Industrial economism didn’t arrive as a conquest. It seeped in — through the school timetable, the factory whistle, the mortgage contract, the development index — until the shape of a human life came to resemble, without anyone quite deciding this, the form of a productive unit. The seepage was so gradual, so total, that the worldview it carried seemed like common sense. And common sense, by definition, is what you don’t examine. There’s no need.
That is what makes a failing fiction different from a failed argument. Arguments can be contradicted. Fictions wear down the ground on which contradiction stands. They don’t tell you what to think; they determine what it feels like to think at all.
Several of the great constituting fictions of our civilisation are failing — not because better arguments have defeated them or more convincing stories have won the day, but because the conditions that made them practical have discreetly ceased to exist. Three great fictions have crumbled as a result. Earth’s rejoinder to industrial economism’s paramount promise, that growth was the metabolism of collective health and prosperity, is biophysical. The school promised that education was what happened inside it; four decades of research into how human beings actually learn has made that deceit increasingly difficult to sustain. The nation state promised that its monopoly on violence was the price we must pay for enduring peace; the industrialisation of conflict has made that promise operationally absurd.
What matters here is less the catalogue of failures than the pattern underneath them.
This pattern is not about failure in the ordinary sense. Institutions fail; policies fail; leadership fails. What’s happening here is different in kind. These fictions are not failing because they were poorly designed, badly implemented, or because better alternatives have since been conceived. They are failing because the world they were invented to inhabit has changed its nature while the descriptions remained set. Maps are always an approximation. But now the territory has moved so far and so fast that every approximation has become a form of active blindness.
Just consider what the school, in its industrially packaged form, actually does. It sequences knowledge into subjects, subjects into years, years into credentials, and credentials into consent to participate fully in economic life. In my own youth this structure was already wobbling. Once upon a time it had been rational in the sense that it matched the requirements of an economy organised around highly specialised, repetitive tasks. What it could never do, by design, was cultivate the lateral thinking, a tolerance for ambiguity, and the capacity for collaborative sense-making that the same economy now claims to need. The school can only manufacture what it was built to produce. The tragedy is that what it was built to produce is no longer wanted — except by the institutions that do the hiring, which were themselves built in the same era and carry the same obsolescence in their veins.
Something similar is true of the way organised conflict is legitimised. The state’s claim to regulate violence — to determine when force is lawful, who may wield it, and against whom — rests on the fiction that without this authority, force would be anarchic and boundless. For much of the modern period this was a workable if brutal arrangement. What it could not survive was the industrialisation of conflict itself: the emergence of arms markets supplying belligerents on every side, of private military contractors operating beyond any legal accountability, of security doctrines requiring the permanent production of enemies, and of media architectures that have made spectacular violence a content category. The state has not lost its monopoly on legitimate force so much as presided over the systematic dismantling of the conditions that made such legitimacy coherent.
Industrial economism produced both of these. The school and the arms trade are not separate phenomena that happen to share an era; they are expressions of the same deep logic — the genetic instructions of a civilisation that learned to treat everything, including human beings and their conflicts, as productive inputs.
This genetic code is worth staying with because it’s where the argument has to go if it’s going to do anything more than just catalogue complaints.
Industrial economism is not simply an economic theory. Economics came later. This was the rationalisation of something already underway in the nervous system of a civilisation based on mass production. At its core, it’s a perceptual habit: the habit of seeing the world as a set of resources awaiting conversion into value of some kind. Not just material resources, mind you. Time. Attentiveness. Relationship. Childhood. The capacity for awe, empathy, and tolerance. Each of these has been, over three centuries, progressively enrolled in the project of conversion — measured, optimised, assigned a coefficient, and made legible to the accounting systems that determine what counts as real.
