Alt Binaries

The Sixteenth Menu

TAMAR: I want to be very clear that I’m not upset.

PELLEGRIN: You are visibly upset.

TAMAR: I am registering a procedural concern. There is a difference.

CAATO: He’s been registering this procedural concern for forty minutes, Pellegrin. I’ve opened a bottle of wine. This is dinner theater now.

TAMAR: Fifteen years. I have been refining the Solstice menu for fifteen years. And every single change I made was a small, defensible improvement. Year one, the bread was stale, so I sourced better flour. Year two, I added an appetizer course because people were filling up on bread and ignoring the main dish. Year three—

PELLEGRIN: I do not need the full archaeological record.

TAMAR: Year three, someone had a nut allergy, so I developed an alternative preparation that actually turned out to be better than the original, and I kept both versions because different people preferred different things, which is reasonable—

CAATO: It was reasonable! Each step was exquisite, Tamar. I remember year nine. You introduced the saffron reduction. I wrote about it in my journal.

TAMAR: Thank you, Caato.

CAATO: I compared it to a Delvasi opera in four movements.

TAMAR: That is… more than I needed, but thank you.

PELLEGRIN: The menu had forty-three items on it.

TAMAR: Forty-one.

PELLEGRIN: Forty-one items. Seven courses. Three alternative preparations for each dietary restriction. A suggested wine pairing document that was nine pages long.

CAATO: The wine pairing document was a masterwork.

PELLEGRIN: The wine pairing document had footnotes, Caato. Footnotes. For wine.

CAATO: Context enriches experience!

PELLEGRIN: I served rice.

TAMAR: You served rice.

PELLEGRIN: Plain white rice. With salt and butter. On one plate. At one temperature. And everyone ate it, and several people told me it was the best Solstice meal they could remember.

TAMAR: Because it was novel! Because they’d been eating forty-one items for so long that plain rice felt like a revelation! That’s not because the rice was better, it’s because their palates were oversaturated!

PELLEGRIN: You are describing the same phenomenon and calling it a criticism.

TAMAR: I’m calling it context! The rice only worked because of everything I built before it. You didn’t create simplicity, you harvested fifteen years of my complexity and cashed it in for one good evening.

CAATO: Oh, that’s a gorgeous way to put it.

TAMAR: I’m not being gorgeous, I’m being accurate.

PELLEGRIN: Let me ask you something. Next year, would you return to the forty-one-item menu?

TAMAR: …

PELLEGRIN: You hesitated.

TAMAR: I’m thinking.

PELLEGRIN: You hesitated because you know. You’ve known since year twelve, probably. The menu was already past its peak and you kept adding because each addition was individually defensible and you did not have a principled reason to stop.

TAMAR: Each addition was individually defensible.

PELLEGRIN: Yes. And a tower of individually defensible decisions is still a tower, and towers fall.

CAATO: But the tower was beautiful, Pellegrin! That’s what you refuse to account for! The nine-page wine document was never about efficiency, it was about care. It was Tamar saying “I thought about this, I thought about you, I thought about the specific way this particular grape interacts with this particular sauce on a winter evening.” That is love expressed as logistics!

PELLEGRIN: And nobody read it.

CAATO: I read it!

PELLEGRIN: You are one person with seven hundred years of boredom to fill. You are not a representative sample.

TAMAR: People read it in the early years. When it was two pages.

PELLEGRIN: Yes. When it was two pages. Before it became baroque.

TAMAR: Don’t use that word like it’s a diagnosis.

PELLEGRIN: It is a diagnosis. The symptoms are: every component is excellent, the total is exhausting, and no one can tell you which part to remove because each part has a justification. That is how complex systems die. Not from any single bad decision, but from the accumulation of good ones.

CAATO: That’s the most depressing thing you’ve ever said, and you once described a sunset as “the star performing scheduled maintenance.”

TAMAR: What I want to know — what I actually want to know, Pellegrin — is whether you think my fifteen years were wasted.

PELLEGRIN: No.

TAMAR: No?

PELLEGRIN: The rice would not have been meaningful without them. An empty plate at the start of a tradition means nothing. An empty plate after forty-one courses means everything. Your work is the reason the reset had power. But you were not going to perform the reset yourself, because you are constitutionally incapable of deleting something that works.

TAMAR: That’s… I don’t know if that’s a compliment.

PELLEGRIN: It is an observation. Compliments are decorative.

CAATO: So Tamar builds the cathedral, and you come in and whitewash the walls, and everyone praises the whitewash?

PELLEGRIN: Everyone praises the light. Which was always there. Which the walls were blocking.

CAATO: You are an insufferable man and I hope next year someone serves you a forty-seven-course meal and you enjoy every bite.

PELLEGRIN: They will not. Because next year, people will remember the rice and begin adding to it. “The rice was wonderful, but what if we added a glaze?” Then a side dish. Then a bread course. And in fifteen years, someone will serve plain rice again, and everyone will act like it was invented for the first time.

