A simple proposal

Our world is becoming more complicated by design and it’s being done to exploit us. It is a time we fought back in favour of simplicity and systems we can actually understand - and trust.

Here's a phrase I find myself uttering a lot these days – 'why does this need to be so complicated?'. Obviously this is something we've all mumbled in the face of bureaucracy, but goes way beyond that.

Trying to open a website these days is like a brain training game. I was trying to browse some DIY stuff and ended up trapped in a mailing list pop-up I couldn't get out of. After I'd wasted enouhg time I just left. These days there seems never not to be 'an extra step or two'.

But that is peanuts really; I hear complication getting in the way all the time. When an unlicensed vape shop burns down a historic city, finding out who actually owns the vape shop is like a John le Carré thriller.

Just take a look at this. Really, have a look. It is a diagram Richard Murphy did of the ownership structure of the Scottish Police College's buildings. It is a chain of 32 separate holding companies and ownership vehicles in multiple countries eventually leading back to an ultimate beneficial owner which is a company in El Paso, Texas.

Or let's have a glance at something as routine as the various subscription services you have. If it's just TV, then whatever. But if you're effectively renting the software that runs your business, see if you can switch provider while maintaining business continuity. And many of these bits of software are little more than very basic forms of database. So why is leaving so complex?

And how on earth can a single country not have consistent data on its own citizens? Why have we spent countless amounts of money on IT systems and yet still my health service and my local authority and my tax service barely know I'm the same person. Why? And what do we do about this?

If you have time, it helps to explain this if you look at this analysis I did about why China can build electric cars but the western economies struggle. The short version is that the Chinese try to minimise the 'leaks' in the system, to reduce complexity in the manufacturing process because that increases efficiency and productivity.

But western economies are no longer driven by manufacturing but by finance, and for finance it works completely differently. For finance, every leak is profit – that is where the money is leaking to; to them. They like complicated processes because each complication needs consultants and lawyers and financiers and that is the lifeblood of the modern financial system.

Finance actively wants you to outsource your supply chain because for them the extended process is lucrative. You're trying to make something, they're trying to take fees and contracts from you at as many points along the way as they possibly can. They love complication, and for them unnecessary complication is literally free money.

You understand the process then. Manufacturer decides to make thing, brings in investor who demands financial review which concludes that it must outsource its supply chain and so the putative manufacturer has to source all its components – and there is a consultant and a lawyer who are just the thing for that.

Now a component doesn't come in on time. If you were Chinese you'd be making the component yourself whereas in the west you now need to get someone to chase the recalcitrant supplier through the law – and guess who is just the person to get on with that...

Finance stretches process because each gap in process is leakage and leakage goes into their pockets. The principle is the same with ownership – they love complex ownership structures because the gap between each holding company is another opportunity to manipulate another tax code to make sure you don't pay any tax.

Why are we plagued by these clearly not productive vape shops everywhere? Because the rules say 'if you want to create ownership structures so complex we literally can't police them you can pay no tax – would you like to do that then?'. The speculator who owns the shop has to make only slightly more than the electricity bill to reap a profit while hanging onto a valuable asset while it increases in value (they hope).

The rest of us get high street blight and raging infernos. So who writes these daft rules which invite abuse? Government departments. Why are the rules not simple? Because the people who wrote the rules told us that they couldn't be simple and so required that they brought in people who understood the complexity to write the rules.

Cue the finance sector seconding policy staff into government to write the rules that make all this possible, on the basis that it is complicated (it is, they made it complicated) so that they can make it even more complicated. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why the UK tax code is ten times longer than the King James Bible.

“I’m utterly sick of the studied confusion of Scotland’s public sector, creating rules and structures it then doesn’t police because the whole thing is just such a damned mess”

Now not every instance mentioned above is the same in nature. The example of the 'enshitification' of the internet is not about tax avoidance and outsourcing but about wasting your time while they advertise at you. The difficulty of shifting software platforms is purely taking your data hostage by making it painfully difficult to disentangle. (They can't legally take your data away from you altogether...)

And the public sector IT debacle is absolutely about hustlers pushing for outsourcing. The problem with outsourcing like this is that the contractor has a vested interest in making themselves indispensable, and that means simple, robust systems are unattractive to them. They would rather sell you 'a solution' to fragmented data than explain that you're just going to have to de-fragment your data one day if you want anything to work.

What is consistent in all of this is what is known in system design as 'friction'. Friction is anything which slows your progress. That isn't necessarily a bad thing because sometimes the process is the point. When you buy luxury goods you often want to be pampered as part of the process, which is technically friction but is pleasant friction.

But what all of the above examples do is use friction specifically to exploit you. They are monetising friction. They know that this friction is making your life worse in countless ways, but they know that if they can disguise the friction in complexity, they can claim there is nothing they can do about it.

That is a lie, and we don't need to put up with this. This is my simple proposal – let's have a war on unnecessary complication. You'd be surprised how robust you can be in this. For example, an existing Common Weal policy is that if Scotland had full control over taxation it should create a 'simplicity' rule.

When the tax authorities are looking at the accounting of tax returns, if they find any step in the accounting process which is there for the purpose of evasion, avoidance or obfuscation, they can simply ignore it. Make it legal for tax authorities to undo tax avoidance. End of.

This is perfectly legal, and the principle holds in lots of ways. I would create a database of every single property in Scotland – house, land, factory, retail unit – and I would require that it records the beneficial owner who will be wholly liable for the property, legally and for tax purposes. No hiding.

This gets us quite a long way, but there is loads more we can do. I am now very firmly of the view that we need to create a publicly-built national database of public sector data, collected in a single place. A chunk of what I've heard senior policy-makers claiming they will use AI for is to bridge all the different fragmented bits of data that are already there.

That is putting in place a bad solution to a situation which itself was the result of a bad solution – and so on. Where we have complexity because of poor system design (often systems designed by people monetising friction...) we need to 'stop the line' and build the system competently. Most of this stuff really, really isn't hard to do if you do it right from the ground up.

In government we need simply to take a 'consultants out' approach. They are not there to help you, they are there to help their clients and everything they touch seems to go wrong. Create an internal government analysis unit and start hiring civil servants who know how to do something other than turn up at meetings and ask for more performance indicators.

I mean, there is so much more than this. Much of the crisis facing the western world just now derive from the 2008 financial meltdown. That was almost wholly caused by cynical complexity, wholly invented financial products which were 'so clever' no-one understood them.

Then again, the whole of international finance is utterly intentionally mind-numbingly complex. If you go and try and understand concepts like 'shadow banking' or 'the repo market' or 'hedge funds and shorting' and you manage to succeed (good luck) you'll find yourself asking 'why do we do this, and why do we allow it?'. It is mad.

Then of course there is algorithmic exploitation. You probably know this as concepts like 'surge pricing', because having a good old-fashioned set price for something is much worse than a complex system that uses an complicated algorithm to work out precisely it can screw you over at any moment. That can just be banned.

What set me off on this this week was mostly the vape shops. I'm utterly sick of the studied confusion of Scotland's public sector, creating rules and structures it then doesn't police because the whole thing is just such a damned mess. Hence it's three years since Edinburgh prosecuted anyone for business rate non-payment. It's like the only way to find out if business rates have been paid on a property is to burn it down...

But I've been following this aspect of equity-driven capitalism for quite a while – as a consumer, as a someone trying to monitor government, as a citizen. Once you understand this and once you know how it works you'll find yourself tearing your hair out. We literally let crime and corruption hide in complex bureaucracy and we know it is happening and we do nothing.

Just remember this – doing something is simple. You just have to want to. But to be honest, most of our politicians just get confused by all of this and end up nodding in compliance. Because they, like the rest of us, are drowning in complication. By design.