Is Clarity Getting More Expensive?

The series so far has built a present-tense problem and shown that it can be measured: information about how the work runs is missing and partly un-retrievable ( claims one and two ) ; the declarations needed to close the gap are costly and arrive in a paradoxical order ( claim three ) ; rebuilding to escape it is a blind bet ( claim four ) ; and the cost and the risk of all this can be measured, directly and indirectly ( claim five ) .

Having the measures lets us ask the question the series has carefully avoided until now: is this getting worse over time?

We must be exact about what we are and are not claiming. We do not claim it is proven that organizations’ knowledge of their own processes decays across the years. The honest state of the public evidence is that it shows a durable present deficit and a striking failure to converge despite decades of tooling — not a measured year-on-year decline. What follows is therefore a conjecture — but one we now hold to be testable, and a strong one: that the cost and risk of clarity are rising over successive technological waves, and are borne less and less, so that process knowledge plausibly erodes over time.

The driver is one thing: entanglement. Each technological wave tends to add systems and wire them into what was already there, and — as the earlier articles argued — adding is cheap while removing is costly, so the connections accumulate and rarely dissolve. The dependency graph grows denser wave after wave. This premise is itself measurable, and it is the load-bearing one; the rest follows from it.