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.
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.
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?
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.
The piece that follows ranges across economic history, energy systems, governance, and administration over nearly two thousand years. No single person can hold detailed expertise across all of these fields. I certainly do not.
Rather than pretend otherwise, I have chosen to work differently.
I use artificial intelligence as a tool that allows me to interrogate multiple bodies of knowledge at once. In effect, it functions as a multidisciplinary team: economic historians, energy analysts, political theorists, and administrative historians. My role is not to accept what it produces at face value, but to question it, challenge it, redirect it, and integrate it into a coherent line of argument.
This matters. AI does not have judgement, values, or lived experience. It does not know what matters. It can assemble information, surface patterns, and test plausibility, but it cannot decide meaning or relevance. That task remains mine.
Throughout the development of this piece, I have repeatedly tested assumptions, corrected errors, pushed for greater precision, and reshaped the narrative until it aligned with a long-term view of how economies, energy, and governance interact. Where uncertainty remains, I have not attempted to hide it. History itself is incomplete and uneven, and any honest account must reflect that.
What follows should therefore be read neither as a definitive history nor as an academic treatise. It is a reasoned synthesis. Its purpose is to make visible patterns that are otherwise obscured by disciplinary boundaries and growth-era assumptions.
If the argument is persuasive, it will be because it resonates with historical experience and present conditions, not because it claims authority. If it provokes disagreement, that too is useful. The aim is not closure, but clearer thinking about where we are, and why certain forms of economic and administrative life keep returning when surplus and energy decline.
In that sense, the method mirrors the argument. Just as local systems re-emerge when large ones become strained, human judgement remains essential even when powerful tools are available.
Modern science has revealed a picture of the universe that differs sharply from the mechanical view we inherited from the industrial age. The world of atoms and particles, once imagined as hard little objects bouncing about in empty space, has dissolved into a web of relationships. Nothing exists in isolation. Everything is defined by its interaction with everything else.
Quantum theory shows that at the smallest scale of nature, separation is an illusion. A particle has no fixed position until it interacts with another; its properties are not its own, but part of a larger pattern. The same lesson appears in the living world. A forest, for example, is not a collection of trees. It is a continuous exchange between soil, fungi, roots, air, and light. Each element draws its life from the rest.
Human societies follow the same law. Communities thrive not through competition but through relationship — through the sharing of work, knowledge, and care. In that sense, localism expresses in social form what physics and biology reveal in nature: that coherence arises from connectedness.
When economies grow beyond the reach of personal understanding, coherence is lost. The global market may seem efficient, yet it often weakens the bonds that hold life together. The shift towards localism can be seen, then, as nature restoring balance — the social equivalent of the universe seeking stability through renewed connection.
In a local economy, producers and consumers know one another. The exchange of goods and services is also an exchange of trust. Each action ripples through the small web of the locality, as energy ripples through the web of nature. The result is not perfection but balance — a kind of social harmony that mirrors the natural coherence of the physical world.
The quantum world teaches humility. It reminds us that reality is not built from separate parts but from relationships that our minds can barely grasp. Local life brings that understanding home. It allows us to live within the pattern, rather than trying to dominate it. In doing so, we rediscover the truth that health — of people, places, and the planet itself — depends on connectedness
I am in two minds about publishing this. Is it believable? I hope not – Barry
The reversal of ocean circulation in the southern hemisphere could double current atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ / ICM-CSIC
By bne IntelliNews July 5, 2025
A major ocean current in the Southern Hemisphere has reversed direction for the first time in recorded history, in what climatologists are calling a “catastrophic” tipping point in the global climate system.
The development, which was confirmed by Spanish marine scientists at El Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM-CSIC) in Barcelona, has triggered widespread alarm among climate scientists due to its potential to accelerate global warming and destabilise weather patterns worldwide.
“The stunning reversal of ocean circulation in the Southern Hemisphere confirms the global climate system has entered a catastrophic phase,” said climate activist Ben See in a post on social media.
