Anna Beth Lane is a Brooklyn-based writer and thinker completing her M.A. in Media Studies at CUNY, where she focuses on complexity-based approaches to media architectures. She recently taught a seminar at SoRA on Complexity, and is currently a member of SoRA’s Study Corps. Anna Beth sat down with supporting faculty and organizer Nick Plante to discuss attention activism through the lens of complexity and systems thinking.
NP: You just finished teaching a seminar at SoRA called COMPLEXITY. I took the class, and wasn’t sure what to expect going in: “complexity” sounds, well, complicated, and pretty abstract. So let’s start there. What does complexity mean to you, and why is it important?
ABL: We often associate complexity with a vague, overwhelming sense of “a lot going on.” But I’m referring to something more specific. My interest comes from Complex Systems Science, or what’s often called “Complexity Theory.” It’s a broad field that studies how systems at all scales – from molecules to global economies – self-organize and exhibit emergent behavior. You’ve probably heard the phrase, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” That’s the essence of complexity. Smaller, interacting parts create something entirely new without a central planner.
There are a lot of useful ideas from this field, but the insight I find most compelling is that complexity exists in a sweet spot between order and chaos. You need enough order to retain organization, yet enough chaos to allow for adaptation and surprise. Too much order makes a system overly rigid; too much chaos makes it incoherent. Complexity is the dynamic dance between the two. In a universe of total order, nothing could be otherwise. In a universe of total chaos, nothing could be. To sustain creative, adaptive life, you need that dance.
In the course at SoRA, we explored complexity as a way of living in that in-between space: learning to work with and embody the uncertain nature of complexity rather than fearing it. That shift has been helpful for how I live and attend to the world, so I was eager to explore concepts in complexity with other attention-minded people.
NP: Can you speak a little more to how we might do that? How we might occupy that “space between?”
ABL: Yes. Complexity is not the enemy of life; it enables life!
There are different levels at which you can engage with this study. It can provide a technical explanation for how the world works, but for most people, complexity can serve as a broader lens for looking at the world.
Our scientific paradigms often shape how we organize our world, so I’m interested in what the complexity paradigm implies for how we live. In many ways, it provides a counter to our more traditional reductionist paradigm that dissects the world into parts. The complexity paradigm suggests that we embrace complementarity, holding two seemingly contradictory truths at once without forcing a resolution. It asks us to attend to what the system as a whole is doing by watching the relationships and flows rather than just aiming at a fixed goal. And it invites us to remain open to noise, error, surprise – to counter the impulse to optimize and flatten.
That dance between structure and open-endedness feels important for any attempt at social change. We often place more emphasis on the plan, the strategy, with a “solve the problem” mindset. But complexity teaches us that it can be counterintuitive to try to solve chaos with order, or to rely on purely top-down solutions.
NP: That rhymes with some conversations I’ve been having in my Attention Activism 201 course at SoRA. We see a constant dance in organizing spaces between the desire to plan and the instinct to surrender to emergence. How do you see complexity theory supplementing these movement-building efforts?
ABL: Complexity gets at a lot of ideas we feel intuitively. Studying the dynamics of complex systems is helpful because it provides specificity to those ideas. It helps us understand how to build systems that actually work towards emergence.
That dance between structure and open-endedness feels important for any attempt at social change. We often place more emphasis on the plan, the strategy, with a “solve the problem” mindset. But complexity teaches us that it can be counterintuitive to try to solve chaos with order, or to rely on purely top-down solutions.
If you map everything out without allowing space for emergence and paying attention to the relational dynamics, you can actually hasten a system’s demise. We see that often in the natural sciences: If you plant trees in perfect, uniform rows to maximize timber yield, you optimize for one goal, but you destroy the soil and the biodiversity that enabled the forest. The ecosystem collapses because it lacks the complexity to adapt – and because the planners didn’t see the value of the relationships.
In more human and social contexts, I think navigating the tension between the two requires more creative thinking. Maybe you treat the plan not as a rigid script, but as a flexible hypothesis. You set a direction but build in regular moments to reassess the system and adjust course based on where the energy is actually moving. By embracing complexity, we can widen the conversation beyond simple binaries of problem vs. solution.
NP: So, on that note, what do you think about the conversations people have in this attention activism space – about the ways people are transforming their relationships to technology and so forth?
ABL: I hear a lot of talk about “online vs. offline,” which feels stuck in a binary. If we fixate solely on a device as the problem, we get a fairly narrow range of solutions, rather than considering the broader ecology of factors that inform how we engage with phones and attention.
I’m certainly not an expert on this topic, but seeing the discourse around policy changes like the Kids Online Safety Act and age restrictions to social media, I wonder if enacting a top-down solution without considering the underlying ecology could inadvertently create negative outcomes. It’s addressing a part of the problem (that children’s capacities for attention are being hijacked) but in doing so, it could create a host of other problems, like mass surveillance. This isn’t to say policy change isn’t useful. I suppose what I’m trying to get at is that if we have a limited conversation around these topics, we risk tilting into binaries that are easier to politicize or co-opt.
If we take a complexity approach, we’d focus on how local conditions influence system-wide behavior. What is a person’s lived experience? How does their relationship to the internet impact the texture of their lives and relationships? Paying attention to those factors is what SoRA seems focused on – understanding our own relationships to attention and being curious about it, rather than keeping the conversation at “I’m addicted to my phone; this is bad.”
From initial starting conditions, you cannot predict the outcome, but that’s usually when the most resilient and expansive structures emerge. So I think cultivating a willingness to include the unknown and encourage emergence may lead us to the solution, instead of us trying to figure the solution out ahead of time.
NP: There’s a line in Attensity! that talks about how all of our individual enthusiasms might “jump together” – that is, to become something that is greater than the sum of its parts [p. 143] ...
ABL: I love the idea of cultivating a shared sensibility from which solutions can emerge. What if you don’t come up with a precise strategy but trust that having a lot of people thinking in an aligned way creates new conditions? Maybe that creates a whole group of people not wanting to be as online, and that ripples out.
This feels riskier, but uncertainty is actually a feature of complex systems. From initial starting conditions, you cannot predict the outcome, but that’s usually when the most resilient and expansive structures emerge. So I think cultivating a willingness to include the unknown and encourage emergence may lead us to the solution, instead of us trying to figure the solution out ahead of time. We need some planning, yes, but we need a lot more room for the unexpected.
NP: Attention Activism emphasizes the collective study and practice of attention – how we can start to think in new ways and build new ways of being together. I hear that you have something similar in the works. Would you like to share with our readers?
ABL: I was so inspired by this cohort and how we seemed to develop a kind of shared mode of thought. I’ve studied complexity on my own, but it was incredibly generative to develop a shared language with others to translate these ideas into our lives and projects.
There is so much in the realm of complexity. You can get deep into the weeds with concepts like fractals and phase transitions and new forms of logic. Initial readings only scratch the surface. I think these concepts can bring a whole new lens to how we live, create, and organize, so I’m starting an ongoing Complexity Lab of sorts. It will be a bit like a reading-and-practice group, where we focus on an idea and then experiment with applying the idea to whatever we’re working on. “School as medium” is such a good frame. I want to be in school-shaped things with people forever!
NP: How can someone get involved in Complexity Lab?
ABL: Email me [[email protected]] if you’re interested in these ideas or hearing about when we meet. Anyone is welcome to join our possibility space!
Loved this convo and sent Anna Beth Lane an email of interest in the Complexity Lab. I've been writing about unexpected possibilities, new beginnings (where does the new come from), and us becoming unpredictable -- out next Tuesday. The convo really resonated!