After Control
On Shedding the Operating System of Industrial Economism
We didn’t vote for the operating system we live inside. Most of us are barely aware of it. Why would we be? We inherit institutions and habits that feel as inevitable as gravity. Nation‑states. Central banks. Corporate hierarchies. Security doctrines. Growth targets. We decorate them with elections and treaties, dropping a random scandal on public awareness, but the underlying code remains untouched: reality is something to be steered from the top, optimised by experts, and converted into numbers that must always go up.
Call that code what you like – industrial capitalism, neoliberal globalisation, the rules‑based order. I have come to regard it more simply as an entire civilisation built on control. Not just control of territory, borders and resources, but of time, information, behaviour, even imagination. It’s the same pattern whether you are looking at a war room, a trading floor, a surveillance hub or a carbon market.
For years I took aim at its most obvious rituals – the big summits, the national strategies, the CEO manifestos – and concluded, with good reason, that they were failures. They’re not stopping the breakdown; if anything, they are accelerating it. But that critique, though accurate, doesn’t go far enough. It treats the symptoms as if they were the disease.
The deeper issue is the operating system itself: the control paradigm that shapes what governments, corporations, media, even many activists regard as “realistic”. Unless we’re prepared to question that paradigm, all our talk of transition and resilience and regeneration degenerates into therapeutic noise – soothing to hear but structurally irrelevant.
What follows is my attempt to name that operating system, to trace how it now fuses with digital technology, and to explore whether we – as a supposedly intelligent species – can shed it in time.
The Control Operating System
We like to believe our political and economic forms are wildly diverse. Democracies and dictatorships. Markets and planned economies. Public sectors and private empires. North and South. But look more closely and you’ll spot a recurring pattern. At its core sits a simple proposition: if we can centralise information, forecast behaviour and tighten the right levers, we can manage reality. That proposition animates ministries and militaries, stock exchanges and tech platforms, NGOs and think‑tanks. It’s the ghost in the machine of industrial economism.
You see it in the insane obsession with aggregate metrics – GDP, shareholder value, quarterly earnings, cost‑benefit ratios – that reduce living systems and living people to abstract numbers. You see it in the faith placed in models and dashboards, as though a sufficiently elaborate spreadsheet could substitute for wisdom. You see it in the reflex to respond to every failure with the same prescription: more data, better analysis, tighter compliance, stronger enforcement.
This is not just a technical style of governance; it’s an ingrained belief system - a worldview that’s become as solid as granite. It treats the planet as raw material, human beings as units of labour and consumption, communities as market segments or security risks. Time is carved into ever finer slices in the name of efficiency: just‑in‑time logistics, high‑frequency trading, real‑time monitoring, constant availability. For a while, this operating system looked triumphant. Industrial power. Mass production and consumption. Longer lifespans in many regions. Digital connectivity. It delivered, on its own terms.
But success has taken it into territory it doesn’t comprehend. The more effectively we have extended control over nature and one another, the more we have destabilised our most life-critical systems; the organisms and structures that make life possible. Climate disruption, biodiversity collapse, exhausted soils, poisoned rivers, mass displacement, algorithmically amplified polarisation – all are feedbacks from an operating system that refuses to recognise limits.
Our dominant response has been to double down with even greater effort and enthusiasm. Confronted with planetary instability, we reach for stronger centralisation, more intense surveillance, more heroic promises from public figures locked inside institutions that cannot afford to tell the truth even if they find it. We try to manage our way out of a predicament our own management mechanisms created.
From Westphalia to Empire to the Platform State
The Westphalian state system was the first large‑scale embodiment of this control instinct: carve the world into territories, grant each government exclusive rights within its borders, treat sovereignty as sacred.
Industrial capitalism became its economic engine. On paper, that produced the familiar modern landscape: flags, armies, ministries, multinational corporations, global supply chains.