The collapse involves the deep overturning circulation in the South Atlantic — part of the global conveyor belt of ocean currents, which typically pulls cold, nutrient-rich water up from the ocean floor and drives planetary heat distribution.
The study, published on July 2, identifies a collapse and reversal of the Deep Western Boundary Current (DWBC) in the South Atlantic — a key part of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).
This current system plays a crucial role in regulating global temperatures and storing atmospheric carbon dioxide in the deep ocean. The ICM’s data show that the flow of the DWBC current reversed from northward to southward for several consecutive months in 2023 — the first such event in 30 years of continuous monitoring.
“This is an unprecedented observation and a potential game-changer,” said physicist and lead author Dr Marilena Oltmanns, who warned the changes could “alter the Southern Ocean’s capacity to sequester heat and carbon.”
According to the ICM-CSIC, the reversal is likely linked to an ongoing weakening of the Antarctic overturning circulation, a deep-ocean process driven by the formation of cold, salty water masses near Antarctica. That system has slowed by up to 40% since the late 1990s, and the new findings suggest it may be destabilising regional ocean dynamics more rapidly than expected.
There has been a lot of speculation that the whole AMOC (otherwise known as the Gulf Stream), could come to a halt. The AMOC brings warm water to Europe from the equator, and when it stops flowing that will lead to a mini-ice age in Europe with winter temperatures dropping by 10-30C. While scientists are 98% certain that the AMOC will stop flowing by 2100, recent studies suggest that the collapse could come as soon as this year, or at least in the next few decades.
The ICM report warns that the reversal of the DWBC could also unleash vast amounts of carbon dioxide currently trapped in deep-ocean reservoirs. The reversal will undermine the ocean’s role as a carbon sink, which currently absorbs about 25% of all anthropogenic CO₂ emissions.
“This could double current atmospheric CO₂ concentrations by releasing carbon that has been stored in the deep ocean for centuries,” the report said. Such a release would likely obliterate existing climate targets, as the additional emissions would overwhelm current carbon budgets and render mitigation strategies based on gradual reductions, obsolete.
“The planet is sending us increasingly clear signals that we are crossing critical thresholds,” the ICM warned, characterising the event as a shift from “chronic climate stress” to “acute systemic breakdown.”
The reversal threatens to weaken the ocean’s crucial role as a carbon sink — one of the Earth’s key natural defences against rising atmospheric CO₂ — and will also dramatically disrupt global weather systems, sea level patterns, and marine ecosystems.
The Mediterranean is as hot as bathwater
The event coincides with an unprecedented marine heatwave in the Mediterranean. A Spanish metrological buoy recorded a sea temperature of 31C on July 4 – as hot as a lukewarm bath. The northwestern Mediterranean Sea has recorded a temperature anomaly of +6.21°C above the 1982–2015 average, part of a pattern of record marine heatwaves that scientists say are reshaping entire ecosystems.
The northwestern Mediterranean Sea is currently 6.21°C above the 1982–2015 average, creating what scientists have called “bathwater” conditions in a historically temperate basin. Warmer surface temperatures could further stall or disrupt ocean currents, feeding a dangerous feedback loop of warming and current instability.
While ocean circulations have shifted in the deep past due to glacial cycles, the current reversal is the first to occur in modern times due to anthropogenic climate change. Researchers now warn of increased risk of abrupt changes in monsoon patterns, fisheries collapse, and a rapid sea-level rise in the Southern Hemisphere. They are calling for immediate global attention and a reassessment of climate adaptation strategies in light of what may be a new and more volatile climate regime.
“The stunning reversal of ocean circulation in the Southern Hemisphere confirms the global climate system has entered a catastrophic phase,” said climatologist Ben See on social media.
The reversal of the current will bring cold water up from the deep in which is trapped CO₂. That means the reversal, “could double current atmospheric CO₂ concentrations by releasing carbon that has been stored in the deep ocean for centuries,” the El Institut de Ciencies del Mar said.
“The planet is sending us increasingly clear signals that we are crossing critical thresholds,” the Institut added.
