Every few years, someone rediscovers the idea of meritocracy. Or decentralization. Or prediction markets. These ideas arrive lucid, well-formed, even elegant. And then they’re run through the machine.
A decade later, anything that survives bears only a passing resemblance to the original.
What happened?
Paul Romer envisioned charter cities as autonomous zones where new rules could be tested, freed from the institutional drag of existing legal systems. In theory, this meant regulatory innovation, economic dynamism, maybe even a reset for countries stuck in low-growth equilibria.
But when actual governments tried to implement them, charter cities morphed into half-hearted economic zones with little autonomy and even less legitimacy. The institutions Romer hoped to circumvent ended up shaping the implementation. The result: A pale imitation of the original concept, met with justifiable skepticism.
A team discovers an efficient workflow or a lightweight decision protocol. Within a few quarters, that protocol is formalized, standardized, and turned into a slide deck. By the time it reaches other departments, it has mutated into a bloated process that requires three approvals and a weekly sync. The seed of a good idea is there, but it's buried under sediment.
There is a name for this: signal degradation.
The term comes from information theory: as a message travels through a noisy channel, bits are lost, distorted, or misinterpreted. But in social systems, the noise isn’t random. It is strategic, structural, and often self-interested.
Institutions aren't neutral conduits. They transform ideas in ways that reflect their own incentives. A bureaucracy filters out anything that can’t be measured or audited. A media platform rewards spectacle over subtlety. An academic department, seeking tenure-friendly output, might reject an interdisciplinary insight because it lacks a pedigree.
There’s a passage in George Orwell’s essay on the English language where he likens political speech to a cuttlefish, releasing ink to obscure its movement. That’s the defensive move of a system that no longer trusts the clarity of the signal. It is not merely that ideas lose sharpness when they pass through complex systems. It is that sharpness itself becomes a liability.
If good ideas are so fragile, how do any survive?
Some don’t.
Most don't.
But others find protection. Monasteries copied texts for centuries, preserving philosophical and mathematical knowledge that would have otherwise vanished. Samizdat in the Soviet Union kept literature alive under authoritarianism. These were unoptimized systems, but they were (demonstrably) effective at conserving integrity.
How do we know that?
Because we’re still talking about them.
We keep mistaking virality for fidelity. An idea that spreads quickly is assumed to be robust. But what spreads may be the most distorted version of all: the memeified, context-stripped soundbite. Meanwhile, the slower, sturdier versions languish in journals, newsletters, or unread books.
The problem isn't that people don't have good ideas. It's that our systems are increasingly built to mangle them. If we want to preserve insight, maybe we need quieter rooms.
