Cory Doctorow (npub1fdr…lvhs) 's blog on why social media barons hate sociality reminded me of Stafford Beer's introduction to variety.
He starts with a simple system. Then introduces a cat. The cat, doing what cats do, makes the system massively more complex.
Beer uses this to explain that an effective system needs as much variety as its environment, or cleverly attune to it.
Or you change the environment and shoot the cat.
That's what techbros do when we don't conform to their data. They shoot the cat.
