Britain’s railways have once again become the battleground for a much larger argument. The Daily Telegraph article, “Labour’s rail nationalisation dream hurtles toward disaster”, presents the looming difficulties facing Great British Railways as a test of whether the state can successfully manage major industries. Yet perhaps the deeper question is not who owns the railways, but whether we have reached the limits of maintaining an industrial infrastructure that society can no longer afford.
The bizarre story of the “ghost train” from Manchester captures something of the absurdity of our predicament. A six-hundred-seat train departed empty to ensure that rolling stock would be available elsewhere, while passengers were left behind. Such incidents appear to confirm the failures of management, whether public or private. But they may also reveal something more profound. The system itself has become so complicated, so interconnected and so stretched, that rational decisions within one part of it produce irrational outcomes for those who depend upon it.
For decades Britain has debated whether railways should be privately operated or publicly owned. The arguments have become ideological. Supporters of nationalisation speak of public service and integration. Advocates of privatisation point to efficiency, competition and innovation. Yet both camps share an assumption that the existing scale of the railway network must somehow be preserved and expanded.
That assumption deserves examination.
The industrial age created infrastructures of astonishing complexity. Railways, motorways, airports, national electricity grids, water systems and telecommunications networks were built during periods of economic growth, abundant energy and confidence in continual expansion. They require constant renewal, enormous capital investment and highly specialised skills. Their maintenance costs do not stand still. As systems age, they often become more expensive to sustain.
The experience of HS2 should have taught this lesson. What began as a grand vision of modernisation became a symbol of spiralling costs and diminishing returns. Each additional mile demanded vast expenditure. The promise that ever larger projects would deliver prosperity appeared increasingly hollow.
Railways themselves face similar pressures. Tracks wear out. Signalling systems require replacement. Bridges age. Rolling stock must be renewed. Staffing costs rise. Passenger expectations increase. Yet the financial resources needed to satisfy all these demands may no longer exist in sufficient abundance.
The argument, therefore, may not be about state ownership at all. Public ownership cannot repeal economic reality. Nor can private ownership magically create resources that society does not possess. Changing the name above the door does not alter the underlying arithmetic.
Localism suggests another way of thinking.
Rather than assuming that every industrial structure inherited from the twentieth century must continue unchanged, communities may need to ask which systems remain essential and which have become unaffordable luxuries. Some railway lines undoubtedly perform vital functions. Others may represent attempts to preserve patterns of life shaped by an era of cheap energy and endless growth.
This is not an argument against railways. Rail transport remains one of the most efficient means of moving large numbers of people and goods. But it is an argument against the belief that bigger systems, more centralisation and ever greater complexity necessarily constitute progress.
Local economies depend less upon long-distance commuting and more upon opportunities close to home. If work, education, healthcare and recreation become more rooted in locality, the pressure on national transport systems may diminish naturally. The need for thousands to travel vast distances every day is itself a consequence of economic arrangements that separate people from the places where they live.
Perhaps the real lesson of Britain’s railway difficulties is that industrial civilisation has entered a period of choosing rather than expanding. The challenge is no longer how to build ever more elaborate systems, but how to simplify wisely and humanely.
Politicians may continue to argue over nationalisation versus privatisation. Yet future generations may judge that debate to have missed the central issue. The question was never simply who should own the railways. It was whether society had the means to sustain every inheritance of the industrial age.
In that case, the future lies not in preserving all infrastructure at any cost, nor in abandoning people to isolation, but in reshaping our way of life around what can be maintained locally, affordably and resiliently.
The ghost train leaving Manchester may prove to be more than an administrative embarrassment. It may stand as a symbol of an age trying desperately to keep moving along tracks laid down for conditions that no longer exist.
Raymond Williams is not usually listed among the great advocates of localism. His name is more often associated with cultural studies, literary criticism and socialism. Yet many of his ideas point directly towards a localist understanding of how society works and how it might be renewed.
Born in the small village of Pandy, near Abergavenny, in 1921, Williams never forgot the community in which he was raised. His father was a railway signalman and Williams grew up in a place where people knew one another, shared experiences and understood their interdependence. Although he later became a professor at Cambridge University, the values of his childhood remained central to his thinking.
Perhaps his most important contribution to localist thought was his idea of the “knowable community”. He argued that communities are strongest when they are small enough for people to understand each other’s circumstances, strengths and needs. In such communities, responsibility is personal rather than bureaucratic. Decisions are informed by local knowledge rather than distant assumptions.
This idea appears most clearly in his novel Border Country. The story follows a man who leaves his Welsh border village to become an academic in England. Returning home, he discovers that the life of the community he left behind possesses forms of wisdom and understanding which cannot easily be measured or recognised by central institutions. The rhythms of work, neighbourliness and shared memory create a richness of life which large organisations frequently overlook.
For localists, this insight is of profound importance. National governments and large corporations often treat people as statistics, consumers or administrative cases. Policies are devised at a distance and imposed uniformly across places with very different histories and needs. Williams reminds us that people are not abstractions. They belong to particular places and relationships.
In The Country and the City, Williams examined the changing relationship between rural and urban life. He showed how economic power increasingly shifted towards large centres of administration and commerce, while rural communities were often viewed merely as resources to be exploited. Yet he rejected sentimental nostalgia. He did not argue that the past had been perfect. Instead, he sought ways in which the strengths of local communities could be preserved and renewed within a changing society.
His unfinished work, People of the Black Mountains, perhaps comes closest to a localist history. Set in the landscape around his native district, it traces the lives of ordinary people over thousands of years. Rather than focusing on kings, governments and military leaders, Williams looked at the people who worked the land, built communities and passed on practical knowledge from generation to generation. History, he suggested, is made from below as much as from above.
There are differences between Williams and some advocates of localism. He remained committed to the idea that national institutions have an important role in securing fairness and opportunity. He did not seek complete local independence. Nevertheless, he consistently argued that large institutions should support communities rather than dominate them.
At a time when many people feel powerless in the face of distant political and economic forces, Raymond Williams offers an alternative way of seeing society. Strong communities are built through shared experience, mutual responsibility and local knowledge. They cannot simply be created by legislation or managed through bureaucracy.
For those concerned with localism, Williams provides an important reminder that the health of a society depends not only upon the efficiency of its institutions but upon the vitality of its knowable communities. The future may depend less upon building ever larger systems and more upon recovering the human scale at which people can genuinely participate in shaping their own lives.
Long before localism became a recognised movement, Leopold Kohr was arguing that most of the problems of modern society arose from one simple cause – excessive size.
Kohr, who spent many years teaching in Wales, became famous through his book The Breakdown of Nations. Published in the 1950s, it was a direct challenge to the prevailing belief that bigger nations, bigger cities, bigger organisations and bigger economies were naturally superior. Instead, Kohr argued that whenever any institution became too large, it became difficult to manage, increasingly bureaucratic, and ultimately destructive.
His central idea was remarkably simple. Problems that appear complex often have a common cause. Whether discussing war, poverty, political instability, environmental damage or social alienation, Kohr believed that the underlying issue was scale. Human beings can understand and manage small communities, but they struggle to control vast systems.
Kohr often pointed to the city-state societies of the past. He noted that many periods of cultural creativity, innovation and democratic participation occurred in relatively small political units. By contrast, large empires frequently became centralised, remote and oppressive.
This perspective has enormous relevance to localism.
Localism begins with the belief that many decisions should be made as close as possible to the people affected by them. It recognises that local knowledge is often superior to distant administration. The local farmer understands the land better than a ministry in London. A local community understands its needs better than a national bureaucracy. A neighbourhood often solves problems more effectively than a remote government department.
Kohr would have recognised these principles immediately.
In modern Britain, many of the difficulties facing public services arise from attempts to administer millions of people through increasingly complex national systems. Health care, education, welfare, planning and transport all require huge bureaucracies to coordinate them. As these organisations grow larger, they require more managers, more regulations and more layers of administration.
The result is often a feeling that decisions are made by people who neither know nor understand the communities affected.
Localism offers an alternative. Rather than continually enlarging institutions, it seeks to restore decision-making to the smallest practical level. This does not mean abandoning national government altogether. Certain functions, such as defence, major railways and specialist hospitals, will always require wider organisation. However, many aspects of everyday life can be managed more effectively closer to home.
Kohr’s ideas become even more relevant in a shrinking economy.
The growth era of the twentieth century was built upon abundant energy and expanding consumption. Large-scale systems became possible because society could afford the transport, administration and infrastructure required to support them. As economic growth slows and resources become more constrained, the costs of maintaining vast systems increase.
Under these conditions, local solutions often become more practical than national ones.
Local food production reduces transport costs. Local energy schemes reduce dependence on extensive networks. Local businesses keep wealth circulating within the community. Local care systems can often provide support more efficiently than distant bureaucracies.
Kohr believed that the future would belong not to ever-larger institutions but to societies organised on a human scale. People are more likely to participate in decisions when they can see the consequences. They are more likely to cooperate when they know one another. They are more likely to feel responsible for their surroundings when those surroundings remain within their understanding.
Perhaps the most important lesson from Leopold Kohr is that progress should not be measured by size. Bigger is not necessarily better. A society can become wealthier, more complicated and more technologically advanced while simultaneously becoming less manageable and less humane.
For localists, this insight remains as important today as when Kohr first expressed it. The future may not belong to the largest organisations or the most centralised systems. It may belong to communities that rediscover the advantages of living and working at a scale that human beings can understand.
In that sense, Leopold Kohr was not merely a critic of bigness. He was one of the earliest and most profound advocates of what we now call localism.
Deschooling Society, published in 1971 by Ivan Illich, remains one of the most challenging books ever written about education. Yet despite its title, it is not really a book about schools. It is a book about how modern industrial societies organise knowledge, power and dependence.
More than fifty years after it was written, many of Illich’s ideas appear surprisingly relevant to the emerging localist movement and to the realities of a shrinking economy.
Illich argued that modern societies had become dominated by institutions. Schools, hospitals, welfare systems, transport systems and many other large organisations increasingly took over functions that had once been carried out by families, communities and individuals. As these institutions expanded, people gradually lost the confidence and ability to organise many aspects of life for themselves.
His criticism of schooling was therefore part of a much wider criticism of industrial society.
According to Illich, schools had become less concerned with learning and more concerned with certification. The possession of qualifications became more important than the possession of knowledge. People increasingly came to believe that learning could occur only within formal institutions and under the supervision of approved professionals.
Illich questioned this assumption.
He believed that people learn continuously throughout life through experience, observation, work, conversation and participation in their communities. A child helping in a workshop, a gardener teaching neighbours, an elderly resident sharing local history, or a farmer explaining soil management are all forms of education. In many cases they may be more practical and more relevant than classroom instruction.
This idea has obvious parallels with localism.
Localism places great value on local knowledge. Every locality possesses skills and understanding that are often overlooked by national systems. Retired craftsmen, gardeners, builders, farmers, cooks, engineers and volunteers hold enormous amounts of practical knowledge. Much of this knowledge is difficult to capture in textbooks but can be passed directly from person to person.
Industrial society tends to replace these local knowledge networks with centralised systems. Expertise becomes concentrated in institutions. Learning becomes standardised. Local variation is discouraged.
Illich saw this as a loss rather than a gain.
One of his most important ideas was the creation of what he called “learning webs”. Today, we might describe these as networks through which people can find others willing to teach and learn. Long before the internet existed, Illich imagined systems that would connect people according to their interests and skills rather than according to age, examination requirements or institutional structures.
Modern technology makes such networks far more practical than they were in 1971.
A localist society could make extensive use of learning webs. A person wanting to learn food preservation could be connected with an experienced neighbour. Someone interested in repairing bicycles could learn directly from a local mechanic. Young people could acquire practical skills from local producers and artisans. Knowledge would flow through the community rather than being confined to formal institutions.
This does not mean abandoning schools entirely.
One weakness in some interpretations of Illich is the assumption that all formal education should disappear. In practice, many forms of advanced knowledge require structured learning. Medicine, engineering, science and other specialised disciplines depend upon rigorous education and standards.
Localism itself does not require the abolition of national educational institutions. Just as localism recognises the continuing need for national railways, specialist hospitals and telecommunications systems, it can also recognise the need for universities and professional training.
The question is not whether schools should exist.
The question is whether schools should be the only recognised path to learning.
Here Illich’s criticism remains powerful.
Many people leave formal education believing they are no longer learners. Yet some of the most valuable learning occurs throughout adult life. Local food production, home maintenance, renewable energy systems, woodland management, community care and countless other practical activities require ongoing learning outside formal institutions.
A shrinking economy may make these forms of learning increasingly important.
Industrial growth allowed societies to become highly specialised. As long as energy was abundant and economic growth continued, individuals could rely upon distant experts to solve most problems. But if economic contraction becomes a long-term reality, communities may need to recover many practical skills that have been lost.
Local food production, repair skills, building maintenance, water management and local enterprise all depend upon knowledge that is often acquired informally rather than through formal qualifications.
In this sense, Deschooling Society may be viewed as a handbook for cultural resilience.
