It's a shame his politics are so polarizing and that he doesn't really develop conclusions as the juxtaposition of society's complexity and how humans manage complexity is interesting and does have political ramifications.

Humans seem to manage complexity by creating categorizations/abstractions until it's reduced to a workable amount. This can lead to a kind of fractal experience where zooming into any area presents the same seeming level of complexity as the whole did.

If you haven't made that particular zoom it's tempting to assume it's as simple as the assumption makes it look. "It's just" or "it should be easy to" are phrases that computer programmers are fairly familiar with and aren't overly fond of.

The political side would seem to be that if there's a lot of embedded complexity in pretty much anything then trying to change something, replace it with something cleaner or clearer, is going to be far harder than it would seem. Without trying to make the same mistake Stross did, President Obama and the disappointing gap between rhetoric and reality would seem to be a current example.