TAMAR: That’s the part that actually bothers me. Not that you reset it. That I know you’re right about the cycle. I’ll start building again, and it’ll get too complex again, and someone will tear it down again. And I’ll do the building anyway because I don’t know how to stop.

PELLEGRIN: Yes.

CAATO: Well. At least document the wine pairings this time. For posterity.

TAMAR: The wine pairings were never the problem, Caato.

CAATO: The wine pairings are never the problem. The wine pairings are the only part worth saving.

PELLEGRIN: Nothing is worth saving. That is what makes it worth doing.

TAMAR: I genuinely cannot tell if that’s profound or if you’re just being difficult.

PELLEGRIN: Both. They converge at the limit.

• * *

When I was in first grade, I wanted to be like the second graders. When I was in third grade, the second graders were embarrassing, and the fourth graders were the height of cool. And when I was a sixth grader? The kindergartners were the real cool ones. Adorable, and not giving a fuck what anyone thought about them.

• * *

Everything gets more complex until it doesn’t.

There is a direction everyone agrees is “up.” More layered, more knowing, more aware of how the world really works.

Calling something “immature” is never a compliment. And there is a real, honest reason for this: a more complex understanding of a subject usually is a better one. The person who understands that wars have geopolitical causes is seeing more clearly than the person who thinks it’s just good guys versus bad guys. The sixteen-year-old who thinks “lots of things matter in complicated ways” is wiser than the one who thinks nothing matters at all. So why does the arrow sometimes flip?

Because complexity has a peak, and past the peak it rots. Comics are the famous case. In the 1960s, superhero comics were bright and corny and aimed at children, and it was genuinely an improvement when writers started asking “what would it actually be like to be a vigilante?” We got Watchmen. We got The Dark Knight Returns. We got “grim and gritty” and for a few years it was electric. Then every single character in the entire medium became a brooding antihero with a dark past and a willingness to kill, and suddenly the ten-year-olds reading these things were looking at something that was neither fun nor genuinely sophisticated. It was a costume party where everyone came as the same guy. I’m going to call the overshoot “baroque,” which is a word that already means what I want it to mean: ornate to the point of collapse, decorated until the decoration is all there is. The correction, when it comes, I’ll call “purity” (not because the baroque version is fake, but because the simplicity that replaces it has a quality of directness, of self-evident truth, that makes it feel like coming home).

Read more: Baroque vs. Purity

• * *

The correction is never one step back.

Nobody dials the complexity down 15% and calls it a day. The thing that breaks through is always a full reset, all the way to the ground floor.

The Superman reboot that tried to be slightly less grim than the Zack Snyder version? Nobody remembers it. The thing that actually broke through was Lego Batman, which went so far in the other direction it was literally made of plastic. The animated Batman series. The early MCU. Ted Lasso. The reset is always total, always from the top of the staircase to the ground floor. And the ground floor is what feels like a revelation.

This is a pattern that shows up everywhere, once you start looking for it. And the key word is “cycle,” because it isn’t just a one-time correction. It happens over and over, predictably, in almost any domain where humans pursue sophistication. Fashion is the most explicit case. Haute couture gets more and more ornate, more referential, more “look how many things I’m doing at once,” until a designer like Phoebe Philo at Céline shows up with clean, minimal, almost austere clothes, and the fashion world collectively exhales. But the minimalism that follows maximalism is never the same as the minimalism that preceded it. Philo’s Céline wasn’t “clothes before fashion existed.” It was a minimalism aware of everything it was rejecting, and that awareness gave it a tension and an intelligence that a plain white shirt from 1950 didn’t have. The reset carries the history forward even as it appears to erase it.

Not every domain resets in a single generation.

Japan is the clearest case of the slow version. According to the founding myth, Emperor Jimmu was a descendant of the sun goddess who conquered the Yamato region by military expedition, subduing rival clans with a divine sword. Pure force, divine mandate, no bureaucracy.

Then real power drifted to the Shogunate, a military government that actually ran the country while the Emperor became a ceremonial figurehead. Then the Shogunate itself decayed, the Ashikaga shoguns dissolving into figureheads while regional warlords tore the country apart for over a century. Oda Nobunaga was the reset: a brutal unifier who conquered through sheer tactical genius, swept away the old order, and nearly reunified Japan before his assassination. His successors consolidated what he started, and the Tokugawa Shogunate that emerged ruled for two and a half centuries, each generation adding layers of hereditary bureaucracy, rigid social hierarchy, and elaborate ritual until the whole structure was so ossified it couldn’t respond to American gunships in the harbor.

The Meiji Restoration blew the whole thing up and reset to a direct imperial government that was lean, modernizing, and ferociously simple in its goals. Then that government accumulated its own layers of military bureaucracy and imperial overreach until it, too, collapsed. Today the Emperor is ceremonial again, and the Prime Minister runs the country, and the cycle continues. Each generation adds a layer of ritual, protocol, and inherited privilege (baroque, in the political sense) until the structure is so top-heavy that a crisis resets the whole thing.

