The Cybernetics of Missing Variety
Jun 21 2026Cybernetics, especially Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety, to look at what happens when software models are too small for the world they regulate. Starting from a deceptively simple paid / unpaid payment status, it follows the complexity that appears when reality adds captures, settlements, refunds, disputes, chargebacks, provider webhooks, reconciliation, and human workarounds. The argument is not that every distinction deserves a first-class model, or that systems should copy vendor state machines wholesale. It is that meaningful variety has to be absorbed somewhere: in owned domain facts, feedback loops, operational processes, or people. A simple model can be useful, but it does not make complexity disappear. It only decides where that complexity will surface.