Illich was asking how people could become less dependent upon large institutions and more capable of organising their own lives. That question sits at the heart of localism.
His vision was not anti-learning. Quite the opposite. He wanted learning to become more widespread, more accessible and more integrated into everyday life. He wanted knowledge to circulate freely through communities rather than being monopolised by institutions.
Many localists would recognise this ambition immediately.
The local economy of the future may depend as much upon the sharing of knowledge as upon the production of food or energy. Communities that can teach themselves, adapt themselves and pass skills between generations will be more resilient than communities that depend entirely upon distant systems.
For that reason, Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society deserves to be read not simply as a critique of education but as an early exploration of ideas that later became central to localism.
Its message is that learning belongs to people, not institutions. In an age of economic uncertainty and increasing dependence upon large systems, that message may be more relevant today than when it was first written.
In relation to localism, Deschooling Society is not a blueprint but a highly compatible companion. It supports the localist belief that communities possess valuable knowledge and that many essential skills can be learned and shared locally. Where localism differs from some interpretations of Illich is that localism would generally retain national institutions where they remain genuinely necessary, while seeking to rebuild local capability wherever possible.
Tim Watkins, writing on the Consciousness of Sheep website, argues that the economy is not simply a financial system but a physical system dependent upon continuous flows of energy. His article, “Economic Entropy”, applies the second law of thermodynamics to human society, suggesting that all complex systems eventually decline when the energy required to maintain them becomes insufficient.
For those interested in localism, this is an important contribution because it helps explain why large-scale infrastructure is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.
Modern society depends upon vast networks of roads, railways, bridges, electricity grids, water systems, telecommunications and supply chains. These systems were built during a period when abundant and relatively cheap fossil fuel energy allowed ever-increasing complexity. Watkins argues that as surplus energy declines, maintaining this complexity becomes progressively harder. Infrastructure does not usually fail suddenly. Instead, it slowly deteriorates through deferred maintenance, underinvestment, shortages of skilled labour and the rising cost of repairs.
This closely mirrors one of the central ideas of localism.
Localism does not emerge because people suddenly decide that small-scale systems are morally superior. Rather, localism emerges because large-scale systems become increasingly expensive and difficult to sustain. As transport costs rise, as public finances weaken, and as national infrastructure ages, local communities are encouraged to provide more of their own needs.
Food is perhaps the clearest example. A highly centralised food system depends upon long-distance transport, refrigeration, packaging, distribution centres and complex financial arrangements. If maintaining these systems becomes more difficult, local food production becomes increasingly attractive, not because it is fashionable, but because it is practical.
The same principle applies to energy. Large generating stations and extensive transmission networks require enormous capital investment and continuous maintenance. Smaller local energy schemes, while unable to replace every national function, may prove more resilient because they depend upon shorter supply chains and can often be maintained locally.
Watkins points to ageing bridges, power stations and other infrastructure as examples of systems that are becoming harder to maintain. The significance for localism is that these are not isolated failures. They are symptoms of a broader process in which complexity exceeds society’s ability to support it.
This does not mean that all national systems disappear. Railways, specialist hospitals, defence and certain communications networks are likely to remain national functions for a very long time. However, many everyday activities may gradually move closer to home. Food production, repair services, care provision, small-scale manufacturing and local energy generation all become more valuable in a world where maintaining large systems becomes increasingly challenging.
Viewed in this way, localism is not an ideological project. It is an adaptive response to economic entropy.
As the cost of sustaining large-scale complexity rises, communities naturally begin to rebuild local capacity. The future may therefore look less like the continued expansion of global systems and more like a patchwork of resilient local economies connected by a smaller number of essential national networks.
If Watkins is correct, localism is not merely an alternative vision of society. It is one of the most likely ways in which society adapts to the realities of economic entropy.
Most public discussion of societal collapse treats history as a warning system: if we read the past correctly, we might predict if collapse is coming, when it should arrive, and how severe it will be. This entire predictive impulse is understandable but not unproblematic. The historical and archaeological record is too contingent, context-bound, and selectively-preserved from which to generate reliable forecasts for our own times. We see a different and potentially more valuable role for historians and archaeologists today. Rather than helping us predict collapse, they can help us reflect on how some societies appear to have softened collapse, adapted to contraction, and transformed in ways that preserved elements of culture, meaning, and social coherence. Studying past civilisations to see how some of them managed their ‘descent’, or their ‘simplification’, could contribute to a conversation about new narratives for the current situation, so that we aren’t trapped in cultural imaginaries that defy biophysical realities. This type of historical curiosity would be interpretive and to some extent subjective, as we cannot escape contemporary values or present-day concerns. But that is not a flaw. On the contrary, acknowledging subjectivity can help this effort to be humble and honest: as a reflective exercise intended to inform present choices, not to claim timeless laws of history or near-certainties about what will happen by when.
Why this matters now
For some years now, we have argued that modern societies remain gripped by two inadequate narratives.
The first is perpetual progress: the assumption that modernisation, technological substitution, and economic growth can and must continue everywhere. In biophysical terms, this narrative is impossible, and increasingly recognised as such. Yet it persists because it structures institutions, identities, and political legitimacy.
The second narrative is a nostalgic, defensive, triage within global disruption: an effort to preserve a mythologised past by fortifying borders, cultures, and hierarchies as various systems come under stress and degrade. This is the emotional base of much contemporary reactionary politics, from the rise of religious traditionalism around the world to the view that immigration is the key cause of a society’s ills. This narrative includes a grain of truth in the need to reconsider the direction of societies and relocalise many aspects, as was explained in our Deep Adaptation book, by ourselves but also and especially by Skeena Rathor and Matthew Slater, who built on the seminal work of Helena Norberg-Hodge. However, what we have called the second narrative is flawed in imagining that some symbolic return to an earlier era will address what is a never-before-experienced biophysical context.
We regard such narratives as these two as offering a pressure-valve of pride and blame, without addressing root causes or pursuing actual remedies. Within the modern societies which we are aware of, what is missing in both popular culture and political discourse are narratives of intentional contraction, adaptive simplification, cultural continuity through transformation, and dignified loss. This is where historians and archaeologists can contribute — not so much warners of roads not to take, still less as prophets of doom — but as curators of possibility. They can contribute to dialogue from a stance of ‘positive pessimism’ that explores potential ‘thrutopias’: ways of getting through what is coming as well as humanly possible, given the impossibility now of perfect utopias. Thrutopia, a concept drawn initially from readings of Ursula le Guin’s great novel of political possibility ‘The dispossessed’, centres process rather than outcome, and possibility rather than alleged certainty. Thrutopianism is thoroughly reality-based, and combines optimism of the will with pessimism of the intellect. In being grounded in the non-negotiability of truthfulness about both our tragic predicament on the one hand and the vast and exciting chance we have of acting for good on the other, thrutopianism connects naturally with ‘apocalypse’ in its true sense: revelatory vision, once the veil of our hand-and-mind-forged manacles has been rended. We might then hazard a label such as ‘hopeful apocalypticism’ to the attitude which we along with the kind of historians and archaeologists for whom we write aim henceforth to take: active hope grounded in truthfulness and curiosity towards how really tough moments in our common human heritage were handled.
When we invite (attention to) such intellectual creativity, we are not ignoring the ongoing suffering, nor what could be reasonably attempted technologically to reduce the damage from environmental disruption. Nor do we forget that there is useful resistance to the ongoing damage being caused, nor deny there is blame for what is happening and accountability to be sought for that. Instead, our interest is how to ‘get real’ about what might help at the level of cultural narratives so as not to make matters worse as societies come under much greater strain.
Three examples of adaptive contraction and transformation
What societies in the past might stimulate such a dialogue? By being curious about this topic and noticing claims about the history of civilizations which resonated with that curiosity, we have identified three examples which could be candidates for further inquiry. As we are not historians or archaeologists, and certainly did not do a methodical study of past civilisations, we offer these examples cautiously. We don’t identify them as something to attempt to copy, but as means for us to ask different questions about what it means to endure.
First, we could consider the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire after the 7th century. Following territorial losses, demographic collapse, and fiscal contraction, the Byzantine world did not simply fall. This section of the Roman Empire, across parts of Eastern Europe and Western Asia, appeared to intentionally reorganise itself. Urban life shrank, monetary circulation narrowed, and state capacity was reduced, yet many core institutions, such as law, liturgy, language, and administrative memory, persisted for centuries. The Empire appears to have willingly embraced forms of localisation: it responded to incursions by the rising Muslim armies not by attempting to double down on an unsustainable large central army, but to give soldiers land and to get cohorts of soldiers to defend their portion of the Empire against the invaders. For more than we have space for here, see Read’s Why climate breakdown matters, which draws upon Joseph Tainter’s classic – though controversial – interpretation of the long survival of the Byzantine Empire. The invitation we see in this case is to consider the possibility that eased material suffering does not require territorial expansion, material growth, or ideological projection, but the relinquishing of some power to communities. We are curious to the extent this was intentional and, if so, by whom and how they communicated with different aspects of society.
A second civilisation we could learn about to inspire our ideas of managed decline is the Mayan civilisation in modern day Central America. It is one that has fascinated archeologists, as well as the anthropologists who study present-day descendants. One of your authors looked into this scholarship for his book Breaking Together, and discovered that the history should not be framed as civilisational failure, but as processes of urban-rural migration and the re-localisation of trade and governance. At various times in the history of the Mayans, their power decentralised, populations dispersed, and ritual life changed rather than disappeared. Many people may have preferred that way of life, even if it was compelled initially by changes in climate or the spread of disease. We note that some scholars (reasonably) claim that the elites in Mayan societies made difficult situations worse, tipping the situation into outright collapse. Clearly the conversation is limited by what evidence archeologists can find. Nevertheless, we see an invitation in this history to shift our attention from the collapse of elite power to everyday persistence, and from worrying loss to lived adaptation.
A third example to reconsider is Post-Roman Britain and Western Europe after the collapse of Roman imperial systems. Of course much was lost at the time, including infrastructure, literacy, and long-distance trade. Yet both ancient and new forms of social organisation, spirituality, and local resilience, all emerged. Meanwhile much was preserved, such as the knowledge that endured and even flourished within Monastic networks. A range of hybrid cultures formed and there is evidence people had bright lives in the “dark ages” — a term merely arising from the subsequent interest in written records (We note the fascinating recent work ‘The Green Ages: Mediaeval innovations in sustainability’). Compared to the Byzantine case, there is less to suggest there was an intention from Rome to manage a transition to a post-imperial situation. So perhaps it was an organic process from people having the opportunity to reclaim their power. We know we are speculating with limited data, but do so to generate the type of reflection we think will be helpful today. Perhaps the invitation here is for us to let go of the idea that complexity must be defended at all costs, and explore how value and meaning can be found in more diverse, yet simpler and more localised ways of living.
Although we have only read some studies on each of these cases, already we notice several recurring themes for narrative-generation that might alleviate the metacrisis, societal decline and collapse. There was the importance of scale-reduction where endurance involved shrinking prevailing systems to ecologically and socially manageable sizes. Interestingly, this shrinking reminds us of the principle of ‘relinquishment’ in the contemporary Deep Adaptation framework. Another theme we notice is cultural portability, where the practices, rituals, and values that could migrate were able to survive, rather than the fixed infrastructures. Highly interesting is that there frequently appeared to be elite loss and popular survival. By that, we mean that the collapses typically meant the end of ruling classes, not the end of culture itself. We also notice that the adaptations sometimes unfolded over generations, so probably required some people to be thinking at that scale. That contrasts with the amount of people today who focus on the next election, annual report, or their retirement fund (or even an afterlife).
As we speculate on such cross-cutting themes, we don’t see them offering any great solace for what is a terrible and unprecedented situation facing humanity today, along with the catastrophic damage to habitats and biodiversity that is unfolding. However, they do expand the imaginative space in which we can think and act. There could be lessons here for people working in the field of futures studies, design thinking, scenario planning, and those wishing to enable hope and imagination in society, at various levels. Artists, writers and imagineers of all stripes plainly have a role to play here, too. We think for instance of ‘solarpunk’ (though we find much too much of it overly utopian in how it pictures technology and politics); or of StarHawk’s remarkable parable of non-violence under extreme strain, ‘The fifth sacred thing’; or of broadly thrutopian novels such as Steve Markley’s ‘The Deluge’ or Ian McEwan’s ‘What we can know’.
Our invitation to explore lessons from those past civilisations which softened their collapse is not ignoring or downplaying the importance of recognising the enduring forms of Indigenous Peoples’ societies. Those societies might not be considered “civilisations” by some observers, but they are culturally rich and have persisted despite efforts of colonialists and modern humans to extinguish or assimilate them. However, the urban societies which the vast majority of humans live within, or are partly dependent on, today, aren’t able to directly copy the lower density and lower specialisation of such societies. We can take inspiration from them in more general terms, and also from the way they coped with external genocidal pressures, as we will explain further in a moment.