In practice, it also produced something else: empire. The neat fiction of sovereign equality in Europe sat atop a far messier architecture of colonialism in Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Pacific. Vast tracts of land were treated as nobody’s property until claimed. Entire peoples were classified as subjects, not citizens. Chartered companies – the East India Company was only the most infamous – acted as hybrid beasts: part corporation, part state, expanding control on behalf of distant capitals and shareholders.
Colonialism was not a regrettable side show; it was the proving ground for the operating system. Techniques of census‑taking, mapping, racial classification, resource inventory, cash cropping, forced labour and “indirect rule” were all experiments in governing from afar, with maximum extraction and minimum accountability. Much of what later passed for domestic public administration and corporate management was imported back from the colonies, normalised, and scaled.
Now a fourth layer has fused with those first three: the digital platform. Governments and corporations are converging on architectures in which data flows are as vital as physical borders. Surveillance cameras, biometric IDs, financial tracking, social media analytics, predictive algorithms – these are the new tools of governance, sold as innovation, efficiency, security. In effect, we have taken the colonial habit of treating whole populations as objects of experiment and extended it to almost everyone, everywhere, via devices in our pockets and sensors on our streets.
In principle, such tools could support more convivial ways of organising. In practice, they are being deployed to reinforce the old operating system. Scoring the loyalty of citizens. Mining behavioural data to sell products and manipulate elections. Automating eligibility for credit, insurance, welfare, visas. Turning every interaction into a datapoint to be harvested, evaluated, monetised, and policed.
This “platform state” is not restricted to one bloc. China’s social credit experiments, Silicon Valley’s surveillance capitalism, India’s biometric identity infrastructure, Europe’s regulatory data regimes, Russia’s digital censorship – each expresses the same grammar: more visibility from the centre, less opacity for those under scrutiny, all in the name of safety and prosperity.
The bitter joke is that we are building the most sophisticated apparatus of centralised control in human history at the exact moment when centralised control is becoming structurally unfit for purpose. In a world of cascading, nonlinear shocks, brittle hierarchies are death traps.
Networks that Refuse to Obey
Alongside this tightening informational cage, another pattern is becoming visible – often reluctantly acknowledged, rarely taken seriously by officialdom.
Where the control paradigm assumes coherence must be imposed from above, a different kind of order is being assembled from below and across. I encounter it in city networks trading practical know‑how on housing, transport, food, energy, and migration without waiting for national permission. In Indigenous nations reasserting guardianship over forests, rivers and grasslands that straddle colonial borders. In co‑operatives and mutual aid networks reinventing basic provisioning. In youth movements that communicate and coordinate transnationally without asking any foreign ministry for clearance.
These formations are messy, context‑dependent and hard to map. That’s precisely their strength. They distribute intelligence, rather than trying to hoard it. Authority is earned through competence and care rather than conferred by office. Accountability flows from those affected by decisions to those taking them. When they work, they embody a very different operating principle: alignment with living systems instead of domination over them.
Crucially, much of the serious work of adaptation and regeneration is now happening in these spaces. Local food webs and energy commons rather than grand energy strategies. Community health infrastructures that reach those state systems miss. Citizens’ assemblies willing to confront trade‑offs that parliaments dodge. Cultural practices that rehabilitate our atrophied capacity for cooperation, ritual and meaning.
From the vantage point of industrial economism, all this is “nice but marginal”. From the vantage point of planetary survival, it may be the dress rehearsal for the civilisation that follows.
Control as a Psychological Addiction
Why do so many intelligent people continue to cling to an operating system that is visibly failing? The answer, I suspect, lies less in ideology than in psychology.
Control offers the illusion of safety. For individuals who feel powerless in the face of planetary upheaval, it is comforting to believe that someone, somewhere – a government, a central bank, a tech genius, a visionary CEO – is at the helm. For elites who benefit from the existing arrangement, the promise of maintaining order is a convenient way of disguising the defence of privilege. For societies shaped by trauma, hierarchy and scarcity, the prospect of letting go of central authority can feel like an invitation to chaos.
We have wrapped those anxieties in elaborate rationalisations: “people are selfish”; “without strong leadership nothing gets done”; “markets are the only efficient allocators of resources”; “national security requires secrecy and sacrifice”. Each phrase becomes a spell that conjures away the possibility of genuine alternatives.
When challenged, the system responds with two default strategies. The first is denial management: elaborate efforts to maintain the appearance of continuity while shifting just enough at the margins to claim progress. The second is distraction: saturating public attention with spectacle and outrage so that the underlying operating system remains safely invisible.
Breaking that addiction requires something more than policy tweaks. It demands a different relationship with uncertainty, vulnerability and mortality. That is why the work of spiritual traditions, therapists, artists and community healers is not peripheral to systemic change; it is central. Without ways of metabolising grief, fear and loss, societies will repeatedly choose authoritarian promises of control over the discomfort of transformation.
When Tools Become Traps
The scandal is not that we developed tools of control. Any complex society needs coordination, standards, and enforcement. The scandal is that we allowed these tools to become our masters.
Take global summits. On the surface, they look like the pinnacle of rational coordination: representatives gather, armed with data and expertise, to confront shared problems. In practice they have become mausoleums for the control paradigm. Their speeches are carefully scripted performances aimed at media clips rather than inquiry. Their media coverage compresses complexity into melodrama – success or failure, breakthrough or deadlock – obscuring the more significant question of whether the process itself is structured to avoid deep change. Their procedures encourage bargaining within fixed assumptions, not collective reconsideration of those assumptions. Strategic conversation – the kind that asks whether the entire architecture is fit for purpose – is absent by design.
The same pattern recurs elsewhere. Corporate boards busy themselves with ESG metrics that leave the core business model untouched. Defence establishments write climate into security doctrines as a “threat multiplier” without questioning the military‑industrial complex itself. Tech companies convene ethics panels that nibble at edge cases while continuing to build surveillance architectures that make democratic self‑governance increasingly brittle.
We have become so used to these rituals that we mistake activity for impact. We are transfixed by dashboards while we’re watching the patient die.
Escaping the Gravity of Control
If the operating system itself is the problem, how do we begin to uninstall it without plunging into chaos?
The first move is diagnostic honesty. We must stop pretending that incremental improvements to a structurally pathological system count as salvation. Efficiency gains in a civilisation oriented towards extraction simply accelerate the damage. Better information in a culture addicted to control is weaponised for more refined domination. “Green growth” and “sustainable develpopment” within an ideology that equates progress with accumulation are contradictions in terms.
The second move is deliberate de‑centralisation – not in the crude sense of smashing institutions, but in the more subtle sense of diversifying the sites of decision‑making and meaning. That means strengthening city‑level governance, bioregional councils, Indigenous polities, cooperatives, citizen assemblies, and translocal networks, so that no single node can credibly claim to “run” the system. This is already happening, but mostly in spite of, rather than with the support of, existing power structures. The question is how quickly we can amplify it.
The third move is redefining success. As long as our primary indicators reward exploitation, we will continue to select for institutions and leaders who are good at exploiting. A civilisation that really wanted to survive would choose different reference points: resilience of local food systems, health of watersheds, distribution of care, time liberated for meaning rather than consumption, capacity of communities to handle conflict without violence.
None of those lend themselves to a single global metric. They demand situated judgement, negotiated standards, humble listening. In other words, they demand the erosion of the very habits of command that got us here.
Beyond the Cult of Leadership
Abandoning the conventional cult of leadership does not mean idealising a world without vision, coordination, or responsibility. It means redistributing those functions. Mayors, ministers, CEOs, judges and generals will not vanish overnight. Community organisers, elders, youth convenors, scientists, artists and spiritual teachers will not suddenly be elevated into positions of power. What must change is the direction of accountability and the source of legitimacy.
In the control paradigm, authority is presumed legitimate until proven otherwise. Elections, appointments, capital flows and institutional traditions confer a kind of default right to decide. Ordinary people can object, but the burden is on them. In a post‑control civilisation, legitimacy would be conditional and always under review. Any institution – whether a state, a firm, a platform or a community council – would have to show, continuously, that it is serving life rather than private accumulation or abstract dogma. The moment that presumption failed, withdrawal of consent would become automatic, normal rather than revolutionary.
We already see faint outlines of this. Workers walking out of companies whose products they can no longer stomach. Residents blocking projects their governments have rubber‑stamped. Shareholders demanding different ownership structures. Movements exploring horizontal, rotating leadership to avoid capture by charismatic figures. These are stuttering experiments, riddled with tensions. They are also training grounds for a different political reflex: from “who will lead us?” to “how will we share responsibility?”
Two Civilisations, One Planet
We are living, now, in a kind of overlay of two civilisations. One is the civilisation of industrial economism, clinging to the assumption that the world can be measured, managed and monetised into submission. Its vocabulary is security, growth, competitiveness, innovation. Its institutions are states, mega‑corporations, militaries, financial markets, and – increasingly – digital platforms welded to them. Its trajectory points towards gated enclaves of temporary safety amid widespread precarity, maintained by ever more intrusive technologies of control.
The other is embryonic, fragmented, seldom recognised as a whole. It surfaces in mutual aid after disasters. In farmers’ movements defending seeds and soils. In Indigenous guardianship of forests and rivers. In neighbourhood assemblies and translocal networks of solidarity. In artists and philosophers exploring post‑growth, post‑nation ways of being. Its vocabulary is care, repair, reciprocity, sufficiency, dignity. Both are real. Both are present everywhere. The question is not which exists, but which we choose to nourish.
The old civilisation still controls most of the hard power: money, guns, infrastructure, narratives. The new one controls relatively little, but it aligns more closely with how living systems actually function. Over time, that alignment may prove more important than raw force.
The danger is probably obvious: if we cling to control until the last possible moment, we risk locking ourselves into a planetary version of a failing dictatorship – unable to adapt until collapse imposes adaptation by force. The opportunity is equally clear: if we use the coming shocks as prompts to loosen the grip of command and control, and to deepen distributed capacity, we might yet manage a descent that is rough but survivable.
Towards Planetary Adulthood
There is a question I keep returning to: what would political adulthood look like for our species? Childhood politics is easy to recognise. It seeks authority figures, hoards power, denies limits, externalises blame, and throws tantrums when reality fails to comply. Much of what passes for high strategy today falls into that category – whether in presidential palaces, corporate towers, or defence ministries.
Adulthood would look very different. It would start from the recognition that we are not in charge of the planet in any meaningful sense; we’re participants in a complex web whose operating rules we can barely grasp. It would concede that some thresholds cannot be crossed without triggering irreversible consequences, and that no amount of bargaining can change that. It would accept death – of individuals, institutions, even entire ways of life – as part of the cycle, rather than something to be endlessly postponed through distraction and denial.
From that stance, the point of politics would not be to maximise control, but to cultivate conditions under which diverse forms of life are able to flourish within the real constraints of a living Earth. The tools of control don’t disappear entirely; but they are placed under strict ethical supervision and used sparingly.
I’m unsure whether we’re capable of such a shift today. Three or four decades ago I night have responded positively. But today I feel we’ve become caught in a vice that’s crushing the life out of our imagination. History offers no guarantee that civilisations will choose maturity over self‑destruction. But the fact that we can even articulate the choice is, perhaps, a sign that the operating system is no longer totally invisible to some of us.
The work now is to make it even more explicit – to name where control lives in our institutions and in ourselves, to support those already experimenting with different patterns, and to withdraw our consent, step by step, from arrangements that cannot be redeemed. We built this civilisation. Its failures are ours. So is the possibility of something more healthy beyond it.