Many of the systems we rely on are easier to understand because somebody has simplified them for us.
A One Health diagram connects human, animal and environmental health. A political message turns a complicated issue into a story or argument. An online marketplace reduces an international supply chain to a product photograph, a delivery date and a price.
These simplified versions are useful. We could not realistically investigate every institution, algorithm, supply chain or piece of evidence involved in every decision we make.
The problem begins when something important disappears during the simplification.
Across REDefine’s work this week, we encountered the same question in three very different places: what happens when the part left outside the frame is where responsibility, cost or power actually sits?
Our latest weekly recap, What Falls Outside the Frame, brings together our recent work on One Health, political emotion and low-cost online shopping to explore that question.
Why is One Health difficult to implement?
One Health starts from a relatively simple principle: human health, animal health and environmental conditions are interconnected.
The principle is increasingly well understood. Implementation is considerably harder.
A disease crossing between wildlife, livestock and people does not remain within the responsibility of one professional field. Water contamination can involve environmental monitoring, agriculture, public health and local authorities. Climate conditions can alter disease risks while also affecting food systems and livelihoods.
The practical challenge is therefore not simply persuading people that these connections exist. It is creating institutions capable of acting on them.
Who notices the first signal? Who receives the information? Can the relevant databases communicate? Which institution coordinates the response when responsibilities overlap? Do professionals understand enough about neighbouring disciplines to recognise when information needs to travel beyond their own organisation?
This distinction matters because a connected problem cannot be managed effectively through disconnected institutions.
The One Health diagram may show us the relationships. It cannot, by itself, create the coordination required to respond to them.
How do emotions influence political judgement?
Political communication presents a different form of simplification.
Campaigns and political messages have always used emotion. Fear, anger, hope, pride and enthusiasm can make an issue feel important long before a voter has examined every piece of evidence surrounding it.
That does not mean emotions are irrational or politically undesirable.
People can be angry because something is genuinely unjust. Fear can reflect a legitimate threat. Hope can motivate participation and collective action. Political decisions affect livelihoods, rights, security and the future, so expecting citizens to approach politics without emotion would make little sense.
The important distinction is between what an emotion tells us about significance and what it establishes as evidence.
A disturbing individual case can reveal a real problem without demonstrating how widespread that problem is. An accurate statistic can be used to support a conclusion that the statistic alone does not establish. A compelling political story can make one interpretation of events feel obvious while alternative explanations remain outside the frame.
Modern digital platforms add another layer because political messages are not distributed neutrally. Recommendation systems and engagement incentives influence which material is repeatedly placed in front of users.
This means contemporary media literacy increasingly requires two questions: what is this message telling me, and what system helped make this particular message unusually visible?
Why can a €5 online product cost more than €5?
The same problem appears when we shop online.
A checkout page gives us a wonderfully efficient version of international trade. We see the product, the price and the expected delivery date. The complexity underneath largely disappears.
Yet the final price displayed to a consumer is not necessarily a complete account of all the costs associated with bringing the product into the European market.
Product-safety enforcement costs money. Customs infrastructure costs money. Environmental impacts occur somewhere in the production and logistics chain. Regulators must process enormous numbers of low-value parcels, while unsafe or non-compliant goods still need to be identified and removed from the market.
None of this means that inexpensive imported goods are inherently unsafe or that international e-commerce is undesirable. Efficient global production and logistics have made many useful products more affordable.
The important question is which costs appear in the price and which costs are carried somewhere else.
That is why the current European debate around low-value e-commerce is more interesting than whether one platform or another becomes slightly more expensive. It raises a broader policy question about how convenience, affordability, enforcement and responsibility should be distributed across sellers, platforms, import systems and consumers.
What do One Health, political communication and online shopping have in common?
At first glance, very little.
But each depends on a simplified representation of a much larger system.
One Health diagrams make relationships visible but can hide the institutional coordination required to act on them. Political messages make an interpretation memorable but can hide the reasoning between evidence and conclusion. Online prices make purchasing simple but can hide costs and responsibilities occurring elsewhere in the supply chain.
Simplification itself is not the problem. It is essential to functioning in complex societies.
The risk appears when the missing part of the system still has the power to determine the outcome.
That is why systems thinking requires us to become interested in the edges of what we can see. What has been removed to make this process understandable? Which assumptions are hidden? Which actors remain invisible? Where does responsibility sit? Who pays the costs that do not appear in the immediate transaction?
Those questions become particularly important when digital technology is involved, because the interface people see may represent only the final layer of a much deeper technical and institutional structure.
From hidden systems to hidden power
That is also where REDefine is heading next.
Our forthcoming The Code Beneath the Floorboards essay, Who Can Turn It Off?, will examine digital sovereignty through the idea of denial power.
A digital service can look local while depending on external cloud infrastructure, authentication providers, AI APIs, app stores, payment networks, hardware suppliers or telecommunications infrastructure. The organisation using the service may control the application while another actor, somewhere deeper in the stack, retains the practical ability to change the conditions or interrupt access.
The question is therefore not simply whether technology is European, open source or locally developed.
It is how far meaningful control extends before someone else holds the switch.
We will also examine a much larger governance question surrounding frontier artificial intelligence: if some researchers believe future AI systems could create catastrophic risks for humanity, how should humanity participate in decisions about those risks?
Scientific expertise is essential for understanding technical danger. But expertise in assessing a risk does not automatically settle the democratic question of who has authority to decide which risks society should accept.
Both questions take the argument of this week’s recap one step further. Once we learn to see what sits outside the frame, we also need to ask who holds power there.
Read the full REDefine weekly recap
In What Falls Outside the Frame, we develop these connections in greater depth and feature two 🌟 Writer Spotlights: Cristina Patrick on the language of inevitability surrounding artificial intelligence, and Mika Horelli on the physical infrastructure hidden behind “the cloud.”
The full essay is available in REDefine // Civic Intelligence on Substack.
Subscribe to REDefine // Civic Intelligence for our weekly essays on responsible technology, European policy, civic intelligence, education and the systems shaping everyday life.
Frequently asked questions
What is systems thinking?
Systems thinking examines how different components, actors, rules and dependencies interact rather than analysing each part in isolation. It is particularly useful when outcomes are produced by relationships between institutions, technologies, incentives and people.
Why is One Health a systems issue?
One Health connects human, animal and environmental health. Effective implementation therefore depends on coordination across professional disciplines, institutions, information systems and areas of government rather than action within a single sector.
How do emotions affect political decisions?
Emotions can influence what people notice, how important an issue feels and how political information is interpreted. Emotional responses are not inherently irrational, but feeling strongly about a claim does not by itself establish whether the claim is accurate or whether the proposed solution will work.
What are the hidden costs of cheap online shopping?
The displayed price of an imported product may not reflect all of the wider costs associated with product-safety enforcement, customs processing, environmental impacts, logistics and regulatory oversight. Which costs should be carried by consumers, sellers, platforms and public authorities is an important policy question.
What is digital sovereignty?
Digital sovereignty concerns the ability of organisations, communities and jurisdictions to exercise meaningful control over the digital systems on which they depend. It includes questions of data, infrastructure, suppliers, interoperability, technical dependencies and the ability to continue operating when an external provider changes conditions or withdraws access.