Existing scholarship pointing towards narratives to soften collapse
In our edited collection Deep Adaptation: navigating the realities of climate chaos, we included perspectives from a range of intellectual disciplines. However, as we did not know any historians or archeologists who were trying to learn about the narratives accompanying softened collapses of past civilisations, we did not include those disciplines in the book. We think this is an important absence, and so would welcome seeing more work done on this topic in future. Currently we know of some scholarship which moves close to such an agenda.
Chris Wickham has usefully reframed post-Roman Europe not as ruin but as reorganisation, producing winners and losers. James C. Scott has drawn attention to non-state spaces and forms of life that evaded societal collapses as they avoided over-integration. In their classic 2009 book Questioning Collapse, Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee present evidence for how famous collapses were actually periods of reorganisation and decentralisation. The work most relevant to our topic here is contained in the 2023 edited compilation “How Worlds Collapse.” Their central explanation is that leaders often faced a ‘cognitive crunch,’ when they recognised crises like resource depletion, but could not respond to the complexity of that, leading to maladaptive decisions. This created tension between elite protection (clinging to power by intensifying extraction) and adaptive leadership (orchestrating a deliberate simplification for wider survival). Regarding collapse as a process, not an event, the authors in this book identify an optimal outcome is a managed reorganisation with smaller units of complexity — a “soft landing.” It stands as the first major scholarly synthesis to explicitly explore the daunting principles and historical precedents for a managed descent in response to our current situation of global ecological overshoot. Luke Kemp, in Goliath’s Curse, explores similar themes, particularly how coercive institutions generate both power and fragility, suggesting that collapse can sometimes release adaptive capacity rather than extinguish it. Building on and rhyming with Graeber, Wengrove and other scholars, Kemp’s work challenges the assumption that larger, more coercive systems are inherently more successful. So if we consider collapse to involve the unravelling of coercive over-reach, then historians could help us imagine futures that are less powerful but more viable.
In the original Deep Adaptation paper on climate chaos, one of your authors referred to an analysis of how leaders of the North American Crow Nation coped with the destruction of their culture. Jonathan Lear explained that some of the Native American chiefs developed a form of “imaginative excellence” by trying to imagine what ethical values would be needed in their new lifestyle within a bounded land reservation. He found that besides the standard alternatives of freedom or death (in service of one’s culture) there is another way, less grand yet demanding just as much courage: the way of “creative adaptation.” He wrote that “what makes this hope radical, is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is.” Identifying that process is not to acquiesce to the destruction of Indigenous cultures, but to include within our appreciation of them how they coped with the devastations of colonialism. Some critics then bizarrely cited this part of the Deep Adaptation paper as if it was welcoming the genocide of Indigenous peoples. Their distortion is a reminder of how upset some people can become about analyses which require us to shift our imaginations beyond modernism and the assumption of progress — but it’s clearly the ideological task of our time.
When seeking evidence for narratives or intellectual perspectives that might have aided a softening of collapse in the past, historians and archeologists could benefit from deep dialogue with philosophers and systems-thinkers from a variety of intellectual traditions — Western, Eastern and Indigenous. Now, to be fair, there are less philosophically-minded thinkers and writers than there should be working openly on this. But there are some who are very much in the ballpark: in the West, we think of Iain McGilchrist, or Roy Scranton; of Paul Kingsnorth’s novels of ideas and non-fiction, and of Michael Albert’s important book ‘Navigating the polycrisis’. Looking a little further back, we think of the immense relevance of Arendt’s ‘The human condition’, and of the great works of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Daoism is a source of relevant riches from the East. One thinker who has done much to make the incredible resources of Indigenous thinking available to the collapse-aware is Tyson Yunkaporta, from whom we have learnt much; Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writings are also of signal importance, in this connection.
What is potentially to be gained from engagement with figures such as these? Far too much, obviously, to even begin to gesture at in a sentence or two: but the glimmerings of a sense of what can be found when one notices the way that many of these thinkers are simply willing to look into the abyss and yet not to drown in despair. Instead, to offer potential pathmarks, including reminders of what we have lost that are not merely nostalgic, but are instead practically beneficial.
And of course there is much more that could be done to learn relevant historical lessons hereabouts: including seeking to learn from what happened under grave pressure during – and after – World War II; and what happened in Cuba when it experienced ‘peak oil’ dramatically, as it lost its oil supply suddenly in 1991 (and Cuba is going through a worse process now, as we write, with outcomes uncertain). The film ‘The power of community’, about the Cuban experience post-1991, is worth watching seriously.
But our topic in this essay has been something different, and comparatively neglected: lessons from deeper-past and more severe still but yet effectually softened– collapses and contractions. As climate and ecological breakdown beckons, tragically, to the human race, it is high time that such lessons were contemplated. We must now begin to treat transformative, strategic and deep adaptation as a genuinely urgent matter that increasingly entails a whole-society approach to its contemplation and enactment. The advantage of using collapse — and descent — softening strategies from civilisations of the last 2000 years as objects of comparison in this endeavour is that they will tend to combine greater psychological accessibility/relevance (compared to Indigenous cultures) on the one hand with sufficient distance to be fairly calmly ‘contemplatible’ on the other.
An invitation, not a prescription
With this essay we are inviting deeper reflection on how some unusual past civilisations/peoples managed one way or another to work out their down-going. It is inspiring how very many Mayan people outran their elites; how the Byzantine empire apparently managed to voluntarily simplify; how post-Roman Britain incrementally set up the quiet glories of the ‘Dark Age’. In further work, one might connect that more directly with some similar emerging trends today: one might for instance see the ‘undensification’ occurring in encouraging examples such as the regreening of Detroit as nodding to aspects of what happened in all three of the main examples that we gave: of civilisations / communities under terrible stress becoming more able to support themselves locally.
Clearly, mainstream civilisational rhetoric is misaligned with biophysical realities, so without stimulating mass imagination beyond the paradigm of progress, the only alternative becomes defensive nostalgia — forms of which we see spreading everywhere without meaningfully confronting reality. We believe that more historians and archaeologists can step into a public, reflective role, helping societies explore narratives beyond either progress and growth fetishism on the one hand, or nostalgic and fortress mentalities on the other. We believe that some of the discussions in the book How Worlds Collapse are a step towards that role. As more scholars take on that role, they do not need to speculate on what might happen, but to help us all ask better questions about what might still matter, what could be carried forward, and how loss might be metabolised without violence or denial. In that sense, ours is absolutely not a call for historical or futural certainty, but for narrative courage and creativity.
To aid this discussion, we are organising a free international online discussion on what inspiration we might take from past civilisational collapses and their handling at the time, under the working title ‘Inspirational collapses: learning from the way some civilisations chose to break down well.’ We will invite historians, archeologists, philosophers and artists to attend and share their ideas on the matter with other interested persons, including activists. Occurring on 7th July 2026, as part of the Metacrisis Meetings Initiative, it will mark the 5th anniversary of the book we edited together. That book demonstrated what can be gained when academics from different disciplines lean into the topic of collapse; and it is in that spirit we are curious about the role of history and archeology.
Please look out for those initiatives (eg via our newsletters/substacks, for which do sign up). But more important: please consider whether you, reader, may have a direct role to play, hereabouts. Is there something in the area where you live which is relevant to the enterprise we have sketched here? Does your location harbour the seeds of a helpful history, for navigating the descent that is to come for us all? Or perhaps it is in your own family-tree, or in your diaspora if that is your background. Or perhaps you simply have a good example to add to the three that we paraded earlier. Whichever it is: consider surfacing it yourself. Or sending it to us.
This week’s Frankly is part three of the series How to Think About the Future. Today, I build a framework for understanding the pathways that connect today’s choices to tomorrow’s realities. Drawing from biology, ecology, history, and systems thinking, I introduce a civilizational terrain of ridges and valleys that is constantly shifting as we are moving through it. I also use the concepts of switchbacks and erosion to explain why some futures emerge by default from existing incentives and momentum, while others require deliberate effort, coordination, and sustained commitment.
Through examples that range from cell development to lake ecosystems to political systems, I examine how complex systems settle into stable states, and why some transitions are far easier to make than to reverse. As economic, geopolitical, and ecological pressures reshape the landscape we traverse, knowing which futures are downhill and which require climbing becomes increasingly important. The episode offers a conceptual tool for interpreting the composite worlds I will outline in the next part of the series, and invites listeners to consider both where they stand in the terrain and whether their daily actions are building pathways toward a more desirable future, or letting those paths erode.
How do societies become trapped in self-reinforcing systems, and what does that look like in our current reality? Which futures seem most likely if present incentives and momentum hold? And which social, cultural, or ecological switchbacks are being built today that could open new possibilities tomorrow
Want to dive deeper into the concepts covered in this episode? Follow along with the Show Notes & Links to Learn More, which you can find at the bottom of the page for every episode of The Great Simplification, or you can download them
One of the most curious features of the mainstream unsustainability debate is almost complete absence of reckoning with ‘population-as-obvious-driver’. The subject remains taboo, mustn’t go there. Even serious degrowthers avoid discussing actively degrowing the human population.
This is, as they say, regrettable.
Thanks for reading standstoreeson! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Unsustainability is about overshoot and overshoot is about humans consuming beyond nature’s recovery rate and dumping wastes in excess of nature’s assimilation capacity. In short, there are already too many people consuming and polluting too much. Need I note (again) that overshoot is, by definition, ultimately a terminal condition?
These are not casual observations that we can merely take under advisement, things that we might consider later if it doesn’t cost too much. In particular, if it is obvious the total human impact on Earth is the product of average impact per person and the number of people doing the impacting, why is population reduction not a major focus of sustainability survival planning?
“Unfair,” you protest, “not all humans are equal impactors.”
Quite true, so let’s get the inequality factor (and any taint of racism) out of the way. Data show that that the richest 10% of people are responsible for half or more of carbon emissions; the wealthy quarter of people account for 52% of resource consumption while the poorest quarter get by on only 6%. This means that, should the global community decide to act aggressively to reduce consumption/emissions by the necessary 44% overall, simple justice would demand that the wealthy take by far the greatest hit (~80% reduction per capita in North America).
Fair enough—though rather more easily said than done. The currently well-to-do are, er… inclined to resist. Income redistribution is, like population planning, taboo. Protected by wealth and associated political leverage, major vested interests, particulary the corporate oligarchs who run the world, won’t even discuss the inequality problem—except to insist we can grow our way to sufficiency-for-all.
And there’s another fly in the equality ointment—even a successful ‘great leveling’ would by no means relieve us of the population question:
· First, overshoot means that even if all 8.2 billion humans had identical lifestyles and ecological footprints, we’d still be in overshoot. Averaging impacts doesn’t reduce totals; material quality per se is not enough—we’d still have to reduce consumption by almost half.
· Second, in recent decades incremental increases in humanity’s (consumption based) ecological footprint and carbon emissions have been driven more by population growth than by increased incomes/consumption in almost all income categories; population growth is a major co-driver of overshoot.
· Third, billions of people in lower income countries (particularly in Africa) are justifiably striving to attain developed nations’ material living standards. But Earth, in overshoot, is not now sustainably supporting even present average levels of consumption; how could it be expected to cope were all 8.2 billion members of the human family living high on the hog? (Remember, we’re supposed to be reducing aggregate consumption; see first bullet point.)
· Forth, we’re actually headed for 10+ billion by the 2080s. Most of the projected population growth will occur in those poorer countries with the greatest material needs and expectations. This amounts to adrenaline for overshoot. What are the additional consequences for global heating and ecological stability? ‘Tipping points’, anyone? Still want to ignore population?
To raise overpopulation-as-issue and ask such obvious questions is not racist; it is simply acknowledging crucial realities and the associated moral dilemma.
Avoiding the obvious
Analysts and the world community actually have myriad reasons for skirting the population question—ancient religious prohibitions, fear of being labeled eco-fascist/racist, self-interested resistance to reform, fanatical allegiance to the perpetual growth ethic and growing science denial being among the most prominent.[1] In one way or another, however, most such excuses arguably spring from the deep ‘exceptionalist’ soil of modern techno-industrial (MTI) culture. To wit: Why be concerned about population? Humans aren’t animals, certainly not like the others; we stand above nature and don’t have to be concerned about natural laws. In any case human ingenuity (technology) will sever any population-to-resources link and solve the overshoot problem.
That’s the happy-clappy story we tell ourselves.
Too bad it’s merely a shared delusion. What goes on in our collective brain often has no grounding in reality.
The obvious flaw here is that H. sapiens not only is an animal, but is the major macro-consumer species in every accessible ecosystem on the planet (always at the expense of both our prey species and our competitors for available biomass). If the scale of material use and population were prime criteria, humans are the most successful large vertebrate ever to walk the Earth. The sheer weight of humans is ten times greater than that of all wild mammals combined. More broadly, the human enterprise has effectively merged (albeit destructively) with the ecosphere and is warping major geophysical processes from the climate and water cycles to landscape erosion. Quite the contrary record for a self-aggrandizing rapacious ape that claims to be detached from the natural world.