Perceptual habits don’t require coordination; they require only repetition until they become the medium through which reality is understood rather than one possible interpretation of it. Children who sit in rows absorbing pre-segmented knowledge are not being indoctrinated into industrial economism — they’re being formed by it. That’s a different and more total process. Soldiers trained to perceive the enemy as a category rather than people are not being taught how to hate — they’re being relieved of the perceptual consciousness that would make organised violence psychologically impossible. Formation is always more durable than instruction. You can argue with what you have been told. You can’t easily argue with what you have been made to see and to feel.
This is why these fictions are so difficult to dislodge, even as they fail. The failure is visible. The costs are measurable. The damage is documented in languages ranging from ecology to epidemiology to developmental psychology. And still the fictions hold — primarily because the perceptual apparatus that would allow any evidence to land has itself been shaped by what is failing. We are trying to see the problem with the eyes the problem shaped.
Here the civilisational stakes become unmistakable in a way that transcends the purely political. What is at issue is not which policies should replace other policies, not which party should govern, not even which economic model should succeed the current one. What is at issue here is whether the perceptual renewal required, the ability to see and understand the human condition differently, is possible within the timeframe the planetary situation allows. The biosphere has its own timeline, and it bears no relation to the pace at which human institutions are capable of reforming themselves. The oceans don’t pause for epistemological debate. Biodiversity loss does not slow to accommodate the progress of human consciousness. The emergency is not approaching. It is the condition inside which everything else is now happening.
This is the pressure that gives these failing fictions their peculiar character — they are not failing into a vacuum but into an emergency. The ground isn’t simply shifting; it is subsiding under specific and measurable loads. And the fictions that might have been gently retired across a century or two of gradual transition are instead being asked to collapse quickly, in real time, while the people and institutions formed by them try to navigate the collapse using the only instruments they have — which are themselves products of what is failing.
There is a blunt cruelty in all of this that deserves acknowledgement. The generations now living didn’t choose the perceptual inheritance they received. They did their best with what they knew. The school that formed them was not malicious; it was faithful to its own logic. The economists who prescribed growth were not reckless; they were thinking within a paradigm that had genuine explanatory power for a world that no longer exists. To claim these fictions are failing is not to indict the people who lived inside them — which is all of us, without exception. It is to say that the living have to change, and that the change required goes deeper than behaviour, deeper than policy, deeper than the rearrangement of institutional fixtures. It goes to what we are able and willing to perceive.
Failing, it turns out, is not a single condition. The word ‘compresses’ what in reality is a range of distinct pathologies. Each has its own tempo, its own distinctive damage, its own particular form of denial. Some failures are loud and sudden — the crash, the scandal, the war that can no longer be euphemised as defensive. These are the failures that make the headlines, that generate the enquiries, that produce the ministerial resignations and the restructuring announcements. They are also, in a sense, the least dangerous, because they are visible. Visible failure at least leaves an address.
What’s harder to see, and harder still to resist, are the failures that proceed quietly – that wear the face of continuity, of stability, of things working more or less as they should. These are the failures that don’t declare themselves because the institutions experiencing them have a profound institutional interest in not announcing them. They are failing, but they persist because the systems built to detect and correct failure are themselves implicated in what’s failing. The auditor is on the payroll. The regulator came from the industry. The journalist needs the access. The academic needs the funding. Failure, under these conditions, is unlikely to surface suddenly — it decays, layer by layer, until the foundations have changed composition without anyone having quite decided that this should happen.
Some fictions calcify. Supple once — genuinely responsive to the conditions that produced them — repetition hardens doctrine into reflex, and reflex into the kind of institutional rigidity that mistakes its own inflexibility for matters of principle. The management orthodoxies that Richard Sennett tracked across the ruins of post-industrial communities offer one instance; the economic austerity models still being prescribed to the Global South by institutions formed in the aftermath of World War Two offer another. These are not necessarily cynical operations. The people inside them often believe, with a great deal of passion, in what they’re administering. That is precisely what calcification looks like from within: not rigidity but conviction.
