"One of the interesting questions about Tainter’s thesis is whether markets and democracy, the core mechanisms of the modern world, will let us avoid complexity-driven collapse, by keeping any one group of elites from seizing unbroken control. This is, as Tainter notes in his book, an open question. There is, however, one element of complex society into which neither markets nor democracy reach—bureaucracy.

Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one. "

Joe Presbrey wrote the crawler, a 7KB bit of Python called walk.py which uses my own somewhat old rdfxml.py to parse RDF/XML (which I was rather surprised about). It's multi-threaded, and runs very quickly indeed: it takes just 32 seconds for it to spit out all 12 OpenIDs currently within three hops of the DIG members: