Jank is the term I use to describe how the parts in a system do not connect well together. A system can be janky in 2 ways:
In practice the internal division of systems and subsystems is downstream of how Reality is divided, which is to say that the internal and external are two sides of the same coin, but to keep this piece concise, I am focusing on the internal jank here.
Here are some examples of internally janky systems:
The main experience of interacting with a janky system is one of falling between the cracks. For instance in the medical world, you are told by Doctor A to go to Doctor B to receive a more precise diagnosis so that you may get the treatment you need, but then Doctor B tells you that they can't do anything about your case, and that you need to go to Doctor C. Then Doctor C prescibes something to you and it doesn't work, so they point you to Doctor D ...
There is a constant delegation of responsibility because the system as a whole has no overview and no consistency. Each doctor interacts with a few other doctors, but the fact that a patient may go for several months, if not years because of the chain of long waiting times, without receiving any helpful treatment goes unnoticed by the system as a whole, because it is no one's responsibility.
On a less significant level, students may go through their entire curriculum without ever properly learning a key concept. I for one never had any class in secondary school which discussed the main concepts related to electricity, such as voltage, amperage and electrical diagrams, even though many of my peers did, because the specific teacher I had didn't cover that topic. The issue is the same: each teacher has their isolated task and curriculum, but there is no broader context to make sure that the individual curriculums come together into a well-integrated whole. This can lead to topics and key ideas never being taught, as well as conflicting information shared by different teachers.
Software often suffers from a similar issue, but replace 'teacher' with 'user message'. It's fair to say that most developers do not think much of the user messages they write, because it is a pretty boring part of their job compared to having to think of the actual implementations, and how they measure according to certain metrics such as performance, memory usage and scalability.
But the thing is that the user only sees the interface and the user messages. This means that the decisions they end up taking are directly informed by those, which means that any mistake or slight ambiguity in the messages they see will shape their decisions in a way which rarely changes over time.
To give an example, most social media sites have a limit of what you can upload based on file size, but videos on Twitter are limited by bitrate. 1 The user message being displayed however doesn't say any of that, it just says that you cannot upload the file, which most would interpret as being based on file size, and wouldn't think twice about examining that assumption.
Another aspect of janky systems is of course their bureaucratic nature, which is made even worse because now it is disconnected across different subparts of the system. You might have to send the same information several times to the same establishment because the different departments within it do not communicate well, require several accounts to interact with it, 2 or again, there might be conflicting information which ends up billing you money you do not owe.
Windows is a particularly egregious case of disconnection. I would not use the word "bureaucratic" to describe it because that applies more so to social institutions, but anyone who has tinkered with their options quickly notices that the inconsistency of themes being displayed is a clear sign of old systems being cobbled together with the new ones. If you want to do something as simple as changing your sound, you can go to the most recent menu to do so, but if you go look into the advanced options, you still get something from like Windows 7 (or perhaps even older, I do not know those versions well). Windows is so janky that it has become incredibly unclear whether anything "new" is truly added to it over the years, because it keeps getting more and more bloated and slow, at the expense of the user of course.
From these examples we can see a key reason why jank happens again and again: it is a way of delegating the cost of complexity of its system from its builders and maintainers to its users. To some extent this is understandable, as doctors and teachers already have enough to do within their small bubble of specialization, and they do not want to take up even more work by making sure that the experience of a patient or student has been smooth and coherent.
No teacher cares about the fact that students learn things which they will use in their future, because they have to care about the current cohort of people they are working with. But what this means is that the schooling system is fundamentally not aligned with any type of work demand outside of school, which means that this disconnect leads to a lot of time spent learning things which one does not care about or even use.
If your point is that schooling provides education, not mere job training, then I am all for that vision, but it doesn't do that either. Students do not become responsible individuals, exposed to their culture and able to hold a broad and flexible vision of the world, even defenders of our system would struggle to make that point. Instead, the curiosity and energy of children is utterly broken under the demands of obedience and passivity of school, though you could argue that this is tangential to the issue of jankiness discussed here. Still, the fact remains that schooling provides neither a coherent and efficient pipeline towards holding a job, nor an education which allows people to blossom.
Another notable type of costs which are delegated onto people are the emotional ones, especially by janky systems. Next to no maths teacher will sit with a child who has been utterly demotivated to learn maths because they didn't understand something about algebra and which only got punished by poor grades, instead of having someone calmly work through the concepts with them. This alienating experience then compounds into an inability to follow in class, which creates a lack of interest and a sense of being constantly out of it, until the student mentally drops out from maths classes altogether.
Or with healthcare and insurance, I have seen some people from the US get terrified from a potential bill they would have to pay, but which they didn't have to either because the medical operation didn't turn out to be necessary, or their insurance turned out to cover it but it was ambiguous at first. These spikes in anxiety which result from the failures of communication and empathy of a janky system are totally invisible to an institution which only focuses on making a profit—all of them in fact—but they are very, very real to the people who experience them.
This disconnection echoes the central aspect of jank, which is why I defined it along that line, but another way to see jank is in terms of its consequences: jank refers to anything in which humans have to compensate or pay for because the system they interact with lacks flexibility, integration and fitness to the context.
This can manifest physically, such as a machine with a lever which doesn't work so you have to find a work around, or digitally, such as a program where the developer has to write an absurd amount of lines of code just to work within the constraints of the APIs they call, or socially, such as the failures of institutions I mentioned.
I think what we are seeing over and over again is that the main way that mankind has solved problems is through a process of divide and conquer and delegating responsibility, not just to other people, but even to our ecosystem and our future selves, and that these have inevitable breaking points.
See for instance Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies, where the main thesis is that all societies become increasingly complex and thus require more energy, human organization and material resources, but that all of these run into diminishing returns, which makes the process of growth increasingly difficult. Because there isn't any mechanism to voluntarily simplify, the systems upon which those societies depend start failing in one way or another, through a combination of physical degradation, lack of workforce and funding, and decreased access to energy.
As our society declines, I expect that janky systems will be even more common than they already are, and that it will not take many decades for us to witness physical manifestations of that jankiness, which is to say, global supply chain bottlenecks, failures in the electrical grid, plumbery, transport and internet infrastructures.
People love to focus on the benefits of larger and more complex systems, until they have to come face to face with the way in which they fail, which is usually quite catastrophic because of the size and the amount of people who become dependent on them.
I suspect that the jank of our technology, systems and institutions are all downstream of the inherent jank with the mind. Which is to say, I believe that ideas and models of Reality are inherently janky. This would be its own topic though, but I like to throw these breadcrumbs in here to feed my own mind, as well as the reader's, and in those situations, I use the tag "expandable".
An example of a janky idea is one that you would inherit from your social environment, and which works well within it, but not outside. For instance, you might grow up fairly poor and internalize the idea that money is happiness, because going from being poor to middle class is a big upgrade in terms of safety, which allows you to spend more time on relationships and things you enjoy. But then you might become obsessed with money, in a way that makes you unfulfilled.
This connects back with the external version of jankiness, the one where for instance we treat the human body as a set of parts we can study in isolation.
1 This might no longer be accurate when you are reading this, but the hypothetical example still holds
2 I remember logging onto the website of a university, and it had a different account for the email system and a different account to sign up and track the courses
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Schooling Health Complexity Mismatch Expandable
2025-09-05