Others are captured. The fiction remains nominally intact — democracy, the free market, the rule of international law — while its operational content is unobtrusively replaced by the interests of whoever proved most adept at occupying its machinery. Capture is difficult to see because it works through legitimacy rather than against it. The captured institution still uses the original language, still performs the original rituals, and still draws on the original reservoir of public trust. What has changed is the direction of flow. The regulatory body now protects the industry it was created to regulate. The development bank now serves the financial system it was created to correct. The captured institution is perhaps the purest expression of what Antonio Gramsci meant by hegemony, though he could not have anticipated the sophistication with which the technique would eventually be deployed.
Still others engage in mimicry — the performance of function after the function itself has expired. Schools that process students rather than educate them. Hospitals that manage throughput rather than tending to the sick. Climate summits that produce communiqués calibrated to the threshold of ambition just below that which would require any real change. Mimicry is the most socially expensive of the failure modes because it consumes the resources — the attention, the trust, the institutional energy — that genuine function would require while delivering only its appearance. In truth it’s a form of civilisational debt, accumulating silently until the gap between the performance and the reality becomes impossible to bridge.
And then there’s what might be called ‘cannibalisation’ — the world-system consuming its own substrate in order to sustain its current form. Drawing down ecological capital accumulated over millennia. Liquidating social trust built across generations. Monetising the last reserves of human attention. Borrowing against future generations that can’t be consulted. Cannibalisation differs from the other failure modes in that it’s not merely dysfunctional; it’s structurally suicidal. A system devouring its own foundations while claiming the process as growth.
Although I have itemised these various modes of failing, they rarely operate in isolation. Indeed, they compound. A calcified institution is easier to capture. A captured institution defaults to mimicry. A system organised around mimicry cannibalises whatever genuine function remains. What begins as rigidity ends as the kind of zombie persistence that characterises so much of the current world system — structures that are functionally dead but can’t fall because too many living arrangements have been constructed on top of them, and the collapse of the fiction would mean the collapse of the lives built inside it.
I am not using metaphors here. This is the actual situation of millions of people whose livelihoods, identities, and social relationships are threaded through institutions whose legitimacy has been quietly abandoned. At some level, they understand the fiction no longer holds. They continue nevertheless, because they grasp, with some inbuilt precision, who bears the cost of a fiction’s ending. And it’s not the fiction.
Not every encounter with a failing fiction ends in its reproduction. This matters — because the argument so far might suggest a closed system, a world-system so totalising in its logic that every apparent departure circles back to the same extractive core. That would be too bleak. More importantly, it would be wrong.
There’s a distinction that the current moment makes newly visible between what might be called ‘capture’ and ‘harness’. Both operate through the infrastructure of the failing fiction. Both use its tools, its platforms, and its networks. But they move in very different directions.
Capture takes the new and bends it back toward the old result. In the world of commerce, Uber is the exemplary case — not because it is uniquely cynical but because it’s been unusually transparent about the mechanism. The platform economy arrived in a blaze of disruption rhetoric: the liberation of workers from institutional dependency, the democratisation of economic participation, and the replacement of corporate hierarchy with peer-to-peer exchange. What it actually delivered was the extraction model with the employment protections removed and the surveillance intensified. Drivers bear the capital risk that employers once carried. The algorithm sets the terms that managers once negotiated. The rating system enforces the discipline that contracts once codified. The form changed entirely. The grammar did not move an inch.
The same mechanism operates well beyond commerce. Social media arrived promising to democratise speech — to route around the gatekeepers, amplify the unheard, and connect the dispersed. What it built instead was the most efficient apparatus for manufacturing consent ever devised, one that works not through suppression but through saturation, not through censorship but through the algorithmic elevation of whatever produces the most engagement, which turns out to be reliably the most divisive. The gatekeepers were not removed. They were simply replaced by something that needed no face, no salary, and no editorial conscience.