Just like the others
Which suggests it might be instructive to pay more attention to what we know about non-human population dynamics—there are plenty of examples of overshoot at work in other large mammal species.
For example, the graph at the top shows the trajectories of reindeer populations in the decades after a few individuals were introduced to the Pribilof Islands off Alaska early in the 20th Century. The islands were resource-rich and predator free. The reindeer, like all species’ populations enjoying favourable conditions, began expanding exponentially. From a handful of individuals in 1911, the St Paul Island herd ballooned to over 2000 individuals in under 30 years before going nearly extinct in little more than a decade. (The St George story was similar but less dramatic.)
The St Paul reindeer’s three decades of expansion provide a classic example of exponential (aka ‘geometric’) growth. This is a form of positive feedback in which each new generation adds to the breeding population ensuring that the next generation will be even larger than itself. The increasing steepness of the curve shows how such ‘compound interest’ accelerates population growth.
An exponentially expanding population has a constant doubling time. After a characteristically slow start in a new habitat, the St Paul herd reached 500 animals around 1931-32, had doubled in less than four years by 1934-35 and doubled again in the next four years, reaching its peak of 2048 animals in 1938-39. The population then crashed spectacularly—there were only eight survivors by 1950. The reindeer had overshot the regenerative capacity of certain lichens, a vital food source in winter. Depleted lichen = starving reindeer, particularly if the winter is exceptionally cold. Out-and-out starvation is one form of negative feedback due to overpopulation; the demise of animals weakened by hunger and succumbing to disease or foul weather is another.
On the upside, the collapse of an over-grazing animal population allows the habitat, particularly crucial food sources, to recover.
So, what have a bunch of starving deer on an Arctic island got to do with we humans?
Quite a lot, actually. For starters, as Malthus emphasized in 1798, humans are just as capable of geometric/exponential growth under favourable conditions as any other species. Malthus also reasoned that we are as potentially susceptible to starvation and other negative feedbacks when circumstances turn South (e.g., when crops fail or pandemics rage).
In this light consider Figure 1. This graph provides a low-resolution portrait of human population over the past 10,000 years, roughly since the beginning of agriculture.
Note that, despite the boost from occasional food surpluses, the population increase for 80% of this period was negligible, averaging only ~.04% annually. Starting from ~4-5 million, it took 8000 years for human numbers to reach just 232 million two millennia ago. The reason is fairly straight-forward; H. sapiens innate capacity for rapid geometric growth (positive feedback) was mostly held in check by local food shortages, constant territorial conflict, and disease (negative feedbacks).[2] As late as the 14th Century, bubonic plague killed off more than a quarter of the European population.
Nevertheless, the population kept growing at a slowly increasing rate. The real boost came with the Enlightenment (beginning in the late 17th Century) and subsequent scientific/industrial revolution. Humanity reached its first billion around 1820 then really took off, eventually on all continents, with improvements in public health and medicine (which reduced death rates) but especially with the exponential increase in fossil fuel-based technologies (which increased food production and access to all other resources needed to support the growing population). Together, these cultural factors enabled humanity to realize its maximum biological capacity for exponential population growth for the first time in human evolutionary history.
Note that the human population trajectory over the past 100 years is a geometric replica of the 30-year explosion of the St Paul reindeer herd (differing only in population size and because the human animal has a longer generation time). By 1927 the human population had reached two billion; we doubled to four billion in ~47 years by 1974-5; the next doubling to eight billion in 2022 also took 47 years (note the constant doubling time).[3] In short, the upslope of the human population growth curve has the same shape as that of the St Paul reindeer herd to peak.[4] It’s nature’s way.
It’s also ‘nature way’ for negative feedback to cut in and strengthen as a population approaches carrying capacity (which depends on habitat productivity and related factors). Figure 2 compares unconstrained exponential growth (2a) with so-called ‘logistic growth’ (2b), the idealized damping of positive feedback by the gradual onset of negative feedback. As population density increases in a specific habitat, so too does competition for food and space; with more crowding, communicable diseases and parasites spread more easily thus increasing mortality; a dense population of prey species attracts predators, increasing the death rate (and producing higher populations of well-fed predators). In theory then, the growth of a population of interest should slow asymptotically as it nears carrying capacity [Figure 2 (b)]. In practice, populations of typical slowly-reproducing mammals like humans tend to fluctuate in the vicinity of long-term carrying capacity as habitat and complex ecological relationships change.
But not always, in extreme cases, particularly in simpler systems such as reindeer on predator-free St Paul Island, the fluctuation may be a dramatic, even terminal, population crash.
Which brings us back to thinking about humans and how far to take our reindeer analogy. The St Paul reindeer population plunged rapidly after reaching peak, but does that say anything important about the human future?
It’s complicated.
Indeed, the human socio-political-ecosystem is vastly more complex and potentially more resilient than was the St Paul Island ecosystem. For example, mainly due to social negative feedbacks,[5] human fertility is actually falling (to the consternation of economists and most governments). The world population is currently expanding at ‘only’ ~70 million people annually, a rate of .85%/year, down and still-declining from the 1963 maximum of 2.2%.
In some ways this is encouraging—one might argue that humanity is gradually approaching peak population and will level off at or below carrying capacity as in Figure 2(b). Conventional wisdom (e.g., United Nations population projections) has it that our population will peak at 10.3 billion in the mid-1980s and then begin a controlled decline to 10.2 billion by 2100. It could be that all is well—crash avoided, airbags unnecessary.
But that’s not the whole story. UN and other conventional population projects are rooted in exceptionalist thinking. They are based entirely on ‘endogenous’ data, e.g., age- and sex-specific mortality rates and average female fertility all abstracted from biophysical reality. There is no consideration of ‘exogenous’ or external factors, the possibility of significant negative feedbacks from the ‘environment’, broadly defined.
Which brings us to Figure 3 (borrowed from my most recent previous post) which includes a should-be-alarming alternative scenario. Note that this graph incorporates Figure 2 (a) and (b). It acknowledges that human carrying capacity is a practical concept, that at any defined average material standard of living there will be a maximum sustainable human population.[6]
Figure 3 presents the recent human population trajectory as an exponential/geometric growth curve which has, indeed, begun to slow and approach peak (first half of solid red line). However, it also indicates that this peak far exceeds pre-industrial sustainable carrying capacity (dotted horizontal black line). Technology has taken humanity far into overshoot which means that our large and growing population is living and expanding by depleting even self-replenishing resources, from fish stocks and forests, to arable soils and groundwater reserves, and by polluting air, soil and waters beyond natural assimilation rates. In doing so, we are causing global heating, destabilizing climate patterns, extinguishing hundreds of other species and otherwise reducing Earth’s productivity and livability. (As I write this much of the Northern Hemisphere including Western Europe is suffering record heat waves. A third of humanity—more than three billion people—may be forced outside of our species’ historic ‘climate niche’ by century’s end). Global heating brings an increasing risk of wide-spread disease and pandemics—recent measles, hantavirus and ebola outbreaks underscore this point—as well as local energy, food and water shortages.
In short, the evidence suggests that exogenous negative feedbacks are rapidly returning as an additional significant factor in human population dynamics. Trump’s war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz (which has broken crucial global supply chains for petroleum, natural gas, urea fertilizer) is providing a preview of a possible global future of chaos and suffering that will eventually visit millions/billions of people as resources run down and limits are breached.
What might have been
Note that an actively intelligent species, one that accepted its niche in the natural world and understood population and systems dynamics[7], would have self-managed to ensure that its population followed the sigmoid growth curve gradually slowing growth to equilibrate (fluctuate, actually) in the vicinity of long-term carrying capacity (Figure 3, solid green line). Maintaining a civilization at a reasonable material standard yet within the productive capacity of its supportive ecosystems is called “one-planet living”.
As matters stand, MTI civilization is a victim of culture-wide self-deception. We have blown the opportunity to optimize or ‘green line’ human life on this single planet Earth. Other eco-oriented demographic analyses agree that Earth cannot support even the present population without a transformation of mainstream MTI cultural beliefs, values, assumptions and behaviours. Resource depletion, ecosystems destruction and destabilization of global life-support functions have reduced long-term bio-productivity and, with it, human carrying capacity[8] whatever the preferred material standard—and this corrosive process is obviously continuing.
The likely outcome is a ‘great simplification’ of MTI societies, much as was projected by the business-as-usual scenario of the original 1972 Limits to Growth report and several follow-up studies of real-world post 1972 trends. Are we prepared for major economic contraction and accompanying population ‘correction’?
We have too long downplayed the population question. The best humanity can now achieve as we come off peak, is to track the dotted red line (Figure 3) and work toward stabilizing our population within the much-reduced productive means of nature. Should we succeed, future generations will live at numbers well below pre-industrial carrying capacity (dotted black line). This assumes we don’t render ourselves extinct in the resource and habitat conflicts that will accompany the coming implosion (total systems collapse segment of the solid red line).
Epilogue
There are no secrets about any of the above. The threats posed by advanced overshoot fills academic journals and even recent policy analyses; ecologists have studied many boom-bust cycles in nature; the unique elements of human population dynamics are well known; policy makers are well-versed in all sides of the (un)sustainability story. Yet quirky MTI culture still denies the population problem.
All of which goes to show, once more, that macro-scale (corporate, national, geopolitical behaviour) is rarely guided by mere facts and analysis unless the latter support existing mythology, economic narratives, development policies and, of course, our governing elites. The modern ‘system’—MTI culture—has acquired a momentum of its own, powered by innate behavioural tendencies; religious doctrines; equally fantastical cultural narratives (e.g., human exeptionalism and infinite economic growth); powerful influencers; privileged self-interest; emotional resistence; willful blindness and a large dollop of popular indifference/ignorance.
The coming implosion should therefore hardly come as a shock. It is the inevitable product of a defective cultural algorithm combined with human cognitive maleability. The most recent ten generations of modern humans (out of ~17,000 generations) have lived mostly unaware that these are truly exceptional times. MTI peoples have been mesmerized into thinking that continuous economic and population growth are normal and ‘to be continued’; in counter-fact, the past 200 years of fossil-powered growth is the most anomalous period in human history and is ‘to be curtailed.’
The human population went way up; it will come down.
Perhaps some will find comfort in knowing that, one way or another, the next century will see a return to normalcy. Conceivably, like St Paul Island, our Earthly habitat will eventually recover from humanity’s over-grazing.
The seeming inevitability of the transition does not, however, relieve the present generation of responsibility. This is no time to relax; we theoretically still have a choice between acting in ‘normal’ ways that facilitate a fast and brutal collapse or of exercising our much-vaunted high intelligence by coming together cooperatively to manage a controlled and humanely equitable soft landing.
Where would you put your money?
[1] Actually, and perversely, we’re not exactly ‘skirting the population question’. Many high-income countries are actively promoting pro-natalist policies to maintain or grow their populations in the face of declining fertility.
[2] Positive feedback occurs when a change in a systems variable generates further change in the same direction (deviation reinforcing). Negative feedback occurs when a change in a systems variable results in suppression of change in the same direction (deviation counter-acting).
[3] The instantaneous population growth rates actually increased initially during these periods rising, in humanity’s case, to a maximum of 2.2%/annum in the early-mid 1960s.
[4] The compressed time scale and steepness of the curve obscures this fact.
[5] E.g., greater economic freedom for women, improved family-planning education, increasing availability of pregnancy prevention technologies, concern about bringing children into an unstable world, etc.
[6] The numerical maximum can vary substantially. All else held constant, Earth could support more people at a modest material standard than if we all choose to live high on the hog (apparently the MTI default position).
[7]H. sapiens did actually understand all this but, being above nature, chose to ignore mere biology.
[8] Bio-productivity or biocapacity is a quality of ecosystems and should not be confused with carrying capacity which is always a population number. The two variables are related, of course—a highly bio-productive habitat (e.g., temperate grasslands) will support more people at any defined material standard than will a comparably-sized low-quality habitat (semi-arid scrubland). (See also Note #6.)
As large-scale systems lose the ability to describe reality, the future belongs to small systems that preserve feedback.
As the formal economy that shaped the last two centuries begins to contract, many Canadians are quietly shifting toward local solutions. This isn’t driven by nostalgia or a rejection of modernity. It’s a pragmatic recognition: small-scale systems often perform better when large ones start to falter.
The core advantage of localism lies in preserving feedback. It keeps decisions close to their consequences and anchors activity in observable reality. In a contracting world, small scale isn’t optional—it’s structurally superior for resilience, accountability, and honest adaptation.
A quick hat tip to Chatting About Localism. Their clear explorations of scale and place have sharpened how I think about these dynamics.
How Scale Actually Works
In localism, scale isn’t just a buzzword; it’s the physical and social size at which decisions are made. It answers a basic question: How big is the system doing the deciding?
Localism doesn’t insist that “small is always better.” Rather, it makes a precise claim: many activities have been pushed far beyond their appropriate scale. This shift has replaced practical judgment with bureaucracy and systemic resilience with narrow efficiency.
Small Scale (The Localist Edge)
Proximity: Decisions are made where their effects are felt.
Knowledge: Producers and users often know one another personally.
