The Coming Spiral: Volatility, Control, and runaway Costs, the Crisis of Governments

The Systemic Case for a Civic Re-State

As existential risks compound and volatility deepens, governments will be structurally compelled—not merely politically incentivized—into increasingly assertive postures of control. This is not an ideological drift, but a systemic and structural response to escalating turbulence in the conditions required for social and economic reproduction.

In an environment of compounding uncertainty, there typically emerges a growing passive demand from populations for states to restore order, reduce volatility, and expand zones of perceived certainty. Governments, in turn, face intensifying pressure—both from citizen anxiety and capital markets—to stabilize a system under strain. The state, as the institutional manifestation of concentrated agency (often aligned with a superminority of economic actors), increasingly frames dissent, disruption, or alternative narratives as existential risks.

In this frame, the scope of threat is redefined. Climate protest in an energy-fragile nation is no longer seen as a democratic expression but a destabilizing act—one that potentially endangers the continuity of the state and its economic substrate. This justifies the invocation of exceptional powers: the restriction of protest rights, the restructuring of the Charities Regulator to discipline civil society, and the redefinition of the public good in service of state stability over pluralism.

Crucially, this expansion of control is not just a function of authoritarian desire, but a structurally induced reactive “strategy” for managing system entropy. But it comes at a cost—both energetic and strategic.

The deeper pathology is this: volatility is not simply rising because the world is unstable, but because we are allocating resources toward control rather than resilience. Instead of building adaptive, distributed systems capable of absorbing shocks, we invest in brittle, centralized control infrastructures designed to suppress them. This misallocation doesn’t reduce volatility—it defers, distorts, and ultimately amplifies it.

Control becomes more complex, more multi-agent, more surveillance-driven—and more costly. This gives rise to a control–surveillance–energy spiral:

We enter, then, a control–surveillance–energy spiral:

• Volatility increases.

• Control expands to manage volatility.

• The runaway cost (energetic, social, moral) of control rises.

• The state is forced to centralise further to sustain the overhead of this system.

• In doing so, it narrows agency and responsibility to an increasingly thin stratum of actors.

• This narrowing feeds perceptions of legitimacy crisis and provokes further dissent.

• The system responds again with increased control.

This is not merely a political loop—it is a systemic attractor, driven by:

• Structural dependencies (on centralized energy, finance, and data systems),

• Fragility in the sociotechnical infrastructure of legitimacy, and

• The lack of distributed epistemic or governance alternatives.

It is not born of malice or desire for domination, but of systemically induced narrowing—where the architecture of control becomes the last remaining lever in a collapsing field of options.

Spiral Interrupted, we need a radically different pathway.

We must build a new civic economy:

One that is not merely a patchwork of charitable responses or a corrective to market and state failures, but a third pole of organizing—autonomous, systemic, and generative. A radicle civic economy rooted in the everyday fabric of civil society: in relationality, care, tenderness, and self owning futures—designed not for extraction or control, but for stewardship and regeneration - dampening volatility at source.

Second, we must invest in the structural resilience of society itself. This means confronting fragilities embedded in our energy systems, food systems, social infrastructures, and epistemic frameworks. Resilience is not a technical fix but a relational and institutional architecture—one that enables society to adapt, recompose, and thrive in uncertainty.

Third, we must cultivate a new class of civic institutions, rooted outside the direct control of market or state. This includes:

• New forms of monetary institutions at the local and bioregional level;

• New Generation Civic Trusts for Next Generation asset-holding;

• Many-to-many structured economic systems that support plural value creation and distribution.

These institutions must be capable of holding space for alternative futures, coordinating complex transitions, and distributing agency across time, space, and actors. They are not peripheral innovations—they are central to interrupting our current path dependency and enabling a viable alternative to the control spiral.

Without this civic reconstruction and re-state, we risk collapsing into ever-deepening cycles of centralized fragility, technocratic control, and democratic erosion; an un-intended authoritarian future.