Modern culture demonstrates increasing complexity. Today, complexity is beginning to be envisioned as a modernity’s immanent quality, a source both of uncertainty and of hidden opportunities for cultural development. This article outlines the sociocultural features of increasing complexity. Modern culture does not promote stability, but, on the contrary, multiplies differences and becomes a kind of differentiation flow. From being a system of sustainable, vitally important forms of human activity, culture is transformed into a kaleidoscope of individual experiences against the background of network structures and technosocial systems that exist according to their own logic. Permeating all cultural forms, complexity becomes sometimes a source for the emergent new cultural practices, sometimes a source of chronic anxiety caused by the inability to ‘master’ socio-cultural transformation.
Keywords: culture, society, progress, simplicity, complexity, simplification, complication