Speed: Feedback arrives quickly; mistakes are visible and corrected before they compound.
Examples: Food grown and sold within a region; housing shaped by local materials; care networks built on neighborhood trust.
Large Scale (The Institutional Trap)
Distance: Decisions are made far from consequences.
Rules: Systems depend on formal procedures, centralized targets, and metrics.
Cascades: Failures aren’t contained—they ripple across the entire system.
Examples: National planning regulations that ignore regional climate; centralized food supply chains vulnerable to distant disruptions.
Why Small Systems Stay Honest
This structural difference becomes critical as formal systems weaken. Large organizations don’t merely become less efficient—they become structurally prone to losing touch with reality.
The reason isn’t individual dishonesty; it’s the effect of scale on feedback.
The “Ostrom” Factor
The late Elinor Ostrom’s research on common-pool resources (fisheries, irrigation, grazing lands) proved this. In thousands of cases, small, self-governing groups consistently outperformed centralized management. They didn’t function because the people were unusually virtuous—they functioned because dishonesty was visible, costly, and immediately damaging.
As discretionary spending contracts and formal institutions struggle to respond, large systems grow more fragile. They require ever-greater simplification to function, and simplification slides into distortion. Targets supplant reality; “invented facts” become the lubricant to keep the machine running.
Local systems, by contrast, don’t “scale up”—and that’s precisely their strength. Their limited size keeps them tethered to observation and personal responsibility.
Localism isn’t a nostalgic retreat. In an era of strained housing, volatile energy prices, and brittle supply chains, it is the structural precondition for accurate description and effective adaptation. It is how we stay connected to reality when the “official” version of reality no longer makes sense.
Join the Conversation
Where in your own life or community do you see small-scale arrangements already outperforming distant ones? What practical steps could help shift more of our everyday needs toward an appropriate, local scale?
The industrial and consumerist era was built upon one overriding condition – abundant surplus energy.
Coal, oil and gas provided such vast quantities of concentrated energy that societies could undertake a wide range of activities far beyond simple survival.
Once food, shelter, transport and basic industry had been secured, enormous additional sectors could emerge. Tourism, advertising, financial services, mass commuting, global retailing, endless entertainment, international supply chains, consumer electronics, consultancy industries, luxury goods and countless other discretionary activities all became possible because the energy surplus was so large.
This surplus energy shaped not only the economy but also the psychology of modern civilisation.
Industrial society increasingly came to believe that human progress consisted of quantitative expansion.
More production meant success.
More consumption meant prosperity.
More movement meant development.
More choice meant freedom.
More wealth meant happiness.
And because industrial civilisation was fundamentally expansionary, it increasingly measured itself in numerical terms. Growth required measurement. Expanding systems could only be coordinated through statistics, accounts, targets and calculations.
Thus, modern society became a gigantic measuring machine.
Governments measure GDP growth.
Businesses measured productivity.
Banks measured financial returns.
Transport planners measured traffic flows.
Retailers measured sales volumes.
Schools measured test scores.
Hospitals measured targets.
Individuals measured income, house values, pensions and possessions.
The modern world increasingly trusts numbers more than lived experience.
At the centre of this system stood Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. GDP measures the total monetary value of goods and services produced within a country during a given period. If more money flows through the economy, GDP rises. If less money flows, GDP falls.
But GDP does not really measure well-being.
It measures activity.
Indeed, many activities which increase GDP may actually reduce human happiness and social stability.
If families stop caring for elderly relatives and instead pay for commercial care, providers.
If people stop repairing possessions and constantly replace them, GDP rises.
If communities become fragmented and individuals purchase more services separately, GDP rises.
If stress, anxiety and overwork generate larger pharmaceutical industries, counselling industries and entertainment industries, GDP rises.
The industrial system, therefore, rewarded quantity over quality.
The assumption was that if measurable activity increased continuously, society itself must be improving.
But this increasingly produced a strange contradiction.
Material quantity expanded enormously while unhappiness, anxiety, loneliness and social fragmentation often expanded alongside it.
People possessed more goods yet frequently felt less secure.
Consumer choice expanded while communities weakened.
Economic growth increased while trust declined.
The industrial era became extraordinarily successful at producing quantity but much less successful at producing contentment.
This occurred because industrial consumerism encouraged perpetual dissatisfaction. Economies dependent on continuous consumption require people to never feel they have enough. Advertising, fashion, status competition and planned obsolescence all depended upon maintaining permanent dissatisfaction.
A happy, contented and materially sufficient population is economically problematic for a growth-based system because contented people consume less.
Thus, industrial civilisation subtly encouraged endless striving rather than sufficiency.
But this entire system depended upon abundant surplus energy.
The critical issue is not simply the price of energy, but the rising cost of obtaining it.
In the early industrial period, huge quantities of surplus energy could be extracted relatively easily. A small amount of energy invested in oil extraction yielded enormous returns. The surplus remaining after extraction powered the rest of civilisation.
But over time, the easiest resources are depleted first. Oil fields become harder to exploit. Minerals require more processing. Infrastructure becomes more complex. More energy must be invested simply to maintain the energy system itself.
As a result, the net surplus energy available to society gradually declines.
Industrial civilisation can mask this process for some time through debt, financial expansion and technological efficiencies. But eventually the effects spread throughout the economy.
And they appear first in discretionary activities.
This is crucial because a large proportion of modern economic activity is discretionary rather than essential. A vast number of jobs and industries exist only because abundant surplus energy once allowed them to emerge.
As surplus energy declines, societies naturally begin reducing these discretionary activities.
People eat out less.
They travel less.
They postpone purchases.
They repair rather than replace.
They reduce luxury spending.
Businesses contract.
Hospitality weakens.
Retail declines.
Large office sectors shrink.
Long-distance commuting becomes less attractive.
Some estimates suggest that perhaps nearly half of modern economic activity may ultimately prove to be discretionary – dependent not upon necessity, but upon temporary conditions of high surplus energy.
As these sectors weaken, formal employment also weakens.
This is not merely a temporary recession. It is part of an evolutionary adjustment.
Industrial society required millions of specialised formal jobs because large-scale systems required central coordination. But as discretionary sectors decline, increasing numbers of people have to move towards informal, practical and localised forms of activity.
Some grow food.
Some repair equipment.
Some provide local services.
Some care informally for others.
Some combine several small activities together.
The formal industrial labour market slowly fragments.
Governments often interpret this as economic failure because they continue to view society through industrial metrics such as GDP, tax receipts, and employment statistics.
But underneath the measurements, another process may be occurring.
People begin adapting individually to a world with less surplus energy.
And this adaptation naturally encourages localism.
The important point is that localism is not primarily an ideology imposed politically from above. It is an evolutionary response to changing material conditions.
As large systems become more expensive, fragile and impersonal, individuals increasingly turn towards what feels immediate, practical and dependable.
They rediscover locality.
They value nearby food production.
They reduce dependency upon long supply chains.
They rely more upon personal relationships.
They seek practical security rather than abstract financial growth.
And most importantly, the emphasis slowly shifts from quantity towards quality.
This is the profound civilisational change taking place underneath the economic statistics.
Industrial civilisation assumed that more quantity created more happiness.
Localism will discover that quality creates happiness.
A locality with fewer possessions but stronger trust may feel happier than an affluent but fragmented suburb.
A slower life with secure relationships may produce greater well-being than a high-income life dominated by stress and commuting.
Repairing and maintaining valued possessions may create greater satisfaction than endless replacement.
Knowing neighbours may matter more than access to vast anonymous systems.
Fresh local food may provide more contentment than unlimited supermarket choice.
Security, familiarity and usefulness begin replacing accumulation as measures of success.
Importantly, many of these improvements barely register in industrial statistics.
A neighbour helping another neighbour creates little GDP.
Home-grown vegetables barely appear economically.
Shared tools reduce measurable consumption.
Repairing old equipment lowers retail sales.
Informal care reduces service-sector activity.
From the viewpoint of industrial economics, these may appear negative because the measurable quantity of transactions declines.
Yet qualitatively, life may improve.
This is why the transition towards localism is so difficult for industrial institutions to recognise. Governments and economists continue to observe declines in measurable indicators while often failing to recognise the emergence of qualitative resilience beneath the surface.
Indeed, localism may initially appear economically poorer but ultimately become socially richer.
GDP may decline while trust increases.
Retail spending may fall while practical competence grows.
Formal employment may weaken while informal usefulness expands.
Consumer choice may narrow while life satisfaction improves.
The industrial era measured society because it believed reality could be understood numerically.
The emerging localist era may increasingly understand reality through lived experience.
People may gradually judge society less by how much it possesses and more by how well it lives.
And the driving force behind this transition is not primarily political theory, but the decline of surplus energy available to support the enormous quantitative complexity of industrial consumer civilisation. As quantity becomes harder to sustain, society naturally discovers quality
The political fragmentation now appearing in cities such as Birmingham may look at first sight like simple chaos. The newspapers describe councils becoming “ungovernable”, with no party able to command a majority, old loyalties collapsing, and independents, Greens, Reform candidates and local issue groups all competing for influence. Yet beneath the confusion there may be something deeper happening. It may represent the first stages of a distinctly metropolitan form of localism.
For over a century British politics has depended on large national parties organising opinion into broad ideological camps – Labour, Conservative, Liberal, left and right. That structure made sense during the industrial age, when large national systems dominated life. Industry, finance, transport, energy, welfare and media were all becoming larger and more centralised. Political life naturally followed the same pattern.
But modern Britain no longer functions in that coherent way. The economy is fragmenting. Cultures differ sharply from place to place. Cities and towns experience completely different realities. National promises increasingly fail because conditions vary too widely across the country for a single policy to work everywhere.
The result is political disintegration.
What happened in Birmingham illustrates this clearly. Labour lost control after years of financial crisis, service cuts and administrative failure. But the replacement was not a single alternative party. Instead, the electorate scattered in many directions at once – Reform, Greens, independents, community campaigns and issue-based candidates.
Conventional commentators see this as dysfunction. They fear endless coalitions, paralysis and instability. In terms of traditional centralised politics, they are probably correct. These councils may indeed become extremely difficult to manage using the old top-down methods.
But localism would see something different.
What if this fragmentation is not failure, but the breakdown of an obsolete political structure?
The older metropolitan model assumed that giant cities could be administered almost like corporations. The central government allocated money. National parties imposed priorities. Councils became delivery mechanisms for centrally designed programmes. Local people increasingly lost meaningful influence over their own surroundings.
Now that system is weakening.
As trust in national politics declines, voters are beginning to revert to locality-based concerns. They vote not primarily for ideology, but for immediate lived experience – housing, refuse collection, neighbourhood decline, immigration pressures, transport failures, local identity, or dissatisfaction with distant bureaucracies.
That is highly significant.
The emergence of independents and highly localised political groups suggests that many people are no longer psychologically organised around national political identities. Instead they are reorganising around place.
This is one of the foundations of localism.
However, metropolitan localism differs from the rural or small-town version.
In smaller localities, localism often grows naturally from personal relationships, direct knowledge, and long familiarity between people. In giant urban areas, intimacy scarcely exists. The metropolitan version is therefore likely to emerge through clusters of neighbourhood identities within the larger city fabric.
One can already see hints of this.
Different wards within Birmingham now behave politically almost as separate territories, each with its own concerns, cultures and loyalties. Similar patterns are appearing elsewhere. Oldham, for example, now contains a fragmented council with multiple competing blocs rooted in very specific local and cultural identities.
This may look alarming to those who still assume Britain must be governed through stable national party machines. But localism suggests that large industrial-era political structures are simply losing coherence because the society underneath them is changing.
Indeed, there is a strong possibility that metropolitan localism emerges precisely because large cities have become unmanageable under centralised assumptions.
The bigger and more financially strained the systems become, the harder it is for any single authority to satisfy everyone. Birmingham’s bankruptcy was not merely an administrative accident. It may have been a sign that the scale itself has become dysfunctional.
As financial growth weakens nationally, this process may accelerate.
The central government will gradually lose the ability to subsidise failing urban systems indefinitely. Metropolitan authorities may then be forced to devolve practical responsibilities downward into smaller neighbourhood units, informal community structures, and highly localised arrangements simply because there is no other workable option.
In other words, localism may first appear not as an idealistic movement, but as an adaptive necessity.
Ironically, the apparent “ungovernability” may itself be part of the transition.
The old political order depended on central authority to maintain coherence across enormous populations. Once that coherence weakens, politics becomes more fluid, local, fragmented and place-specific. From the viewpoint of the old system this appears chaotic. From the viewpoint of localism it may represent political life returning closer to the realities of everyday existence.
The important point is that this fragmentation is unlikely to be temporary.
The old left-right framework is weakening across Britain because many of today’s problems are no longer fundamentally ideological. They are structural. Housing shortages, energy constraints, financial overstretch, deteriorating infrastructure and declining public trust cannot easily be solved through conventional party politics.
As these pressures deepen, people increasingly turn toward what is near, tangible and immediate – locality, neighbourhood, family, community and practical survival.
