simplicity lost

I vaguely remember, many years ago, hearing a couple of old guys wax nostalgic about the simple old days, before everything got so new-fangled complicated. I pretty much scoffed at the time, thinking they just couldn't cope with change, or had a bad case of grass-is-always-greener syndrome.

But today I'm thinking that maybe they understood something that took me a lot longer to learn.

Now I'm no Luddite. I wouldn't know what to do without my Blackberry and my laptop. Hell, I'm a consultant, we thrive on change and ambiguity... we better, or we would have gone nuts in the first two weeks.

But today, I'm responding to the confluence of two things.

First is something I did at work these past few days. In the process of preparing the environmental documentation for what was originally designed as a fast-track federal permit, something to cut down on red tape and reduce the time and expense of obtaining fairly routine approvals for low-impact transportation infrastructure projects... I had to wade through more than 1000 pages of background guidance and participate in one meeting and several conference calls from the state implementing agency (Caltrans). And I'm not done yet. Someone obviously missed the point here.

Second, I'm seriously thinking of upgrading my DSLR. I've never been very happy with my 4-year old D100, it does bad things to skin tones, and after all this time in the damp coastal climate it's starting to create rare but annoying little glitches. Not often, but too much. Almost time to replace it. And in the digital world, 4 years ago is practically the bronze age.

Looking at D300 literature, I'm seeing that there's a 421-page technical manual, and interspersed with all the high praise I'm reading complaints about the complexity of the menus. I don't really think that's going to be a problem, there's enough in common with the D100 in a control layout sense that I'm pretty sure I can have it functional in a basic sense in an hour or less, and I have no problem thinking in hierarchical terms and dealing with elaborate menus. Although I pity someone touching one of these things for the first time, with no previous DSLR experience.

I probably need to do this sooner or later. Yet I'm seriously spoiled by years of playing with my Leicas and their stark minimalism.

But those are just the symptoms prompting the rant. What I'm seeing is ever increasing complexity. I never knew those allegedly simpler times the old guys talked about, the post-war economy was well underway before I was born. Yet in that relatively short timespan I've seen ever increasing complexity, and if anything the rate of change is only increasing. Rapidly.

I can't help but wonder how long we can sustain it. Probably beyond my lifetime, with any luck. But I wonder what todays kids might witness, or their kids.

There's no turning back. It's easy to utter platitudes about cutting bureaucracy, but all those bureaucrats are real people with real mortgages and real families. Chop all those regs I had to deal with today, and a whole lot of people are out of work. Chop enough at once, and throw the economy into the mother of all depressions. As if we could chop them anyway, because the workers and the special interests have already built a powerful political lobby to keep them in place.

The technical complexity is harder to pin down. The consumer DSLR highlights the paradox of it all; it caters to the masses looking to take a picture without thinking too much (as they have since the first Kodak Brownie); yet to do top-end work with a DSLR requires understanding that 421-page manual and a bunch of software and peripherals. They aren't simple gadgets, even as they create the illusion of simplicity.

In practice, it makes us either become specialists, good at a few things, or a drop out.

The recent news about how many Americans are locked away in prisons highlights that drop out rate. Lots of others fall into a perpetual underclass, unable to function in a high-tech society even as corporations clamor to let more educated foreigners in on work visas.

Our entire economic philosophy is a 300-year experiment based on the assumption of never-ending growth. It's scary to think there might be flaws in those assumptions.

I have no idea where it's headed. The possible paths diverge from here, and a lot depends on the vagaries of political will and outside circumstances.

But I'm pretty sure of one thing: Whichever road we follow, it's going to be full of potholes, because of all the paperwork required to fix them.