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Let’s consider a fairly mundane example. Amazon is a gigantic network of buyers and sellers. Its operation involves the use of huge quantities of information—about prices and quantities, supply chains and delivery dates, bank accounts and interest rates.

It is, in short, a tool our society created to help manage some of that enormous complexity and make sense of that vast quantity of information (Jeff Bezos’ parasitic rentier ownership aside).

Some enterprising individuals figured out they could exploit Amazon to sell fake products. This poses legitimate problems: some of those knock-offs might genuinely hurt people.

So: society had a lot of complexity and created a new system for making sense of that complexity, but now there’s even *more* complexity as a result. Rather than trusting the system to produce reliable results with minimal effort, customers have to expend additional effort to figure out if they’re actually paying for what they set out to buy.

Since Amazon doesn’t care—they get paid either way—perhaps we’ll see professional Amazon validators emerge, whom the public can hire to evaluate and aggregate Amazon information.

Complexity on top of complexity on top of complexity.

2/10

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/amazon-counterfeit-fake-products/