That is why the events in Birmingham may matter far beyond Birmingham itself.
They may represent an early glimpse of how metropolitan Britain gradually reorganises itself during the long transition away from the centralised growth-based age.
The BBC report on Sir John Curtice’s analysis points to a clear conclusion: UK politics is no longer structured around a stable two-party system. Instead, voting behaviour is fragmenting across several parties, with no single political force able to command broad and lasting support. Sir John Curtice has for some time argued that British politics has become more volatile and multi-directional, with traditional anchors such as class voting weakening and being replaced by a mixture of trust, identity, place, and issue-specific loyalties.
What is emerging is not a temporary disruption but a structural change. Elections are now shaped by a wider spread of parties, each with concentrated support in different kinds of places. The Conservatives and Labour still matter, but they no longer define the political landscape in the way they once did. Smaller parties are no longer peripheral. They are now active components of how power is distributed and contested.
This matters because political systems tend to reflect the economic and social systems beneath them. Fragmentation in politics is usually not an isolated phenomenon. It signals that the underlying society is no longer moving in a single direction with shared assumptions. Instead, it is becoming more differentiated, locally varied, and less centrally coordinated.
Seen through the lens of a shrinking economy and the gradual transition away from growth dependency, this fragmentation begins to look less like instability and more like adaptation.
A growth-based political system depends on a shared belief that national government can manage expansion, distribute benefits, and smooth out tensions through rising output. When that assumption weakens, political unity becomes harder to maintain. Competing priorities become more visible, and no single narrative is able to hold everything together.
If economic growth slows structurally, as energy, resource, and demographic constraints tighten, then national politics inevitably becomes less about managing expansion and more about managing constraint. That shift tends to produce disagreement, not consensus. Different places experience constraints differently. Some adapt through services, some through informal work, some through reliance on local networks, and others through continued dependence on formal state systems that are themselves under pressure.
In that context, the fragmentation identified by Curtice is not just electoral behaviour. It is a surface expression of a deeper divergence in how different localities are already functioning.
This is where localism becomes less of an ideology and more of a practical outcome.
As national political systems struggle to maintain coherence across a diverse and increasingly uneven country, decision-making naturally begins to drift downwards. Not necessarily through formal constitutional reform, but through gradual necessity. Local authorities, community networks, voluntary groups, and informal arrangements begin to carry more weight simply because central systems cannot respond uniformly to varied conditions.
In a sense, political fragmentation and economic constraint reinforce each other. As the ability of national government to direct outcomes weakens, politics becomes more localised. As politics becomes more localised, expectations of uniform national solutions weaken further.
This also links to the emergence of informal systems within the economy. In a shrinking or non-growing context, not all activity can be captured or managed through formal structures such as taxation, corporate employment, or centralised public services. Instead, a growing proportion of daily life tends to be supported through informal arrangements: mutual aid, home-based work, local exchange, and practical cooperation between households.
These systems are often dismissed in formal analysis, but they become increasingly important when the formal economy is under pressure. They also align closely with localism, because they operate at a scale defined by proximity, trust, and direct knowledge of place.
Taken together, the political and economic trends suggest a consistent direction of travel.
The fragmentation of party politics is not simply a breakdown of the old order. It is part of a wider transition in which national systems lose their capacity to organise life in a uniform way. In their place, more locally grounded arrangements emerge, both in governance and in economic activity.
From this perspective, the UK is not moving towards disorder, but towards a different kind of order. One in which coherence is no longer imposed from the centre, but built from the accumulation of local responses to shared constraints.
Localism, then, is not a policy choice waiting to be adopted. It is increasingly the way a constrained and fragmented system resolves itself in practice.
For more than a century, politics in the United Kingdom has largely been organised around the idea of left and right.
The left was associated with labour, public ownership, welfare and collective provision. The right was associated with markets, private enterprise, individualism and national tradition. Governments changed, policies altered, but the overall industrial structure of society remained intact. Economic growth was assumed. Expanding energy supplies were assumed. Expanding tax revenues were assumed. The state, corporations and financial systems all depended upon continual expansion.
Today that framework is beginning to fracture.
The fragmentation of UK political parties is often presented as a crisis, but it may actually be part of a deeper historical transition. The decline of loyalty to the major parties is not merely the result of bad leadership, media influence or unpopular policies. It reflects the gradual breakdown of the industrial growth model itself.
Increasing numbers of people no longer feel represented by either the traditional left or the traditional right because neither side can solve the underlying problems. Rising housing costs, failing infrastructure, NHS pressures, declining affordability, insecure employment, failing town centres, loneliness and the erosion of local identity are not problems that can easily be solved through the old arguments about tax rates or ownership structures. Both sides remain trapped within the assumptions of economic growth, large-scale administration and centralised systems.
As growth slows, politics naturally fragments.
Different groups begin responding to immediate local pressures rather than broad national ideologies. Rural areas experience different realities from cities. Coastal towns face different pressures from affluent commuter belts. Former industrial towns experience different problems from university cities. The industrial political system struggles to hold these very different experiences together under a single national narrative.
This helps explain why political loyalties have become unstable. Voters move between parties rapidly. Smaller parties emerge. Independent candidates gain support. Protest voting increases. Political debates become confused and contradictory because society itself is entering a transitional period in which the old assumptions no longer fit reality.
In many ways, the disappearance of a clear left-right divide is understandable. Both left and right emerged during the age of industrial expansion. Both assumed that large national systems could continually improve living standards through economic growth. But if growth becomes increasingly difficult because of energy constraints, resource depletion, environmental pressures and debt saturation, then the old industrial political categories begin losing meaning.
The practical realities of daily life start becoming more important than ideology.
People begin focusing on questions such as:
Can we still afford to heat our homes?
Where will food come from?
Can local services survive?
How far must people travel for work, shopping or healthcare?
How resilient is the electricity supply?
Can families remain within their own locality?
What happens if national systems become unreliable or unaffordable?
These are not fundamentally left-wing or right-wing questions. They are questions about survival, resilience and locality.
As this transition deepens, political organisation may gradually evolve away from mass national parties towards more fragmented, localised and practical forms of governance. Local alliances, independent groups, community organisations and informal networks may become increasingly important. Politics may become less ideological and more concerned with maintaining the practical functioning of everyday life within particular localities.
This would represent a profound historical shift.
Industrial society required centralisation. Large factories, national transport systems, centralised electricity grids, mass retailing and national bureaucracies all encouraged large national political structures. But as the industrial system weakens under financial and physical strain, political structures may begin decentralising alongside the economy itself.
In this sense, political fragmentation may not be a temporary disturbance. It may be an early sign of the gradual evolution towards localism.
Under localism, decision-making increasingly moves closer to where people actually live. Informal systems become more important. Communities become less dependent upon distant national institutions and more dependent upon local relationships, local production and local adaptation. Politics becomes more practical and less ideological because local people are dealing directly with real constraints rather than abstract theories.
The future local political landscape may therefore look very different from the twentieth century model. Instead of a few dominant national parties competing for control of a highly centralised state, there may be a patchwork of local arrangements reflecting differing local circumstances.
Some localities may prioritise food production. Others may focus on energy resilience, local transport, housing adaptation or woodland management. Policies may increasingly vary from one locality to another because physical conditions, resources and social structures vary enormously across the country.
This does not necessarily mean the disappearance of national government. The state will still exist. But its role may gradually shift away from managing endless growth towards holding together a society adapting to contraction.
The political arguments of the future may therefore no longer revolve around left versus right, but around questions such as:
How much should remain centralised?
What functions can realistically remain national?
How can localities become more self-supporting?
How should scarce resources be allocated?
How can social stability be maintained during contraction?
What level of complexity can society still afford to maintain?
These are fundamentally different political questions from those that shaped the industrial age.
The present confusion within UK politics may therefore not simply be political failure. It may reflect the beginning of a much larger civilisational transition in which the assumptions of industrial growth, mass centralisation and permanent expansion are slowly giving way to a more local, decentralised and constrained society.
The fragmentation of political parties is not necessarily the end of political order. It may be the beginning of a different kind of order altogether.
On this platform, the Great Simplification, we’re trying to change the initial conditions of the future. We do this by putting together a quite complex, wide-boundary overview of the human predicament, including how humans and the biosphere interrelate. We also explore what the underpinnings, scenarios, and interventions are in this predicament. It’s complex, it’s threatening, and it’s not for the faint of heart. This content isn’t for everyone.
But then there’s another filter, which is attention span. A lot of people today, including me, don’t have the attention span for a 90-minute podcast. I can interview someone for 90 minutes – or for three and a half hours in Daniel Schmachtenberger’s case – but I am just too busy and don’t have the attention span to sit and watch something for that long (or read a 4k-5k word essay). I’m sure there are increasing numbers of people falling into that category.
So, this platform’s message could be parsed into something shorter. Last year, I was in California doing a sort of pre-TED talk event called “Ignite.” The challenge offered to me was, “Nate, can you give a five minute talk, with only twenty slides?” Of course, I say, “Sure, I’d be happy to.”
It ended up being one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. When I actually presented, I only had fifteen seconds for each of the slides. The one I had prepared on the economic Superorganism, which is a central theme of this platform, ended up not working.
Because of that, I decided to take this opportunity to redo the Superorganism – in a shorter, tighter delivery. I hope this can be a helpful resource for those new to my work, and to send to those unfamiliar with the more-than-human predicament.
Surplus and Civilization
Let’s start by looking at the conditions we live in today. Modern civilization looks impressive relative to the past – invincible markets grow, planes fly, artificial intelligence has arrived. Yet, something doesn’t feel right beneath the surface. More vital signs are flashing red. There are lots of people working on “cures,” but we are mostly prescribing fixes without first diagnosing the underlying condition. The “patient” is the energy-and-materially-coupled system of the global economy embedded inside Earth’s biosphere. The symptoms we’re seeing and feeling make sense, but only once we zoom out and see how the whole system fits together.
Most people believe that money powers the world, but this is a narrow viewpoint. If we zoom out further, it’s really energy. Animals were the first investors, spending calories in order to gain more. This surplus energy built organisms, ecosystems, and eventually human cultures and the civilization we experience today.
Two centuries ago, we tapped into the stored energy of ancient sunlight in the form of coal, oil, and gas. A single barrel of oil, when combined with a machine, can do around five years of human labor for mere pennies. It’s portable, concentrated, and incredibly cheap magic. This fossil jackpot underpins the phenomenon I call the Carbon Pulse – a one-time release of energy that’s been stored over deep geologic time. In under 200 years, we’ve burned what took millions of years to form. This isn’t a paycheck that keeps showing up in our bank account, it’s a trust fund with which we’ve been throwing a planet-wide party.
When paired with machines, this huge energy surplus has done wonders. Population, production, and profits have all soared, powered by an invisible fossil army equivalent to half a trillion human workers.
But such power also comes with blind spots. Our culture confuses the tiny cost of fossil energy with the enormous value it provides us and ignores the pollution impacts almost entirely. We built a global economy that’s fully dependent on these two hidden subsidies, without acknowledging or even seeing them. Today, we remain energy blind, mistaking financial and technological growth for progress and forgetting what enabled and empowered these things in the first place.
Emergence and the Superorganism
In nature, complexity builds through flows of energy and materials. Forests, coral reefs, and even brains all emerge from this dynamic. Human systems are no exception. Cities, economies, and technologies are all self-organized as emergent structures powered by energy and shaped by matter. From simple patterns like this, nature creates beautiful patterns.
For example, a single starling follows three rules when flying in a group:
Stay close to your neighbor
Don’t run into your neighbor
Move towards the center.
From these seemingly unremarkable behaviors, a breathtaking murmuration appears – fluid, unpredictable, and alive. This is called emergence, and it happens in the human world too. Billions of individuals, businesses, and nations each follow simple cultural rules: seek profit, minimize cost, and grow. All of this is tethered to energy, materials, and ecosystem impact. The result is global physical patterns that no one designed or intended – and few are accounting for.
If we zoom out far enough, human civilization itself starts looking and acting like a giant organism with its own metabolism. Data flows, echoing neural signals, while highways and shipping lanes function like veins and arteries with gasoline and diesel as blood. Fractal nodes in the global system require a higher and higher baseline metabolic requirement each year.
What has emerged is something new and massive: a globally-synchronized economic Superorganism, built from energy, machines, and billions of human decisions, all driven by both biological and cultural incentives.
This Superorganism is mindless, unplanning, and energy-hungry. It isn’t evil, it doesn’t feel, and it doesn’t care about equity, ecology, or human wellbeing. It solely optimizes for throughput, scale, and for more – even when more becomes the problem. There is no mastermind behind the wheel, only billions of incentives aligned in the same direction toward extraction and consumption.
We’ve inadvertently built a system that rewards material expansion, not wisdom, and we’ve outsourced our decision-making to markets and algorithms. As a result, we have consumed more energy and materials in the past thirty years than all humans before us combined. Our current culture feels and acts like it will continue forever, but infinite growth on a finite planet is not possible. Technology on its own won’t save us, because it runs on the same fuel and has the same master.