This is capture at its most sophisticated — not the crude occupation of an institution by hostile interests, but the unconscious reproduction of a logic so deeply embedded that even those who believed they were escaping it simply recast it in a new key. The real tragedy of the gig economy is that the perceptual habit of industrial economism — the world as a set of resources awaiting conversion into value — was so thoroughly internalised that disrupting the form while preserving the substance felt, to everyone involved, like genuine transformation.
Harnessing works differently. It takes the same substrate — the app, the matching algorithm, the distributed network, and the technical capacity for frictionless coordination — and organises it around a different question. Not how to extract maximum value from the transaction, but how to distribute benefit across the network of people the transaction involves. Ride Austin, the non-profit ride-sharing cooperative that briefly displaced Uber and Lyft in Texas, was not a utopian experiment. On the contrary, it was a practical demonstration that the technical infrastructure of the platform economy is indifferent to the values of whoever deploys it. The algorithm doesn’t care whether it serves extraction or mutuality. That choice belongs to the people who build the system and the communities that adopt it.
What makes harnessing genuinely significant — and genuinely difficult — is that it requires the perceptual shift that mere capture never demands. To build a Ride Austin rather than an Uber, you have to be asking a different question right from the outset. You have to have already noticed, and already rejected, the assumption that the purpose of the platform is to concentrate value at the centre of the network. That’s not technical. It’s not even primarily political. It is perceptual — which returns us to where this argument has been heading all along.
Slowly but surely, the failing fictions of industrial economism are being replaced. That process is already underway, irreversibly, across every domain this essay has touched. The school is being supplemented, circumvented, and in some places genuinely reimagined. The arms economy is being challenged, however inadequately, by frameworks of human security that refuse to treat conflict as a productive industry. The extractive platform is being shadowed, in community after community, by cooperative alternatives that use the same tools toward different ends. None of this is sufficient, of course. The scale is wrong, the speed is inadequate, and the distribution of power remains grotesquely skewed. But the distinction between capture and harness reveals something the despair narrative can’t accommodate: that what has passed for inevitability is nothing more than a habit. And habits, given sufficient pressure and sufficient imagination, can be broken.
The pressure is already here. What remains is the imagination.
The imagination required is not in short supply. That is perhaps the most startling finding of this survey of wreckage — that alongside every mode of failing described here, something else is also underway. Not a movement, not yet a paradigm, but a scattered and stubborn insistence, in communities and cooperatives and classrooms and laboratories across the world, that the deep logic of industrial economism is not destiny, nor is it the only logic available. People are building differently. Teaching differently. Organising conflict resolution differently. Measuring wellbeing in ways that GDP cannot register and was never designed to. The harnessing is happening, quietly, at the margins of a system still loudly committed to capture.
And yet. The planetary situation doesn’t have the patience that genuine perceptual transformation requires. The ecological systems now destabilising were built over timescales that make human institutional change look like the blink of an eye — and they are unravelling faster than the institutions formed by industrial economism can register, let alone respond to. The imagination is present. The will, in scattered form, is present. What’s not present is the time that would allow the slow work of cultural renewal to outpace the accelerating consequences of three centuries of extraction.
This is the dilemma that sits at the centre of the current moment, and we must say so without flinching. The fictions are failing. Their failure is necessary — overdue, in many cases, by several decades. But the manner of their failing, the corruption and calcification and cannibalisation documented here, means that what collapses when they finally go will not be only the fictions themselves. It will be the lives threaded through them, the communities organised around them, the identities formed inside them. Metamorphosis at a civilisational scale has never been cost-free. The question that history will eventually put to this generation is not whether the transformation happened — it will happen; it is already happening; indeed, it cannot be stopped — but who bore the cost of it and whether those who had the most to gain from the old fictions had the imagination and the decency to share the weight of their passing.
That question has no answer yet. It may be the most important question our species has faced, precisely because it can’t be resolved by the tools and models and practices the failing fictions bequeathed us. It requires the capacity to hold an impossible tension without reaching for the comfort of a premature resolution, to remain present to a dilemma that will not close, and to act anyway, with whatever clarity the uncertainty allows.