Simplicity — that’s the answer. To get through the crisis and its aftermath we must let go of what we don’t need.

I see versions of this argument popping up all over the place. One of the best is made by Andreas Kluth for Bloomberg:

The rationale is that unnecessary complication is at best a luxury and at worst a liability — a house of cards waiting to tumble down. So, if the alternative is civilisational collapse, there’s certainly a case for achieving resilience through retrenchment.

However, I have my doubts as to whether our response to the current crisis really is one of simplification. In particular, I’d suggest that our accelerated reliance on digital technologies is compelling evidence to the contrary.

The online video conference is an obvious, glitchy and awkward example. I, for one, can’t wait to get back to screen-free office meetings — not only because I quite like my colleagues, but because real life is by far the easiest medium for communication.

However, in other domains, tech offers a much smoother user experience — and therein lies a trap. What might look like simplicity itself, cleverly conceals its true complexity.

Think about online retail, for instance. For millions of us, click-and-buy has become routine — an everyday miracle in which goods from around the world appear as if by magic on our doorsteps. But what lies behind each delivery is an intricate logistical operation — powered by tech that can only get more sophisticated as human labour is replaced with delivery drones and other machines.

From the consumer’s point of view, the traditional method of going to the shops to physically locate, pay for and bring back purchases may be a bigger effort, but organisationally it’s far less complicated. The individual components of the system (i.e. shoppers) don’t depend on one another. If one fails, for any reason, there’s no knock-on effect on the others. Compare that to an online delivery service with its deeply inter-connected components — a partial failure of which can bring the whole system crashing down.

Of course, infectious disease turns a human population into a system too — individuals co-opted into a complex network whose nodes can compromise their neighbours. Lockdown is about unplugging ourselves from these harmful connections.

The irony, though, is that in relying on technology to facilitate our social isolation we become dependent on systems where complexity is a feature, not a bug… until, that is, there is one.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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