The Superorganism cannot see what’s coming. It doesn’t anticipate, it only reacts – and the signals it reacts to are prices set for profits, which ignore the deeper long-term risks of constantly striving for growth.
So far, our collective response when we’ve hit limits has been to go deeper into ecological and biophysical debt. Buy now and pay later at a planetary scale, now in full effect. When central banks print money, they are not printing oil, copper, or lithium. They’re actually printing claims on those things. In other words, we can double the money supply, but the fossil fuels, forest, metals, and orangutans haven’t doubled. The financial system assumes endless growth, but the physical world, both the sources and the sinks, have limits.
Down-Slope of the Carbon Pulse
For over two centuries, growth has been our default, fueled by energy and abundance and amplified by financial systems. But we are now hitting ecological, energetic, and social constraints. The cultural story of “more” is colliding with physical reality. What if more money doesn’t help, but only accelerates our transmutation of non-renewable wealth into temporary income?
The up-slope of the Carbon Pulse brought growth and complexity. On the down-slope, the inverse will happen: less energy, less complexity, less “more.” This phenomenon is what I call the “Great Simplification,” and is also the namesake of this platform.
This Great Simplification is not a “maybe,” it’s a “when.” The economic Superorganism is not something humans plan for, nor something we wanted. It’s an emergent phenomenon of large numbers of social primates blindly interacting with a large energy surplus. Downstream of aggregate behavior, as individuals, humans continue to seek the emotional states that served our ancestors. But now we live in a world of scale, speed, and stimulation they never faced. We are a species far out of context. But we are not just individuals, we’re also deeply social animals. Our values and behaviors adapt to our cultural environment. This is the bright spot, because culture can change – sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly. It’s in our nature to shift once the story shifts too.
At the end of the day, the things that truly bring us joy and meaning are not tied to material consumption once our basic human needs are met. What fulfills us is ancient connection, purpose, time in nature, and being in service to others. Humans don’t need endless growth to live rich, meaningful lives.
Responses to a Simplification
So what can we do as this Superorganism reaches old age? The responses fall into four broad categories, in my view:
Policy: biophysical realism and planning for bending rather than breaking as we approach a Great Simplification.
Cultural: new stories, less hubris, and more trust and social capital.
Community: mutual aid, more localized food and supply chains, and ecosystem repair.
Personal: skills, mindset, connection, and meaning.
We can’t easily steer or stop the economic Superorganism, but we can plant the seeds for what comes next. Each of us can be the mitochondria in the cells of a different social organism being born in the not too distant future – in communities, in bioregions, and in gatherings across the world. I talk about this more in one of my videos, 10 Qualities That Could Change the Future: The Seeds of New Cultural Mitochondria. This is already happening, and the stakes have never been higher for humans and the biosphere.
Power scales up – energy, money, control, hierarchy. Life scales deep – interconnection, regeneration, community. The future depends on which of these we feed. This is more than a crisis, it is a rite of passage for Homo sapiens. The Superorganism we are part of today is not our destiny as a species, but it is a fork in what could still be the long road of our time on Earth. So start the conversation. Build local resilience. Consider being more actively in service of life.
This was just a primer on the human predicament (the college course I taught on this was a hundred hours). There is a huge amount left unsaid here, and every sentence could have been unpacked further. That’s part of our problem, our culture has come to favor short, simple explanations, while reality is nuanced and complex. But I am confident that, over time, integration of our reality – the systems science – can help us meet the future halfway.
In 2013 Samuel Alexander published his work of eco-fiction, Entropia: Life Beyond Industrial Civilisation. It is a story that gives account of a sufficiency-based community that emerged after the collapse of industrial civilisation. Interestingly – and rather ominously – the collapse-scenario Alexander presented as the catalyst for the breakdown of civilisation was based on oil supply being disrupted due to bombing around key choke points in the Middle East in 2027. As the current situation (March 2026) around the Strait of Hormuz continues to destabilise the global economy, it is timely to return to Alexander’s analysis outlining ‘the Disintegration of Empire’ (being Chapter Two of Entropia). For those wanting to read about the simpler way society that emerged after the collapse, paperbacks of Entropia are available here and pdfs available here. The following is written from the perspective of the year 2099.
The Disintegration of Empire
The picture of Entropia that I will endeavour to paint in this book does not begin with a blank canvas. Our community was, and is, a creature of its time, and our way of life on the Isle can only be understood in relation to the collapse of industrial civilisation out of which it emerged. Accordingly, I feel the nature of that collapse must be described, or at least outlined, in order to make clear why our society took the form it did.
Before sketching that history of collapse, however, it is worth acknowledging that no matter how well our economy and broader society may be functioning today, we have not been able to escape – nor did we ever think we could escape – those darker, painful elements in life that are built into the human condition. I feel this is an important acknowledgement to make, because I do not wish to give the impression, or give rise to the expectation, that our way of life on the Isle is or has been free from difficulty, grief, and strife. I assure you, Entropia is no utopia! We are human! And that means we are as susceptible to suffering as any other community. I will not dwell on these grim themes for long, but to give some tonal balance to the picture this book will paint, some darker shades must be introduced from the outset, at least around these foundational edges.
Let me begin by stating the obvious: the Great Disruption was by far and away the most destabilising and traumatic series of events our community has ever had to endure. While I was not alive during this tumultuous period, and so cannot speak from experience, it is an historical era that is given prolonged attention in our schools and the Academy, so all of us are very familiar with it, even though we now only have the distanced perspective of historical scholarship. My understanding of this period is also enriched by the many stories my grandparents used to tell me when they were still alive. My grandmother, in particular, was an engaging storyteller, and her soft-spoken but vivid anecdotes about the Great Disruption taught me that human suffering is always personal, always specific, no matter how broadly it is shared. It hurt here, she would explain, and it felt like this. She would speak not so much of hunger in the abstract, as of the time the bean crop failed; not of loss, but of her own shattered dreams of security; not of pain, but of grandfather’s arthritis, which he endured silently as he worked in the vineyards and orchards in the hope of feeding the community he loved. She would speak of how the sparkle in a friend’s eyes forever disappeared as a result of spiralling despair, and of the quiet sadness she could see in the eyes of every parent who could not assure their children that the future would be kind and safe. Most striking of all was my grandmother’s account of the Isle’s only suicide – the melancholy story of a young Tibetan woman called Nishka, for whom the Great Disruption was too much to bear. A genuine prodigy of the violin, and blessed with a face of penetrating beauty, Nishka seemingly could not find solace even in our warm community, choosing instead to take her own life in a warm bath – violin in hand. On the wooden stool next to the bath she left a composition, entitled ‘Avoiding the Rush’, to which even today only the brave-hearted dare to listen. The melody too easily evokes the harrowing image of a girl playing her own requiem in a bath, with bloodied wrists. Naturally, such events shook the community to the core, but the gut-wrenching images and emotions they evoke help to humanise an era that otherwise might be too easily intellectualised by those of us who came later.
The first issue to highlight, then, is that the Great Disruption brought with it widespread anxiety, fear, and often tremendous suffering – like any radical discontinuity in social and economic life would be expected to do. Although we had been transitioning for many years toward self-sufficiency, our way of life at the time remained highly dependent on imports of industrially produced food and materials. What is more, despite the fact that ‘building resilience’ was high on our list of stated priorities, when the cargo ships suddenly stopped arriving, the social and economic shocks we faced were by no means painlessly absorbed. We may have been better placed than most of humankind, but as the Great Disruption shook the world and isolated us permanently from the rest of civilisation, we found ourselves grossly underprepared, both mentally and in terms of our social and economic systems. In retrospect we see that many of our attempts to build resilience were really little more than pleasant, well-intentioned games, which did little to absorb the shocks that were eventually delivered upon us. At the same time, perhaps some things just cannot be prepared for, however diligently a community might try.
In the face of civilisational collapse, the internal or psychological shocks typically hit first. Human beings are creatures of habit and custom, and we have an overwhelming tendency to assume tomorrow will be similar to today. Even when we see our world falling down around us, calling for an urgent and sustained response, we divert our gaze in an attempt to distance ourselves from the radical changes that are announcing themselves on the horizon. But wilful blindness in the face of civilisational deterioration is at best a short-sighted strategy, one that ultimately leads to the crash just hitting harder and louder, and with the distressing element of surprise. It is like watching a balloon being blown up, breath by breath, and assuming that since no breath so far has burst the balloon, adding more air should not produce any great changes. And so we go about our days, business as usual. When we wake to our new circumstances, however – as the balloon bursts violently – we find that the world we knew has been shattered, and our insides begin to twist with the angst of terrifying uncertainty. We complain that nobody warned us; that we could not possibly have known. But we were warned, we did know, and now our inaction looks not just foolish but shameful.
Coming to terms, psychologically, with the Great Disruption was challenging enough. It was as if our parent civilisation had committed suicide, tragically leaving our community orphaned and alone. Cut off from the Old World, our universe suddenly seemed a whole lot smaller and our minds had to adjust to this new cosmology. But soon the sheer physical reality hit home, which is to say, the fear of being hungry gave way to the physical experience of hunger itself. A collapsing civilisation does not wait for people to adjust mentally to the new circumstances. While everything was breaking down in chaos, testing people to the limits of their mental fortitude, it was precisely then when the physical dimensions of collapse became dominant, compounding our challenges. By this stage there was no time to sit around adjusting mentally to the new situation. Instead, urgent, practical questions had to be faced about how to secure the provision of basic material needs, especially food. Suddenly everyone was a farmer, a scavenger, a jack-of-all-trades, and an inventor.
Fortunately, as noted earlier, we had quite well-developed systems of local food production on the Isle, so nobody faced starvation, as such. Nevertheless, for some time, while we desperately expanded those systems after the crash, our diets were significantly tightened. Instead of three meals a day, we had one or two. The variety of food was also limited to the most productive and nutritious crops, such as beans, potatoes, and lentils, although people did not lament the lack of variety, for they were grateful simply to have enough food to survive. Most people began to look worryingly thin, and they carried the mental and physical strain of the circumstances in their eyes.
Innumerable things our community once took for granted – conveniences and comforts that we once considered necessities – were no longer available. Everything, it seemed, was scarce: from food, to medicine, to materials. Soon enough our material standard of living barely resembled what preceded it, in ways that will be discussed further in due course. We endured these material privations stoically, however, determined to struggle onwards through this period of trial with our community and spirit of positivity more or less intact. There were social conflicts too, of course – such as the long, heated debates over how much of our minimal oil and coal reserves to use, and for what purposes – but generally these were measured, mature conflicts. Everyone knew that there was no place for childish egoism in times of social distress and economic crisis.
My point in briefly reviewing this period is simply to highlight the fact that our community, far from having a smooth or idyllic commencement, was born of struggle and considerable hardship. Nevertheless, even the clouds of a violent thunderstorm can have a silver lining. As it happened, this early, post-crash period shaped us in ways that are still with us, for what did not kill us made us stronger.
¨ ¨ ¨
There is obviously much more to say about how our community dealt with its isolation, and this book will describe our existing way of life in detail, as it has taken form roughly seven decades after the crash. This chapter, however, presents an historical review of industrial civilisation’s rise and demise, because this is necessary to provide a backdrop against which life on the Isle today can be fully understood. At first this may seem like rather too dark and heavy a foundation, but the flourishing sufficiency economy we have created on the Isle will seem clearest when defined in contrast to the industrialised, growth economies of the Old World, which now lie in ruins.
Fortunately, I have in my possession an old essay, dated 8 June 2031, written a few years after the Great Disruption, which provides a remarkably concise, if somewhat polemical, history of this collapse. I shall reproduce this essay below, knowing that I am unable to improve it. At some stage over the course of recent generations the author’s name was lost, or perhaps the essay was originally published anonymously – a practice that was not altogether uncommon on the Isle in earlier generations. Whatever the case, that issue need not concern us presently. What is important is that our journey through Entropia is given some historical context, and the following essay serves that purpose well. As the great poet, Thomas Hardy, once wrote: ‘If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst’.
As large-scale systems lose the ability to describe reality, the future belongs to small systems that preserve feedback.
As the formal economy that shaped the last two centuries begins to contract, many Canadians are quietly shifting toward local solutions. This isn’t driven by nostalgia or a rejection of modernity. It’s a pragmatic recognition: small-scale systems often perform better when large ones start to falter.
The core advantage of localism lies in preserving feedback. It keeps decisions close to their consequences and anchors activity in observable reality. In a contracting world, small scale isn’t optional—it’s structurally superior for resilience, accountability, and honest adaptation.
A quick chat tip to Chatting About Localism. Their clear explorations of scale and place have sharpened how I think about these dynamics.
How Scale Actually Works In localism, scale isn’t just a buzzword; it’s the physical and social size at which decisions are made. It answers a basic question: How big is the system doing the deciding?
Localism doesn’t insist that “small is always better.” Rather, it makes a precise claim: many activities have been pushed far beyond their appropriate scale. This shift has replaced practical judgment with bureaucracy and systemic resilience with narrow efficiency.
