has to omit details, which might be relevant to some people; and 3) More complex systems tend to produce longer summaries.
People can start asking the difficult question of whether to stop adding, but that is fraught with emotional, economic, and political conflicts. Happy U.S. Independence Day!