Clay Shirky doesn't write a lot — he's averaged about one post every two months over the past year — but when he does write something, it's usually well worth reading. His latest looks at what the media theorist calls "The Collapse of Complex Business Models."
In a nutshell, Shirky draws a comparison between the theories of anthropologist Joseph Tainter — who wrote about why ancient societies such as the Romans or the Mayans suddenly collapsed, despite having achieved high levels of sophistication — and the current state of the mainstream media. Need a hint? It's not good.
I always thought that the collapse of the ancient Mayan civilization had something to do with inventing basketball, but it's possible that I'm confused about that. In any case, Tainter's theory is that most of these civilizations collapsed not in spite of their sophistication and complexity but because of it.
As Shirky describes it:
| "When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn't because they don't want to, it's because they can't. In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change." |
The comparison between these societies and modern media giants is obvious: both are large, sophisticated and complex — and incapable of behaving in any other way.
So when media leaders such as Barry Diller, Steven Brill and Rupert Murdoch say that readers and viewers will have to pay them for their content, Shirky says, what they really mean is:
| "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." |