Small Scale (The Localist Edge)
Proximity: Decisions are made where their effects are felt.
Knowledge: Producers and users often know one another personally
Speed: Feedback arrives quickly; mistakes are visible and corrected before they compound.
Examples: Food grown and sold within a region; housing shaped by local materials; care networks built on neighborhood trust.
Large Scale (The Institutional Trap)
Distance: Decisions are made far from consequences.
Rules: Systems depend on formal procedures, centralized targets, and metrics.
Cascades: Failures aren’t contained—they ripple across the entire system.
Examples: National planning regulations that ignore regional climate; centralized food supply chains vulnerable to distant disruptions.
Why Small Systems Stay Honest
This structural difference becomes critical as formal systems weaken. Large organizations don’t merely become less efficient—they become structurally prone to losing touch with reality.
The reason isn’t individual dishonesty; it’s the effect of scale on feedback.
The “Ostrom” Factor
The late Elinor Ostrom’s research on common-pool resources (fisheries, irrigation, grazing lands) proved this. In thousands of cases, small, self-governing groups consistently outperformed centralized management. They didn’t function because the people were unusually virtuous—they functioned because dishonesty was visible, costly, and immediately damaging.
The Structural Precondition for Adaptation
As discretionary spending contracts and formal institutions struggle to respond, large systems grow more fragile. They require ever-greater simplification to function, and simplification slides into distortion. Targets supplant reality; “invented facts” become the lubricant to keep the machine running.
Local systems, by contrast, don’t “scale up”—and that’s precisely their strength. Their limited size keeps them tethered to observation and personal responsibility.
Localism isn’t a nostalgic retreat. In an era of strained housing, volatile energy prices, and brittle supply chains, it is the structural precondition for accurate description and effective adaptation. It is how we stay connected to reality when the “official” version of reality no longer makes sense.
Where in your own life or community do you see small-scale arrangements already outperforming distant ones? What practical steps could help shift more of our everyday needs toward an appropriate, local scale?
I have just spent two days trying to get a new mobile phone working. In the end I had to order an adapter.
Each time I tried to complete the purchase, a security code was sent. Often the code arrived after it had expired. So I requested another. And waited again.
Nothing was technically “wrong”. The system was functioning exactly as designed. Yet the process absorbed hours.
This is not an unusual experience. It is normal life in a large, centralised, digitised economy. But it raises a serious question.
How much productivity is being lost in friction?
Friction in the Formal System
In the formal economy, simple transactions pass through layers:
Remote suppliers
Automated call centres
Security platforms
Banks
Delivery chains
Warehouses
National distribution systems
Each layer protects itself. Each layer has procedures. Each layer introduces delay.
The individual carries the cost in time.
When codes expire, when parcels are delayed, when call centres cannot decide, when websites reject passwords, the clock is running. The economy counts the transaction as efficient. The lived experience is different.
Multiply this by millions of people and millions of transactions.
The hidden loss of productivity is enormous.
How It Would Work Locally
If I lived in a strongly localist locality, none of this would apply.
I would walk to a local electrical shop. I would take the phone with me. The shopkeeper would look at it. He would hand me the correct adapter. I would pay and leave.
Total time: ten minutes.
No expired codes. No delivery tracking. No outsourced helplines. No national logistics network.
The transaction would be resolved at human scale.
The Cost of Hierarchy
Large systems require hierarchy.
Decisions move upward. Authorisation moves downward. Queries are escalated. Responsibility is divided.
Even when digitised, hierarchy remains embedded in procedure.
In contrast, a localist economy operates with minimal hierarchy.
The person who serves you can decide. The supplier can adjust. The builder can agree. The shopkeeper can solve the problem.
Decision-making is immediate because authority is local.
Speed increases because there is no need to refer upward.
Real Productivity
Productivity is usually measured in output per hour.
But this misses something essential.
What about the hours lost navigating systems? What about the time spent correcting digital errors? What about the administrative overhead of compliance, security, and centralised control?
In a localist area:
Fewer intermediaries exist
Fewer verification layers are needed
Trust reduces transaction costs
Problems are solved face to face
The time saved is real. The reduction in stress is real. The efficiency is human, not statistical.
Trust as Infrastructure
Large systems replace trust with procedure.
Local systems rely more heavily on reputation.
In a locality, the electrician knows the builder. The shopkeeper knows the customer. The customer knows where to return if something fails.
Trust becomes infrastructure. And trust reduces friction.
Reduced friction increases productivity.
The Wider Implication
As the UK moves into a period of economic contraction, hidden inefficiencies will become more visible.
We will not be able to afford vast administrative overheads. We will not be able to tolerate wasted time embedded in digital layers.
Localism is not nostalgic. It is structurally efficient.
Short supply chains. Flat decision-making. Direct accountability. Immediate resolution.
These characteristics are not sentimental. They are productive.
The adapter episode may seem trivial. It is not.
It illustrates how much time modern systems consume. And it suggests that localist areas, with fewer hierarchies and faster decisions, may in fact be more productive in real terms than the complex structures they replace.
The future will not be shaped by growth. It will be shaped by contraction.
This is not a crisis to be solved. It is a condition to be lived with.
A shrinking economy changes the meaning of almost everything. Work. Value. Security. Progress.
In an expanding economy, success comes from scale, speed and abstraction. In a shrinking economy, success comes from continuity, judgement and care.
We have already discussed how declining discretionary income will reduce travel, consumption and centralised provision. Markets thin out. Systems simplify. People turn back towards what is near, familiar and dependable.
This naturally favours localism. Not as an ideology, but as a practical response to scarcity. Food, energy, repair, care and shelter become local questions again. Not because people want them to be, but because distance becomes expensive and fragile.
In this setting, the future does not belong to novelty alone. It belongs to memory.
Agrarian cultures evolved over centuries of constraint. They understood seasonality, limits, soil, weather and labour. They developed customs, tools and social arrangements that worked without growth.
Industrialism broke from that inheritance. It replaced judgement with throughput. Skill with scale. Time with speed.
Now the economy is shrinking, but industrial knowledge does not disappear. It lingers. Mechanisation, logistics, sanitation, medicine and materials still matter. The question is how they are held.
The future will not be a return to the past. Nor will it be an industrial system running in reverse. It will be a hybrid that we have little language for.
This brings us to mindset.
What sort of wisdom is needed when expansion is no longer the organising principle? What replaces the growth-oriented habits of optimisation, extraction and acceleration?
Agrarian cultures valued prudence, continuity and collective survival. Industrial culture valued innovation, efficiency and control. A shrinking economy demands something different again.
It demands restraint without nostalgia. Competence without hubris. Knowledge without abstraction from place.
So the real questions are not technical. They are cultural.
How do people learn to think long-term again when systems no longer promise improvement? How does judgement replace targets and metrics? How do communities rebuild shared norms when formal systems retreat?
What does “progress” mean when the aim is to endure rather than expand? What forms of authority emerge when expertise is local and experiential rather than centralised and credentialed? How is knowledge passed on when the future looks smaller than the past?
Perhaps the most difficult question is this. Can a society shaped by industrial abundance relearn the quiet intelligence of living within limits, without romanticising hardship or denying what industrialism taught us?
The future of a shrinking economy will be decided less by technology than by mindset. By whether wisdom can evolve. And by whether experience, memory and restraint can once again be treated as assets rather than obstacles.
These are not questions with quick answers. But they are the questions that now matter most.
There is a growing assumption that artificial intelligence can be adapted to a shrinking economy by making it smaller, slower and local. The idea is that large data centres disappear, but modest local systems continue to operate within communities. Once declining materials, declining know-how and the collapse of capital investment are taken seriously, that assumption no longer holds.
Modern AI depends on hardware that cannot be produced locally. Even the smallest systems rely on ultra-pure silicon, rare metals, chemically complex processes and precision manufacturing. These are not craft activities that can be recreated at community scale. They depend on long supply chains, high energy use and continuous industrial coordination. As those conditions weaken, hardware replacement becomes impossible. Existing machines are kept running only by scavenging parts from others, until a single failed component ends the system entirely.
Know-how declines even faster than hardware. The knowledge required to design, fabricate and maintain advanced electronics is deeply specialised and distributed across global institutions. It depends on formal education, constant practice and large teams working together. In a shrinking economy, people move into roles that meet immediate needs such as food production, care and repair. Training pipelines collapse. Tacit knowledge disappears first. What remains are machines that exist physically but cannot be meaningfully understood or repaired.
Capital investment is the third constraint, and it is decisive. Even if some hardware and some expertise remain, a contracting economy cannot justify investing scarce resources in systems that offer indirect or marginal benefit. Capital flows toward things that are essential, durable and repairable. AI hardware fails that test. It requires controlled environments, specialist components and planned redundancy. When it breaks, it is not worth replacing.
Taken together, these forces do not produce a gentle scaling down of AI. They produce a threshold effect. Once materials, knowledge and capital fall below a certain level, AI systems are no longer reproducible. From that point onward, they are not tools but legacy artefacts. They may continue to function briefly, in isolated pockets, but they have no future path.
This distinction matters. Technologies that survive deep economic contraction are those that can be remade from what is locally available. They use materials that can be sourced nearby. They rely on skills that can be passed from person to person. They require little capital and reward repair rather than replacement. Mills, hand tools, simple buildings and food systems meet these conditions. AI hardware does not.
In that sense, artificial intelligence belongs to a surplus phase of civilisation. It externalises knowledge into machines that only function while energy, materials, expertise and investment remain abundant. As surplus disappears, knowledge moves back into people, into practice, habit and shared experience.
AI therefore does not become local in a truly shrinking economy. It becomes historical. Not because it was a mistake, but because it depends on conditions that no longer exist.
Localism is not about finding smaller versions of global systems. It is about rebuilding ways of living that can be sustained, repaired and passed on using what is at hand. Once that standard is applied, the long-term fate of AI is clear.
Many of the pieces on this blog start from the same observation. The formal, industrial system that shaped the last two centuries is no longer expanding. It is becoming more brittle, more abstract, and less able to describe the conditions it is meant to manage. One consequence of this is rarely named, but it matters greatly. Large systems are increasingly poor at telling the truth about what is actually happening.
This is not because people have become less honest. It is because scale weakens feedback.
There is strong evidence that small, local systems generate fewer invented facts than large, top-down organisations. This strengthens the case for localism, not as a lifestyle choice, but as a structurally viable way of organising society in a period of contraction.
In local settings, most interactions are direct and repeated. People know one another and share overlapping knowledge of the same places, activities, and outcomes. Claims are made in the presence of others who can test them against lived experience. If a harvest is considered good, the fields are visible. If a scheme is said to be working, its effects are felt locally.
This produces tight feedback loops. False claims are rarely exposed through formal processes. They are exposed through everyday contradiction. A person who repeatedly invents facts does not simply lose an argument. They lose trust, cooperation, and standing. In an informal local economy, that loss has immediate practical consequences.
Large organisations operate oppositely. Information moves upwards through layers, losing detail as it goes. Reports replace observation. Targets replace judgment. Responsibility is dispersed to the point where no one wholly owns the accuracy of what is being said.
In such systems, invented facts usually arise without malicious intent. People adapt their descriptions of reality to what the organisation can tolerate. Bad news is softened. Ambiguity is resolved in favour of approved narratives. Over time, internal coherence becomes more important than correspondence with lived conditions.
This is a structural outcome of scale, not a failure of individual character.
In small communities, knowledge is redundant. Many people know the exact facts through different routes. This makes sustained fabrication difficult. In large systems, knowledge is siloed. Falsehoods can persist simply because those closest to reality lack authority, while those with authority are distant from reality.
This pattern is well supported by the work of Elinor Ostrom, who studied how local groups successfully managed shared resources such as water systems, fisheries, and grazing land. Across thousands of cases, she found that small, self-governing groups shared information openly, detected rule-breaking quickly, and maintained higher factual accuracy than centrally managed systems.
These groups did not function because people were unusually virtuous. They functioned because dishonesty was visible and costly. Everyone depended on the same resource. Everyone could see when claims diverged from reality.
This connects directly to the wider argument of this blog. As discretionary markets shrink and formal institutions struggle to adapt, systems that depend on abstract reporting and distant control become increasingly fragile. They require simplification to function, and simplification drifts into distortion. Targets replace reality. Invented facts become a way of keeping the system moving.
Local systems do not scale, and that is precisely why they remain viable. Their small size anchors them in observation, shared experience, and rapid correction. Errors surface quickly. Misjudgements are owned locally. False claims cannot be institutionalised or passed endlessly upwards.
Localism does not eliminate deception. People remain human. But in a local setting, deception is short-lived and self-limiting. It damages trust quickly and cannot be embedded into the structure of the system.
As the formal economy contracts and informal systems take on a larger role in meeting everyday needs, this matters. A society that cannot accurately describe its own condition cannot adapt to change. Localism remains viable not because it promises harmony or moral improvement, but because it preserves feedback.
And feedback, more than scale or efficiency, is what keeps a system connected to reality.
