SENSORICA: Complexity Rising: Are We Living Through the Collapse of Hierarchy?

In our previous post Are We Living Through Collapse? Complexity, Digital Technology, and the Future Beyond Capitalism we proposed complexity as the main cause of the socioeconomic turbulence that we experience today. Here we double down on this proposition by addressing Yaneer Bar-Yam’s paper Complexity Rising.

Collapse rarely looks like fire and ruins. Most often, it feels like drift, a slow unraveling of institutions, the loss of confidence in systems that once seemed unshakable, a spreading sense that no one is in control anymore. The question that haunts our time is not whether society will collapse, but whether it already is.

Over the last few decades, researchers across economics, ecology, and complexity science have been circling around the same idea: our world is entering a transition phase. The mechanisms that once allowed civilization to grow and adapt are breaking down. And yet, from the midst of that breakdown, a new kind of order is trying to emerge.

The Big Picture: Civilization as a Living System

In his seminal essay “Complexity Rising: From Human Beings to Human Civilization” (1997/2002), Bar-Yam proposed that human societies evolve much like biological organisms. Over time, our social structures have grown more intricate, not by accident, but as a necessary response to increasingly complex environments.

To survive, a system’s behavioral complexity must match the complexity of the challenges it faces. When the environment changes faster than the system’s ability to adapt, collapse follows.

Bar-Yam takes this further: he argues that humanity as a whole has become a global complex system, a civilization behaving like a single organism. Its “cells”, i.e. individuals, communities, corporations, governments, are now so interconnected that local crises ripple instantly through the entire system. The Internet, global trade, financial markets, and planetary ecosystems are no longer separable subsystems; they are the body and nervous system of a new, planetary-scale entity.

When Complexity Outgrows Control

Bar-Yam’s key insight is disarmingly simple: hierarchies have cognitive limits. Traditional power structures, empires, bureaucracies, corporations, depend on a top-down flow of information. But there’s only so much complexity one mind (or even a leadership class) can handle.

When the diversity and interdependence of tasks outpace the cognitive bandwidth of those at the top, control systems fail. Decision-making slows, coordination falters, and institutions drift into dysfunction. In Bar-Yam’s terms, hierarchical control collapses when the complexity of collective behavior exceeds that of an individual human being.

Sound familiar? This is precisely what we see today: governments struggling to manage global crises, corporations overwhelmed by their own data, and entire political systems paralyzed by information overload. The world has simply become too complex for hierarchies to govern. The proper response is not to sweep complexity under centralized AI using big data, which is the natural instinct of the elite who thinks is in control of humanity, since no existing computational model can simulate strong emergence in highly complex and dynamic systems, the global economy or society.

Collapse as Evolution, Not Apocalypse

In this light, collapse is not an anomaly. It’s part of the evolutionary process of civilization.

Every major phase of human organization, tribal, imperial, industrial, and now digital, has been marked by a jump in complexity and a shift in how societies coordinate. When old forms can no longer cope, they break down, making space for new structures better adapted to the next level of complexity.

Think of it as the social equivalent of biological evolution: single cells gave rise to multicellular organisms; hierarchies gave rise to networks. What we’re witnessing now is a phase transition, from industrial-era hierarchies to networked forms of collective intelligence (add to that AI-enhanced collective intelligence if you will).

This view reframes what other scholars have called the “crisis of capitalism.” Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly Silver (2001) described the current global disorder as the exhaustion of capitalism’s old cycles of renewal. William Robinson (2024) calls it an “epochal crisis” that capitalism can no longer resolve within its own logic. Bar-Yam gives this a systems-science explanation: the economic and political hierarchies of the 20th century are cognitively obsolete.

The Digital Catalyst

Digital technology is the accelerant. It amplifies both complexity and interdependence. As Barry Buzan and George Lawson (2014) note, information networks have restructured the global system, diffusing power while destabilizing liberal institutions. Malaina (2014) warns that capitalism’s adoption of “complex adaptive” rhetoric hides the fact that digital complexity is eroding its own foundations.

In short: information technology has not simplified the world, it has supercharged complexity, creating a scale of interconnection that no centralized system can manage. Every tweet, trade, or microchip is part of a planetary web of feedback loops. The result isn’t chaos but a new kind of order, one that defies the logic of control.

The Rise of the Networked Civilization

If hierarchies are breaking down, what comes next? Here, Bar-Yam’s vision dovetails with thinkers like Yochai Benkler and Michel Bauwens, who see new modes of organization emerging from digital society itself.

Benkler’s commons-based peer production (2006) — the collaborative model behind Wikipedia and open-source software — shows how value can be created and coordinated without markets or managerial hierarchies.
Bauwens’ P2P and Commons Transition (2020) frames these peer systems as seeds of a post-capitalist order, organized through distributed, participatory networks rather than centralized control.
Movements like cosmolocalism (Schismenos, Niaros & Lemos, 2020) combine local production with globally shared knowledge, which create conditions for strong emergence.

These aren’t utopias. They’re adaptive experiments, embryonic forms of collective intelligence that can handle the rising complexity of the digital era. Instead of collapsing under complexity, they thrive on it, processing vast flows of information through self-organization, feedback, and trust.

Living in the Interregnum

Antonio Gramsci once wrote: “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” We are living in that interregnum — a time when the industrial-era order is failing but the networked order is not yet fully formed.

Bar-Yam helps us see that this is not just a moral or political crisis. It’s a structural one. The “monsters” of our age, populism, misinformation, ecological breakdown, are the symptoms of a civilization outgrowing its own command structures.

But collapse, in his sense, is also opportunity. It is the painful but necessary step in humanity’s evolution toward distributed intelligence, a civilization that learns, adapts, and acts collectively. The question is not whether we can prevent collapse, but whether we can guide it, whether we can transform disintegration into reorganization.

From Collapse to Collective Intelligence

The path forward may lie not in rebuilding the old hierarchies, but in cultivating the networked intelligence already emerging in digital commons, civic tech, and decentralized cooperation. These systems distribute knowledge and decision-making in ways that mirror the architecture of the brain, resilient, adaptive, and capable of managing high complexity.

If Bar-Yam is right, the future belongs not to empires or corporations, but to networks of networks: self-organizing systems that evolve as fast as the problems they face. Whether we call this peer production, the digital commons, or post-capitalism, it may represent civilization’s best chance to adapt to its own complexity.