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Top-level
 *stares into the void* What’s more complex? An app running in an in-house 4u server racked in the office’s telco closet in the back running off the office Verizon line, or an app running four hypervisors deep in an AWS datacenter? Which is more complex to you? What about to your organization? In total? Which is more prone to failure? Which is more secure? Is the complexity good or bad? What type of Complexity can you manage effectively? Which threaten the system? Which threaten your users? 4 comments
@mhoye I really like your map–territory relation analogy here; definitely resonates with me!  @paul @mhoye I also think about Latour's theorization of "black boxes". he says that complexity becomes black boxed once a mechanism's running becomes a settled "matter of fact". I recommend his "Pandora's Hope" -- it is a wonderful book that asks the question: what happens, in a epistemological and ontological sense, when we abstract away complexity? What are the *mechanics* of that? |
Gregory's Server
@paul I really like the combined ideas of "complexity has to live somewhere" and "complexity for who" - I think they're both real, but together they suggest that there's a topology of complexity here, that a kind of maps-vs-territory model of understanding complexity is possible.