# Gruber discovers Systems Theory (and annoys me again)

> Source: <https://iainsinclair.net/gruber-discovers-systems-theory-and-annoys-me-again/>
> Published: 2026-08-28 19:25:47+00:00

# Gruber discovers Systems Theory (and annoys me again)

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After not thinking about John Gruber for easily more than two decades, I have been exposed to two of his hot takes grounded in misunderstandings of things I actually understand.

The first was his LLM watermarking "I expect the perfect word" [take](https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/anthropics_watermark_text_adulteration_in_claude_is_a_perversion_of_writing), where he casts the EU as a villain ruining American tech. His argument is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs and the proposed watermarking work, which the internet pushed back on. He subsequently [doubled down](https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/follow-up_thoughts_on_watermarking) on it, which elicited an annoyed [post](https://iainsinclair.net/thoughts-on-grubers-criticisms/) from me.

But today, I get ["POSIWID"](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/08/26/posiwid) in my feed, where Gruber discovers 50 year old systems theory and uses it to tear the EU's DMA a new one. Which I think fails a critical reading for a lot of reasons.

Gruber's naive, positivist reading of the Stafford Beer maxim "the purpose of a system is what it does" (the POSIWID referenced above - here's a [wiki link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does)) is that there is one purpose, and if you use your galaxy brain you can uncover it. But no contemporary systems thinker would read it this way. When you define a system's purpose, you are drawing out your worldview in relation to others, to make sense of the situation you find yourself in. The engineering-rooted "hard" systems thinking approach has been eclipsed by more human-centred methods partly through the work of thinkers like Beer.

So if you think, as Gruber [evidently does](https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/what_is_the_point_of_the_dma), that the purpose of the DMA is to *"impose unnecessary bureaucracy and inconvenience on major markets where it previously had no footprint"*, I think we learn more about your worldview than about the purpose of the DMA. The idea that bureaucracy is an impediment to technical flourishing is a particular American technical libertarianism, which definitely featured strongly in Gruber's hero Steve Jobs' behaviours.

Yes, the DMA most definitely is imposing something on major markets. That is on purpose, a small wedge into American hegemony that produces opportunities for rebalancing power towards the EU over a time horizon that is likely alien to someone submerged in a Silicon Valley worldview. Complaining about regulations in "major markets" by the very owners of those markets is a signal that Gruber is infused with the same American exceptionalism that the DMA is there to counteract.

I really don't know if the DMA is the right legislation, or even reasonable in a technical sense, but I do know that it is doing what the EU wants it to - evidenced by Gruber's response to it - in pushing back on American technical hegemony. And that is my view of what the purpose is. Unlike Gruber, I don't expect that it is a true reading of reality, but rather, my understanding, seen through my worldview, and thus more useful for me to understand what I think about things than as a true explanation of the external world.