One especially deep-cut example, for the nerds: the history of competitive Magic: The Gathering deck-building. In the early days, decks were built on intuition and cool combos. Then the game matured and became hyper-analytical (the rise of “net-decking,” probability calculations, metagame theory). Deck construction became a solved optimization problem. And then something shifted at the very top of competition. The best deck-builders started valuing “elegance” and “redundancy” in ways that looked, to the spreadsheet optimizers, like going backwards. They’d cut the clever combos and play fewer, simpler, more individually powerful cards. The philosophy was: if every card in your deck is independently strong, you never have a “bad hand.” This is sophistication that looks like simplicity. It drives the mid-tier optimizers absolutely crazy because it seems to break the rules they spent years mastering.

And that, I think, is the emotional core of this binary. It drives people crazy. Because if you’ve spent years climbing the complexity staircase (learning the nuances, absorbing the layers, rejecting the naive version of things) it feels genuinely insulting when someone resets to purity and gets praised for it. You feel like you did all that work for nothing. You feel like the people cheering for the simple version are the same rubes who never climbed the staircase at all, and they can’t tell the difference between earned simplicity and ignorant simplicity. And sometimes you’re right about that! There are absolutely readers who prefer early Superman because they find moral ambiguity confusing, not because they’ve transcended it. There are writers who write short sentences because they can’t write long ones. But the uncomfortable truth is that the cycle is real regardless of who’s riding it. The person who resets to purity after mastering complexity is doing something different from the person who never left purity. And you mostly can’t tell them apart from the outside.

Consider the ouroboros, which is always the wrong metaphor and yet always the one that suggests itself, the snake eating its tail because it has gone as far forward as forward goes and now the only direction left is inward, which is also backward, which is also through. The cycle of baroque and purity is not a pendulum (pendulums are lazy; pendulums imply that both endpoints are equivalent and the motion is meaningless). It is closer to a spiral staircase in a building that occasionally burns down. Every civilization that has built towers has also produced a literature about the folly of building towers, and the two activities are not opposed but symbiotic, the tower and its critique growing in tandem like a vine and its trellis, until the weight of the vine exceeds the strength of the trellis and the whole architecture collapses into a field. And in the field, someone plants something. And the field, which looks empty, is full of nitrogen from the decomposition.

The medieval cathedrals were an apex of baroque complexity: stone lace, flying buttresses, iconographic programs that took a lifetime to read, and after them came the Cistercians, who built in stripped white stone, who banned ornament, who said that the elaboration of the world was a veil over the face of God and that to see clearly you had to remove it, and were the Cistercians less sophisticated than the cathedral builders, because they had all the same engineering and chose not to use it, because the restraint was the achievement, and there is a passage (quoted by too many start-up founders) in the Tao Te Ching that says “in the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired; in the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped,” and the cycle this binary describes is the passage between those two sentences, most of your life being the first one, acquiring, adding, complicating, making things more baroque and more nuanced and more complete, and this is real and it is good and the people who skip it are not wise, they are merely empty, but then there is a moment where the acquisition inverts, where the adding becomes a weight rather than a wealth, and the drop is not a loss but a liberation, and the thing you are left with is not less than what you had, it is what you had minus everything that was never yours to begin with, the master calligrapher who paints a single circle, the architect who after a career of glass and steel designs a room with one window, the poet who at the end of the long career of metaphor and allusion writes a sentence so plain it breaks your heart, because purity earned is not the same as purity inherited, and the distance between them is the entire human project of learning and unlearning and learning again, the six-year-old who says “be nice to people” and the eighty-year-old who says “be nice to people” saying the same words across a canyon that contains everything that ever happened to them, and the words mean completely different things, and also they mean exactly the same thing, and you will spend your whole life crossing that canyon and when you arrive you will find you are holding what you left with.

That is the cycle.

Military operation names: WWII used functional codes (Overlord, Torch). By the 90s they were branding: Desert Storm, Enduring Freedom. In 2026, the U.S. named its Iran campaign “Operation Epic Fury.” Is that a protein supplement?

Music: Punk rock was a deliberate reset after prog rock’s baroque complexity. Three chords, two minutes, done. It carried forward everything that mattered (energy, attitude, emotional honesty) while stripping away everything that had become decorative. And then punk itself got baroque (post-punk, art-punk, the seven-minute Fugazi album closer) and someone had to invent the Ramones all over again.

Information architecture: A new system begins clean and elegant, someone sitting down with a blank editor to design something that does exactly what it needs to do, no more, no less. Then a bug is found and gets patched. Then a feature is requested and bolted on. Then another feature, and another, and each one is individually reasonable, but the codebase is now full of special cases and dependencies and workarounds layered on top of workarounds. The documentation (if it exists) describes a system that no longer resembles the one actually running. Every developer who touches it is afraid to change anything because nobody fully understands what will break. Eventually someone decides it would be faster to rewrite the entire thing from scratch than to add one more patch. And the rewrite is beautiful, and fast, and maintainable, and it does exactly what it needs to do. For about six months, until someone finds a bug.

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