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Big Complexity

Page created: 2023-10-11
Updated: 2025-03-13

You’ve heard of "Big Oil" or "Big Tech".

Now I present: "Big Complexity"

This isn’t just about companies. This is about any system that promotes and contributes to increasing complexity for any reason.

To be a member of Big Complexity, you need to have dominance in your field and you have to have a system that promotes growth, creeping featurism, and complexity.

The Big Three Web browser engines are Big Complexity:

All three are technically open-source. But they’re so huge that having access to the source isn’t much of a freedom as it is a curiosity. I don’t want to be completely fatalistic and say that nobody can change or fix these browsers on their own. But that’s pretty close to the reality.

Enormous complexity is practically indistingishable from intentional obfuscation.

(Just being big is not quite the same as complex, but there’s definitely a relationship of some sort. Like, the Venn diagram has a lot of overlap.)

The only way to combat Big Complexity is to use and promote simple tools and methods. Sometimes that means accepting inconvenience or having to trailblaze your own path. But more often than not, it eventually leads to more convenience (and certainly more freedom and opportunity in the long run) to be not reliant on complicated things.

Kartik Agaram has a brilliant take on this in "Using computers more freely and safely":

"Prefer software: * with thousands rather than millions of users * that seldom requires updates * that spawns lots of forks * that is easy to modify * that you can modify"

https://akkartik.name/freewheeling/

Openwashing standards

The term "openwashing" is usually used for commercial companies that use the term "open" or "open source" for proprietary software that is not actually open in the "libre" or free-as-in-speech sense. Sometimes these software products are called "source available".

But I really like this use of openwashing by Lorriane Lee in "Standards Bloat is a thing":

"It certainly seems sometimes like Firefox is an example of openwashing, which is scary, as browsers are basically the key underlying technology of the web, and the HTTP/HTML/CSS/Javascript standard is getting complex enough that only a multigazillion dollar organization can build a web browser (in particular, a rendering engine) from scratch that correctly implements the standards."

https://astoundingteam.com/wordpress/2020/04/21/standards-bloat-is-a-thing/

The idea here is that, yes, Firefox is an "open source" browser in both the "source available" and "libre" sense of the term. But because the open standards are being piloted by huge big-tech interests, they’re still serving big tech.